Gerry Sussman, 23 May 2007

Rachel Boynton’s first documentary film, exhibited in many countries, is an unusual and remarkable inside account of how American political consultants operated as electioneering king makers in Bolivia. Boynton was given direct access to the 2002 presidential campaign of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (popularly known as “Goni”), a U.S.-raised and educated businessman, mine owner, former Bolivian finance minister, and ex-president (1993-1997), by his high-powered American “full service” Beltway campaign management company, GCS, of Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Robert Shrum. The threesome are famous for having run, together with George Stephanopoulos, the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, which was featured in a 1993 documentary The War Room.

The GCS team set out to defeat the frontrunner in pre-election polls, Manfred Reyes Villa, a former military man and mayor of Cochabamba (1993-2001), Bolivia’s third largest city, who ran under a party called the New Republican Force (NFR). Carville urged the campaign to stay on message, while his partners began a series of focus groups and polls to determine the public perception of their man in La Paz. They also ran American-style attack ads against Reyes Villa. Their Israeli partner, Tad Silberstein, insisted that Sánchez had to be converted: “from a clean to a dirty candidate, that’s our task.” The tactic, as it turned out, proved counterproductive in a country where such stratagems, especially when organized by gringos, are not well received. Reyes Villa’s poll numbers only grew, at least initially.

Boynton chooses to show, more than tell, the political story that unfolded in Bolivia that year. She intermixes scenes of Sánchez on the campaign trail, with street demonstrations in La Paz, and shots of and running interviews with the GCS operatives at work, principally the chief strategist for the campaign, Jeremy Rosner, a former Clinton pollster. Rosner describes his client as initially stubbornly reticent toward their best advice. The GCS “experts” urge and eventually convince Sánchez to follow their talking points, spin his responses to journalists, and let the professionals remake his image from an arrogant Creole elitist to a more humble persona. But they see no need to recraft his policy approach, one based on the advice of “shock therapist” Jeffrey Sachs, on further opening Bolivian markets and natural resources to foreign investment, known domestically as “capitalization.” Crisis is the central message and “brand” the Americans want to attach to the campaign, particularly in response to the rising candidacy of the Quechua-speaking indigenous leader, Evo Morales Ayma, of the left-wing Movement to Socialism (MAS).

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If the manipulative tactics of GCS were not enough to propel the neoliberal candidate into power and hold back the tide of MAS, Manuel Rocha, a Bush-appointed U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, openly campaigned against the Morales candidacy, asserting that his victory would lead to the rule of drug dealers. Rocha publicly threatened the loss of foreign aid. This was seen by Bolivians as additional evidence of foreign meddling, and they responded with higher poll numbers for Morales. Bolivian resistance to foreign interference had been seriously underestimated.

Sánchez nonetheless won the election very narrowly, with just over a recorded 22 percent of the vote. The second-highest tally went to Morales, with 20.9 percent, 721 more votes than Reyes Villa. Unlike many other countries, Bolivia does not hold runoff elections among the top two vote recipients, enabling Sánchez to take office. But not for long. Fourteen months later, with deteriorating economic conditions associated with his neoliberal “reforms” and after growing and increasingly bloody demonstrations and fear for his safety, the American-backed president was forced to resign. He returned in comfortable “exile” to “El Norte.”

Although Boynton doesn’t venture into the larger context of foreign political domination, including the long tortuous history of American intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean, she does capture an important facet of how Americans penetrate what historian Eduardo Galeano called the “open veins” of the region. A modern Cold War liberal, Rosner champions the correctness of neoliberal policies in every polity in which he and his colleagues operate, though he offers no evidence to back up such a prescription for Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. Indeed, most of the Latin American populace has rebelled against the depredations of foreign economic control, the most recent expression being the election in December 2005 of Evo Morales (with 51 percent of the popular vote), who soon nationalized the country’s natural gas industry and began a massive land distribution program.

The political consultants working overseas are not the cause of Bolivia’s or Latin America’s economic problems but more like johnny-come-latelies seeking to bulk up their business resumes for the corporate clients they serve when not running political campaigns. Though self-proclaimed liberals, Greenberg and Rosner’s website boasts of their regular polling and advising work for such “progressive companies” as Monsanto, BP, Boeing, General Motors, British Airways, Coca-Cola, and Sainbury’s. In Bolivia, as much as in their home turf, their toolkit of campaign tricks help, as Alex Carey said, to take the risk out of democracy. Not only do the consultants drive up the costs of election campaigns, they also help to build a nexus between the corporate and state sector, making themselves indispensable while promising that electoral outcomes will be awarded to those with the deepest pockets.  

Our Brand is Crisis provides a window for viewing some of the depredations of the international consulting industry, the violence of the subaltern state apparatus in Bolivia, and the nature of U.S. “democracy assistance.” It is an encouraging addition to a wave of recent documentaries that have exposed the corruption of the power elites of the United States at home and abroad.

Gerald Sussman is the author of Global Electioneering: Campaign Consulting, Communications, and Corporate Financing (Rowman & Littlefield), 2005. He teaches urban studies and communications at Portland State University.