Luis Arce: Go back to govern in Bolivia

By Franz Flores Castro / Latin America21

In 2008, the famous American political scientist Joel S. Migdal made a statement with overtones of prophecy: “As the 21st century unfolds, the State will continue to be at the center of the scene, but it will be increasingly difficult for the State to achieve conformity and obedience”.

The paradox was that this highly requested State sought to dominate a society with strong tendencies to disregard its authority and, in some cases, the legitimacy of its governments. At the end of 2019 there were “social outbreaks” in Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia that led to political crises.

In Chile, the government headed by Sebastián Piñera had no choice but to annul the rise in the price of the Santiago Metro ticket, just as, in the case of Ecuador, President Lenín Moreno had to abandon his claim to eliminate the subsidy to gasoline. For its part, in Bolivia, the massive urban protests caused by the insistence of President Morales to remain in power, ended with his resignation and subsequent departure to Mexico.

However, something distinguishes the Bolivian case: the MAS, despite the 2019 crisis and the resignation of Morales, was able to rebuild its party structures, organize its bases and achieve a resounding victory in the 2020 presidential elections with an absolute majority.

Backtracking as government logic

With this background, can one speak of government weakness in a government like that of Luis Arce, who obtained 55% of the votes plus 76 seats in Parliament out of a possible 130? Even more so, when the opposition parties are (almost) a caricature of a political party? Certainly not, the resounding electoral victory has given the MAS government an indisputable legitimacy of origin that, in theory, should lead it to deploy its policies without major turbulence.

However it is not so. So far this period, the Government has had to back down on various policies, most notably the repeal of Law 1386 against illicit profits and financing of terrorism, a Law that, in addition, had already passed all the filters of the Legislative Power.

What is surprising is that the opposition to this norm came from sectors allied to the Government such as transporters, unions and mining cooperatives, who, beyond the anti-MAS speeches of their current comrades in the struggle such as the civic groups of Santa Cruz and Potosí, were certainly frightened by a law that could investigate the sources of their fortunes.

The second major setback was the postponement of the requirement to carry the COVID-19 vaccination card to carry out procedures in public and private entities. On January 1, 2022, Luis Arce launched this policy to stop it cold six days later.

The government has justified the freeze by alluding to the long queues at the vaccination posts, but that is not the truth or not the whole truth. What happens is that (once again) social movements allied to the MAS announced measures calling for the annulment of the decree, such as the La Paz Departmental Federation of Rural Education Teachers, the Yungas coca growers, the MAS youth, the Tupac Katari Peasant Federation. , the Bartolina Federation of Peasant Women, the Intercultural, the Confederation of Markas and Ayllus, the El Alto Civic Committee and the Council of Peasant Federations of Los Yungas, along with several other smaller organizations, but no less combative such as the Red Ponchos . All of them are in power today but, from the outside, they block Arce’s policy.

This could be due to Arce’s style of government which, unlike his predecessor’s, prefers to retreat rather than confront. However, although leadership is important, even more so in a presidential regime such as the Bolivian one, the repetition of these setbacks by Arce invites us to propose some explanations that point to more structural aspects, typical of the configuration of the Bolivian plurinational State.

The problem lies in in which the MAS government came to power supported by a series of popular organizations (peasant unions, indigenous movements, urban groups) that were never fully institutionalized by the State, that is, they were not absorbed by the MAS. For union actors, it was more beneficial to maintain the independence of their organizations while remaining present in the state apparatus, which leads them to act, when it comes to preserving their interests, both from within and from outside the government. The clearest example is the Federation of cooperative miners whose leaders have reached the head of the mining ministry, but when they saw that government policies did not coincide with their business interests, they did not hesitate to take to the streets to confront their government.

Therefore, Although Luis Arce can set his agenda with some autonomy, in the long run those who shape the policies, who define whether the law or public policy comes into force or not, are the social movements or a part of them. The aforementioned Migdal pointed out that the State engaged in real “pitched battles” with other actors with power who opposed or resisted its determinations, but Migdal affirmed this assuming that they were, in one way or another, outside the government, not inside. The particularity of the MAS government is that its partners, when it suits them, act as allies and when not, as independent unions.

Although this is nothing new (in fact, it was the constitutive feature of the MAS government), Morales’ broad command and leadership over the social movements attenuated this problem somewhat. Now, however, President Arce absolutely lacks any reach on these actors, which leads to configuring a government with a very relative autonomy to establish its own agenda of priorities and a marked weakness to carry out its public policy.

The damage to democracy

That said, it is possible that this routine of advancing and then retreating, this logic of pleasing the allies to carry out the policies, is the tonic in the Arce government. Michael Mann (the sociologist, not the filmmaker) established that states evolved as they achieved infrastructural power in which the state penetrated and dominated society. In Bolivia there is an inverse process: it is society that penetrates the State, it is its organizations that end up configuring the policies of the MAS.

This phenomenon is highly negative for society. A state that cannot impose itself on the particular interests of the actors with power is a state that does not build citizenship and, ultimately, not democracy either. (THE)

Franz Flores Castro Political scientist, professor and researcher at the San Francisco Xavier University of Sucre, Bolivia. Doctor in Social Sciences with a mention in Political Studies from Flacso, Ecuador www.latinoamerica21.com, a plural medium committed to the dissemination of critical opinion and truthful information about Latin America. Follow us on @Latinoamerica21.