The COB After the Deluge: Anatomy of a Petition Between Epic and Ridicule | La COB después del diluvio: Anatomía de un pliego petitorio entre la épica y el ridículo

By Gonzalo Chávez, Unitel:

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There are documents that are read and documents that are endured. The petition submitted by the Bolivian Workers’ Center (COB) on June 15, 2026, grandiosely titled, in the characteristic style of the genre, “Minimum Agenda for a Great National Dialogue,” decidedly belongs to the second category. Not because of its intellectual density—of that, unfortunately, it suffers from an industrial-scale shortage—but because of its rhetorical feat of presenting defeat as victory, exhaustion as strength, and negotiated surrender as a historic achievement. In the Olympus of Bolivian verbal pyrotechnics, this document deserves, at the very least, a silver medal.

It is worth recalling the context, because context, in politics, is everything. The COB emerges from 47 days of road blockades that paralyzed transportation routes, increased the cost of living, destroyed productive chains, and cost the country, according to conservative estimates, $2.5 billion in lost economic activity. An organization that presents itself as a defender of working people organized, with exemplary consistency, the deprivation of those very same people. After weeks of government resistance and an enormous social cost borne by the most vulnerable—not exactly by the union leaders—the COB now arrives at the negotiating table. And it arrives, naturally, making demands. Because in Bolivian political grammar, defeat is always drafted in the imperative mood.

Point 1. Human Rights, Organizational Guarantees, and Pacification: or the Art of Requesting Impunity with Constitutional Vocabulary

The first point of the petition is undoubtedly the most intellectually audacious. It requires considerable conceptual gymnastics to present as a “guarantee of rights” what, in basic legal terms, constitutes a request for amnesty for those who committed acts classified as crimes. It demands an end to the “criminalization of protest” and the release of “political prisoners.” Translated from euphemism into plain language: it seeks political and legal impunity for the dozen documented offenses committed during the blockades, ranging from attacks on public facilities to assaults on individuals.

The demand to prohibit accusations of terrorism or drug trafficking “without individualized evidence” sounds reasonable until one remembers that the individualization of evidence is precisely what courts attempt to do, not the COB. The organization appears to confuse the principle of the presumption of innocence—which no one denies—with the right to preventive impunity, a jurisprudential innovation that will find support neither in Montesquieu nor in the Constitution that the document so frequently invokes.

As for the Anti-Blockade Law: opposing a regulation that was not even formally on the legislative agenda is the political equivalent of tilting at windmills. Cervantes called it madness; the COB calls it “defense of social protest.” There is an interpretation for everything.

And regarding racism: it is a real structural phenomenon with deep historical roots that deserves serious treatment. But reducing it to a temporary decree, while ignoring that in recent conflicts racism flowed in both directions with an uncomfortable symmetry for everyone, is not analysis; it is propaganda. The COB discovered structural racism precisely when it became useful to invoke it.

Point 2. Fulfillment of Commitments and Social Oversight: or Law as a Substitute for Reality

This point deserves the National Award for Legal Fetishism, if such a distinction existed. The COB proposes that the Legislative Assembly pass a law obliging the government to fulfill its campaign promises. The idea, worth contemplating in its full magnitude, assumes that the reason governments fail to keep their promises is the absence of a rule compelling them to do so, rather than, say, state bankruptcy, the exhaustion of the rentier model, unsustainable debt, a structural fiscal deficit, and a shortage of foreign currency.

Someone should explain to the COB leadership that budget constraints cannot be repealed by decree. That a technically bankrupt state cannot legislate prosperity. That the electoral demagoguery of the government of the day does not become economic reality simply by being transformed into an article of law. The shortage of dollars does not disappear through a program-compliance law; bonds still come due even if the Assembly forbids it; and the fiscal deficit does not close through legislative will.

In academic terms, this is called confusing the norm with the fact. In popular terms, it is believing that writing “there will be bread for all” on paper guarantees flour.

Point 3. Economic Sovereignty and Defense of Public Enterprises: or How to Protect Plunder with the National Flag

The third point reaches heights of irony that the document itself does not appear to notice, which makes it all the more remarkable. It demands that strategic public enterprises not be privatized. No one disputes this principle in the abstract. The problem arises when one recalls that most of those enterprises—YPFB, BOA, ENTEL at various stages—have for years been subjected to systematic looting by corporate groups linked precisely to the social movements that now sign this petition. The plunder was state-owned, yes, but with a union face and a membership card from the “process of change.”

Protecting bankrupt public enterprises from foreign private capital in order to preserve them in the hands of domestic political capital is not exactly economic sovereignty: it is a monopoly on capture. A nuance the document omits with elegant discretion.

The clause prohibiting any agreement with the International Monetary Fund is, in the current context, a display of admirable fiscal creativity. Bolivia urgently needs external financing with mathematical certainty. International organizations are, at this moment, practically the only available source given the closure of voluntary debt markets. Forbidding the doctor from administering medicine while the patient bleeds out is a philosophically coherent position, but a medically suicidal one. With this clause, the COB demonstrates that it prefers anti-imperialist rhetoric to the fiscal survival of the state it claims to defend.

The proposal to distribute the budget 50/50 between the central government and the regions also deserves special mention. Equitably distributing what does not exist is a redistributionist exercise of notable originality. A bankrupt state has nothing to distribute: neither 50 for the center nor 50 for the regions. Only debts, and those distribute themselves.

Point 4. Transparency, Oversight, and Sovereign Investigation: Fighting Ghosts and Winning

Of all the points in the petition, this is the easiest to satisfy and the one that changes the least. It demands the removal of Argentine adviser Fernando Cerimedo, presented with the solemnity of a state-level demand. The government could satisfy it tomorrow without the parallel exchange rate moving a cent, without debt decreasing by a dollar, and without improving the life of the average Bolivian by the slightest degree. In the language of political negotiation, it is a low-cost symbolic victory for the government and a high-yield rhetorical victory for the COB. An ideal candidate for the “opening concession” in any Harvard negotiation manual.

The Special Commission to investigate “narco-timber” and “narco-suitcases” is equally welcome in the catalog of Bolivian commissions, that cemetery of truths where scandals go to die by statute of limitations. Formal institutions are already investigating both cases. An additional legislative commission will be, like its predecessors, a patriotic gesture of excellent protocol and null results. But it fulfills its political function: it gives commissioners something to do, generates headlines, and allows everyone to declare victory.

Point 5. Hydrocarbon Policy and Technical Compensation: The Fuel Price Hike Accepted in Fine Print

There is in this point an implicit confession of notable political value, although hidden among technical demands. By demanding that fuel prices not be increased, the COB is de facto accepting the adjustment that has already occurred: current prices, resulting from the so-called “gasolinazo” that triggered part of the conflict, are established as the floor. The organization that mobilized Bolivia against fuel price increases arrives at the negotiating table accepting that increase as a fact of reality. It is what negotiators call “anchoring an adverse status quo”: you did not want it, but you accept it, disguising it as a demand for a freeze that in reality consolidates what you protested against.

Compensation for adulterated gasoline is a legitimate and technically manageable demand. The government can reopen that channel without major political costs and with a real impact on affected families and transport operators. Curiously, it is one of the most concrete points in the petition and, paradoxically, one of the least discussed in the media.

Point 6. Legislative Consultation and Participatory Democracy: Corporate Veto Disguised as Consultation

The demand for mandatory prior consultation on any law, decree, or macroeconomic measure contains a far-reaching corporate aspiration: to transform social organizations into de facto co-legislators with veto power over the agenda of a democratically elected state. The COB, whose organizational—not electoral—representativeness has not recently been subjected to scrutiny, seeks to equate its institutional weight with that of state powers elected by more than six million Bolivians.

The principle of consultation is legitimate and constitutionally enshrined for Indigenous peoples in matters affecting their territories and collective rights. Extending it to every macroeconomic measure turns the government into a permanent hostage of any sector capable of mobilizing sufficient street pressure. It is not participatory democracy: it is institutionalized blackmail with good manners.

Point 7. Family Basket, Labor Rights, and Social Security: 100% Retirement or the Eternal Dream

For decades, the COB has included in its petitions the demand for retirement benefits equal to 100% of workers’ salaries. In Bolivian union mythology, it is what the Golden Fleece was to the Argonauts: the destination that justifies the journey, even though no one ever arrives. Pension system technicians have calculated the cost of this measure in figures that make any national budget pale in comparison. A state that cannot pay its current bills cannot create a sovereign fund to finance universal 100% pensions.

This is not ideology; it is arithmetic. And arithmetic, unlike petitions, does not negotiate.

The demand will end, as always, in a technical study commission that will produce a report no one will read, which will be archived with respectful solemnity, and which will reappear in the 2027 petition with identical vigor. It is the perpetual motion machine of Bolivian union politics.

Point 8. Environment and a Peaceful International Policy: Selective Environmentalism and Twitter Geopolitics

The final point of the petition displays an environmentalism of variable geometry that deserves recognition for its audacity. It protects national parks and nature reserves from mining and hydrocarbons—a legitimate demand—but the document maintains an eloquent, sepulchral, deafening silence regarding the two principal environmental predators in Bolivia today: mining cooperatives and coca growers. Both sectors are organically linked to the social movements that subscribe to this very petition. COB environmentalism, it seems, protects nature from everyone except its own allies.

As for the “peaceful principle” that closes the document, with its rejection of “Israeli Zionism” and its demand for constitutional coherence in international affairs: it is the type of declaration that earns applause in Latin American solidarity forums while costing absolutely nothing and changing absolutely nothing. Bolivia has problems with the price of bread, a shortage of dollars, a failing pension system, and deteriorating infrastructure. Solving Middle Eastern geopolitics from La Paz, with the seal of the National Executive Committee, is an ambition that honors the internationalist spirit but is unlikely to rank among the priorities of the citizen who could not find gasoline last week.

Conclusion: The Art of Losing Well

Read as a whole, the COB’s June 15, 2026 petition is a politically intelligent document in its internal logic, though economically fanciful and legally heterodox. Its real function is not to transform Bolivia—for that, among other things, it would be necessary to recognize the severity of the crisis that the blockades themselves deepened—but rather to provide a worn-out leadership with enough narrative material to present a failure to its base as a victory.

The COB emerged from the conflict militarily defeated: the government did not fall, the adjustment model was not reversed, and the institutional apparatus endured. It urgently needed to reposition itself as a relevant actor in the post-conflict negotiation process. This petition is precisely that: not an alternative governing program, but a menu of banners that allows COB leaders to return to their federations with something in hand, even if that something consists largely of promises of commissions, symbolic gestures, and demands that the bankrupt state they criticize cannot fulfill.

There is a classic lesson in negotiation here that Fisher and Ury would have recognized: when you cannot win on the ground, change the ground. The COB shifted the battlefield from blocked highways to stamped documents. It is a legitimate move and, within its limits, a skillful one.

But Bolivia needs more than tactical skill. It urgently needs a serious debate about how to rebuild a state that has run out of dollars, reserves, credit, and the oil rent that financed social peace for twenty years. That debate is not in this petition. Perhaps, deep down, it is not on anyone’s agenda. And that is what is truly concerning.

“The emancipation of the workers,” says the COB’s historic slogan, “will be the work of the workers themselves.” Probably. But it is unlikely to occur through legislative magic, 100% pensions financed by nonexistent reserves, or the expulsion of an Argentine adviser as the founding act of a new Bolivia.

Meanwhile, arithmetic waits. And arithmetic, unlike union leadership, has no urgency whatsoever to negotiate.

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