Along the Bolivian Highway: Social Mobility and Political Culture in a New Middle Class

6. Middle Classes and Debates over the Definition of Community

C h a p t e r 6 Middle Classes and Debates over the Definition of Community October 3, 2005, was a bright, chilly, spring morning. In the Rural Planning Office on the second floor of Sacaba’s city hall, several men and women were entering data into Excel spreadsheets. The high ceilings and battered, ornate ironwork on the office doors betrayed the age of the building, circa 1880. Inside, across from me at a scuffed table, sat Don Carlos and Lucho, his enthusiastic agronomist friend and employee. Completing the group was Diego, a high-ranking municipal planning official who lived in an expensive gated high-rise condo building in Cochabamba City. Diego’s chain-smoked cigarettes filled the office with a soft haze. For the previous two hours, we had been staring at a laptop computer, reviewing Choro’s list of project requests as part of Sacaba’s Annual Plan, fruit of the state-mandated participatory planning process that Don Carlos spearheaded in Choro. Don Carlos had followed the guidelines of the 1994 Popular Participation Law (LPP), within which Choro was officially designated as a rural peasant community (comunidad campesina). The Choro wish list included money to buy a plot of land for a new high school, cement to pave several irrigation canals, and tubing to expand Choro’s drinking water system. The ongoing failure of Choreños to engage in the collective action necessary to capture the funding from the LPP quickly emerged as a chief concern in the meeting. Don Carlos remarked to Diego that, as elected agrarian union (sindicato) president and codirector of Inti, the NGO, he was trying to build social capital (capital social) in Choro, but it was very difficult. He and community members were intensely frustrated because Debates over the Definition of Community 183 Choreños were failing to organize collectively to access the LPP’s significant new resources for development projects. Collective action as a community was essential, development workers knew from experience: residents had to agree on which projects to prioritize from their LPP funds; sustain pressure on lackadaisical municipal officials—protesting in the street, when necessary—to disburse funds and draw up project blueprints; and collect the money from each household to make up the inevitable shortfall of government funding for each project. They needed to mobilize in work parties to build the irrigation canals and health clinic they wanted and to meet often to decide on their priorities and budget. Choreños failed to carry out these collective actions and therefore missed out on immense funding opportunities. Even the municipal government’s simplest and most essential offers of assistance slipped through Choreños’ fingers, said Don Carlos. When the Sacaba government announced that it would vaccinate cows against footand -mouth disease, for example, there was no organizational structure in Choro to take advantage of the offer, because this required leaders and the rank and file to express interest and set up a system to collect the cows to receive their shots. Choreños had received only occasional bags of cement and a few adobe classrooms for their ancient and decrepit elementary school in the ten years since the passage of the LPP, hailed by former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada as ‘‘the most important redistribution of political and economic power in the republic since the 1952 Revolution’’ (Sánchez de Lozada in Molina and Arias 1996:30). Don Carlos and Lucho spent several more moments lamenting that social division in Choro impeded this collective action and therefore blocked development in Choro. Diego remarked offhandedly that only an ‘‘organized civil society’’ (sociedad civil organizada) could effectively launch development. He was echoing the terminology of the designers of the Popular Participation Law (e.g., Finot 1990:87; Molina and Arias 1996:26) and continued regretfully that this was a problem throughout the municipality of Sacaba, subverting LPP planners’ intentions. Don Carlos’s face lit up and he asked Diego to repeat himself. He cried out with a jubilant smile, ‘‘organized civil society!’’ and wrote it down with a flourish in his date book. He exclaimed, beaming, that what Diego had just called ‘‘organized civil society,’’ he and Lucho had been calling ‘‘social capital,’’ but Diego’s phrase captured his notion more precisely. The three men lamented for a few more moments that most 184 Chapter 6 Bolivians...