Revolution in democracy: Bolivia says yes to new constitution

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The approval through referendum of Bolivia’s new constitutional text marks a new era in Latin American politics and in Bolivia’s history towards a more just future. However, the battle for people’s control of their destiny is not over yet.

Kepa Artaraz

Today, 25th January 2009, the people of Bolivia went to the polls for the third time in three years. The first delivered a historic victory for Evo Morales – the first president of indigenous origin heading the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) – in December 2005. This demand of the Bolivian people for change was followed by the only and most consistent show of support for a president in the republican history of the country when he received a 67 per cent endorsement in a recall referendum celebrated in August 2008. Today’s vote was to approve or reject a new constitutional text that has been heralded as the basis on which to re-found Bolivia and ‘decolonise’ a country victim of five centuries of oppression.

As expected, at the time of writing, exit polls suggest that the constitution received the broad support of the people with more than 60 per cent of the votes. Now Bolivia begins a process of implementation of the new constitutional text that includes, amongst other things, proposals to end centuries of oppression and exclusion suffered by the indigenous majority. Indeed, today’s referendum can be seen as the end of a process of political mobilisation began by lowland indigenous Bolivians as far back as 1990 to demand their recognition and inclusion in a society traditionally led by urbanites of European extraction.

But the path to recognition of this forgotten majority has not been easy. Firstly, it required their political participation en mass, followed by their takeover of the institutions of government – MAS has a comfortable majority in congress – to deliver the 2005 presidential seat to one of their own. Secondly, it required a strong dose of patience and sang froid during the myriad violent attempts to destabilise the country led by a reactionary opposition and supported by the US embassy. Along the way lie scattered the obstacles placed in the path of this new constitution, including the ingenuity of those who three years ago thought this process would be easy, the lost support of key social groups, especially in the lowlands of Bolivia, and the bodies of dozens of dead supporters of Evo Morales.

A democratic process

If the new politics inaugurated in January 2006 with the swearing in of president Morales was the result of social movement demands mobilised to take control of state institutions that had repeatedly failed the country throughout its history, the biggest challenge that lay ahead at that point was to rewrite the basic societal rules for the re-foundation of a country with chronic problems: weak institutions mired in political corruption; the political and economic domination of a small oligarchic groups; and an excluded and poor indigenous majority.

The response from the new government was to deepen the process began to empower a traditionally disempowered majority and help it take ownership of the major national debates, building democracy through participation in order to deliver sorely needed structural changes rather than cosmetic ones.

Thus the process of writing this constitution has included far reaching participation levels and the provision of deliberative spaces for every section of society, making it a profoundly democratic exercise. It couldn’t be otherwise for, if the ultimate aim was to achieve a democratic society, the means to achieve this goal had to be as democratic as possible.

For this, members of every sector of society were elected through universal suffrage to represent their social movements, communities and parties. The result was that 255 elected members gathered in Sucre between August 2006 and December 2007 to put into practice the best example yet of deliberative democracy and to reach a consensus on the vision of society they dreamed of. This included men and women, city dwellers and peasants, poor and middle classes, professionals and workers, whites and representatives of the indigenous majority. The result of their discussions was, in spite of a small intransigent right’s every attempt to boycott and derail the process, a collective vision of the future Bolivia that includes everyone.

A revolutionary content?

It seems strange, after considering the new constitutional text, that the Morales administration is almost universally derided in the mass media as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘socialist’. The constitution certainly does not include the nationalisation of all private property or the authoritarian imposition of single party rule, as the recalcitrant right and sectors of the Catholic Church would make us believe. In many respects, the new text is rather moderate, nuanced, respectful of the country’s diversity, and based on the consensual discussion and deliberation described above. Three main features characterise the new Bolivian constitution.

The first is the recognition of the country’s diversity and its description as plurinational. What this means is that at last, the country’s indigenous majority is recognised in this constitution in its entire diversity. With this, the country sheds both the openly excluding nature of its foundation in 1825 and the closet racism that fed the 1952 revolution. According to the latter, all Bolivians were the same in theory, although the practice of this official view remained of course the exclusion, poverty and marginalisation of the indigenous peoples.

The new constitution enshrines at last the principle of equality in diversity. This means equality of rights and duties to the country but also the acknowledgement and acceptance that, within Bolivia, a diversity of languages, cultures, belief systems and customs coexist. 

The second feature of the new constitution is the creation of new institutions, powers and form of the state. The three main powers that characterise the state now – the executive, legislative and judiciary – remain although the latter is expected to undergo serious reform. However, the new constitution declares the existence of a fourth power, constituted by ‘the people’, who are ultimately sovereign, and the creation of institutional mechanisms so that ‘the people’ can exercise control of the previous three powers.

In addition to this, the traditionally centralised nature of the Bolivian state will no longer be apparent. The new constitution provides for a profound decentralisation of the state into autonomous regions and municipalities. It also permits the autonomic government of indigenous communities with control of their territories and the possibility to practice their customs, laws and forms of justice.

The third main feature is the universalisation of basic rights for all. For the first time in the history of a country infamous for the brutality of the socioeconomic divisions that coexist within it, the state undertakes the responsibility to provide basic health care and education for all, a dignified retirement through the implementation of a universal pension, and guarantees the access of all Bolivians to safe water, described for the first time as a basic human right. The provision of basic health care to all might sound heretical to audiences in certain parts of the world but many of these achievements are the basis on which European countries were rebuilt after WWII and are basic to their welfare states.

The challenges ahead

Many are the challenges that lie ahead in order to bring to fruition the aspirations of social justice and wellbeing – literally translated as ‘living well’ in Bolivian political parlance – that underpin the new constitution.

For the last two years opposition sectors have tried everything possible to prevent the celebration of this referendum, boycotting the constitutional assembly, resorting to violence at various points, and claiming fraudulent practices on the part of the government.

This minority opposition in parliament, backed by important agro-industrial interests in the east and south of the country, will continue to place obstacles on the path of the post-referendum process that has to create the legislative framework that accompanies the new constitution. Their tactics in the short term might reflect whether the final results show a percentage of approval for the constitution that is above or below the president’s ratification figure of 67 % last August.

Final results showing landslide support for the new text might be very hard to argue against. However, any result below the 67 per cent figure might encourage the opposition to take a hard line against the legislative process forcing the celebration of earlier elections than those anticipated for December 2009. Worse still, a return to violence and greater national fragmentation can never be entirely dismissed as a real possibility in the weeks and months to come.

Preventing this is something that the international community can and must work hard to avoid – just like UNASUR did in September – supporting the democratic process that has brought the country to this point, a point of no return in the path of further equality and social justice for all Bolivians.