When, on the 11th, the Financial Times declared its worry over Evo Morales' alleged desire to expropriate gas without compensating multinationals, I was rather skeptical as to whether Morales' rhetoric at the Vienna summit had any substance to it. Indeed, reading major Bolivian daily La Prensa, we find some rather interesting nuggets of information about what else Morales said when he was in Europe. On Sunday the 14th, just 3 days after pretending that his government's position was not to compensate foreign gas companies, he had some rather different sentiments for the right-wing French President Jacques Chirac -

"We are neither expropriating foreign companies nor expelling them... We are only exercising property rights over our natural resources. The press has demonised the nationalisation of hydrocarbons, but leaders like Zapatero [Spain], Lula da Silva [Brazil] and Chirac have understood it perfectly well - there's no problem between us".

While this was a bad enough betrayal of the struggling Bolivian workers' demands in itself, Morales also chose in Paris to make a laughable foreign policy statement - he affectionately referred to Lula, the right-wing, corrupt 'social-democrat' president of Brazil, as "like an older brother". While in Brazil Lula's right-wing turn was met with all too little opposition, we would hope that if Morales actually followed the same agenda, the Bolivian working class and peasants would have something to say about it - their organisation is strong.

But the problem at the moment with the Central Obrera Boliviana is the increasingly discredited leadership of Jaime Solares, who has put up a weak fight against the failures of Evo Morales, in spite of his own leftism. The leadership of the FSTMB (miners' federation) has attacked both the autocratic control and the relative inactivity of Jaime Solares, who appears to have had little interest in implementing the union's 'Political Instrument' policy of posing a revolutionary political challenge to MAS. So while COB Oruro protest that Solares is not entitled to run for another term as General Secretary, he decided to cancel the May Congress of the COB, saying that the threat posed to the union by the government was too severe for it to elect another leadership at this point. In fact, his own unpopularity within the union probably weakens its unity in the face of governmental attacks.

It all revolves around a measure called Estado Mayor del Pueblo ('Greater State of the People'), which was originally set up in 2003 as a network to organise social movements into a coherent whole. The government has announced that it wants this to exist again - but this time, it will exist not as a challenge to the government, but as its ally and mouthpiece among the working class and peasantry. Essentially Morales is working to undermine the authority of the COB (which brings together all Bolivian workers) by creating an alternative power base which channels workers' radicalism into mere loyalty for the government.

Jaime Solares has attacked this as a move by the government to "undermine trade union independence", replacing the revolutionary leadership with "yellow unionists who love it [the government]". He said that, if it tries to interfere in the COB, the government will "bring on a civil war". But while this is all true, Solares' rhetoric sounds all-so-radical, and he references Leon Trotsky with every passing breath, what I wonder is when his leadership in the union is practically going to go through with its policy of creating a political challenge to the government. La Prensa accused him of "washing his hands" of the union's apparent disunity, which he blames on "lack of revolutionary working-class consciousness".

Unfortunately, it appears the right-wing of the COB, which is soft on the government, is capitalising from Solares' cack-handed leadership style in order to discredit his Trotskyist politics and advocate involvement in the E.M.P. MAS denies that it will violate union independence, and many union activists such as the - Trotskyist - FSTMB believe them.

Alfredo Rada, Deputy Minister for Co-ordination with Social Movements - perhaps a rather sinister-sounding governmental post - took advantage of COB's 'trouble'. He even insinuated that Solares' April 21st call for a general strike on the same day as the Santa Cruz oligarchs held a demonstration was "no co-incidence"... his claim is a clear attempt to secure leftist support behind the government and against COB, a real workers' organisation.