Palacio Quemado by Edmundo Paz Soldán (revised)

I don't often do book reviews, but I will make an exception for this.

Nepotism led me to it: I was in a bookshop in the south of Spain last weekend, visiting my in-laws and spotted a copy in their local bookshop. I recognised the author's surname. A General Paz Soldán was our landlord when we lived in Bolivia, more than a decade ago. The General was a fascinating man and we had numerous and fairly lengthy conversations. He had a lot to tell: he is the only person I have met to have met both Hitler and Mussolini (come to think of it, to have met either). This happened, he told me, while he was attached to the Bolivian embassy in Italy. Before this he had been a pilot in the war of the Chaco (the war between Bolivia and Paraguay that formed the basis for the Tintin story The Broken Ear. You may know it as the war between Standard Oil and Shell Oil, fought for the rich deposits of hydrocarbons that were believed to lie beneath the Chaco region.

The General was elderly when I knew him, but googling around I was delighted to find an interview with the General from last April. He was 96 years old by then. General Paz Soldán is described elsewhere on the web as an uncle of Edmundo Paz Soldán. So this really is nepotism.

The Palacio Quemado is the Bolivian version of the White House (although the President does not live on site). I worked a couple of blocks away from it in the time I spent in La Paz, but never entered the buidling. It is a historic building in many ways. "Quemado" means burned: the Palace was once burned to the ground in a revolt, and has been singed repeatledly in Bolvia's countless coup d'etats. Numerous Presidents have been shot on site: the unlucky ones were hanged in Plaza Murillo outside.

The story is a very lightly fictionalsed account of the second presidency of Goni (Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada). His name is changed in the book, but he retains his American accent and faulty Spanish ("Tenemos que tomar decisiones muy duros"). The narrator signs up as his speechwriter. The theme of the book is, I suppose, the failure of Goni (who is quite sympathetically portrayed here) to persuade the Bolivian people that his policies were in their interests.

Two of Goni's policies attracted real opposition. The first was the eradication of coca - in particular in the Chapare. This was the issue that brought Evo Morales to prominence - and helped bring to an end the dominance of Bolivian politics by its traditional elite. The second - and the most significant in the novel - was the sale of Bolivia's natural gas.

The only real option was to transport this through Chile. This provoked a nationalist reaction, because in the nineteenth century Chile defeated Bolvia in the war of the Pacific, and turned it into the landlocked country it remains to this day. But this was not the only objection. Bolivia has been involved in exporting commodities for longer than it has existed: first silver, then tin. And it has gained little from this - or at least ordinary Bolivians have gained little.

An exchange with the narrator's housekeeper crystalises this argument:

- The economists say that we will benefit from this project

- But this money never comes to us. It goes to others. We sold our tin, we sold everything, and we're no better off.

(my translation).

The housekeeper is right: the Bolivian economy has been dominated by the extraction of natural resources. A piece in the LRB the other week summed up some of the problems this can cause (in this instance, in oil-rich African states):

Typically, because governments in oil-rich states depend on oil for taxable income, the wealth of local citizens ceases to matter. Untaxed citizens, for
their part, don’t have many ways of holding their governments accountable; elites become richer and majorities become poorer, and violence – expressed in terms of ethnic, religious or regional difference – is almost inevitable.

Most of this transfers to Bolivia pretty easily. Indeed it was generally true of the Spanish empire that cash flowed from natural resources (above all from Potosi in Bolivia) and thus largely inot the hands of the state. As a result, living off the rent, and obtaining and preserving a share of government largesse, become the most profitable activities imaginable. In the worst cases the public sector becomes bloated, corruption prevails, elites perpetuate themselves - or flee the country when they have taken as much as they can.

Paz Soldán is one of the leaders of the McOndo movement, writing of South American in terms of McDonalds and Macintosh rather than the magic realism of Garcia Marquez (whose stories are often set in Macondo). For me the facination of the book (other than nostalgia for long lost Bolivian streets, squares and nightclubs) was the politics of it. This is a antidote to West Wing politics: Palacio Quemado portrays a world where the well-crafted speech has no power to change minds, and argument only convinces where it comes from the mouths of demagogues.

But it is also the story of a coutry built upon multiple paradoxes: the narrator reminds his marxist sister that sin injusticia, no hay pais (without injustice, there is no Bolivia). These multiple paradoxes are dealt with by recourse to multiple ideologies: nationalism, supremacism, marxism.

The fall of Goni led (after the brief interrgnum of my old friend, Eduardo Rodriguez) to the accession to power of Evo Morales, friend of Chavez and Castro, and the first indigenous President in a country in which the vast majority of the population is of indigenous descent.

Whether this leads to a better life for ordinary Bolivians remains to be seen. The natural resource curse remains (perhaps winning the war of the Chaco would have done little for either particpant) and Morales reminds me of the Queen in Alice - capable of believing multiple impossible things before breakfast.

Palacio Quemado is a good a place to read about the problems Morales - and Bolivia - face as any. But don't expect to come away from it filled with optimism.