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(50YEARS.ORG) The World Bank Tries to Re-Write Bolivian History

From the 50years.org mailing list's Sameer Dossani:

Our friends over at the democracy center in Bolivia have done a great job of de bunking some of the Bank's latest PR. Amazingly, the Bank's propaganda attempted to paint a picture of World Bank generosity out of a disaster that they created. As many of you will know, Bolivia was forced to privatize its water in the late 1990s, resulting in the "water wars" of 2000 where the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia refused to pay the exorbitant water tariffs. The private company involved, the San Francisco based Bechtel, used the World Bank's investor dispute mechanism, ICSID, to file a case against Bolivia. Bechtel eventually withdrew from the case in exchange for a token payment from Bolivia.

How the World Bank, which was involved as the privatization pusher, and the mechanism for pursuing legal punishment against the people of Bolivia, is attempting to portray this in a good light is beyond me...

-Sameer.

http://www.democracyctr.org/blog/2008/04/world-bank-tries-to-re-write-bolivian.html

The World Bank Tries to Re-Write Bolivian History

As any Bolivian newspaper reader knows, paid political propaganda is a staple of the Sunday editions. Running full-page ads, or whole inserts, aimed at self-promotion is a practice that crosses ideological lines.

In the same edition readers might be treated to twenty column inches of Evo Morales wrapping himself in the wonders of Bolivia's new aid plan for the elderly, side-by side with four pages of photos of Cochabamba Governor Manfred Reyes Villa cutting ribbons at newly paved roads. All this of course is at Bolivian taxpayer expense.

Well, now the World Bank's Bolivia office has decided to get into the propaganda game. This month it produced a snazzy little 22-page booklet that it is distributing by the tens of thousands in three major Bolivian dailies, in La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz. The booklet is titled, "Ten Things They Never Told You About the World Bank in Bolivia."

There is, however, a good reason that Bolivians aren't used to hearing some of the Bank's ten boasts – it's because they aren't true. In fact, a few of the Bank's claims wander so far into fiction that one wonders whether the Bolivia office has hired Pinocchio and Associates Inc. as its new public relations firm.

Inside the Imagination of the World Bank: We Won the Bechtel Case for You!

The real whopper among the Bank's claims is 'Thing They Never Told You #6': "The Aguas del Tunari Conflict [the Bechtel vs. Bolivia case] was resolved by an arbitration facilitated by the World Bank."

The Bank writes:

In 2002, after being expelled from Cochabamba the company Aguas Del
Tunari [Bechtel's subsidiary] presented a demand before ICSID [The
International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, the
World Bank-operated trade court]. In the end the controversy resulted
in favor of the Bolivian state, which bought the shares of the company
for a price of 2 dollars. This shows that arbitrations can prevent
trials against countries and serve to resolve conflicts.

Perhaps a short look at the facts the Bank seemed to miss:

First, it was the World Bank itself that set the entire Bechtel-in-
Cochabamba fiasco in motion. In 1997 the Bank made privatizing
Cochabamba's water a condition of any further aid for expanding water
service in the country. In the aftermath of the 2000 Water Revolt –
following the bloody death of a 17-year-old boy and the wounding of
more than a hundred others – Bank officials went to work to disclaim
any connection to the privatization. But even those denials ended
after The Democracy Center led reporters to a World Bank report
confirming the Bank's demand that the water be privatized.

Second, the World Bank did not protect Bolivia from facing a case
against it by Bechtel. It provided the venue where Bechtel filed the
case, shielded from the public and press. Under the Bank's helpful
graces Bechtel sought $50 million from Cochabamba water users, after
having invested less than $1 million.

In 2002 when Cochabamba water users petitioned the Bank to open the
case to public participation and media scrutiny, a tribunal headed by
a World Bank appointee rejected the request, insisting that the case
be handled in secret. Not surprisingly, none of this appears in the
Bank's little booklet.

It seems quite clear that the Bank would love for Bolivians to believe
that the Bank itself deserves credit for the case being settled for
pennies. That honor however, goes not to the institution that aided
Bechtel, but to Bolivian Waqter Revolt leaders and the thousands of
citizens on five continents that pressured Bechtel to drop its
Bolivian demand.

Other Bedtime Stories from the Bank

The Bolivia office of the World Bank's attempt at spin does not end
with its re-write of history on Bechtel vs. Bolivia.

Take 'Thing They Never Told You #3': "The World Bank decided not to
collect the debt that it had with Bolivia." This makes it sound like
Bank officials just woke up one day with a big smiles on their face
and a song in their hearts and out of great generosity suddenly
decided to excuse Bolivia from paying back all the money it owed. Not
mentioned is the fact that debt cancellation, in Bolivia and
elsewhere, came only after a decade of aggressive campaigning by
religious communities and others worldwide, who pointed out the heavy
burden that the world's poorest were bearing to finance bogus
development deals pushed and financed by the Bank. Maybe Bank
officials just missed all those protesters outside the doors of their
annual meetings.

Or consider ‘Thing They Never Told You #4’: “The World Bank is one of
the least expensive sources of financing on the planet.” Whether this
is true with regard to the Bank’s interest rates may be a reasonably
debated point. But not included in the Bank’s definition of ‘cheap’ is
the payment taken in lost democracy. Assistance from the World Bank is
never a simple cash transaction, but one full of dictates and
conditionalities about how nations should conduct their economic life
– such as thou shalt privatize.

Banks making student loans, for example, do not generally dictate your
college major. Nor do banks making home loans insist that you should
paint your house green and not yellow. The World Bank however does not
blanche at such demands and as a result of these conditions over the
past decades; the price of World Bank loans in Bolivia has been very
high indeed.

A History That Can Not Be Rewritten with Spin

There is certainly one thing that the World Bank got right – its image
in Bolivia is miserable. The World Bank played a leading role in
decades of so-called 'structural adjustment' policies that wrecked
Bolivian industries, traded away natural resources at bargain prices,
and left the country deeply in debt for boondoggle projects that often
just benefited the small elite that cozied up to the Bank's
ideological agenda. In fact, during the time in which Bolivia was
supposedly deciding these issues 'democratically', the Bank had dozens
of Bolivian public officials on its own consultant payroll, just to
make sure the Bank's bidding was done correctly.

I am not, as some others are, a 'World Bank hater'. However, if the
Bank's office here thinks that it can remake its image through public
relations and spin, it may have another hard Bolivia experience ahead
of it. Asked by e-mail about how much in Bank dollars the Bolivia
office spent on the booklets, the Bank offered only that they cost 14
cents ($US) a piece to print but would not reveal how many they had
printed nor the cost of distributing them. Secrecy, it seems, remains
a World Bank reflex. But based on the number of Sunday papers
distributed in the three cities (well more than 100,000), the Bank's
public relations project was not a cheap enterprise.

The World Bank has a new representative in Bolivia, Oscar Avalle. If
fiction is how Mr. Avalle intends to guide his tenure in Bolivia, he
won’t be doing Bolivia, the World Bank, or himself any favors. My
guess is that he can expect to hear from Bolivian social movement
leaders about his opening act, and the welcome will not be a warm one.


Note: We have sent this Blog post to the World Bank's Bolivia office
and invited officials there to respond, as they may wish, in the
comments section below.

Labels: BOLIVIA, HYPOCRISY, NEOLIBERALISM, PRIVATISATION, UTILITIES, WATER, World Bank

posted by MrK @ 5:50 AM