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Bolivia's 'Texan' President Does U.S. Bidding

Jim Shultz

Pacific News Service, Mar 20, 2002: High on the agenda at President Bush's meeting with Andean presidents will be free-market and drug policies, just the problems looming larger every day for Bolivia's boyish-looking new technocrat president, Jorge Quiroga. Also being charged with serious rights abuses, says PNS contributor Jim Shultz, Quiroga's administration is breeding resentment where hope had reigned. 

LA PAZ, Bolivia--In his upcoming meeting with Andean regional presidents in Lima, President Bush may feel especially at home with Bolivia's Jorge Quiroga Ramirez, who spent seven years in the Lone Star state as an IBM executive, and married a Texan wife, Ginger. But Quiroga's reputation as the model of the new generation of Latin leaders is quickly becoming overshadowed by a dark human rights record that includes political murder. And he is finding the war on drugs he inherited a tough one, demanding balance between U.S. and local demands.

Quiroga, 41, ascended from the vice-presidency to the top post in August, when President Hugo Banzer Suarez resigned after being diagnosed with cancer. Quiroga found himself leading the poorest country in South America, where thousands of urban and rural families struggle for mere survival (a full 70 percent live below the poverty line). He also inherited -- and strongly supports -- two policies many here blame for the worsening economic crisis: a "free market" economic package adopted under pressure from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, including labor rights rollbacks and privatization of state companies such as the national airline, trains and water; and the end-game in the Washington-financed drug war, the forced eradication of the last of Bolivia's illegal coca leaf crop.

Boyish-looking, fluent in English, and schooled in business -- not soldiering -- Quiroga was called "a pro-reform technocrat with the backing of Washington," by the Financial Times. On paper, Quiroga could not be a sharper contrast to Banzer, 75, who first ran the country in the l970s as a military dictator. In December, an Argentine judged issued an arrest warrant for Banzer for his role in Plan Condor, a continent-wide campaign by the era's strongmen to hunt down and assassinate political critics.

Social conflict, often violent, was a signature feature of Banzer's presidency. Yet according to the non-government Permanent Assembly on Human Rights, since Quiroga took office his government has been responsible for the deaths of 13 persons in political conflicts. Hopes were high, even among government critics, that the arrival of the new, modern president would be a chance for a fresh start, an opening to address long-standing conflicts through dialogue rather than bloody confrontation. Instead, Quiroga's administration appears to be taking on its opponents with even more ferocity than the recent Banzer administration.

In November, soldiers methodically sought out leaders of the coca growers union for capture. One, Casimiro Huanca, was brutally killed in police custody, in what rights monitors call "an assassination." That month the government also arrested and jailed Oscar Olivera, winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for leading a movement against water privatization. He was charged with sedition for making comments critical of Quiroga.

The new president had been in office just five weeks when terrorists attacked the United States on September 11. Quiroga lost no time pinning the "terrorist" label on a wide swath of movements that were not to the government's liking. By month's end, officials seized a group of African, Asian and European visitors at the international airport on their way to attend an international conference on globalization. A Quiroga subordinate branded the conference "a meeting of terrorists."

"We cannot permit terrorists to disguise themselves as social movements," Quiroga told Bush at their first meeting in Washington last year.

The most violent conflicts on Quiroga's watch so far have been over the coca issue. More than 90 percent of the country's illegal coca leaf crop has already been eradicated, according to U.S. and Bolivian officials. The remaining coca farmers, mostly peasant families, claim what remains of the crop is not destined for cocaine production, but for the ancient and widespread local practice of chewing coca leaves. Growing coca is the only way they can keep their families from starving, those farmers say. Bolivian and U.S. officials insist the remaining crop is still aimed at the coca trade, and all of it must go.

Washington has pushed this country to deliver the goal of "zero coca" in part because it wants to use Bolivia to prove that forced eradication is a winnable strategy, a model for Colombia and Peru, too. But when Quiroga shut down a local coca leaf farmers' market, it set off a month of violent protests that left two farmers and four police and soldiers dead. For weeks, despite pleas from the Catholic Church and others, Quiroga refused talks with coca farmers' union leaders. Soldiers openly beat protesters and journalists covering the conflict. Many arrested were tortured.

Suspicion is common here that Quiroga was under heavy pressure from the U.S. Embassy to refuse meetings with farmers or their allies. During an earlier protest round, a Quiroga representative reportedly used his cell phone in the middle of a meeting with union leaders to call U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha and ask permission to agree to a specific concession. Among the public, resentment deepens. The president of the Bolivian Conference of Clergy, Fr. Carmelo Moreno, declared, "The government needs to listen to its people, not simply obey the voice of its master, the United States."

In February, faced with a bloody standoff and no end in sight, Quiroga finally allowed the government to join Church-convened talks and agreed to allow coca leaf markets to reopen. That sparked sharp criticism from the U.S. State Department in its March 1 report on the "War on Drugs." In a letter back to Washington, a frustrated-sounding Quiroga pointed out that his country has paid a price for anti-drug efforts, noting, "Bolivia is owed a debt." 

Jim Shultz, executive director of The Democracy Center (www.democracyctr.org), is author of The Democracy owners' Manual (Rutgers University Press).