Bolivia, our beacon of hope

[AlphaCentauri]

There's a game I've been playing recently. Any time I read the news and get depressed about the parlous state of our world, I type "Bolivia" into Google news and wait for the results. It's really all you need to brighten up your day.

In the last month things such as this have popped up: Bolivian women spearhead Morales revolution, which describes the decision by Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, to stock half his new cabinet with women, nearly half of them indigenous. More recently there was this: Bolivian president donates half pay to victims, which detailed Morales and his vice president Alvaro García's decision to donate half their March salaries to help the victims of the Haiti and Chile earthquakes.

What is happening in Bolivia now – and has been since MAS, or Movimiento al Socalismo, came to power in 2005 – is truly inspiring. There has been a lot of talk about how the left is dead and Francis Fukayama's "End of History" means we all have to accept that a global economic system that creates obscene inequalities and mass starvation is the highest stage of social and economic organisation our species can attain.

That might be true for an academic at Johns Hopkins, but for everyone else looking to the future and something to fight for, I ask them to kindly divert their gaze to Bolivia. It is the closest thing we have to real democratic socialism: a government, but more importantly a grassroots movement, committed to economic and gender equality, anti-racism, free speech and every other ideal the left should hold dear.

...

Throughout his mandate Morales has determinedly pursued a programme of social change, including the part-nationalisation of the country's energy resources and a surge in social spending that has focused on conditional cash transfers (whereby payments have been made to poor families on the condition that they send their children to school.) These measures have seen Bolivia record a fiscal surplus for the first time in 30 years; the country has been predicted a higher growth rate this year than anywhere else in the Americas; and poverty levels have dropped continually since MAS came to power. Even the head of the IMF's western hemisphere countries unit has praised the Morales government for what he referred to as its "very responsible" macroeconomic policies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/08/bolivia-evo-morales-election

[protocol rv]

1. Evo seems to be level headed

He's not as radical as Chavez.

[Judi Lynn]

2. They've struggled so hard to overcome the vicious, murderous, filthy racism

of the invaders, and successive groups of scum from Europe and the South African white sector, which was GIVEN the ancestral property of indigenous Bolivians by Hugo Banzer, in his attempt to create a "white Bolivia."

Evo Morales has paid hideous price, himself, at the hands of the racist oligarchs in the long years leading up to his election.

Bolivia is NOT going to allow them to hold Bolivia hostage ever again. That's gone.

Thanks for your information, AlphaCentauri.