Rio De Janeiro, Brazil – Flush from a historic electoral win last month, Bolivian President-elect Evo Morales is taking a global victory lap that’s revealing the pragmatic side to the peasant leader’s provocative leftist agenda.
The 46-year-old former coca farmer, who’s pledged to be a “nightmare” for the United States, started his two-week tour Dec. 30 with fawning visits to Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, two of Latin America’s boldest critics of U.S. policy.
On Tuesday, Morales again stressed his revolutionary ambitions during a stop in South Africa, where he compared the plight of that country’s black majority under apartheid to that of Bolivia’s poor indigenous majority, which long has lived under Caucasian, elite rule.
An Aymara Indian, Morales will be Bolivia’s first indigenous president when he takes office Jan. 22.
“We share a common history of discrimination,” Morales said.
Yet Morales also has met political and business leaders in Europe and Asia and tried to calm fears that his government will seize the property of foreign companies that are working in Bolivia.
Morales told European officials he’d respect private property rights while demanding more control over his country’s natural gas, minerals and other resources, aides said. Bolivia claims Latin America’s second largest reserves of natural gas.
“Bolivia needs private foreign partners and entrepreneurs, but not owners for our natural resources,” Morales said in Spain last week.
The Madrid-based energy company Repsol YPF is the second biggest investor in Bolivia’s energy sector.
Meeting Chinese leaders in Beijing on Monday, Morales pleaded for foreign investment while calling China a “political, ideological and programmatic ally of the Bolivian people.” “He wants to show he has international support and will guarantee the safety of the investments of companies that play fair with us,” said Ivan Canelas, a newly elected congressman from Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“He is ready to work with honest companies.” Morales’ conciliatory tone has partly paid off. Spanish officials announced during his visit that they’d forgive $120 million of Bolivian debt.
Many, however, see Morales’ dueling rhetoric as an attempt to have it both ways, with the leader attacking U.S. policies such as open markets and anti-drug efforts for the home crowds while offering cooperation with multinational companies abroad.
“He has effectively talked out of both sides of his mouth for some time now,” said Roger Stark, an energy finance expert and a partner at the Washington law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham.
“Sooner or later, that will have to result in concrete energy policy.” Such shifts in rhetorical tone have tainted Morales’ relationship with neighboring Brazil, which he’s scheduled to visit Friday.
While promising Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in November that he’d respect the holdings of state-controlled oil company Petrobras, Morales made headlines weeks later by threatening during a campaign stop to seize two of the company’s refineries in Bolivia.
Last week, a top Petrobras official said the company was prepared to renegotiate all its contracts with Bolivia. With about $1.5 billion in investments, Petrobras is Bolivia’s largest foreign investor.
“That may simply be acknowledging the inevitable,” Stark said.
“The restructuring of those concessions will probably be the first item on Morales’ agenda from an energy standpoint.” Brazilian officials also have said they’ll seek Bolivia’s quick entry into the four-country Mercosur trade bloc in an attempt to protect Bolivia from international economic sanctions in the event that Morales takes a more radical economic path and breaks treaties and agreements.
“Brazil is trying to serve as the go-between between Bolivia and the United States,” said David Fleischer, a University of Brasilia political scientist. “Brazil has good relations with people as diverse as Morales and Bush, and it’s trying to make use of that.” Morales pointedly didn’t visit the United States on his world tour.
He’s drawn Bush administration ire by threatening to cut cooperation with U.S.-funded efforts to eradicate coca leaf, the main ingredient in cocaine.
Bolivia is the world’s third biggest producer of coca leaf, behind Colombia and Peru.
Yet even on the coca issue, Morales has moderated his rhetoric occasionally, saying he’ll cooperate with the United States to stop cocaine production but not the growth of coca leaf.
Morales, who’ll lead South America’s poorest country, has made big headlines on his global jaunt, and not all of them kind.
Last week, he shocked European observers with his dressed-down wardrobe of brightly striped sweaters and a black leather jacket, which he wore at street rallies and formal meetings alike, even when meeting Spanish King Juan Carlos.
