Freedom and democracy on the march in Bolivia

The last few weeks in Bolivia have been nothing short of astonishing. In 2000, in what was dubbed the "Water War," the people of Cochabamba expelled an international consortium headed by Bechtel that had taken over their water supply and jacked up prices. In 2003, the people inaugurated the "Gas War" because of rage at a foreign investment deal that would give Bolivians only a tiny fraction of the total profits to be made from extracting and selling their natural gas (just as had been the case with 500 years of extraction of silver and tin). In October of that year, the Gas War claimed a head of state, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who had to resign and go in disgrace to Miami.

This time around, in the second stage of the Gas War, things have gone far beyond that. Another head of state, Carlos Mesa, is gone – and, unlike in 2003, he was not replaced by his natural constitutional successor. That would have been Hormando Vaca Diez, head of the Senate, hated as a feudal plantation owner with a violent law-and-order fetish; though desperately desiring power, he had to agree not to take the presidency, instead allowing it to pass to the head of the Supreme Court.

Re-nationalization of Bolivian gas is now permanently on the agenda.

Ordinarily, we could simply stop there and say, in this post-Cold-War political climate, this much is all that we could possibly expect. But, after 25 years of there being no alternative, something new is stirring in the air – most particularly, in the rarefied air of El Alto, the massive Andean shantytown that is the world's gateway to La Paz, Bolivia's capital.

To understand these events fully requires terms that we were told history had forgotten – much as the indigenous were told history had forgotten them.

Here's one: dual power.

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