Bolivia's vice president on indigenous rights, coca crops, and relations with the US
An interview with Vice President Álvaro García Linera of the Movement Toward Socialism Party (MAS).
from the March 27, 2007 edition
Page 4 of 4
Can you say how many Venezuelans are currently working for the government?
Venezuelans, Argentinians, Cubans, Brazilians, and Americans are present in the social area. American pediatricians are coming, we have Cuban eye specialists, Cuban and Venezuelan teachers are working on the literacy issue, computer technicians are helping to prepare ID cards, and Argentine officials are working on reconstruction and providing civil support for the flood victims. The number varies, because they do a job and then they go. We don't have any advisers or collaborators in political areas or in areas that aren't social.
There is a possibility that the US Congress will not renew the Andean Trade Preference Act [known in Spanish as the ATDPEA]. How is the government preparing for this?
We started to fight for our own ATDPEA because Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, which also benefit from this treaty currently, were moving forward in their free-trade negotiations. We said that a free-trade agreement would be problematic for our economy, that it didn't take into account the asymmetries [in relation to the US]. We're talking about a country with a 16th-century level of agricultural development and another one with a 21st-century level. This is why we don't think a free trade agreement is convenient. But we clearly wanted, still want, and are working to try to link ourselves in a lasting way to the most important economy in the world, which is the US. While these countries negotiate free-trade agreements, we will negotiate the ATDPEA because it takes into account these asymmetries. It doesn't provide for the unlimited opening of our borders, in which case we would have to compete in everything.
So the government of Evo Morales would never sign a free-trade agreement with the USA?
A free trade agreement, no. But a just and lasting trade agreement, yes. We need to move ahead on that and we want to move ahead. And we hope that the authorities responsible for international commerce in the US understand.
The international press has asserted on various occasions that your political ideology is more leftist than Evo's. Is this true?
We are here to collaborate with President Morales. I have a Marxist/Indigenous intellectual and academic background, and I don't know if it's more or less radical [than his]. But because my background is very rationalist, with a strong Hegelian influence – according to which all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real – this allows me to have a very realistic view of the world rather than a utopian one. I don't have a utopian reading of the world today, as a part of this government. I have a more realistic reading of the possibilities, and in this sense I try to collaborate with President Morales. That's all I can say.
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