Overview of Land and History 39authentic voice, with a signifi cant
indigenous base.
With Condepa gone and the
COB in tatters, at the turn of the
20th century there was a near
total political void for the 70 per cent indigenous population.
Bolivia’s masses were excluded even from being co-opted,
since the Popular Participation programme of the previous
government was in neglect.
The whitest of all parties was in power, Bánzer’s ADN
(Democratic Action). Bánzer’s government inherited an
economically crippled state, with former revenues now
subject to the trickle-out-of-the-country effect of the
privatisation (labelled ‘capitalisation’), a policy inherited from
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist
Movement). The privatised state enterprises were now
incapable or unwilling to signifi cantly fi nance government
social programmes.
The loss of such revenue, especially that of the hydrocarbon
industry, led to a situation in which the economy depended
almost exclusively on a neo-colonial system of exportation of
raw materials. Exporting raw materials before creating any
value-added products was hardly a strategy for job creation.
Bolivian history documented the results of such an economy;
impoverished Bolivians had nourished the world for two
centuries with Bolivian silver, saltpeter, and later, tin and gas,
and Bolivian intermediaries even expressed a willingness to
export water to Chile for a pittance.
A native product, the coca leaf, had always been used for
local consumption (tea, medicinal, ceremonial), but excess
coca found its way into the Colombian-US cocaine economy.
Bolivian producers of excess coca languished at the abject
bottom end of this economy, with the real benefi ciaries being
the Colombian cartels that transformed the coca into an illicit
value added powder.
At the behest of the United States Embassy, Bánzer’s
‘Dignity Plan’ sought the massive eradication of all excess
coca. With no effective marketing of alternative crops set in
place, the ‘Dignity Plan’ thrilled the United States Embassy
One of Bolivia’s most
impoverished cities, Potosí had
supplied gilded Europe with
silver, yet in English, something
‘worth a Potosí’ was priceless.