| Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada | |
|---|---|
| 74th and 77th President of Bolivia | |
| In office 6 August 2002 – October 17, 2003 |
|
| Vice President | Carlos Mesa |
| Preceded by | Jorge Quiroga |
| Succeeded by | Carlos Mesa |
| In office 6 August 1993 – 6 August 1997 |
|
| Vice President | Víctor Hugo Cárdenas |
| Preceded by | Jaime Paz |
| Succeeded by | Hugo Banzer |
| Personal details | |
| Born | July 1, 1930 La Paz, Bolivia |
| Nationality | Bolivian |
| Political party | MNR |
| Spouse(s) | Ximena Iturralde |
| Religion | Christianity |
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada y Sánchez de Bustamante (born July 1, 1930), familiarly known as "Goni", is a Bolivian politician, businessman, and former President of Bolivia. A lifelong member of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), he is credited for using "shock therapy", the economic theory championed by then Harvard University economist Jeffrey Sachs. This measure was used by Bolivia in 1985 (when Sánchez de Lozada was Minister of Planning 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.
Sánchez de Lozada was twice elected President of Bolivia, both times on the MNR ticket. During his first term (1993–97), he initiated a series of landmark social, economic and constitutional reforms. Elected to a second term in 2002, he resigned in October 2003 in protest after violent protests related to the Bolivian gas conflict in which some 60 protesters, soldiers and policemen died. In March 2006, he resigned the leadership of the MNR.
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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. Having grown up in the United States, his Spanish is accented, leading many Bolivians to refer to him as "El Gringo." 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 and participated in several cinematic projects in the 1950s, including the production of early footage of Bolivia's 1952 Revolution. In 1954 he founded Telecine. His film Voces de la Tierra (Voices from the Earth) won First Prize for documentaries at the 1957 Edinburgh film festival. In 1957, he founded Andean Geoservices. In 1966, he founded the mining company COMSUR, later becoming one of the most successful mining entrepreneurs in the country.
In 1979 and again in 1980, on the return to democracy after 18 years of military dictatorships, Sánchez de Lozada was elected to congress as deputy for Cochabamba. In 1985, he 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 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.
In 1993, Sánchez de Lozada again ran for president, this time in alliance with the MBL, a leftist party, and 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 1993–97 MNR-led government initiated a series of Constitutional, social, economic and political reforms. Most noteworthy was the redefinition of Bolivia in the Constitution as multethnic and multicultural and the first articles in Bolivia's Constitutional history enshrining indigenous rights. Other vanguard legislation included the pro-poor Popular Participation Act, 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 classroom teaching in the local indigenous language, Universal Maternity Coverage and milk and medical coverage for children up to the age of five years, a Universal Old-age Annual Benefit, opening elections to independent candidates for congressional seats, Capitalization, a reform which enabled 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.
The Capitalization reform was controversial because it was perceived as a privatization of five major state-owned companies. The law was controversial because it ceded management of these industries to foreign interests. Supporters of the law, however, believed 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.
In 2002, Sánchez de Lozada again ran for president. 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 running a sophisticated campaign based on public relations strategies formed by the US political consulting firm, Greenberg Carville Shrum, de Lozada seemed well on his way to winning a strong enough plurality to form a strong government. However, three days before the elections the US ambassador publicly warned the Bolivian people against electing "those who want Bolivia to again be an exporter of cocaine" as it would put in jeopardy US aid to Bolivia.[2] The population's subsequent reaction to this statement swelled the anti-US vote of Evo Morales in the last three days of the campaign by 9 percent putting him on the heels of Sánchez de Lozada's vote. Evo Morales of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) received 20.94% of the popular vote. The center-right neopopulist candidate, Manfred Reyes of NFR placed a close third with 20.91% of the popular vote. After a difficult coalition-building process, Sánchez de Lozada was elected in a coalition formed by the MNR-MBL, MIR and UCS, the last two former members of the preceding coalition headed by the rightist, former dictator General Hugo Banzer.
When Sánchez de Lozada took office, he was faced with an economic and social crisis inherited from the preceding administration. Under the preceding administration, economic growth had plunged from the 4.8% at the end of Sánchez de Lozada's first presidency to 0.6% in 1999 and had recovered to only 2% for 2002. The fiscal deficit was running at 8%.
From his inauguration in August 2002 until the end of the year, there were fewer public tensions. In January 2003 and under the leadership of Evo Morales, a group of 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 "People's 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 government, 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 widespread 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 "Coca 0" policy had been replaced by the earlier subsidized crop substitution policy for gradual coca reduction but not total eradication; the indigenous farmers of the La Paz Aymara region wanted a "re-founding" of Bolivia, with the recognition and inclusion of Bolivia's indigenous ethnic groups as legitimate political blocs, and a type of economic de-centralization based on said recognition of indigenous groups as legitimate political actors.[3] Other demands included autonomy for their territories; urban workers, primarily in La Paz, and miners protested against the proceeds of increasing natural gas production going to foreigners.
Demands for a return to the corporatist state put in place by the 1952 revolution and the nationalization of Bolivia's hydrocarbon resources assumed primacy, and calls began to be heard for the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada. In late September, a convoy of buses and trucks under a police 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 the convoy was ambushed on the highlands (Altiplano). The attackers were well armed and gave every indication of being well organized. The armed confrontation left six dead, among them two soldiers and a child.[4]
A few days later, in early October, it claimed that President Sánchez de Lozada had decided to export Bolivia's gas to Mexico and the United States 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 La Paz ensued.
After three days, fuel and other essential supplies were dangerously low in La Paz. On the fourth day, President Sánchez de Lozada sent a security force to open the way for highly explosive diesel and gasoline cisterns through densely populated neighborhoods to pass safely down to La Paz. The convoys were attacked[5] by rioters at several points along their route. Some of the protesters are said to have been armed with firearms or dynamite sticks. According to official figures, 59 deaths resulted from this incident.
On 17 October, Evo Morales' supporters from Cochabamba tried to march into Santa Cruz, the largest city of the eastern lowlands where support was strong for the president. They were turned back. Faced with the option of resigning or more bloodshed, Sánchez de Lozada offered his resignation in a letter to an emergency session of Congress. After his resignation was accepted and his vice president invested, he left on a commercially scheduled flight for the United States.
According to his attorney, Sánchez de Lozada is currently residing legally in the United States.[6]
On November 3, 2005, Sánchez de Lozada was speaking at the reception sponsored by a non-profit group associated with Princeton University in downtown Princeton, New Jersey. A group of activists from Food & Water Watch, served summons for Sánchez de Lozada for the events of the October 2003 Gas War between presidential candidates. The event was seen as a political stunt as only US Marshals can serve in a case like this,[7] 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.
On November 11, 2008, Bolivia formally served the US government with a request to extradite Sánchez de Lozada back to Bolivia.
On November 10, 2009, the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida ruled that the claims for crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killings could move forward in two related U.S. cases against Gonzalo Daniel Sánchez de Lozada Sánchez Bustamante and former Bolivian Defense Minister Jose Carlos Sánchez Berzaín. The cases, Mamani, et al. v. Sánchez Berzaín, and Mamani, et al. v. Sánchez de Lozada, seek compensatory and punitive damages under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).[8]
| 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 |