One day at work, as I was walking to lunch with a couple of my local engineers, we passed our office messenger along the way who handed each of us a $100 bill. ?! Then I realized that it wasn’t real – in the States it would be called counterfeit – that day was the opening of the Las Alasitas festival. Las Alasitas is an annual festival with Aymara roots where you can buy miniatures or replicas of nearly anything and then, if you get it blessed and then burned by an ordained Aymara witchdoctor, you’ll acquire that thing in the coming year. Stacks of dollar bills, sacks of gold coins, passports, certificates of degrees, houses, and cars are all very popular items. When we reached the main road on our way to lunch we could appreciate that the street was packed with stalls and shoppers for several blocks in every direction – I’ve never seen so many Alasitas stalls set up in our neighborhood before – the big Las Alasitas market is located uptown. My local guys said that when there’s a national crisis the people really turn out for Las Alasitas – hoping that it will bring them good fortune.
At work, I re-started my big Yungas projects this month (January) – which have been on hold since September when my previous contractor walked off the job – with two new contractors. Getting my new crews up and going required that I spend a significant amount of time this month in providing training seminars. I guess we’ll see if we can actually wrap up this project this year. We got off to a slow start when the rainy season started early and wiped out both the old and the new roads into Yungas with landslides. The new road has never been officially opened yet because of the continuing landslides; when you include the cost of all of the repairs and maintenance on the un-inaugurated road, it brings the total cost up to $4M per km spent to-date – and they still don’t have a functional road. Meanwhile, the old “World’s Most Dangerous Road” continues to swallow up lives by the busload.
Also in January, the dreaded Yemen project kept raising its ugly head, eating up valuable time – the budget on that project is so tight that I can’t actually bill my time to the project unless I’m physically in-country. I’m not looking forward to returning to Yemen after the string of kidnappings of foreigners there in December. Poor Yemen is such a basket case of a country – in most of the country they have no schools or clinics in the rural areas because of all of the tribal warfare. What little petroleum they had is about to run out, and they can’t produce anything else because they’ve grown accustomed to a 3-hour work day and then spending the rest of the day zoned out chewing Qat leaf. Their government is (currently) pro-USA while the populace is largely pro-Bin Laden – I guess we’ll see how long the government stays in our camp now that Yemen’s been bounced from W’s “Millennium Challenge” funding for a host of deficiencies, including corruption. What a mess. (*See my note on the Millennium Challenge below.) In Yemen’s favor – it is a very visually striking place – I’ve never seen anything like it before.
On the political front here in Bolivia, for the first three weeks of January everyone was feeling a bit nervous about the newly elected government, especially the bureaucrats in the government offices with which we work. This is the first time in Bolivia’s history that they’ve elected a president: 1) with an outright majority, 2) who is an Indian, 3) who doesn’t have a high school education, 4) who, along with his vice-president, is a “confirmed bachelor” (the graffiti on the city walls has been considerably less kind), and 5) who is militantly pro-coca. The fact that he’s openly anti-USA isn’t new – it’s a throwback to the bad old days of the 50’s and 60’s. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, has been able to afford to stay anti-US through the years thanks to the pre-existing industrial infrastructure he inherited and unlimited petrodollars flowing in from the US. But the formerly radical socialist candidates of Brazil and Uruguay seriously softened their stance when they became presidents of their respective countries, so we have hopes for ours. Our new president, Evo, was busy all month prior to his inauguration on a “Rainbow Tour” of the world, tapping the leftist governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, France, Spain, Belgium, China, Iran, and India. But all together they haven’t offered him a fraction of the financial support that the US has been giving to Bolivia. So, at the end of his tour, while in South Africa, Evo “pardoned” the US for all of the humiliation that we’ve “heaped on Bolivia over the years.” I guess Evo has proven that he’s not so dumb after all. Now we’ll have to see how the two governments tackle the drug trafficking problem while Evo totally legalizes coca. Speaking of legalizing coca, my construction inspectors in the Yungas tell me that the hotels and restaurants in Caranavi have lost all of their employees – reportedly they’ve all headed to the hills to grow coca. One thing I have to say for Evo, however, is that he’s shaking up the world leaders’ dress code – he goes around in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a polo shirt (and a sweater, when it’s cold) and refuses to wear a tie or suit. The stuffed shirts of Europe really had a cow when he met the king of Spain in his casual wear – you’ve got to kind of like the guy for that at least.
Evo’s inauguration was kicked off on Saturday the 21st with full Indian rituals out at the ruins of Tiahuanaku, where he was crowned king of the Aymara tribe – we caught a few minutes of it on TV. Then on Sunday the 22nd he was officially inaugurated president of Bolivia (in his open collared shirt.) His honor guard consisted of as many miners as soldiers – it made me wonder who will protect him from the miners when he hasn’t solved the economic problems in short order, or who will protect him from the soldiers if his economic policies return Bolivia to the bad old days of hyperinflation and worthless national currency (the 80’s.) Actually, Venezuela has offered to send in troops to Bolivia if anyone tries to overthrow Evo. On the night of the inauguration we enjoyed the red glare of many rockets through our upstairs window as Bolivia threw Evo a much bigger bash than any of the other four new presidents that have been inaugurated since we’ve lived here.
And besides the new president, Bolivia has elected a 90% new parliament (talk about throwing the bums out), totally dominated by the new president’s MAS (socialist) party – they have the presidency of the Senate and the House. (An amusing aside: our newly elected president has announced that he, the vice-president, and the presidents of the House and the Senate will all four be sharing the Presidential mansion. He says that the house is big enough for all four and that way they’ll be able to work more closely together.) So anyway, the new president is going to have a free ride, as far as getting congress to go along with whatever he decides his program is going to be. My personal prediction is that this first time Indian government isn’t going to do any worse than all of the previous white governments; but I am curious to see how the general population is going to react when they see that the new government hasn’t solved all of their problems in short order. Will they be more patient than they’ve been with the recent white governments? Or will they turn on them and rend them like dogs? The first indications of which it would be came on Evo’s first day in office, the Monday after the big inauguration party on Sunday, when he named his cabinet. Then the miners’ union announced that they didn’t like the new Minister of Mines, the teachers’ union didn’t like the new Minister of Education, and the health care workers didn’t like the new Minister of Medicine. Further, the residents of El Alto are apparently on the outs with their former leader who led the movement to oust the private water company here in La Paz/El Alto and who was named the new Minister of Water. Who knew? And everyone is sniggering at the house maid who’s been named as Minister of Justice. So now the new government has been given one week to make changes “or else.” On the “positive” side, the workers seemed to be OK with the new Minister of Work who promised to raise the minimum wage. Hmm… I foresee both inflation AND blockades in the near future.
On Tuesday Evo “retired” the top two tiers of the armed forces commanders and installed the third level guys as the chiefs of the various armed forces. Of course that created a bit of an uproar among the outgoing military guys, but in the end they went without a fight (although there was something in the news about their protesting wives getting roughed up a bit.) I had to wonder at the brashness required to shake up your military establishment like that – surely he must have worried that it could backfire on him. But now that it’s over and done, I can see that it was probably a good thing to remove anyone senior enough to consider making himself the next military dictator, and to have the new top generals beholden to you for their new positions. By Wednesday the first wave of protest marches hit La Paz – the Landless Movement were protesting that two and a half days of the new government had already gone by and they were still landless. So… that’s how it’s going to be. On Thursday Evo cut government salaries by 57% (good thing) but then practically doubled the government employment (bad thing) by creating a whole host of “shadow” positions – Soviet-style social consciences to parallel the technical oriented vice-ministers (imagine the vice-minister of electricity having to get concurrence from his socialist counterpart every time he wants to approve or reject a project.) With the news of all of the new government positions opening, La Paz was flooded with unemployed “campesinos” looking to get on the gravy train. Next Evo will have to deal with a whole host of disenchanted campesinos who didn’t get one of those cushy government jobs.
And speaking of newly elected socialist governments – I guess you all noticed that Chile just elected a socialist president this month – their first woman president too. I’m thinking that that makes a clean sweep of all of South America. The other day I was eating lunch with a friend of mine who is a Chinese expat married to a Danish diplomat. He thought it was too bad that the US has so neglected relations with the South American countries that the whole continent has gone socialist and has made tight ties with China – I heartily agreed. For those of you who haven’t noticed, China’s skyrocketing development (thanks in no small part to Wal-Mart) has left them voracious for natural resources, far beyond what they can produce domestically, which they’re now going to be getting from South America. And, since said resources are finite, that means that the US will quickly find ourselves shut out of the world market, which will put the brakes on our own economic progress. Way to go US.
*Note from above: The misbegotten Millennium Challenge Account, administrated by the newly created Millennium Challenge Corporation, has yet to disburse its first dollar to ANY developing country because the nimrods who dreamt up this idea want to give the money directly to the foreign government after they’ve passed a host of economic, financial, and ethical tests – like that’s ever going to happen. Worse, if a country ever did pass muster, World Bank studies show that 50% of all money donated directly to a developing country’s government is immediately “lost” in the shuffle. I’ve seen both models firsthand in my projects overseas, the one where the development banks give money to the local government to administrate and they promptly skim off the top for their personal accounts, or the model that USAID follows which hires trusted (American) contractors who buy quality (American) products and then execute the projects for the direct benefit of the target population. So now, instead of using our foreign aid to win friends and influence people and maybe even help a few poor people along the way, we’re using ours to alienate nations and turn old friends into new enemies. What’s worse is that this Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) has created a whole new bureaucracy in Washington DC (just what we needed) to parallel USAID’s existing bureaucracy. And then, to add insult to injury, the MCC has no infrastructure outside of DC, so they’d have to rely on USAID’s international presence if they were ever to do anything overseas. In summary, we’ve created a new bureaucracy that has an impossible directive and doesn’t have the infrastructure to function at even a minimal level. What a stupid idea – obviously the product of some naïve politician who has no international experience whatsoever.
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