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WE SPENT OUR FIRST YEAR OF MARRIAGE IN BOLIVIA

We were “student missionaries” in 1969-70, financed by our Seventh-day Adventist college to teach for a year at a small church high school and teacher training institute in Vinto, just beyond Quillacollo near COCHABAMBA, then the second-largest city in Bolivia. We learned to love the high, cold and spare land with its people of surpassing kindness despite their poverty. Our school, Universidad Adventista de Bolivia (then only secondary level) was virtually the only place with electricity along our road, and we also had running water and actual sewers. Most folks nearby walked a mile to the artesian well for water at the corner, or used the ditch in front of their houses for washing. Outhouses were the “modern” plumbing for most folks at our end of the valley.

After Peace Corps service in Venezuela, we visited Cochabamba again in 1975, and little had changed. But, over the next 25 years, Bolivia liberalized (in the old sense) and the suffocating socialist governments eased, moving the country in fits and starts toward market reforms, privatising industry and even city services. Clean water spread to areas that had never had it before, electricity became available even in rural areas.

When we went down in 2003 to help build a church near Vinto, we were bowled over by the changes—just outside the school, there were three Internet Cafes within 100 yards! We saw campesino youths plowing with two oxen pulling a wooden plow tied to their horns, just like in the ‘70s, but now the plowmen were wearing blue jeans and listening to a Walkman! In the market, the same piles of vegetables and fruits were there, under the same glass roof, but now the vendors were busy cutting up carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage, etc. and making “instant salad”....the Cochabamba Valley was actually developing a middle class! 30 years earlier there were too few people willing to pay for the “value added” to make such things worth providing. We left the country (after getting the church built, and meeting some our of former students and colleagues at the college) with a good feeling about the future of the country and its long-suffering people.

Sadly, it looks like they’re headed back to the bad old days…..in an article titled BOLIVIAN WITCH HUNTS (unfortunately, subscription required) the Wall Street Journal tells the sad story of the re-nationalization of industry, the jailing of anyone standing for the rule of law and transparency of financial dealings, and the economic disaster that is overtaking this beautiful and so-sad country. The guys running things aren’t going to be the ones suffering - they never do. There has been an average of almost one change of government per year of existence for the Bolivian republic, and deposed leaders live quite well, even if it’s in another country.

For most Americans, this isn’t even a story, but if you love the country and its people like we do, it’s enough to make you a little crazy…...

There is something about Bolivian President Evo Morales that doesn’t inspire confidence in a prosperous, democratic future for his country. And it’s not only the fashion statement he makes with the striped sweater he wears like a uniform.

For a good many Bolivians it’s the erosion of civil liberties under his leadership. Just ask Marcela Nogales, a 47-year-old mother of two pre-teens who holds a master’s degree in auditing and financial control from Bolivian Catholic University in a joint program with Harvard University.

Mrs. Nogales, who was the general manager of the Central Bank of Bolivia for five years until May, has been detained in a Bolivian prison for the past six weeks at the behest of the Morales government. She has yet to be charged.

This detention, a flagrant violation of Bolivian law, appears to be part of a broader campaign against anyone connected with modernization efforts in the past decade. As such, it has further ignited the fears of Bolivian democrats who are deeply concerned that their country is heading toward an authoritarian police state under Mr. Morales.

Evo has already badly mishandled the economy. Exhibit A is his decision on May 1, amidst the biggest energy boom in the history of humankind, to nationalize the investments of foreign energy companies in his gas-rich country. Perhaps such bravado felt good to the country’s first indigenous leader in modern times. But if he was making a political calculation, he left out one important variable: Bolivia is poor. So poor, it seems, that it hasn’t the funding or expertise to exploit the gas itself.

On Aug. 11 the government announced the suspension of the full takeover of the oil fields “owing to a lack of economic resources.” But it’s a little late. Some 30 energy companies are reported to have ceased operations, and there has been no new investment. Bolivia has been converted into an unreliable energy supplier, badly wounding the only goose that lays hard-currency eggs.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/01 at 07:03 PM

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