USAID in Bolivia: Partner or Patrón?

Abstract

More valuable as a memoir than a work of historical criticism, Lawrence Heilman's USAID in Bolivia sheds light on the ground-level workings of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Written by a former protagonist at USAID's Bolivian mission, the book offers a striking portrayal of US development thinking from this mission's early hopes in the 1940s to its Cold War failures, depicting a conveyor belt of US economic missions (led by Merwin Bohan, Hugh Keenlyside, George Jackson Eder, Willard Thorpe, and Jeffrey Sachs) that culminated in the agency's expulsion from Bolivia in 2013.The book is an honest survey, though not always self-aware. For example, despite the subtitle's question as to whether USAID was Bolivia's partner or its patrón (boss or master), Heilman restricts his consideration of paternalism to the scale of the local mission, where the “Yankee management verve” of USAID's “high-quality professionals” sometimes “stifled Bolivian initiative” (pp. 41, 81, 107). Yet the broader meaning of these micropaternalisms is not explored, as it has been in much of the critical development scholarship, including works by Nils Gilman, Michael Latham, Arturo Escobar, and others. Those works describe the US government's development apparatus as a method to reward friends, punish enemies, and perhaps even fold the global periphery deeper into the US-led world economic system. It is perhaps telling that one of Heilman's few sanguine passages is his description of 1980s shock therapy, a US-backed structural adjustment that he praises for having “encouraged Bolivia to pursue a free market economy in which the Bolivian government's role was appreciably reduced” (p. 187).If USAID succeeded in encouraging austerity in the mid-1980s, the agency fell short of most other goals during its 70-year saga in Bolivia. In keeping with his apolitical (though not unideological) tone, Heilman blames these failures not on US arrogance or shortcomings but on the host country's supposedly abstruse nature. Whether it is “the uniqueness of Bolivia's human geography,” the “toughness of the development challenge in Bolivia,” or the “complexity of Bolivia's development problems,” Bolivia's elusiveness “proved more difficult than even the most realistic and pragmatic US development professional could have imagined” (pp. 48, 81, 106, 118). To some extent, this fatalism (and that demonstrated by USAID officials elsewhere) reflects a certain embedded ideology of power, in which an imagined harmony of interests is presumed to exist between colonizer and colonized or between (international) capital and (domestic) labor.As Heilman loyally catalogs, these dynamics played out on the ground. Decade after decade, USAID officials obsessed over whether the Bolivian government was holding the line on domestic salaries or collecting enough taxes (from Bolivians, not from foreign companies) to pay back its many loans to the US government. When a rare grant was approved, there were the predictable disagreements over aid conditions as wide ranging as the opening up of raw mineral deposits to private investment (in the 1950s and 1970s) or the firing of tens of thousands of state-employed mine workers (in the 1960s and 1980s). But by narrating these events as a horse race between supposedly apolitical developers (USAID) and parochial politicians (in Washington and La Paz), Heilman sidesteps essential disharmonies of interest, not to mention tough philosophical questions about the ultimate beneficiaries of US assistance: not just (US and Bolivian) political empire builders but also US economic interests such as construction companies, big agriculture, and raw mineral extractors.By the end of the book, Heilman concedes a bitter irony in US development policy in Bolivia since World War II: that the two most dynamic periods of wealth redistribution in Bolivia took place during radical, anticapitalist upheavals respectively following the 1952 nationalist revolution and the 2005 election of socialist president Evo Morales. Heilman justifiably credits the United States for tempering its negative reaction to the former event, and he handles the rise of Morales (and the expulsion of USAID) with grace. Except, that is, for some factual issues in his description of Bolivia's 2004 gas referendum, the result of which backed up the insurgent Morales's hard line, not the moderate position of the ancien régime, as Heilman suggests (pp. 245–52).The book ends on a poignant lamentation. Despite the fact that President Morales expelled USAID in 2013, he was in fact “the type of leader that the US government wanted to emerge—one who was elected in the most democratic elections ever held in Bolivia, who emerged from the majority indigenous community, and who typically pursued the hopes and needs of the poorest of the poor” (p. 283). It seems that Morales's only sin was promoting Bolivia's economic growth not through an alliance with USAID but through bold redistributive socialism and a historical realignment in Bolivia's international affairs. As a memoir and a valuable catalog of ground-level USAID operations, Heilman's book represents an excellent source for historians of Bolivia and of US development policy.