Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada
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| Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada | |
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74th President of Bolivia
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| In office 6 August 1993 – 6 August 1997 |
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| Vice President | Víctor Hugo Cárdenas |
| Preceded by | Jaime Paz |
| Succeeded by | Hugo Banzer |
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77th President of Bolivia
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| In office 6 August 2002 – October 17, 2003 |
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| Preceded by | Jorge Quiroga |
| Succeeded by | Carlos Mesa |
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| Born | July 1, 1930 La Paz, Bolivia |
| Nationality | bolivian |
| Political party | MNR |
| Spouse | Ximena Iturralde de Sánchez de Lozada |
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada Sánchez Bustamante (born July 1, 1930, La Paz), familiarly known as "Goni", is a Bolivian politician, businessman, and former president. A life-long member of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), he is credited for using "shock therapy", the economic theory championed by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs. This measure was used by Bolivia in 1985 (when Sánchez de Lozada was President of the Senate in the government of president Víctor Paz Estenssoro) to cut hyperinflation from an estimated 25,000% to a single digit within a period of 6 weeks. More broadly, he is credited with having engineered the restructuring of the Bolivian state and the dismantling the state-capitalist model that had prevailed in the country since the 1952 Revolution.
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[edit] Political life
The son of a political exile, Sánchez de Lozada spent his early years in the United States, where he attended boarding school at Scattergood Friends School and studied literature and philosophy at the University of Chicago. He returned to Bolivia in 1951, on the eve of the 1952 revolution led by the MNR political party, which transformed Bolivia from a semi-feudal oligarchy to a multiparty democracy by introducing universal suffrage, nationalizing the mines of the three Tin Barons, and carrying out a sweeping agrarian reform. Sánchez de Lozada pursued film-making, including early footage of Bolivia's 1952 Revolution, and participated in several cinematic projects in the 1950's and founded Andean Geoservices in the 1960's. In 1962 he founded the mining company COMSUR, later becoming one of the most successful mining entrepreneurs in the country.
Sánchez de Lozada was twice elected President of Bolivia, both times on the MNR ticket. During his first term (1993-1997), he initiated a series of landmark social, economic and constitutional reforms. Elected to a second term in 2002, he resigned in October 2003 and left the country after violent protests in which at least 49 armed protesters, unarmed civilans and security force members died. In March 2006, he resigned the leadership of the MNR - Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario.
In 1985, on the return to democracy after 18 years of military dictatorships, Sánchez de Lozada was elected senator from Cochabamba and became President of the Senate. Soon after, President Víctor Paz Estenssoro named him Planning Minister. As Planning Minister, Sánchez de Lozada oversaw a series of economic structural reforms that steered the country away from state capitalism, towards a mixed economy. He describes himself as a fiscal conservative and social progressive.
Sánchez de Lozada ran for president unsuccessfully in 1989 as the MNR candidate. While he won the plurality with 25.6% of the popular vote, in the congressional runoff between the top three candidates, the third-place winner, Jaime Paz Zamora of the MIR, who had polled 21.8% of the popular vote, won the presidency. Paz Zamora was backed in the runoff by the second-placed, former military dictator Hugo Banzer of the ADN, who had won 25.2% of the popular vote.
[edit] The first presidency: 1993-1997
In 1993, Sánchez de Lozada again ran for president, this time in alliance with the Tupac Katari Revolutionary Liberation Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Katari de Liberación, MRTKL), an indigenous party formed in 1985 whose leader Víctor Hugo Cárdenas was the candidate for vice-president. The MNR-MRTKL ticket won the first plurality, this time with 36.5% of the popular vote, and Sánchez de Lozada was confirmed as president by Congress. A coalition government that included the center left Free Bolivia Movement (MBL) and populist Civic Solidarity Union (UCS) was formed. The 1993 electoral victory also made Cárdenas the first elected indigenous vice president in South America.
The 1993-1997 MNR-led government initiated a series of social, economic and political reforms. These included Popular Participation, which decentralized the country by creating 311 (since expanded to 321) municipal governments and empowered them for local governance. The law introduced direct, municipal elections for the indigenous population, and included direct decision making on municipal spending for which 20 percent of federal spending was guaranteed to the municipalities on a per capita basis. Other reforms included the Educational Reform that introduced primary classroom teaching in the local indigenous language, Universal Maternity Coverage and milk and medical coverage for infants up to the age of one year, a Universal Old-age Annual Benefit, opening elections to independent candidates for congressional seats, significant changes to the constitution, and Capitalization, a privatization reform for the formation of joint ventures by private capital and the Bolivian people (not the Bolivian state)and requiring the private capital be invested directly in the new company, and significant changes to the constitution, among them the definition of Bolivia as a "plurinational, multicultural" republic; .
The privatization reform, the Capitalization Law was controversial. It privatized five major state-owned companies. Though not sold outright (the Bolivian people were transferred ownership of 50% of the new companies), the law was controversial because it ceded management of these industries to foreign interests. Supporters of the law, however, pointed out that the requirement that the private capital be directly invested in the new joint ventures significantly reduced the room for corruption and would bring about the development of these "strategic" resources in the absence of any possibility of Bolivia alone funding their development, that the fiscal obligations of the new companies would greatly increase the funds available for human and social, as well as infrastructure development, and that the dividend payouts for the Bolivian people went to create a universal, annual old-age benefit, the BONOSOL, which though small would have an immense impact on the rural elderly, the most marginalized sector of Bolivia's indigenous population
Finally, the reforms also included changes to the country's electoral laws. A new electoral system was introduced. The change opened elections to independent candidates who were elected by plurality to fill 70 congressional seats, and the remaining 60 seats were filled proportionally by the votes cast for the presidential tickets. Also, the president would no longer be elected from among the top three contenders (if no candidate won an absolute majority), but from among the top two, and his term of office would be five years.
[edit] The second presidency: 2002-2003
In 2002, Sánchez de Lozada again ran for president, this time in alliance with the left-wing MBL. As his running mate, Sánchez de Lozada chose Carlos Mesa, an independent historian and journalist who had MNR sympathies. Sánchez de Lozada hired U.S. political consultants James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum to advise his campaign.[1]
After an especially difficult and controversial campaign, the MNR-MBL ticket won the first plurality with 22.46% of the popular vote), edging out Evo Morales of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), which had 20.94% of the popular vote. The center-right neopopulist candidate, Manfred Reyes of NFR placed a close third, 20.91% of the popular vote). After a difficult coalition-building process, Sánchez de Lozada was elected in a coalition that included: MNR-MBL, MIR and UCS, the last two former members of the preceding coalition headed by the rightist, former General Hugo Banzer. When Sanchez de Lozada took office, he faced a very difficult economic and social situation. Under the preceding administration, economic growth had plunged from the 4.8% at the end of his first presidency to 0.6% in 1999 and had recovered to only 2% for 2002. In 1999, Banzer privatized the water distribution in Cochabamba, giving control to the private company Aguas Del Tunari, owned in large part by the US-based Bechtel corporation.[2] The company immediately raised rates, triggering violent demonstrations, the Water War, in the city. The company abandoned Bolivia, but this marked the beginning of constant protest marches and barricades that continued even during the election campaign. Unable to deal with the worsening economic and social situation, the Banzer government opted to place the blame for all its problems on Sanchez de Lozada and the "neoliberal" model in place since 1985. It stridently attacked the capitalizations of the state hydrocarbon giant as "sell outs to foreign interests." However, it did nothing to change or revert the Capitalization Law. The many other landmark reforms of the Sanchez de Lozada government were at best taken for granted. Banzer's focus was to achieve 100% eradication of coca crops. His policy was forcefully resisted by the coca growers under the leadership of Evo Morales and opposed outside the coca growing regions, extending Morales's political relevance far beyond these regions. The coca leaf, although the raw material for cocaine production, is also deep rooted in many traditions of the Bolivian people. In addition, intensive eradication undermined the country's gray economy. Banzer died of cancer in 2001 and his vice president, Jorge Quiroga, did his best to regain stability with a series of populist measures, but, again, was unable to define a coherent government program. Sanchez de Lozada had designed his economic recovery program on information released by the Quiroga government. Once president and with full access to the numbers, he found the state coffers were virtually empty. The urgency of his efforts to receive the essential foreign aid to jump start his program was not understood.
[edit] Gas War and resignation
From his inauguration in August 2002 until the end of the year, there were less public tensions. In January 2003 and under the leadership of Evo Morales, a group of trade union leaders (Evo Morales for the “cocaleros” - coca growers, Jaime Solares and Roberto de la Cruz for urban workers and miners, Felipe Quispe for the indigenous farmers in the Aymara region surrounding La Paz) joined together to found the "Peoples High Command" (Estado Mayor del pueblo). A new wave of heightened protests began; main roads were blocked and towns and cities were brought to a standstill. Some aired long-standing grievances against the county's political elite and its governments, others were targeted entirely locally, against decisions of the now self-governing municipalities. In February, a standoff between police demanding higher pay and army units called to protect the presidential palace suddenly ended in violence and deaths in the streets of La Paz without articulated demands. The acute economic crisis affecting above all the urban workers and the farming/indigenous population fed wide-spread support for protests in general. Protests and demands became more focused: the cocaleros continued protesting against eradication of a milenary plant (coca) although Banzer’s 100% policy had been replaced by the earlier subsidized crop substitution policy for gradual coca reduction but not total eradication; the highly militant indigenous farmers of the La Paz Aymara region wanted a “re-founding” of Bolivia, with the reins of political and economic power in the hands of the country’s indigenous communities and autonomy for their territories; urban workers, primarily in La Paz, and miners protested against the proceeds of increasing natural gas production going to foreigners. The claim that 82% of profits went to multinational corporations and only 18% was left for social spending gained wide currency. A deaf ear was turned to company denials and calls for an international and independent audit to quantify taxes and profits. Demands for a return to the corporatist state put in place by the 1952 revolution and the nationalization of “foreign hydrocarbon” companies assumed primacy, and calls began to be heard for the resignation of Sanchez de Lozada. In late September, a convoy of busses and trucks under military escort was bringing back to La Paz over 700 persons, including foreign tourists, freed after a 10-day blockade of a valley resort town when it was ambushed on the highlands (Altiplano). The attackers were well armed and gave every indication of being well organized; some were positioned as snipers. The armed confrontation left eight dead, among them two soldiers. Some two weeks later, in October, President Sanchez de Lozada had announced that the export of Bolivia's gas to Mexico and the US (the prices was very very low) would be through a Chilean port notwithstanding strong public opposition. (Rancor runs high against Chile since Bolivia lost its coastal territory to Chile in the late 19th century War of the Pacific.) The main highway from the city of El Alto down to neighboring La Paz was blockaded and the local population called out to protest. A massive demonstration and virtual siege of the city ensued. After three days, fuel and other essential supplies were dangerously low in La Paz. On the fourth day, in compliance with his constitutional responsibilities and with the agreement of his cabinet, President Sanchez de Lozada sent a security force to open the way for supply trucks to enter the beleaguered city. The soldiers met with people and there were victims especially one child of 5 years old, the army kill almost 65 innocents person.
On 17 October, Evo Morales supporters from Cochabamba tried to march into Santa Cruz, the largest city of the eastern lowlands where the lands keepers support was strong for the neoliberal president. They were turned back by lands keepers. Then Sanches de Lozada decided to live the country, without taking any responsibility of the 65 dead people.
Sanchez de Lozada currently is fugitive form the Bolivia justice, and got impunity in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in the United States. The government of Evo Morales, elected president in 2005, is pressing Washington to extradite him to face charges of genocide in Bolivia. Morales also seeks international support for his efforts to bring the former president to trial in Bolivia.
[edit] November 3, 2005 Legal Papers Served in Washington DC
On November 3, 2005, Mr. Sánchez de Lozada was speaking at a wine and cheese reception sponsored by a non-profit group associated with Princeton University in downtown Princeton, New Jersey. A group of activists, led by Douglas Hertzler of Eastern Mennonite University and Sara Grusky of Food & Water Watch, served the legal summons for Mr. Sánchez de Lozada to testify for an investigation in the events of the October 2003 Gas War. Immediately after being served, Sánchez de Lozada dropped the documents on the floor. Several observers accompanied Hertzler and Grusky to witness the serving. The event was seen as a political stunt, since neither the documents nor the servers had any legal validity or jurisdictional authority. Nonetheless, the documents were transmitted to the U.S. State Department on June 22, 2005, which has to date ignored them.
Evo Morales has constantly demanded actions against Sanchez de Lozada in the United States seeking specifically the support of NGO's
View a press release from the event.
View a press release, photos and the proof of service documents from the event.
[edit] See also
Member of the Club of Madrid[1]. [3]
Interview from Commanding Heights, PBS documentary [2]
- Our Brand Is Crisis, 2006 documentary about Sánchez de Lozada's second presidential campaign and the advice he received from American political consultants
- List of presidents of Bolivia
- History of Bolivia
- Politics of Bolivia
[edit] External links
- Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy [3]
- Biography of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada at CIDOB (Spanish)
- ^ Forero, Juan (February 26, 2006), “The (American) Selling of the (Bolivian) President, 2002”, The New York Times
- ^ (English) [http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=640_0_1_0_C Plunder and Profit: The IMF and World Bank continue to push privatization, in spite of its massive failures.
- ^ (English) [http://www.clubmadrid.org The Club of Madrid is an independent organization dedicated to strengthening democracy around the world by drawing on the unique experience and resources of its Members – 66 democratic former heads of state and government.
| Preceded by Jaime Paz Zamora |
President of Bolivia 1993-1997 |
Succeeded by Hugo Banzer |
| Preceded by Jorge Quiroga |
President of Bolivia 2002-2003 |
Succeeded by Carlos Mesa |
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