Bolívia - Morales contra a sua base?

In Bolivia, Morales faces a challenge from below, por Jerome Roos:

The quasi-socialist government of Evo Morales in Bolivia is facing a popular challenge from below. Since May 6, tens of thousands of striking miners, teachers and health workers have been marching through the streets of major Bolivian cities, clashing with riot police, paralyzing traffic, and confronting government officials in front of ministry buildings. A group of miners even set off dynamite in the streets of La Paz during violent clashes last week, while another tried to occupy the national airport to force the state into concessions.

The general strike and mass protests are part of an attempt by workers organized through the Bolivian Workers’ Central (Central Obrera Boliviana) to secure higher pensions so poor Bolivians can retire in dignity. Despite running a surplus, however, Morales’ government has so far insisted that a rise in public pensions would deplete government revenues, and has in turn cracked down on the protests and called on its main popular support base — the indigenous Aymara people from the highlands — to contest the striking workers in the streets. (...)

Upon coming to power, Morales himself lamented that “the worst enemy of humanity is capitalism,” and claimed that “this is what provokes uprisings like our own, a rebellion against a system, against a neo-liberal model, which is the representation of a savage capitalism.” But rather than making a concerted move towards the abolition of the system that had spawned his rebellion — by supporting the devolution of power to the movements, peasant communities and working places — Morales has sought to centralize power within the state apparatus and the presidency in an attempt to strengthen the “developmental state” and support a process of “endogenous” capitalist development.

Former Vice-President Álvaro García referred to this approach as “Andean and Amazonian capitalism”, and confirmed that “the MAS is in no sense seeking to form a socialist government.” When asked what the Bolivian model is truly about then, García simply answered: “A strong state, and that is capitalism … It isn’t even a mixed system.” The greatest irony, perhaps, is that García is a renowned Marxist intellectual who defends this capitalist route precisely on the basis of the teleological argument that a pre-industrial society like Bolivia’s could never move beyond the capitalist mode of production and should therefore embrace capital to stimulate domestic development. (...)

Perhaps, then, the “Pink Tide” that has swept leftist leaders into office across Latin America over the past decade is precisely that: a diluted form of red, watered down to the point of degrading into a caudillo-run project of nationalist-populist state capitalism — where the only hope for truly revolutionary social change resides with those who made it all possible to begin with: the people of Latin America, and the grassroots social movements that unite them in all their beautiful diversity.

Outra forma de ver a coisa é se não sei se não haverá aqui um conflito entre operários (ou assalariados em geral) e camponeses (pelo menos, pelo texto parece que Morales está a contar com o apoio dos indios aymara). De qualquer maneira, com os defeitos que tenha, Morales (com a sua ligação aos movimentos sociais) sempre me pareceu um caso mais interessante que o chavismo venezuelano, com o seu culto do líder e a visão de uma transformação social muito a partir "de cima" (em parte, é a diferença entre um lider de uma associação de camponeses e um ex-militar golpista).