Author: Carwil Bjork-James

Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. (My opinions are my own, and not my employer's.) Author of The Sovereigns Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia (sovereignstreet.org). I conduct immersive and historical research on disruptive protest, grassroots autonomy, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in Bolivia.

Dignidad y dinero: Ecuador, Bolivia reject US pressure on climate

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“The central aim of any climate summit is not to save itself and accept any outcome, but to come to an agreement that will save humanity.” — Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s climate negotiator

In the days before this week’s conference, and while a global preparatory negotiations were being held on climate change in Bonn, this news came:

The US State Department is denying climate change assistance to countries opposing the Copenhagen accord, it emerged today.  The new policy, first reported by The Washington Post, suggests the Obama administration is ready to play hardball, using aid as well as diplomacy, to bring developing countries into conformity with its efforts to reach an international deal to tackle global warming.  The Post reported today that Bolivia and Ecuador would now be denied aid after both countries opposed the accord. (Guardian)

This came as a shot across the bow of other developing countries who are caught between environmental principles and economic realities.

These pressures are quite serious. A leading daily newspaper in Cochabamba, Los Tiempos, ran an op-ed yesterday that circled around the movie Avatar, a story of indigenous resistance to extractive industry. It was a blunt caution to the Bolivian government under the headline “Truths that hurt“:

If Bolivia were to act in a more diplomatic way, it could have a great opportunity in the carob market, and this could even be a part of the new economic base of the country. … With the poverty of people, they cannot make speeches which at the moment of settling accounts will amount to no more than that. Bolivia could play its cards in a different way, avoiding the politicization of an issue in which its vote matters very little. The rest is for the movies and for science fiction.

Of course, Bolivia is making just such speeches and hosting a massive civil society gathering on climate change. And it’s clear from the compendium of speeches all of us participants were given by the Foreign Affairs Ministry that this didn’t start yesterday. Instead, Bolivia has been playing a diplomatic role on behalf of the world’s hundreds of millions of indigenous people: pushing for the passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, calling for the Rights of Earth to be globally recognized, and connecting with environmental and indigenous delegates in the Copenhagen summit. It would represent a major reversal of rhetoric and a betrayal of the government’s indigenous base to turn back under pressure.

It’s also true that for many countries, the outcome of climate negotiations is the primary issue. The overall targets agreed to, and the effectiveness of the measure worked out determines how severe climate change will ultimately be. As long as negotiations are open, their resistance can push climate agreements to be more serious. Agreeing to take money from a mechanism

But there is something else at stake. To abandon a political initiative under this kind of pressure, is effectively to admit that the hemisphere’s great power  determines your policy. As Bolivian climate negotiator Pablo Solon put it, “We are a country with dignity and sovereignty and will maintain our position.” To do otherwise would be to admit that the country’s principles come with a price tag.

At yesterday’s Root Causes panel, Ecuador’s Ambassador to the UN, María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, took this one step further.

Last week, the United States suspended Ecuador from$2.5 million in assistance in its climate change agenda because Ecuador did not adhere to the Copenhagen Accord. It was a punishment that the United States carried out upon Ecuador for not adhering to that Accord that was not an Accord. It was a spurious document made by just a few, without consulting all the governments and all the peoples of the world. Ecuador is not going to accept these forms of extortion. In return, the president of Ecuador and the people of Ecuador have said to the United States with all seriousness that Ecuador offers the United States $2.5 million if the US would sign the Kyoto Protocol. [applause] And we say it seriously. If the United States signs the Kyoto Protocol, we will transfer $2.5 million in cooperation to that country  to help them in their process of technological conversion that will so help the planet.

The offer stands.

CMPCC: Root Causes of Climate Change are Capitalism and Culture

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Big conference, bigger questions

Tuesday at the CMPCC was the first day of truly massive events, besides the 17 (+1) Working Groups (Mesas de Trabajo) which themselves reached up to 500 people each. Yesterday morning was devoted exclusively to a massive opening ceremony held at Tiquipaya’s stadium. The New Bolivia has a combination of faces: the grassroots movements gathered in a stadium face, the indigenous tradition face, and the we’re running the state face. All three were on display in the pageantry of yesterday morning: dozens of banners and hundreds of wiphalas (indigenous flag of the Andes whose rainbow colors symbolize inclusion) marked the first side; the ceremony was inaugurated with requests for permission from Mother Earth and Father Cosmos; and Evo’s entrance began with a massive salute from hundreds of red-coated soldiers.

The content of the speeches was more interesting (Evo’s personal content was extended and rambling, but had its good moments which are already beginning to be overshadowed by tactless and factless comments about male sexuality and European baldness), and led into the afternoon session on “The Root Causes of Climate Change.”

The morning speeches were marked first by representatives of five continents (no one from Australia or Antarctica) addressing the summit: Faith Gemill (a Gwich’in from Alaska) spoke about a shared need to decolonize indigenous peoples; a member of the European Parliament’s left-green alliance said that the summit has allies on the European left willing to challenge the Copenhagen Accord; Nnimmo Bassey of Friends of the Earth-Nigeria/International called for an end to fossil fuels (“Keep the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, and the tar sands in the lands”) and a rejection of false solutions; Suma Dutra argued that more than 90% of her native India has not been part of the new fossil-fuel-dependent economy and that this majority is waking up to the issue; and Eveldina Mazioli (Brazil) spoke to the systemic change towards small-scale agriculture advocated by Via Campesina, one of the world’s largest and most dynamic transnational alliances.

This brought us to Evo, who addressed with props differences between the capitalist and indigenous way of life. What I found striking was the personal animus involved on the part of people wanting show they are “better than” indigenous people, by using commodities. Contrasting a ceramic, fancy china, and plastic plates, Evo pointed out that capitalism/consumerism encouraged people to leave behind the plates that return to being earth when they break, in favor of modern versions that contaminate the world around them.

The massively attended afternoon session on “Root causes of Climate Change” kept its focus more exclusively on capitalism, with activists, a sociologist, an ethicist, and a vice president all framing the issue. Real aspects of capitalism are driving factors in the global ecological crisis: the quest for expansion, relentless incorporation of resources into the economy, an inability to settle for sufficiency, the promotion of consumerism as an economic strategy, treating environmental costs as externalities, and on and on.

Of course, however reasonable it is to put capitalism at the center of the ecological crisis, doing so raises more questions than it answers. Let me put this another way for people who aren’t as skeptical of capitalism as I am: suppose we accept that the dynamics of capitalism are provoking a crisis in the liveability of the planet; and that those same dynamics make any kind of solutions extremely difficult. What other questions does that raise?

First, what kind of economic and social systems might substitute for endless growth? How will they provide incentives for a “people-centered economy”? Unlike when I was growing up, the other possible are less unified, but far more diverse. The plural left here in Bolivia is one example of the kind of diversified solutions: nationally direct industries function alongside communal indigenous economies, and small and massive cooperatives. What is not capitalism is many things.

Second, how in the world does the political groundswell needed for real transformations get built? Third, what alternatives? (This is the easy one, actually: There’s a ton of movement, planning, and visioning work done on this question.)

Fourth, and most complicated, given that capitalism isn’t going anywhere in most of the world for at least a few decades, how much inside-capitalism response to the climate crisis is necessary? This may be the hardest question, since capitalism and its critics will have to work together to solve one of the most difficult technical and social problems ever, even as the critics remain skeptical that an end to the crisis is possible through such cooperation.

Beyond our economic system (as if that were a small matter), I think we have to ask real questions about the other issues raised by our five continental representatives.

Culture: We are talking about a real ethical transformation, built atop many cultures that have got used to relentless consuming more as a chief measure of personal status. And we’re also talking about internalizing all the consequences of our decisions for other people and the planet in our economic and social choices. What in the world will that look like.

Colonialism: The power states exercise over indigenous peoples, and that a powerful few countries exercise over the rest ends up being a key factor in climate change. The oil and mining industries operate through inequality between regions of production and consumption. Simply put, the kind of people who drive SUVs wouldn’t put a conventional oil pit in their backyard to do so. Instead they rely on less fortunate communities to supply the fuel, and pay the price. The one nice thing about this arrangement is that confronting it creates a virtuous cycle. To the degree that drillsite and fence line communities demand respect or gain in power, the whole system gets an incentive to switch to green ways of being. The difficult part is that very real systems of power have to be challenged in the process.

False solutions: In the short term, there are both real and false solutions to climate change. Some things will in fact slow, and one day reverse, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Others won’t. How do we tell the difference? And how do we stop the false solutions from being implemented? This is extremely important in a “flexible” climate change regime like the one that exists since the Kyoto Protocol: any country can pay another to implement a cheaper false solution, and avoid real emissions cuts in return.

Finally, in writing this I feel torn geographically. Half of these questions may seem un-askable in the United States. They are daily matters of discussion in movements here. And from the looks of the conference not just here. The thing about the global climate crisis is that it makes asking difficult questions a necessity. Since the 1990s, the small island states of the world have regarded these kinds of global discussion as life or death matters, because they are: they might be literally underwater without comprehensive solutions. In recent years, much of Africa (facing desertification and major food production loss) and countries like the low-lying, very-dense Bangladesh (not as low-lying or dense as the Netherlands, but money works wonders) have been added to the list. In circumstances like these, you must move very quickly along a chain of logic like this: “If capitalism is the problem, what might be the solution.” Or along a different chain of logic: “If the global economy can’t feed over one billion people, what good is it?” Part of seeing this week’s conference for what it is, is to recognize that thousands of people from movements across the global South, and some of the North as well, are here asking themselves just these kinds of questions. It may be a while before such questions seem reasonable to North Americans, and longer before they seem practical. This post hopes to make that possible.

And here we go… (How we got here)

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The inauguration of the climate summit is happening right now. This summit comes 115 years since ahead-of-his-time scientist Svante Arrhenius proposed that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could change the climate.By 1970, an observatory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, had over a decade of observations showing that Co2 in the atmosphere was steadily rising (the annual cycle comes as the seasons change and plants take in and release carbon dioxide, like a global breath). The cause? Burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

By 1988, the global importance of rising CO2 was clear, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded to coordinate scientific work on the subject and explain the results to policymakers. The IPCC, and its regular reports are one of the most comprehensive joint science projects ever. Listen to grad student Rachel Pike explain how it works. In 1992,at the Rio Earth Summit, a treaty making process called the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change started to make international agreements to avert dangerous levels of climate change. The industrialized countries pledged to stabilize their emissions of greenhouse gases at 1990 levels by the year 2000. Most lied.

By 1995, the IPCC was ready to conclude that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” This cautious statement reflects the extreme complexity of the the many factors involved in human impact on the climate, (summarized in this graph). In fact, scientists thought they might not have definitive certainty until 2000, but detailed regional modelling, and the fact that 1970s-era pollution laws reduced the masking effect of soot and other pollution (which briefly cool the Earth before they fall to the ground, leaving the warming greenhouse gases to linger in the atmosphere for centuries) made the issue apparent by the mid-1990s. A continuing series of record-breaking temperature years helped to make the case:

Global temperature record since the 19th century

In 1997, the Clinton-Gore administration pushed hard for a range of “flexibility mechanisms” to be included in the Kyoto Protocol, most of which allowed rich countries to pay poor ones to make reductions for them. Greenpeace and other international NGOs calculated that loopholes in the Kyoto treaty, such as military bunker fuels, transnational plane flights, and “Russian hot air” (the right of Eastern European countries to claim credit for the emissions they weren’t making after the post-Soviet collapse, and sell it to others who were emitting more), amounted to more CO2 than would be reduced in the first place. Despite this weakening, the US failed to ratify Kyoto, saddling the rest of the world with a weaker treaty not accepted by the world’s largest polluter.

Efforts to extend and fix Kyoto continued through annual meetings of the UNFCCC conference of parties (COP), and US efforts to weaken the accord continued even as it ignored the Protocol. Finally, last year, a deadline loomed at COP15 in Copenhagen. The US opted for a second track of negotiations with a handful of highly polluting countries and produced the Copenhagen Accord. The COP as a whole merely “acknowledged” the Accord, and the word “failure” hung in the air. If the UNFCCC process is to be resuscitated, the next chance will be at COP16 in Cancun, Mexico this December.

Bolivia, which played a key role from the environmental side in Copenhagen is hosting this week’s World Peoples’ Summit to give the process a push, and create a space for planning both inside and outside strategies on global environmental issues. I’ll be spending a lot of time in the Strategies for Action working group seeing what participants think might be a Plan B if the international impasse continues.

Cochabamba’s water system since the Water War: DIY blooms, Public utility stalls

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Cochabamba’s Water War in 2000 was the beginning of a long and upward climbing story of the country’s resistance to neoliberal policies. That story joins the defense of the right to grow coca leaves by farmers nearby in the Chapare and near La Paz in the Yungas, resistance to the privatization and export of Bolivia’s gas resources, demands for greater indigenous self-governance, and calls to rewrite the constitution. The forms of pressure pioneered or revived in the Water War played a key role in all of them.

But what became of the water? Bechtel’s demands for international arbitration after it was kicked out of Cochabamba dragged on from 2002 to 2006, when it was the first such international case to be withdrawn under popular pressure. Cochabambinos got a public water system, managed by a municipal company called SEMAPA. And Bolivia’s new constitution proclaims water as a human right.

Yet, on the ground, things are more complicated. The first, critical thing to understand is the massive role of neighborhood water associations play in supplying water here. The municipal water service only provides water to about half the city’s burgeoning population, mostly in the central area and the wealthy northern zone. In  the massive Zona Sur, few people have direct water connections. Instead, neighbors have organized themselves into associations to build their own tanks, pumps, wells, and cisterns that supply water locally. Nearly all these systems have some kind of holding tanks and distribution pipes, but not all have their own water sources. Those that don’t rely on outside water to be trucked in, and then distributed.

Much of this week’s Water Fair was an opportunity for these groups to network and also to showcase their operations. Three sides of a soccer field were surrounded by tents that hosted each of these associations, most with their own scale models of their neighborhood and the self-financed apparatuses that supplies its water. A great deal of ingenuity is going into repurposing automotive motors to run pumps, to finding water sources and maintaining wells, to keeping the neighborhood organized.

And it was these organizations members that blockaded the southern entrances to Cochabamba in 1999 and 2000 when they were threatened with privatization. (The concession owned by the Franco-American corporation Aguas de Tunari included the infrastructure created by numerous water committees.) Their members went from building and maintaining pipes or paying into a local cooperative to fighting in the streets to maintain what they built. And, most surely thought, to reclaim an accountable, publicly-owned water utility that would provide for all.

SEMAPA has fulfilled its half of that dream. The company has been plagued by mismanagement, failure to invest in major expansion, and internal corruption. Thursday night, a panel on SEMAPA since the Water War was primarily an opportunity for former directors, a former community board member, engineers, and investigative journalists to describe what has gone wrong. It was, to be fair, also a remarkable opportunity of the kind of transparency that a utility that was won by the public is subject to: the managers offered a level of internal detail that would be shockingly frank in the United States. But coverage of the city remains around 50%, while the company only bills about half the water it supplies, with much of the remainder clandestinely siphoned by industrial users or received without payment by parts of the municipality.

Nowadays, when the water committee members dream of the future, they do so outside of SEMAPA. There is an association of the committees called ASICA-SUR, engaged in running trucks with water to supply the source-less committees, maintaining water quality standards, facilitating new committees, and planning for universal access. Cochabamba uses more water than flows in its own valley, and an Italian-backed project is under construction to supply water from the Misicuni River. When that water is coming, ASICA-SUR would like its own direct connection, outside SEMAPA.

The idea of a universal public service, accountable to all, is not necessarily just a dream. But it has proved elusive here in Cochabamba. Small-scale alternatives based on community involvement have been a real, viable alternative, and the way that much of the Zona Sur receives its water. The bottom-up organization of ASICA-SUR has found a secure foundation in local groups that require the direct involvement of neighbors. Without economies of scale and piped connections, however, they do so at a higher price that other Cochabambinos, and that is when they don’t rely on trucks to move their water or private middlemen to supply it. Large-scale decisions remain to be made, and large infrastructure is a major part of the city’s water future. Meanwhile, the pollution of underground water sources is putting some of the community-based water systems at serious risk, particularly around the unregulated municipal dump Kara Kara. In the end, the Water War has to be fought again and again, in local organizations, in planning discussion, and in pressure on the streets.

Thursday’s march celebrates Water War, kicks off International Water Fair

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Many here in Cochabamba are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Water War, a series of protests against the newly-privatized water utility and its French and American owners in 2000. Back then, privatization was taken on faith as an all-purpose solution by Bolivia’s national government. Rate payers, who saw 40 to 200% hikes in their bills, and water supply committees that coordinate local water systems (which the new corporation claimed as its own) disagreed, strongly. Sectoral protests found a new form, a cross-movement coordinadora that brought them together, and caught fire. Two major confrontations in February and then April 2000 saw protesters take over the central streets of Bolivia’s third largest city. In Bolivia, the Water War came towards the beginning of a series of massive mobilizations that redefined politics. It was the first globally visible reversal of neoliberal policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank (the package of such policies, including privatization and “fast money” or easily reversible foreign investment, was called the Washington Consensus).

Thousands march in Cochabamba ten years after Water War

So, on Wednesday a march was held to celebrate the anniversary and to inaugurate a three-day conference on water rights activism globally. At the Factory Worker’s Union complex, speakers from four continents talked about the inspiration that the water war provided for their movements, doing such things as mobilizing against the privatization of municipal water systems in Italy, advancing a national referendum on public water in Uruguay, and protecting irreplaceable (in human lifetimes) aquifers from bottled water manufacturers in Maine.

More photos from Wednesday are on flickr here.

Cochabamba hosts the world…

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Like what is soon to be thousands and thousands of people, I’m now in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Cbba is Bolivia’s third-largest metropolis, and fourth-largest city (both of the twins, La Paz and El Alto, are larger along with Santa Cruz). If you’ve heard of Cochabamba before, it’s probably because of the April 2000 Water War. In celebration of that event’s tenth anniversary, water activists are gathering in the 3rd International Water Fair from this past Thursday until Sunday (website). And Bolivia, which played a pivotal role in the December Copenhagen Climate Summit is hosting a global gathering to re-plant the global effort to confront damaging climate change, the World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (website), Monday through Thursday in the Cochabamba suburb of Tiquipaya. So far, there are over 14,000 registrations online for the conference, with representatives of over 60 governments and over 100 countries making the trip.

Since I’ve been passionately involved in climate change issues, but am actually focusing on other matters here in Bolivia, I’ll be channeling this week direct to you here, as well as doing my best with 140 characters at a time via twitter: @CarwilJ. Stay tuned.

Exit Polls: Evo Morales & MAS win 62%, Absolute Senate majority

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Bolivia’s television networks are reporting an overwhelming MAS victory in today’s elections, based on exit polls at “the mouth of the voting urns.” While the victory was not in much doubt, reports indicate that the MAS won a higher than expected 62-63% to Manfred Reyes Villa/PPB’s 23-24% (figures vary among the Red ATB, Unitel, and Los Tiempos). The MAS victory is reported to extend to 6 departments including Tarija (traditionally a part of the right-leaning Media Luna) and Chuquisaca (where MAS lost departmental elections, but won two national referenda in the last eighteen months). The television network Unitel is projecting that MAS will win 25 of the 36 seats in the Bolivian Senate, giving it an absolute and unblockable majority.

I may play at live blogging this over the next day…

14:40 PST Manfred Reyes Villa (PPB-CN), the leading opposition candidate has just made his first reaction. Reyes Villa is the former governor of Cochabamba, a post he was recalled from by referendum in August 2008. Speaking in Santa Cruz, he tried to reconfigure the national map to that of the height of the right-wing opposition, by noting that if Chuquisaca and Tarija, which joined the solidly pro-MAS departments in voting for Morales and the MAS today, were added to the remaining parts of the Media Luna, the overall five-province vote is projected to show a PPB-CN majority. This is an extreme and hard to justify geographic stretch.

14:50 PST ERBOL, a community radio network is passing on the ATB exit poll results, broken down by province. These shows a close vote in Santa Cruz and Pando in which the PPB-CN leads the MAS, but the margin is within the likely (but unstated) margin of error of the polls.

As Bolivia votes, a closer look…

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Bolivia’s elections are prompting the mainstream press to run a series of profile pieces, such as these: “In Bolivia, a Force for Change Endures,” New York Times; “Bolivia’s Morales favored to win re-election,” Reuters.

There has also been some hyperventilating led by the Heritage Foundation’s claim that “U.S. Should Reject Illegitimate Election Process in Bolivia.” Heritage goes so far as to advocate, “The Obama Administration should … refuse to recognize the new government Morales forms, and call for Bolivia’s expulsion from the Organization of American States (OAS).”

Leaving the election’s legitimacy to the ample contingent of observers, and noting that Heritage writers have managed to trump up Senate President Oscar Ortiz’s statement with uninformed exaggerations throughout the piece, let’s turn to Heritage’s alternate universe account of the first Morales term:

Not only have Morales’s economic policies weakened and further impoverished the already destitute poor of Bolivia, but his win in the December 6 election will empower him to further persecute what little remains of a democratic alternative.

Many of Morales supporters are indigenous Bolivians from the western highlands who have been mired in poverty for generations. Improving these indigenous people’s living conditions is certainly a laudable goal, but Morales’s methodology for realizing such improvement — statist policies and totalitarian control — has been disastrous.

As it turns out, Bolivia’s economic performance is the subject of a newly released report (announcement|pdf|flash)  by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (home of Dean Baker, the economist most vocal about the housing crisis before it became headline news). In it we find:

Bolivia’s economic growth in the last four years has been higher than at any time in the last 30 years, averaging 4.9 percent annually since the current administration took office in 2006. Projected GDP growth for 2009 is the highest in the hemisphere. It is worth noting that Bolivia’s growth for 2009 follows its peak growth rate in 2008. As discussed in more detail below, Bolivia’s 2009 growth is all the more remarkable in view of the size and number of negative shocks to the economy. These included falling remittances, declining foreign investment, the United States’ revocation of trade preferences, declining export prices and markets for part of the year and other impacts of the global recession.

In short, Bolivia has ducked the Great Recession’s global impact, something achieved by only a handful of countries. How? Largely by its partial nationalizations of natural resource extraction industries, paying down external debt (including to the World Bank and IMF, with the help of debt cancellation), accumulating currency reserves, and spending them in a stimulus that is relatively larger than ours in the United States. Where has that money gone? Partly to public investment and infrastructure, and partly directly to the poor:

In the last three years the government has begun several programs targeted at the poorest Bolivians. These include payments to poor families to increase school enrollment; an expansion of public pensions to relive extreme poverty among the elderly; and most recently, payments for uninsured mothers to expand prenatal and post-natal care, to reduce infant and child mortality.

More official sources concur in the economic success, notably the International Monetary Fund: “The International Monetary Fund said in October that Bolivia is likely to post Latin America’s strongest economic growth this year at 2.8 percent” (source: Reuters; see also Bolivia’s Gross Domestic Product over time).

Five years ago, Bolivia’s national politics revolved around the future of its national gas resources. Today, none of the candidates is even suggesting a reversal of the partial nationalization that movements demanded and the Morales government has carried out.

Further background on the elections is available from: the Cochabamba-based Democracy Center (1|2|3); Upside Down World (1); Andean Information Network (1|2); InterPress Service (1); Bolivia Transition Project (“Pre-election analysis”).

Bolivia to hold elections tomorrow

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2009 has been a very different year for Bolivia than 2008, marked more by elections than by the intense street confrontations of late last year. The new Bolivian Constitution was sent to the polls in January 2009 after the referendum was approved under the influence of a march of more than 100,000 people to surround the Bolivian parliament in late 2008.

Now, eleven months later, general elections are being held tomorrow to elect the president, parliament and departmental governors. The MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) ticket of Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera is polling well ahead, and is expected to receive a majority of votes. Their closest rival, led by recalled Cochabamba governor Manfred Reyes Villa, is polling around 24%.

The poll will be marked by two innovations: a “biometric” (fingerprints, signature, photo) identification system, demanded by the opposition to prevent alleged voter fraud; and the participants of Bolivians outside the country’s borders, including the United States. The biometric system raised a lot of questions, starting with: could it be implemented for the entire population? Six months ago, at the Bolivian Studies Association in Sucre, I heard several talks about the many rural residents who lack a formal identification card, and the costs (and occasional benefits) of being invisible to the state, such as inelegibility for formal land ownership and government service. Four months later, after a 76-day registration marathon (in which everyone had to re-register to the new standards), the largest electorate ever (es) was certified with 4,997,172 voters.

International monitors (such as those from Carter Center) are following closely, and it will be “the most heavily monitored election” in Bolivian history. Despite some recent street confrontations, the Organization of American States’ head obsever expects the elections to be “calm, peaceful, and transparent” (es).

Looking forward to next year, and my long trip to Bolivia, I’m keeping a close watch on tomorrow’s elections, comparing this year to last year, and imagining the consequences for the year to come. I’ll keep you posted.