The Romantic Radical: Move Over, Hugo Chavez
News: With a life story that reads like an adventure novel, Bolivian VP Alvaro Garcia Linera is Evo Morales' Karl Rove — and one of the most interesting figures in the new Latin left.
December 21, 2006
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In May 2005 as the streets of La Paz filled with dynamite-tossing indigenous demonstrators supporting the socialist party Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS, one of the party's senators summed up the consensus on the Bolivian left this way: There was no chance the party would be winning the presidency. As the opposition it could hope to change policy little by little, but it wouldn't be ready to govern for years to come.
The protests continued. President Carlos Mesa ordered the police into the streets but told them not to kill: One dead protester could mean civil war. Tear gas and rubber bullets were no match for the crowds, who soon blockaded the main roads, surrounded the presidential palace, and shut down the La Paz airport. The capital's streets filled with uncollected garbage, the economy ground to a halt, and the government teetered on the brink of collapse.
It was amid this chaos that a tall, skinny, 43-year-old sociologist made the rounds of the TV talk shows. His name was Alvaro Garcia Linera; dressed in dark suits and long overcoats that contrasted oddly with his youthful face, he had a disarming way of pushing aside his mop of salt-and-pepper hair and smiling with an almost girlish charm. He exuded such confidence and pleasure in talking about ideas that even right-wing hosts couldn't resist inviting him back. Rumors proliferated about his never having married, his dandyish tastes and delicate mannerisms; when one host finally asked if he'd ever had sex with a man, Garcia replied slyly: "Not yet." He proceeded to decimate his antagonists' rhetoric in the patient tone of a professor disabusing students of some unhelpful notion.
Garcia had a way of making radical explanations seem reasonable, and given that Bolivia was staring into the abyss, people were ready to listen. It helped that he looked like a European-descended oligarch, that he could quote French sociologists or World Bank data at the drop of a hat, and that unlike many of his free-market-loving opponents he had actually read Adam Smith. His erudition was a source of seemingly natural authority: In Bolivia education commands deep respect across social classes.
About a year after the crescendo of street protests, in March 2006, Bolivia's new president — indigenous protest leader Evo Morales, elected in an emergency ballot in December 2005 — announced that the state was seizing control of Bolivia's vast natural gas reserves, which are the heart of the country's economy. U.S. commentators were flabbergasted, but most poor Bolivians cheered the move; even local businesspeople described it as "reasonable" and "necessary." By Morales' side was Alvaro Garcia Linera, wearing his fancy suit and coy smile. Garcia had joined the MAS ticket during the election as part of a compromise between Morales and the social movements to his left. Now the academic and longtime underground organizer — not that many years ago, anyone who knew Garcia would have expected him to spend his days as an obscure mathematician, or else go down in a hail of bullets as one of the continent's last mythic guerrilleros — was vice president.
There is no way of understanding the ongoing transformation of Bolivia — one of the hemisphere's most dramatic political experiments — without grasping the role of Garcia, who has been cast as Morales' Svengali, or perhaps Karl Rove. For that matter, no one embodies the recent history of Latin American politics — from a contest between Marxist revolution and Washington-sponsored dictatorship to a new pragmatism that is equal parts socialism and Silicon Valley — as well as Alvaro Garcia Linera.
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Born in the town of Cochabamba as the youngest of three siblings, Garcia was a shy child and an obsessive reader, one of his brothers recalls. He devoured Marx and Hegel as a teenager, and absorbed some liberation theology from the teachers at his Catholic school. But he remained apolitical, choosing to study math and eventually moving to Mexico City to pursue an advanced degree. There he met Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar, a student and activist who was, as Garcia quickly points out even decades later, "very beautiful."
"We were a couple in all senses," Garcia says, "intellectual, academic, in our activism, and in love." The pair fell in with Mexico City's Salvadoran exile scene, much of which was affiliated with the FMLN guerrillas, and it wasn't long before they resolved to start a socialist revolution in Bolivia.
Never mind that Che Guevara had met his death in Bolivia attempting to do the same, or that with the sun setting on the Soviet Union, the guerrillas of Central America were starting to negotiate their surrenders. Young, dashing, and hyper-intellectual, Garcia and Gutierrez were convinced they could make history.
