March 23, 2005

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Dear Friends,

La Paz, Bolivia, is a long way away from Birmingham, Alabama, but often I find myself thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Two weeks ago, Bolivia’s president declared the country ungovernable due to constant protests that have shut down much of the country, barred travel and damaged business. The flash point of many of the blockades was Bolivia’s troublesome gas law, though protesters made demands on a wide range of issues, including their right to reasonably priced clean water, concern about keeping profits from natural resources in the country, and independence from U.S. pressure on issues like eradicating the coca crop.

But at the root of these sometimes disparate protests was the sense of powerlessness felt by Bolivia’s indigenous majority, despite promises that democracy would give them power to chart the country’s future.

Then, on March 6, Bolivia’s ever turbulent political situation took a troubling turn: President Carlos Mesa, who’s served since his successor was forced from office last year, made a calculated play for middle class sympathies and got them. In the process, he opened festering wounds of racism and resentment.

As calculated, Congress rejected Mesa resignation letter—giving him a second chance to govern (but this time with an awakened middle class behind him). And so that night, glowing with victory, a crowd of supporters cheering below, Mesa made a speech calling for an end to the blockades and for people to mobilize against those sectors that have been shutting down the country.

I stood outside the presidential palace while Mesa greeted the thousand or so people who had gathered there to support him. They waved Bolivian flags and white handkerchiefs. They cried out for peace. And they carried signs employing various explicit terms aimed at Bolivia’s indigenous opposition leaders. “Death to the piece of sh** Indian Evo.” Jumping up and down, the crowd chanted “If you don’t jump you’re a blockader,” and “Mano dura, mano dura,” encouraging Mesa to use a “strong hand,” to use force against protesters.

Tuesday I talked with Jaime about the situation. Jaime is a young, professional, upper-middle-class man. He made an argument I’ve heard before: Bolivia needs a dictatorship. We aren’t mature enough for a democracy. Things are too chaotic, people protest over everything. We need a leader who will shut down congress, step in with a strong hand (mano dura), and take charge. It doesn’t have to last long—and any violence would be a necessary evil to get our country back on track.

Recently, international “experts” also have made this argument about maturity and democracy—especially in light of UN polls that found many South Americans have lost faith in democracy. They ask if people are too poor, too uneducated, too immature to handle democracy (as Jaime argued). They wonder if the inequality exacerbated by capitalism creates too many problems for a nascent democracy to survive—making the poor even poorer while giving them new political power they can wield over the rich, threatening to lead to violence against wealthy racial minorities.

But I see it differently. I believe economically poor, indigenous, working class Bolivians have been sold a phony democracy. They vote, but they have no real power to affect change. Bolivia’s decision makers are notoriously corrupt and self-serving. Yet even they don’t really run the country. External interests continue to dictate Bolivia’s future, its economic and social policy.

Bolivians were sold the idea that democracy meant that they controlled their destiny and could shape it to be more just. Instead, they continue to face racism, classism, joblessness, hunger, and voicelessness, and an inability to develop their own, creative policies that could address these problems. In Bolivia, many rural indigenous and migrants to the city can’t even vote because they lack birth certificates. They don’t exist as citizens. For indigenous Bolivians, this democracy is a joke. In rural indigenous communities, a truer democracy—consensus-based decision-making—stands in stark contrast. They know they’ve gotten a raw deal.

And so they march, blockade, protest—yes, sometimes to a point that it seems irrational to outside eyes. But they are flexing what they perceive as their only muscle to affect change. Just as nonviolent direct action during the civil rights movement sought “to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” Bolivian social movements seek to force the government to respond.

I have listened to city-dwelling Bolivians and American friends—good people—express confusion at the seemingly irrational push to blockade and strike. When they ask “why can’t people be reasonable and take it slow?” I am reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. When white Civil Rights supporters and church folk grew uncomfortable with the confrontational and disobedient tactics employed by the movement, King said, “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

Peace, with justice.

Susan

If you are interested in reading King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, visit: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/letter.html or I can send you a copy.

The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 46