Bolivia: electoral process grinds to a halt

The fragile truce that has given a semblance of normality to Bolivia over the past few months could soon fall apart. The country, torn by internal strife and increasingly split between a more affluent, European-descended eastern population and the indigenous communities of the poor western highlands, has been rocked this week by a controversial court ruling, that seeks to redistribute the country’s parliament. Under the ruling, three highland provinces will lose their seats, with the wealthy province of Santa Cruz gaining up to four. In a country polarised along ethnic lines, it could be enough to provoke the indigenous groups to once again plunge Bolivia into chaos. In light of the ruling, on September 22nd, the Presidential elections scheduled for December 4th were postponed. It is just the latest in a series of false starts that have robbed the country of democratic legitimacy these three years and, unless it is quickly resolved, it is all too likely to drag this impoverished nation back into disaster.

Political groups whose popularity rests in the highlands are, understandably, aggrieved with the court’s timing. Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS, led by Evo Morales, is the country’s largest indigenous group, and would stand to lose a considerable number of votes if the ruling is upheld. Morales, who narrowly lost the country’s last election in 2002 and is predicted to become the country’s next president, agrees broadly with the court’s decision – which is an attempt to implement data from a 2001 census rather than a 1991 one – but argues that it should not be carried out during an electoral process, and should be implemented after December’s vote. While his case is legitimate, his reasons are nothing if not self-interested: his presidential bid could well be wrecked by any parliamentary shift to the east, which is generally hostile to MAS.

Whether or not Morales takes the presidency will no doubt influence both the country’s relationship with the US, and, more importantly, Bolivia’s very future as a unified state. Morales has come under fire from the Bush administration, which has suggested thatt the MAS leader is nothing more than a puppet controlled by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, bete noire of the White House. Evidence of contact and collaboration between the two is thin on the ground, although Chavez has spoken in favour of the rights of indigenous groups throughout Latin America. If Morales is elected, it will further signify the leftwards shift that has spread across the region over the last five years, spurred on by a rejection of the neoliberal values and IMF-dictated social and economic policies that became rigid orthodoxy in the 1990s – broadly known as the “Washington consensus”. The vicious swerve away from US-concocted ‘remedies’ is something of concern for the United States. Republican Senator Mel Martin of Florida offers a typically condescending analysis, saying of Latin America that it is an area “where our U.S. influence is not what it was and I think this is a dangerous situation”.

However, a putative Morales presidency would rule over a far from united nation. One bone of contention that sparked civil unrest earlier this year was the desire of wealthy Santa Cruz province for regional autonomy. While the row has been quelled for now, and a referendum on the issue pencilled in for next year, the ascension of Morales – whom, to many in the east, represents a corrupt and interfering figure, all too willing to strip the region of its assets (potentially lucrative natural gas fields) – could spark the independence-leaning eastern province into action.

Morales’ main rival for the presidency, Jorge Quiroga, is running a well-orchestrated campaign that is reminiscent of American elections in its blitz of carefully-marketed PR. However, this could prove to be his undoing; Bolivians remember all too well the US-educated president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, ousted from his job back in 2003, and exiled now in that Mecca for deposed Latin American leaders, Miami. Quiroga is, whether true or not, tainted by accusations of funding from the US. While the White House would undoubtedly prefer to see Quiroga installed as president, a Morales presidency currently looks more likely.

This is, of course, assuming that Congress and current President, Eduardo Rodriguez, find a way to restart the electoral cycle. Right now, Bolivia is becoming increasingly mired in a crisis of constitutional legitimacy. The fear is that, rather than being resolved through peaceful negotiation, the country’s impatient factions will decide that further anarchy is the only cure.

A response to 'Understanding Christopher Hitchens'

note: this comment was initially written in response to this article on Christopher Hitchens. I initially aimed to post it on the blog in question, but they closed their comments section and hence I reprint it here:

Good article on Hitchens. I think you make a lot of important points, especially in the way you destroy the faux-naive reasons offered by Galloway for what he (and many others) see as Hitchens' 'betrayal' of the left. As a liberal, anti-fascist individual who remains determinedly against the war, I am often dismayed by the media attention granted to Galloway, Moore and their ilk, who are all-too-easily painted by the right as the only manifestation of liberal anti-war discourse. I am fully supportive of Hitchens attempts to shatter their deluded, self-serving campaigns, although less enamored by his inability to differentiate between those who supported Hussein and those who have always loathed his brutal regime.

However, I feel that you neglect to consider one of the key inconsistencies on Hitchens' post-September 2001 embrace of American military involvement in the Middle East. Hitchens has been a constant critic of totalitarian religious authority wherever he has seen it, from the Catholic church to the Ayatollahs in Iran. This latter case is for him a personal one, as your article notes, due to his friendship with a number of secular Kurdish pro-democracy groups - the Kurds just being one of the peoples to have suffered under both the Shah and, latterly, the progenitors and inheritors of the 1979 Khomeini revolution. In Iraq, the 'coalition' troops have managed to remove a totalitarian - yet secular - regime; one, it should never be forgotten, responsible for some of the worst crimes against its own people since the Second World War; in exchange, Iraq is now a barely functioning, yet existent, democratic state. Yet what kind of democratic state is it likely to become? The likelihood is, one that represents many of the things that Hitchens purports to abhor - a Shi'ite theocracy, a puppet state largely under the control of the mullahs in its northerly neighbour, a place where women are forced to wear the veil and are beaten and even killed for daring to show an ankle in public (these things are already coming to pass in the country's Shia-dominated south). The country's President pays lip service to the idea of women's rights, yet it features not in the much-maligned Constitution, which to virtually all intents and purposes reduced Iraq to a barely affiliated trio of often hostile regions.

This may bode well for the future of Hitchens Kurdish friends, who will be granted in everything but name their long-cherished country of Kurdistan; but what of the Shi'ites who, having endured the viciousness of Saddam, are now forced to live under a brutal theocratic regime? Do we just wash our hands of the whole matter, chalk it down to the quirks of 'democracy', and move on to better things? If Iran is already a thorn in the side of the West, a Shi'ite Iran-Iraq axis will not only prove a massively destabilising force in the region - particularly in Saudi Arabia, which has long feared a united Shia presence on the edges of the peninsula - but will no doubt create more justification in the West for intervention in order to stop the development of nuclear weapons, or in order to provide 'freedom', or for whatever post-hoc reason they can come up with. Would it be impossible to suppose that, with the coalition troops removed from Iraq so that 'democracy can flourish' (or whatever ridiculous epithet is coined), they would have to be sent back in to defeat the very regime they helped to establish?

I feel these are legitimate concerns that Hitchens has yet to properly address.

The coming end of the 'oil age'

An amusing comment on the influence of the automobile in the 20th century can be found in an incident that occurred in 1896. The occasion, a fatal accident that saw Bridget Driscoll run down by a modified vehicle travelling at a blistering 4 mph, prompted the following warning from the coroner Percy Morrison:

“We must ensure that such a thing would never happen again”

In hindsight it’s a touching, if not a little naïve, sentiment. Road accidents resulted in the death of some 3221 people in 2003 alone in the UK. Meanwhile, the internal combustion engine – and the way it exponentially drove the oil age – has proved to be a far more lethal device than anybody in the nineteenth century could have imagined.

The fuel protests, which this week threatened yet failed to materialise, demonstrate how the price of gasoline has evolved into a barometer for public grievance with the government. In 2000 well-organised protests scared a government that was approaching the end of its first term into cutting duty tax. However, back then the assumption (largely correct) was that the problem was due to the government’s punitive measures. In 2005, the problem is more one of logistics: the high price of oil, coupled with the worldwide shortage created by Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of vital Gulf refineries, has caused pump prices in Britain to inch over the once-unthinkable £1 per litre mark.

Thus, a sense of panic has set in across the country, with drivers filling their tanks and lines of cars idling outside petrol stations who are struggling to cope with the demand. Whether all this is an example of a self-supporting myth is unclear; the ‘crisis’, if it can so be termed, appears to stem from the beginning of this week – a day on which the Daily Mail published a largely inconsequential piece, which nevertheless carried the alarming headline “Panic at the petrol pumps”. Cue sinister threats from some of the co-ordinators of the 2000 protests, and on Wednesday efforts were made to blockade refineries. By all accounts these were a somewhat ridiculous failure and, despite fighting talk from the organisers, efforts on Thursday and Friday were similarly futile. Unlike in 2000, the protestors lack the backing of the public.

Part of the reason is the assumption that Britain, like many other countries, is the victim of oil price rises elsewhere on the globe. This week Gordon Brown claimed that the problem lay squarely at the door of OPEC and their opaque declarations on oil production quotas. It is a simplistic, short-term analysis of what is a problem on a much larger scale. Even if OPEC were to increase production, it would not alter the fact that – according to an increasing number of experts on the subject – we have long passed the point of peak oil production.

In his recent book The Long Emergency: Surviving the converging catastrophe of the 21st century, James Howard Kunstler depicts a nightmarish, yet chillingly plausible, account of the way that the end of the oil age will change civilisation as we know it. His central argument is that the world’s population is sustainable only in an age of vast industrialisation. When cheap fossil fuels are exhausted, which could happen much more quickly than anybody anticipated, this industrialisation will gradually come to an end, and with it the ability to sustain what we have come to regard as the ‘westernised’ style of existence – suburban living, mass car ownership, air travel on demand, food, goods and services, shipped from one side of the world to the other. The dramatic rise of industrialisation in China and India is further exacerbating the problem.

Furthermore, the ‘controversial’ subject of global warming – controversial only to those, such as many in the Bush administration, who blithely refuse to believe that it even exists – is reaching an ever-more precarious position. A report in the Independent suggests that global warming is now past the point of no return – the polar ice caps are now melting at an unprecedented rate, and, essentially nothing can be done to reverse the process.

Such apocalyptic considerations jar with the idea – expressed most effectively by the disgruntled drivers lining up at petrol stations - of our ‘right’ to cheap fossil fuel. It is a word you often hear bandied about, this notion of one’s ‘right’; to have the freedom to own and run a car, go on cheap flights, enjoy a plentiful supply of energy. The unfortunate truth is that we are going to have to wean ourselves off this idea if we are ever to move beyond the oil age into whatever form of energy comes next. Trade advertisements by companies such as Shell and BP talk blithely about wind power, as if it is a ready-to-use solution that can be simply switched on as and when necessary. There is a chance that we will discover some form of renewable energy that is as plentiful and as wide-ranging as oil; however, as Kunstler ominously warns, the “likely scenario is that new fuels and technologies may never replace fossil fuels at the rate, scale and manner that the world currently consumes them”

When this crisis comes, there is little chance that such arcane events as the ‘fuel protests’ will be remembered. But for us today, they are important milestones it what will emerge to become the greatest challenge of the 21st century: how civilisation will react to the end of the oil age.

A sober warning in the wake of Katrina

Eschewing the blame game would seem a noble goal in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, especially with rotting bodies still being pulled from the murky floodwaters that have sunk New Orleans. Inevitably, though, the disaster almost immediately took on a political dimension, with local authorities blaming the federal government, and the federal government shuffling around and looking elsewhere before assuring the world that the fault lay with anybody else but them.

Whoever is eventually held to account over what transpired, the focus right now is on governmental incompetence. This is not necessarily borne out by the public: various polls have produced contradictory results – a CNN/USA Today Gallup poll claimed 42% of the American public rated Bush’s handling of the crisis as ‘terrible’, while a Washington Post poll suggested that his performance was approved of by 74% of Republicans. However, this incessant poll taking has been accompanied by frosty reportage from former Bush acolytes such as Fox News and the New York Times’ David Brooks. Some commentators have seen the American media’s critical response as nothing short of a revolution, an epochal moment when the normally supine hacks grit their teeth and respond with an all-out attack on federal incompetence. With mid-term elections coming looming, and a presidential approval rating already tethered by Iraq set to flatline, the administration’s formidable machinery is stirring into action. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Karl Rove is orchestrating a plan to minimise political damage following Katrina, involving visits to Louisiana and Mississippi by high-profile administration figures, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice. For his part Mr. Bush has been flying back and forth between the South and Washington for a week now, burning up gallons of fuel whilst urging his countrymen to cut back on their consumption.

Some of the more vociferous critics of the Bush administration, including the former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, have laid out a whole battery of reasons as to why Katrina was solely the fault of the government. One of the more curious charges is that, by refusing to address climate change, the administration has contributed to global warming which has caused hurricanes like Katrina to become more and more frequent. It is an argument that is difficult to sustain as, while hurricane seasons are getting increasingly prolific and violent - no doubt in a large part due to global warming - it is a process that has been going on for decades. It is patently ridiculous to suggest that, had Kyoto been ratified, New Orleans would still be standing tall above the waves.

However, this line of inquiry does open up another facet of American society that is being largely ignored. The USA has, from its beginnings, considered itself a ‘frontier’ nation, well used to battling the elements and overcoming nature. Whether it was the inherent hostility of the indigenous population, the freak weather patterns, the inhospitable land, the recurrent earthquakes – America has long been a country which has prided itself in its ability to wrestle with the elements, and win. The notion of building a major city on, for example, an unstable fault line (San Francisco) or a concave bowl beneath sea level (New Orleans), seems faintly absurd, yet both feats were accomplished and great metropolises established. America’s oil consumption, the world’s largest and showing no signs of slowing down, further demonstrates the myth of dominance over nature. The country has never before met an obstacle that its rapid technological advances have not been unable to overcome. Whole spans of desert have been transformed into viable, liveable communities. Why should the oil age’s impending demise prove any different? Surely, the unspoken wisdom goes, a viable form of renewable energy will be discovered before oil supplies are gone?

Within certain departments of the federal government this myth no longer holds much sway. In 2001 the much-criticised Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) produced a shortlist of disasters that were likely to hit America over the coming decade. One was a terrorist attack on New York, which happened later that same year. Another was the flooding of New Orleans, which has duly come to pass. The third, and potentially most catastrophic, was the arrival of the fabled ‘Big One’ – a cataclysmic rift of the San Andreas Fault that could potentially return much of California to the desert from whence it rose. Were this to happen, the death toll could well be in the hundreds of thousands.

Nor are we in Britain entirely safe in our island nation. The Thames Flood Barrier is being raised more often each year – from three times in its first five years of operation, to 20 times in the winter of 2002-03 alone. More worryingly, it was initially designed to function until 2030 – and right now precious little is being done to consider what comes after that. The potential of natural disaster to subsume civilised society is becoming a greater and greater risk, and we should think carefully about the fact that the world’s richest and most powerful country was rendered helpless by the type of weather that is becoming more and more common.

It is often facetious to suggest that lessons can be ‘learned’ from natural disasters such as the one that struck the Gulf Coast nearly two weeks ago. Perhaps, in this case, it will serve to rock the myth of America’s – and, by extension, the world’s - mastery of its own land.

Film Review: "Primer" (dir: Shane Carruth)

This review first appeared on the Culture Wars website

Like a bolt of lightning from an otherwise clear sky, Primer touched down at last year’s Sundance film festival and quickly became the event’s talking point. The pet project of Shane Carruth – who, as well as starring, wrote, directed, composed the score - Primer subjects its audience to a tortuously exacting seventy minutes in which the conventions of the science-fiction film are torn up, swallowed, regurgitated and then torn up again. Not for the short of attention, Primer nonetheless rewards the patient viewer with an intriguing examination of time travel and its discontents. It is a singular achievement, one that renders the complexities of films such as Mulholland Drive, Donnie Darko and Memento as mentally taxing as Disney. Unlike those carefully plotted films, Primer cares little whether or not it takes its audience along for the ride.

The film centres on two engineers, Abe and Aaron, who work in dull assembly plants by day, but reserve their enthusiasm for a garage-bound project whose properties appear to be connected with a new type of cooling device. The film’s first twenty minutes are a blinding miasma of scientific vernacular surely of interest only to the most dedicated of PhD students, yet the effect is to inculcate the audience into the film’s pared-down naturalistic style. Its low-key aesthetics – the film was shot for a reputed cost of just $7,000 – and the barely nuanced performances from the key actors, make the twists and narrative backflips to come all the more powerful.

By trial-and-error, the duo realise that the machine has an unexpected property – the ability to bend space in such a way that time travel becomes possible. Rendering a full-sized device in a local self-storage locker, the friends manage to drag themselves backwards to an earlier point in the day. The verisimilitude of this experience – the banality of the scene, its lack of effect or dramatic music - add to the quirky plausibility that inflects the entire film. With the device’s properties established, the friends’ thoughts turn to moneymaking, petty revenge and, finally, a bizarre attempt to prevent an altercation at a party.

To give away how exactly this unfolds would be churlish and also difficult, as – on just the one viewing – I confess I was lost by the film’s end. Suffice it to say that from hereon in the plot becomes increasingly thick, as the pitfalls and temptations of rudimentary time travel are picked over mercilessly. By taking to heart one of the complexities of time travel – namely, the idea that by moving through time you are creating endless facsimiles of yourself – the film ends up resembling the Escher print of two hands drawing each other; it becomes increasingly difficult to follow which ‘copy’ is which. The film does demand a lot of the viewer, and even the most attentive is unlikely to grasp the implications first time round, but nonetheless as the plot unravels everything comes into question until the very foundations on which the film is built are ripped asunder. Primer is the kind of intelligent film that so rarely appears in American cinema, and is all the more refreshing because of it.