Start Date: May 14 2010, 10:00am

The Washington Office on Latin America

invites you to a seminar on

Bolivia in the Age of Evo Morales

featuring presentations by

John Crabtree
Oxford University

Pamela Calla
New York University

Doug Hertzler
Eastern Mennonite University

and comments by

Kevin Healy
The George Washington University

Friday, May 14, 2010
10:00 am - 12:30 pm
The Washington Home of Stewart R. Mott
122 Maryland Avenue, NE, Washington, D.C.
(across from the Supreme Court Building)

In December 2005, Evo Morales became Bolivia's first democratically-elected president to win an absolute majority in the first round of voting.  Re-elected in December 2009 with a resounding 64 percent of the vote, President Morales has already been in office longer than his three immediate predecessors combined.  His current term runs through the year 2014. 

Meanwhile, last December candidates from Morales' MAS (Movement toward Socialism) party claimed large majorities in both chambers of the National Congress, and in April MAS candidates won the governors' seats in six of Bolivia's nine departments, including the eastern lowlands department of Pando.

Please join our panel of academic experts for a timely and wide-ranging discussion of the Morales presidency, including changes and challenges in Bolivian economic and social policy; race, ethnicity and public policy; and Bolivia's role within the wider South American community.

John Crabtree is a Research Associate at Oxford University's Latin American Centre, and a senior member of Saint Antony's College, Oxford.  He specializes in the politics of the Andean countries, particularly Bolivia and Peru.  John is author of Patterns of Protest: Politics and Social Movements in Bolivia (Latin America Bureau, 2004).  He is co-editor (with Laurence Whitehead) of Towards Democratic Viability: the Bolivian Experience (Palgrave, 2001) and Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia Past and Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

Pamela Calla is a Visiting Scholar at New York University's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.  A Bolivian anthropologist, she has conducted research and published on topics of gender, ethnicity, class and state formation, educational policies, inter-culturality and racism.  In 2007, as Dean of the Universidad de la Cordillera in La Paz, Pamela launched the Observatory on Racism in collaboration with the office of the Human Rights Ombudsman.  The Observatory is a research-action-training program that promotes informed debates, policy and legislation to combat all forms of racism.

Doug Hertzler is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Eastern Mennonite University and Associate Director of the university's Washington Community Scholars' Center.  His research and teaching interests include political economy, land reform, social movements, and the intersections of class and ethnicity.  Doug is currently conducting research on the land reform process in Bolivia.

Kevin Healy is a Professorial Lecturer at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, where he teaches graduate courses on "Indigenous Social Movements in Latin America" and "Drug Trafficking in the Americas."  He specializes in Andean socio-economic development issues involving the rural indigenous poor.  Kevin is the author of two books on Bolivia, including Llamas, Weavings and Organic Chocolate: Multicultural Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazon of Bolivia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).

Please RSVP by Wednesday, May 12, by e-mailing Anthony Dest
at adest@wola.org or by calling (202) 797-2171.