Polling without a clue - Latin America

While trolling for articles about uruguay i came across an economist poll of public opinion in latin america. The poll was conducted by Latino Barometro in chile and included 20,000 with a margin of error of %3.

It asks misleading questions about whether or not people support ‘democracy’. The implicit assumption is that if you support democracy you are against right wing dictatorships AND cuban style single party communism.

This is a major issue i’ve found frustrating when looking at neo-liberal polls of latin america. Come on folks. Ask interesting questions. What kind of system do people want. One with caudillos (strongmen) and at times dictatorships, centrist neo-liberal democracies, social democracies like the governments of uruguay, venezuela, and others advocate, or some sort of marxist dictatorship of the proletariat. That would tell us something interesting. Just asking, do you want this failed democracy / cleptopracy or a dictatorship which may be leftist or ring wing is crazy.

The other major issue which gets me is WHO are they polling. I mean look at their stats for Colombia. The poll say almost 80% of colombians support the free market, were they asking the upper class in major urban centers, or people who live in the majority of the rural countryside controlled by the FARC and ELN?

It reminds me of bounces in the polls Evo Morales gets depending on whether or not the pollster only sampled people with telephones or went out to talk to rural campesinos. If you can’t even get a reasonable look at the population then why do the poll.

Perhaps the real reason is they are of distinct propaganda value. Look the colombians don’t want leftists to win, 80% support the free market as the solution to all life’s problems! I suspect a poll only held in FARC and ELN controlled territory to be drastically different.

In other news it looks like the elections have once again been called off in bolivia. This means potentially another very confrontational round of street protests, blockades, more protesters will probably be killed, and nobody knows exactly what will happen. Today Evo Morales and the MAS campaign are clearly leading the polls in the elections, though not by enough to actually win, and there will be demands that he take power directly if elections are canceled.

A few years ago I was with a group of indymedia activists who interviewed Evo Morales and we talked about tactics, the de-centralist tactics of People’s Global Action, and how to bring about radical change. He’s way to much of an authoritarian for my takes, but he was quite pragmatic. He said if we can win through the ballot we will, if we can win through taking the street we will. The next phrase he never did say, but was on everybody’s mind, winning by the bullet. His running mate and vice presidential candidate Álvaro García Linera, was a member of the Ejército Guerrillero Tupac Katari (EGTK), an unsuccessful marxist armed guerrilla movement in the early 90’s and served 5 years in jail after being captured. Since accepting the vice presidential nomination he has moved many of his policies to the center, yet recently in an interview he would push for a classic marxist economic system.

It seems highly unlikely that MAS is willing or considering anything but winning by the ballot or the street. While there may be others who want to take bolivia down a more violent form of revolution, it’s unlikely that would happen. Just looking at the demographics and maps of social movements in bolivia, it’s very regionalized and has been so since the the collapse of the 52 revolution lead by the miners unions. No one ethic or political faction could open fronts across the country. Even with blockades there is a delicate dance between groups who setup and maintain the blockades. During the last uprising Evo was shunned when he and his cocaleros arrived in El Alto to support the uprising.