South America's Constitutional Battles

Just as Ch¿vez did before being elected in 1998, both Morales and Correa campaigned on the promise of creating constitutional assemblies to dramatically alter what was perceived by many as the failure of government institutions and of the rule of law.

"Large-scale constitutional reforms are extremely popular with citizens," said Jonathan Hartlyn, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina who has studied constitutional politics throughout Latin America. "They're particularly popular in a context of perceived economic and social exclusion, and in places where political parties and politicians are both weak and extremely unpopular and are blamed for the crisis."

The political tension has been worst lately in Bolivia, where thousands of people took to the streets last month, many of them advocating a break from the central government. Several regional governors created "autonomy statutes" calling for more independence and local decision-making power.

A draft of the constitution was passed Dec. 9, but the opposition continues to protest some of its articles, including those that would give the federal government more control of local tax revenue and limit the size of individual landholdings.

Jaime Aparicio, a former Bolivian ambassador to the United States who also helped oversee Ecuador's constituent assembly elections last year, places the blame for Bolivia's constitutional problems on the makeup of its assembly.

"The problem in Bolivia is that Morales's supporters elected people based on their loyalty to the party and on their political activism experience," said Aparicio, who also serves as vice president of the Inter-American Juridical Committee, based in Rio de Janeiro. "So once they were seated there in the assembly, there was clearly a problem that was very simple -- incompetence."

That's exactly the kind of statement that angers Morales's supporters most. They have argued all along that the constituent assembly should give more power to grass-roots movements -- not lawyers or the political elite.

When the opposing sides met in La Paz this month, they adopted a tone of conciliation, promising to focus on what brings the different regions of the country together rather than what splits them apart.

"When drafting a lasting constitution, you need to take specific policy off the table and focus on principles," said David King, associate director of Harvard University's Institute of Politics and a native of Bolivia. "It can be helpful to focus on abstractions and not particulars."

Morales, who has been accused of trying to consolidate power through the constitution by expanding presidential authority, last week seemed to suggest that the battles of the constitutional drafting process -- despite the deep rancor that has marked it so far -- might eventually lead to a consensus of what it should mean to be Bolivian.

"When there are no personal or sectorial ambitions, it's possible to understand each other for the well-being of the country," Morales said.

That has been the hope for the process since its inception, before something as basic as a face-to-face conversation between the two sides of the constitutional debate could have been labeled a breakthrough in negotiations.

"I think it will be a very difficult process, but I think we're in a much better place now," said Aparicio. "Like it happened in Venezuela, the circumstances are changing and I think President Morales realized that. We were very close to a confrontation, and he had everything to lose."