World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [29]
The market dominance of the white minority in Bolivia does not necessarily imply superior entrepreneurialism on their part. Most of the people I met through Augusto—even those in business—did not pride themselves on being particularly good entrepreneurs (although some clearly were). “Corporate law in Bolivia is not like in New York,” explained Augusto, who is also an essayist and political commentator. “I could, I guess I probably should, work harder—go out and find new business perhaps. But I prefer to spend my time reading books and writing.” Observers have long noted a disdain for commerce and industry among Hispanic elites. Some have attributed this disdain to Spain’s and Portugal’s eight-hundred-year conflict with the Moors, in which soldiers and priests were glorified while merchants and bankers—roles often occupied by Jews or Muslims—were denigrated. Whatever the reason, the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers of Latin America were famous for proclaiming their contempt for business and manual labor.
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Something of this “gentleman’s complex” may persist today. On the other hand, many families in the Bolivian elite have strong entrepreneurial roots as well. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, small but enterprising waves of immigrants from Germany, France, Italy, England, and Spain developed Bolivia’s—indeed much of the Andean region’s—import-export, finance, mining, transportation, and manufacturing sectors.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Bolivia, following the dictates of the World Bank and IMF, and advised by U.S. economists like Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, pursued aggressive privatization and free market policies. These policies were spectacularly successful in many respects. Under President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada—a mining tycoon educated at the University of Chicago—annual growth rose from negative rates to 4 to 5 percent, and foreign investment more than doubled between 1996 and 1999.
10 Globalization, moreover, has definitely created opportunities for “mestizo” Bolivians; among the upper crust today there are those with darker skin and unmistakably Amerindian features. Globalization has even produced some benefits for the indigenous majority. Growing tourism means that Amerindian entrepreneurs can sell more animal fetuses, peddle more Coca-Colas, even act as tour guides if they learn a little English. On a less wholesome note, there are an increasing number of Aymaran merchants prospering from illegal contraband businesses.
Yet global markets have, if anything, intensified the economic dominance of Bolivia’s white elite—the natural business partners of Western investors—over the country’s growth-stunted, impoverished indigenous majority. Certainly globalization has intensified the visibility of Bolivia’s wealth disparities, as condominiums and tony art galleries boom in the major cities of La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz while the rural parts of the country continue to be mired in abject poverty. Indeed, for many indigenous Bolivians, market reforms have meant infuriating increases in utility rates, layoffs—to reduce hyperinflation a few years ago, the government slashed social spending and closed state-owned tin mines, sending the unemployment rate soaring—and hollow promises of trickle-down.
11 “Free trade?” scoffed a Quechuan tour guide named Osvaldo, who accompanied us to the surreally beautiful Uyuni salt flats after we left La Paz. “That just means that we now sell our gas to Brazil, while there is no heat here in Bolivia.” Osvaldo added with a shrug, “The same families make all the money in Bolivia, whatever policies we have.”
Bolivia is one of only four countries—the others are Peru, Guatemala, and Ecuador—in which Amerindians still constitute a majority or near majority of the population. In all these countries, the same basic ethnic reality holds. Centuries of racial intermixing and immigration have produced the ethnic complexity distinctive to Latin America. In Cuzco, for example, the former Inca capital of Peru, many among the elite have Amerindian