Bolivia comes to the end of the road

Press, 30 September 1986, Page 17

Bolivia comes to the end of the road

By JOHN RETTIE ‘Guardian’ London Countries, they say, cannot go bankrupt. But somehow, one feels, they had not thought of Bolivia, in the wilds of South America, which was endowed by the pre-Inca gods with all the wealth the heart might desire. Yet none of this did any good to Bolivia or the Bolivians, least of all to the Indians of the altiplano, or highlands, from whom the Spaniards and their heirs snatched the country’s birthright. Today, they are the poorest people in South America, many of them grossly undernourished and unable to earn a living — unless it be by growing coca leaves for the immensely lucrative international drugs trade. It’s hardly surprising that some of the thousands of tin miners, who lost their jobs when the Government closed their mines, should have set off to the eastern lowlands with a view to getting in on the coca act. Some of them were beginning to drift away even before the closure. No wonder. For many miners, working at anything up to 17,000 feet in the icy, windswept Andes, the daily ration is a few bread rolls. For years the tin mines have been kept going by Government subsidy, and now the Government has run out of money. The only reason they have been kept going is that hitherto no Government has dared take on the tough and well-organised miners, who march and throw sticks of dynamite about in a manner which has brought Governments down before now.

But last year a Centre-Right President was elected who decided that the challenge had to be made. Dr Victor Paz Estenssoro, the hero of the 1952 revolution who at 78 is no revolutionary any more, was seen as a lesser evil than General Hugo Banzer, the man of the far Right who ran Bolivia with an iron hand in the 19705. Although there have not- been the largescale killings and torturing which were normal during military rule, President Paz’s economic policies are about as far Right as you can get. When the miners marched in protest op the capital, La Paz, he sent the army in and forcibly returned them to their ailing mines. “How shameful,”- one Bolivian is quoted as observing. “We send in the tanks to control the miners, but to deal with the drug runners we have to send for foreign soldiers.”

Incredible though it seems, this is true. So weak is Bolivia’s situation that in July President Paz felt obliged to succumb to United States pressure and allow American planes, helicopters, and 160 troops to stage raids on drug runners in the Bolivian tropical lowlands. This violation of national sovereignty brought Dr Paz more criticism in Bolivia than the action against the miners. But what could he do? Bolivia is as bankrupt as a country can be, and without a huge injection of foreign money, its future is almost unthinkable.