The Foreign Service Journal, April 2006

and pressure groups, many with tenuous attachments to liberal democracy. Ironically, the decentralization of government and state spending during Goni’s first administration made a large contribution to the decline of traditional political parties, including his own MNR. Popular participation and decentralization stripped important sources of polit- ical patronage — the lifeblood of Bolivia’s traditional political parties — from the central government, while fostering a dramatic increase in the number of locally- based parties. In rural areas, especially on the Aymara- speaking altiplano, indigenous leaders used the reforms to strengthen their political base in small municipalities. Liberal reforms that shrank the size of the state eliminat- ed jobs that had previously gone to loyalists of the nation- al parties, further reducing their patronage base. The dramatic increase in the size of civil society encouraged by domestic and foreign NGOs added a decidedly antiparty bias to the environment, further undercutting the legitimacy of traditional politics. The government’s own anti-corruption campaigns, while ineffective in combating the scourge, reminded Bolivians of the glaring weaknesses in transparency and governance that marked the political system, driving down the prestige of the parties further still. To be sure, the traditional parties had a major role in their own demise by adhering to authoritarian, exclusionary and elitist practices that distanced them from the rest of soci- ety, as evidenced by Goni’s very weak support in 2002. The December 2005 election completed the demise of the traditional parties: the once-powerful MNR won just one Senate seat and elected 7 deputies, collecting a mere 6.5 percent of the popular vote for president. After 2002, Bolivian politics morphed into an ongoing conflict between the national government and regional, often ethnically-based political and social groups making direct demands on the state. The rule of law, habitually weak in Bolivia, was swept aside by the protests and road blockages used by an active political minority, above all in the cities of El Alto and La Paz, to impose their will over F O C U S A P R I L 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 57