The big MST landgrabbing offensive fizzled out last week when the government, following a show of force at one of the ranches occupied by the movement of landless peasants (WR-03-26), agreed to negotiate. No sooner had this happened than the government's nemesis, coca-growers' leader Evo Morales, was launching a new attack on a different flank, this time wearing his political hat as leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS).
The government of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada countered the MST's campaign with three simultaneous moves. First, the demonstration that it was in earnest about evicting occupiers by force if necessary. Second, the distribution of communal titles to 'ancestral' lands of Quechua communities (22 were handed out last week, amid proclamations that this represented the satisfaction of 'genuine' indigenous aspirations).
Third and decisive, the government agreed to talk to the MST leaders, putting on the table its 'detection' of more than 500,000 hectares of state-owned land that could be distributed to landless peasants.
This falls well short of the 12m ha the MST has been citing as the minimum necessary, but it is a starting point.
Evo's new tack. As the land squats were being abandoned, in congress Evo Morales was renewing his campaign demand for a constituent assembly to rewrite Bolivia's constitution. He reminded legislators that not only the MAS but also the Nueva Fuerza Republicana (NFR, third in last year's presidential contest) had promised a constituent assembly. Together, he noted, they could muster the two-thirds' majority required to approve a constitutional amendment calling elections for an assembly.
Morales says that the existing constitution supports the 'hegemony of the traditional and rightwing parties'. What Bolivia needs, he says, is a 'refounding'.
If congress doesn't act, he warns, 'the people will [...] in an uprising like that of 1952.'
The subtext: a constituent assembly can declare itself sovereign and terminate existing mandates.
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