Evo's Approval Ratings In His 1st Year in Office

Image from La Razón (La Paz), January 22, 2007. (just click on the image to see it full-size in another window)

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some basic explanations, translations:

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aprueba/desaprueba/no precisa

approve/disapprove/no opinion
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Feb/Mar Evo's political honeymoon after being elected to the presidency in December 2005 with 53% after the first round of voting. This was the first time any candidate in Bolivia's history had been elected president directly by the people and not by Congress in a run-off, as the law dictates in the case of no candidate getting absolute majority in the first round. (This is likely the first law to be changed in the new constitution.)
April Bolivia's signature airline, LAB (Lloyd Aereo Boliviano), teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. Many call for Evo to nationalize the airline. (The notoriously unreliable LAB is somehow still around, although this author will be one person who will not mourn its passing when/if it does hopefully go under.)

May Evo announces the nationalization of the gas reserves. People consider this as signalling the end of the exploitation at the hands of foreigners their country has been under since colonial times.
Sept/Oct Conflicts between vying mining groups lead to 16 deaths. Many hold Evo responsible for not attending to the matter sooner.
Nov All gas companies operating in Bolivia pre-May sign re-negotiated contracts. (The land reform bill is also signed later during the month, but the approval rating had already come out prior.)
Jan 2 people die in protests in Cochabamba. Again, many say Evo did not call for an end to protests quickly enough.

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The chart at the bottom compares Evo's approval rating in various parts of the country. The column on the left compares Evo's approval with three other of the last four presidents. People were asked to rate each respective president's performance on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being bad and 5 very good. (Interestingly enough, if you look, you'll find that the pollsters have apparently already been able to ascertain what Evo's approval rating will be a few months from now in April.)

Evo as Artist

"I thank the Lord for crudity, which is rawness, which is raw material, which is the part of life not yet worked up into form, or at least not worked all the way up. We meet with another fallacy of the foolish: having had a glimpse of finished art, they forever after pine for a society that shall be nothing but finished art–why not a world safe for good government and art–all things perfectly accomplished. An artist delights in roughness for what he can do to it. He's the brute who can knock the corners off the marble block. So also is the statesman politician: only the statesman works in a more protean mass of material that hardly holds any shape long enough for the craftsman to point it out and get credit for it. His material is a rolling mob. The poet's material is words that for all we say and feel against them are more manageable than men …"

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From The Notebooks of Robert Frost, as excerpted in Harper's January 2007 issue.

Death and the Moustache of Cochabamba

it hit the fan in cochabamba last week over calls for the department's prefect (equivalent of a state governor) to resign. two people were killed, one from each side, and protesters are saying they'll resume protests in 15 days if dialogue doesn't happen. on one side are cocaleros, who support evo, against supporters of the prefect, manfred reyes villa, pictured here, who leads the opposition, or if he didn't before, has now become the figurehead of opposition to evo.
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the interesting thing is that while the cocaleros are calling for manfred's outright resignation and saying they'll set up their own ad hoc parallel government so they don't have to recognize manfred's, evo has not supported them in this latter point, rightly citing the lack of any type of legality of such a proceeding. instead, he's promoting his own proposed measurement to institute a legal process for recalls. (bolivian law currently does not provide for any way to recall a sitting elected official.)

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here's the website for jim schultz's democracy center, based in cochabamba. schultz has lived in bolivia for at least 10-15 years or so and played an important role reporting the events of the water wars in 2000 in cochabamba.
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here's his sum of events: http://democracyctr.org/blog/

also, a good article from the bbc: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6273177.stm