La Paz – Bolivian President Evo Morales marked the completion of his government’s first six months in office with a visit Saturday to the central highland town of Orinoca, his childhood home, where a manifesto was read asserting that the country’s “pride” had been restored during that brief period.
Morales, a Socialist and the country’s first Indian head of state, delivered a speech splattered with jokes and playful remarks and presented an evaluation of his first six months as president in a document titled “Orinoca Manifesto,” which his chief of staff, Juan Ramon Quintana, read.
The text asserted that “for the first time in Bolivian history a political party has won two consecutive elections in six months and by an absolute majority,” a reference to the victory by his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in the December presidential election and also in a recent election of delegates to a Constituent Assembly.
“These victories allowed us to move in these six months toward the construction of a new state, a new development project that leaves behind the neo-liberal (meaning laissez-faire capitalist) state that condemned Bolivians to poverty, submission and backwardness,” the manifesto said.
Bolivia’s Socialists won a slight majority of the seats on the Assembly that will write a new constitution, but that margin of victory was well short of what Morales said he needed to fulfill his vow to “re-found” the Andean nation on behalf of its downtrodden Indian majority.
The document also referred to Morales’ controversial decision to nationalize Bolivia’s estimated 48 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, though the move actually consisted of giving foreign energy firms six months to accept the state petroleum company as the controlling partner in their operations here.
“As we did with the gas and oil, we must continue recovering all the natural resources to industrialize (the country) for the benefit of Bolivians and break the dependence on the imperial centers that have condemned us to be sellers of raw materials,” the document said.
“Only some minority sectors who resist losing their privileges and which now lack a (political) project and leadership don’t want the country to change,” the manifesto said.
“Minority sectors” was a veiled reference the wealthier mestizo population of Bolivia’s natural gas-rich eastern provinces who voted for greater autonomy in referendum earlier this month.
Bolivians voted against the autonomy measure nationwide, however, and it will be up to the Constituent Assembly – which begins work on Aug. 6 – to determine whether the eastern provinces will have greater independence from La Paz.
“After only six months of revolutionary transformations, we can say that being Bolivian has become a source of shared pride, because today Bolivia is respected,” the manifesto concluded.
During his appearance, Morales also recalled in a speech the difficulties he faced growing up in poverty in a mud and straw hut in Orinoca.
