The Republic of Bolivia boasts a new national monument: the
childhood home of Evo Morales, the country’s new president.
In July, reports the Bolivian newspaper La Razon, Morales issued presidential
decree No. 28807, declaring his hometown of Orinoca a “National
Historical Heritage” site and turning the house where he was born
into a “Historic Monument.”
The decree, approved by the president and his cabinet without
input by the national legislature, directs the Ministry of Culture to allocate government funds
toward maintenance of the home, and to build an “interactive
museum” chronicling Morales’s life up until his election victory
last December.
Then in August the Bolivian postal service issued not just one,
but three postage stamps bearing the president’s image. According
to the daily El Deber, one stamp shows Morales wearing the
ceremonial presidential sash, a common symbol of authority in Latin
American countries.
Another stamp shows Morales, an Aymara Indian, attired in
traditional native dress and holding the baston de mando
(staff of command), another customary emblem of power south of the
border. In the third stamp, Evo is seen smiling and waving to his
people.
As the country’s first president of Indian heritage, Morales is
a significant figure in Bolivian history. But will he prove to be a
great statesman, one worthy of museums? Popular politicians
sometimes have a way of disgracing themselves. It’s way too soon to
start building monuments.
Morales asserts, in ostensible modesty, that the measures are
intended simply to render tribute to Bolivia’s ascendant indigenous
movement. One wonders, however, why then Evo’s birthplace and Evo’s
image, in particular, were chosen. Surely there are other places
and other events in Native Bolivian history or culture that are
worth memorializing. There may be more at work here than Indian
pride.
Evo currently enjoys 60 percent approval in opinion surveys —
but this is already down twenty points from polls taken during his
“honeymoon” period early in 2006. In the end he could become a sort
of Bolivian Boris Yeltsin: an indisputably courageous leader, whose
utter incompetence once in power set the cause back for years.
Since taking office in January, Morales’s government has made an
inauspicious start in this regard, with a number of key posts going
to people unlikely to inspire much confidence. As put by an
Associated Press summary of what it delicately termed these
“unconventional” appointments, “A former maid is justice minister.
A coca-farming feminist with little formal education heads the
assembly rewriting the constitution. A renowned Quechua-language
singer whose voice mimics birdsongs is ambassador to France.” And
the new ambassador to the U.S. is a “career journalist with no
previous diplomatic experience and limited command of English.”
Morales himself is a longtime political activist with the
Movimiento al Socialismo (“Movement Toward Socialism”) party who
participated in protracted unrest leading to the downfall of a
previous president; whereas his vice president, Alvaro Garcia
Linera, is a former guerrilla fighter who spent five years in prison for
alleged terrorist acts in the 1990s.
WHAT EXACTLY IS AT WORK HERE — the idealist’s faith in the ability
of non-professionals to manage the affairs of state, or the
revolutionary’s contempt for the processes of law, diplomacy, and
other ordinary institutions? The answer may lie in the exaltation
of the president’s person as the embodiment of the “new
Bolivia.”
There’s something unseemly, if not ridiculous, about printing
stamps with Evo’s image at this stage — indeed, at any stage of a
sitting head of state’s term in office. (Imagine the fun Jay Leno
might have had if the U.S. Postal Service had issued Bush or
Clinton stamps during their terms.) Hence opposition leaders’
warnings of a budding “evolatry.”
But then, Evo is a celebrity president. The cult is nurtured not
only from above, but also eagerly from below. Calendars bearing photos of Evo Morales grace homes all
over Bolivia’s countryside.
The ultimate adulation gets underway this month as Bolivian
moviemakers Tonchy Antezana and Homero Rodas start filming a
fictionalized Morales biography. The film, to be titled “Evo Pueblo,” hones in on key moments in the
president’s eventful life from childhood through his rise to power,
stopping along the way to focus on Evo’s musical skills, on Evo’s
love of soccer, and on Evo’s leadership of the country’s coca leaf
growers. Four actors have been selected to play the role of Morales
at different ages. The company expects to hire up to 15,000 extras
from native villages to re-create an ambitious carnival scene at
the start of the film.
The movie may yet turn out to be even more topical than its
makers expect, with Evo front and center — and Bolivia’s
long-suffering Indians serving as props.
Jorge Amador is a freelance writer and editor emeritus
of the Pragmatist, a current-affairs commentary.
