The tears are finally drying — the tears of the Bush years, and the tears of awe at the sight of a black president of the United States. So what now? If we want to see how Obama will affect us all — for good or bad — we need to trace the deep structural factors that underlie United States foreign policy. A useful case study of these pressures is about to flicker on to our news pages for a moment — from the top of the world.
Bolivia is the poorest country in Latin America, and shows us in stark detail the contradictions facing a black president of the American empire.
President of Bolivia Evo Morales has a story strikingly similar to Obama’s. In 2006, he became the first indigenous president of his country — and a symbol of the potential of democracy. As recently as the 1950s, an indigenous person wasn’t even allowed to walk through the center of La Paz, where the presidential palace and city cathedral stand. They were (and are) routinely compared to monkeys and apes. Morales was born to a poor potato-farmer in the mountains, and grew up scavenging for discarded orange peel or banana skins to eat.
Before Morales, the white elite was happy to allow American companies to simply take the gas and leave the Bolivian people with short change: Just 18 percent of the royalties. In 1999, an American company, Bechtel, was handed the water supply — and water rates for the poor majority doubled.
Morales ran for election against this agenda. He said that Bolivia’s resources should be used for the benefit of millions of bitterly poor Bolivians, not a tiny number of super-rich Americans. He kept his promise. Now Bolivia keeps 82 percent of the vast gas royalties — and he has used the money to increase health spending by 300 percent, and to build the country’s first pension system. He is one of the most popular leaders in the democratic world.
But how did the US government (and much of the media) react? George Bush fulminated that “democracy is being eroded in Bolivia”, and a recent US ambassador to the country compared Morales to Osama Bin Laden. Why? To them, you are a democrat if you give your resources to US corporations, and you are a dictator if you give them to your own people. The will of the Bolivian people is irrelevant. For these reasons, the US has been moving to trash Morales.
Enter Obama — and his paradoxes. He is obviously a person of good will and good sense, but he is operating in a system subject to many undemocratic pressures. Bolivia illustrates the tension. Which America will Obama embody? The answer is both — at first. Morales has welcomed him as “a brother”, and Obama has made it clear he wants a dialogue, rather than the abuse of the Bush years. Yet who is Obama’s Bolivia adviser? A lawyer called Greg Craig, who represents Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada — the hard-right former president of Bolivia who imposed some of the most extreme privatizations of the 1980s, and is now wanted on charges of genocide. Craig’s legal team says Morales is (yes) leading “an offensive against democracy”.
The US is still dependent on foreign fossil fuels to keep its lights on, and US corporations still buy senators from both parties. Obama will still be swayed by those factors.
Obama also says he wants to peel back the distorting effect of corporate money on the US political system. He is already less slathered in corporate cash than any president since the 1920s. The further he pushes it back, the more breathing space democratic movements like Morales’s have to control their own resources.
But we will see. If you want to know if Obama is really altering the tectonic forces that drive American power, keep an eye on the rooftop of the world.
