You wouldnt know it from most media in the United States, but the continent where the janitors come from is seething. The natives seem intent on administering a set of lively kicks in response to what they see as Yankee tunnel vision in the war on drugs (Bolivia), the pursuit of natural resources (Ecuador) and the drive for free trade (Brazil).
Bolivia
On a visit to the White House in November 2002, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, the president of Bolivia, told George W. Bush that he needed more money to help ease the impact on Bolivian farmers of the US requirement that they eradicate their coca crop. Otherwise, he said, he would be back within a year asking for political asylum.
Bush thought he was joking. But in September 2003, popular discontent against Goni (as Sánchez de Lozada is popularly known) exploded. Demonstrations against a $5 billion project to build a pipeline to export natural gas to California turned violent. Protestors, including an alliance of coca workers led by Evo Morales, (the far-left candidate who came a close second in the June 2002 elections and is Washingtons worst nightmare), blocked roads and confronted security forces in the capital La Paz. Around 70 people were killed. The former president is now seeking asylum in the US.
The gas pipeline was a trigger issue for deeper issues. Sánchez de Lozada, a US-educated mining magnate, personified what most Bolivians call neo-liberalism, which they see as the latest in a long run of imperial ventures.
The suspicion of elite foreigners runs very deep in Bolivias troubled history since at least 1545 when Cerro Rico (Silver Mountain) was discovered at Potosí in the south-west of the country, providing the Spanish ruling class and their successors with immense wealth but inflicting on the indigenous people nothing but poverty, exhaustion and early death.
Yet had it not been for the rioting, Bolivians might have spent this month celebrating twenty-one years of democracy a marked improvement over the previous twenty years of mainly military rule (which itself came after around 150 years of chronic political instability). The Bolivian economy had been achieving respectable growth rates. The country was even reckoned for some time even with its botched privatisations and persistent abject poverty to be a model World Bank pupil.
Not everything in the economic programme Bolivia pursued was completely crazy. For example, the need for developing countries like Bolivia to reform their regulatory systems is reaffirmed in the World Banks new publication Doing Business in 2004: Understanding Regulation, which draws heavily on the work of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto.
Martin Wolfs account (Financial Times, 28 October 2003) of the Bank's report cites some of its powerful evidence. For example, around 82% of business activity in Bolivia takes place in the informal sector (by implication, then, a more law-governed society would ensure a wider spread of prosperity). But this is little comfort in a context where the foundations of peoples livelihoods are being undermined by outside intervention.
As Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue told Globolog, Insisting on coca eradication without offering any viable economic alternative for thousands of farmers only fuels resentment, leading to protests, greater strains on already fragile institutions, and political instability.
Ecuador
In Lago Agrio, a small frontier town in the Ecuadorian Amazon, one of the most extraordinary trials of recent times is reaching a climax. The Chevron Texaco corporation faces a class action suit brought on behalf of 30,000 indigenous people who claim that the dumping of highly toxic waste water and crude oil from 1971 to 1992 damaged their lives and livelihoods.
Lawyers working for the indigenous people argue that Texaco saved $4bn by not reinjecting toxic waste produced during oil extraction back into the earth a standard practice. They are pressing for $1bn in damages.
The local judge, Alberto Guerra, will decide whether to hold ChevronTexaco liable. The proof stage of the trial ended on 29 October; following this, a judicial inspection of specific sites began.
They are very close to where the alleged violations took place, physically close to the indigenous people, Michelle Rathbun, who analyses social responsibility for consultancy PFC Energy, told the Financial Times. They will feel the pressure from these people acutely.
I have never seen this company so on its heels, says Steven Donziger, lawyer for the plaintiffs. This trial is one of the most extraordinary in the history of the indigenous movement in Ecuador and Latin America. It is the first major trial about environmental damage in which a multinational American defendant has shown up to defend charges with a court order from the US hanging over its head.
Chevron Texaco says the whole thing is nonsense. Says the companys website: When [we] completed a remediation program in 1998, the government of Ecuador and its environmental agencies unconditionally released the company from all liabilities and obligations related to the oil operations.
The trial comes at a time when indigenous people are increasingly asserting their rights. In 2000, indigenous groups and sympathetic members of the military overthrew the Ecuadorian government and brought in the countrys sixth president in five years. And the trend is by no means confined to Andean countries. As Moisés Naím, the editor of Foreign Policy and former foreign minister of Venezuela, has argued, globalisation makes it increasingly possible for indigenous people (who number approximately 350 million, spread over more than 70 countries) and their allies to work together and more effectively.
But some of the problems they face, particularly with regard to natural resource management, are formidable. Ecuador shares problems common to all oil-producing countries in the south, Chris Jochnick, legal director of the Centro de Derechos Economicos y Sociales in Quito, told Globolog. There are high levels of government corruption, social inequality, poverty, external debt and political instability.
Exploitation of oil and ever-deeper structural economic difficulties have come together in Ecuador. Before oil development began around thirty years ago, the country had a negligible foreign debt of around $200m, a poverty rate below 50% and unemployment and underemployment of 15%. Today, with an estimated half of the countrys reserves depleted, Ecuador is the most highly indebted country in Latin America on a per capita basis. The poverty rate is over 67%, unemployment and underemployment more than 65%. Its a recipe for more trouble and more pain.
Meanwhile in Miami
Ever freer trade, to which US trade representative Robert Zoellick has declared his country committed, is said to be a vital link in the process of increased and more equitably distributed growth. That proposal will be put to the test in Miami, where trade ministers from all 34 countries in the Americas (Cuba is out it has outlawed capitalism in perpetuity) meet on 21 November.
Theyre supposed to be finalising an accord for a free trade zone to cover both continents, with a deadline at the end of this year.
After the collapse of the Doha round of global trade talks in Cancún, the prospects for an Americas-wide accord are mixed. To put it very crudely, the big boys Brazil and the US each of whom have electorally-vulnerable politicians and vociferous domestic interests, are squaring off in negotiations, while other players seek to extract advantage from both. Following Cancúnblog, openDemocracy wants to hear the most vital arguments in this debate.
E mail: globolog@openDemocracy.net