The way Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales puts it, South America's poorest country is threatened by a U.S.-backed oligarchic movement in the eastern province of Santa Cruz that wants to secede from the rest of the nation through an ''autonomy referendum'' on Sunday.
Morales' closest friends in the region are equally alarmed. They fear that if Santa Cruz Gov. Ruben Costas wins the vote by a landslide -- some polls suggest he might win with 70 percent of the vote -- the same will happen in autonomy referendum scheduled for June in the provinces of Beni, Pando and Tarija, and the country's wealthiest regions will secede from Morales' Indian-majority stronghold in the capital.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez presided over a Venezuela-Bolivia-Nicaragua-Cuba summit in Caracas last week to draw international attention to the supposed U.S.-supported plan to divide that country. Cuba said in a statement that Bolivia faces ''destabilization'' because of ``separatist plans by the oligarchy's attempt to . . . threaten national integrity.''
In a telephone interview from Santa Cruz on Wednesday, Costas ridiculed the idea that he is seeking to break away from the national government.
''That's absolutely false,'' Costas told me. ``It's the same old song that the central government has been telling us for more than 100 years. All we want is greater political, economic and administrative independence, like in Spain.''
Contrary to what Morales claims, greater regional autonomy will help keep Bolivia united, Costas said. If Spain hadn't allowed regional autonomies, it might have ended up like the former Yugoslavia, he said.
`MIDDLE LEVEL'
Juan Carlos Urenda, a Harvard-educated attorney who is a top advisor to Costas and is known to be the ideologue behind the autonomy movement, said in a separate interview that the Morales government is using the separatism charge to try to discredit Santa Cruz and other like-minded regions.
''Bolivia is one of the few countries in the world which only has two levels of government: the national government, and the municipal government,'' Urenda said. ``What we want is to create a middle level, like 98 percent of the countries around the world.''
Santa Cruz says it contributes $600 million a year to the national coffers but only gets $150 million back. It says it wants greater control of its resources, while recognizing it must give the central government a significant slice of its income.
Are you planning to create your own armed forces, as the Morales government says, I asked.
''That's false,'' Urenda said. ``What we are calling for is a police force that will be acting in coordination with the national police, with some specific tasks such as the control of [local] highways, to guarantee the free movement of people and merchandise.''
Isn't the autonomy referendum unconstitutional, as the government says, I asked.
Urenda suggested it's Morales' radical leftist government that broke the constitution. In a July 2, 2006, nationally-recognized referendum, Santa Cruz had voted to include its autonomy in the new constitution, but Morales ignored that vote and passed a constitutional reform that gives autonomy to pro-central government Indian communities and pro-government municipalities, he said.
In addition to that move to strip elected opposition state governors of their powers, the central government passed the constitutional reforms by force, keeping opponents from entering the building where the voting took place, autonomy supporters say.
FINAL THOUGHTS
My opinion: Judging from what I hear from people who have looked into the fine print of Bolivia's Kafkaesque constitutional rules, both sides -- the Morales government and Santa Cruz authorities -- are right in that the other one is circumventing the laws. Morales has passed -- through dubious methods -- a constitutional reform aimed at creating an ethnic majority-controlled Socialist state and stripping the opposition governors of their powers, and the opposition governors are bypassing the central government's electoral rules to secure their rights.
It's hard to know what will happen after Sunday's referendum, but it's clear that Morales has tried to carry out a Chávez-modeled takeover of democratic institutions to win absolute powers, but without Chávez's oil money. He tried to outsmart the opposition, but might have been outsmarted.
Seventy percent of Santa Cruz's population can't be dismissed as an ''oligarchy.'' Morales will have to decide whether to crack down on the people of Santa Cruz, which will almost surely cause bloodshed, or include Spain-styled regional autonomies in his constitution. Let's hope he opts for the latter.
