Bolivian President Hangs On but Fails to Secure Promises

In an ever-stranger political drama, Congress voted Tuesday to keep President Carlos Mesa in office 48 hours after he submitted his resignation, even as the country’s social and political order remained tenuous.

Early Tuesday, Mesa’s aides said he would stay in office only if by 4 p.m. he had obtained an agreement from all the nation’s political parties on the most contentious issues dividing this Andean country.

Long past the deadline, negotiations to draft an agreement fell apart when leaders of the largest opposition party, the Movement to Socialism, and other groups refused to sign it.

But Mesa did not step down, even though he had failed to win any concessions on the issue that caused him to offer his resignation Sunday: road blockades across the country, organized mostly by peasants, that have snarled transit for weeks and caused sporadic shortages of fuel and food.

Instead, moments after Congress voted unanimously to reject the president’s letter of resignation, Mesa walked from the presidential palace to Congress to address the legislators. He called the vote to reject his resignation a show of support that gave his government new strength.

“Once again, this country has said no to the blockade of the country, it has said no to violence, and it has said yes to the untangling of the most important problems facing us,” Mesa said.

Mesa called on Bolivians to march Thursday in all of the largest towns and cities to protest the highway barricades. Since Mesa’s surprise offer of resignation, thousands of middle-class citizens have taken to the streets to show support for him.

“We want a country of free transit, of economic freedom and democratic rights,” Mesa said.

The Movement to Socialism, or MAS, is the force behind many of the blockades. The party is popular among impoverished farmers of Indian descent who are suspicious of Bolivia’s business elite.

For several hours Tuesday, Mesa huddled in a meeting room in the Central Bank building here with more than three dozen leaders of MAS and other major parties in an attempt to reach a broad “social pact” that would bring peace.

“If Congress is disposed to sign this agreement, it’s possible to continue governing,” Jose Galindo, the president’s chief of staff, said early Tuesday afternoon. “If it isn’t, today this administration comes to an end.”

In return for lifting the barricades, Mesa offered MAS concessions on its chief demand: significantly higher taxes and royalties on foreign oil and gas companies. But the concessions did not go far enough for party leaders, who believe the taxes and royalties on foreign companies should be high to fund social programs.

“We are under the permanent attack of those who want to make deals with the international oligarchies,” said Congressman Santos Ramirez, a MAS member.

“Our struggle is for the dignity, hope and future of the Bolivian people.”

Hugo San Martin, a lawmaker who supports Mesa, said the refusal of MAS and its leader, Evo Morales, to lift its barricades amounted to holding the rest of the country hostage.

“Their position is anti-democratic,” he said. “How much further down the spiral can we fall? It this attitude continues, the democratic system is in danger.”

Analysts said Mesa had remained in power largely because there appeared to be no alternative.

The man next in line in the presidential succession, Senate President Hormando Vaca Diez, is a conservative who is anathema to the Indian and peasant groups. And Vaca Diez has said he doesn’t want the job.

Despite the calls from many middle-class Bolivians in recent days for a strong hand -- “una mano dura” -- to restore order, no major political leader is willing to push the country down a road that could lead to civil war.

Similarly, the Bolivian electorate is so fractured that calling early elections would be unlikely to produce a new president capable of healing the nation’s myriad ethnic, class and regional divisions.