Our Brand is Crisis (2005) is a documentary film exploring the 2002 campaign for the presidency of Bolivia of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Sanchez de Lozada, or "Goni" as he is commonly known, was born in La Paz, but was raised and educated predominantly in the United States. In fact, he attended a Quaker prep school at West Branch, Iowa (a mere 45 miles from where I am writing this) and graduated from the University of Chicago. Goni's administration implemented neoliberal reforms, leading to a decline in popularity over his first term as president between 1993 and 1997. Along with substantive critiques of his policies, he was popularly perceived as somewhat of an outsider to Bolivia not only because of his background in the US but also by his foreign accent and a popular belief that his fluency in Spanish was limited.
Despite his and the country's earlier experience with his administration, in 2002 Goni mounted the presidential campaign that is the subject of this film.
In 2002, the presidential field in Bolivia was crowded as usual. Eleven parties were running candidates. The three top candidates, who ended up splitting over 60% of the vote among them, were Goni, Evo Morales, and Manfred Reyes, representing the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and Nueva Fuerza Republicana (NFR) respectively. Goni's secret weapon in the 2002 election was the use of US-style campaign strategies and tactics as advised by campaign consultants of the GCS group. GCS is none other than our old DLC friends Greenberg, Carville and Shrum. Of course, Goni is the only candidate who can afford the services of such talent.
And with the stage set, Our Brand is Crisis documents the workings of the campaign - from focus groups where the consultants sit behind two way mirrors, listening to reactions to test messages through an interpreter, to "war room" sessions to strategy sessions where the pitch is made to make the campaign about the economic "crisis" facing Bolivia and setting up Sanchez de Lozada as the one candidate who is ready to step in to manage the crisis. (Side note, President Herbert Hoover was from West Branch, Iowa, where Goni went to prep school. Hoover's handling of the economic crisis in the US at the end of the roaring twenties is thought by many to have made a bad situation worse.)
Secondarily, the campaign adopted a scorched earth strategy against the two top rivals in the multi-party race so as to disperse the anti-Goni vote among the minor party candidates and position Sanchez de Lozada as the winner by plurality, much as a portion of the anti-Clinton vote in 1992 and 1996 was siphoned away from the Republicans by Ross Perot's candidacy, giving Bill Clinton plurality wins.
In the end, the GCS strategy worked well enough to give Sanchez de Lozada 22.46% against 20.94% for Morales and 20.91% for Reyes. Hardly a mandate. And so GCS went home with a win and with their fees, while Sanchez de Lozada was left to try to govern Bolivia with a very slim plurality of the vote.
There are some key historical and demographic facts about Bolivia that should be kept in mind. First, the majority of Bolivians are indigenous peoples, chiefly Quechua and Aymara, but with other groups represented, also. Bolivia was rule exclusively by the Spanish descended elite and the indigenous people were denied education and were forbidden to learn Spanish long after independence. A large proportion of the people speak Quechua or Aymara as their first language and Castillano as their second language. In addition, Bolivia has a long history of the pillaging of its natural resources, historically tin and silver, with little to show for it for the vast majority of people. In 1867 and 1903, Bolivia lost territory to Brazil. In the 1880's, Bolivia lost its seacoast to Chile in the War of the Pacific and became landlocked. In addition, Bolivia lost a large land area to Paraguay in the Chaco War of the 1930's. Finally, it should be remembered that in Bolivia, coca is commonly consumed in natural form as a tea or simply chewed as a mild stimulant and folk remedy (purified cocaine, however, can land a person in prison).
His predecessor, Jorge Quiroga (a graduate of Texas A&M) had advocated selling natural gas from reserves in the southeast of the country and export it through Chilean seaports. When Goni continued on that course, he touched several of the aforementioned hot buttons at once. Again, according to the opposition, the foreigners would get Bolivian resources and Bolivians would get nothing. That, coupled with the resentment of the US effort to eradicate coca allowed Evo Morales to lead and grow his popular movement not only by advocating socialism, but also by portraying his as a populist movement standing up for the common people against the first world which only wanted to take more from Bolivia while leaving its people as poor as ever.
And so it was that in October of 2003, in the face of massive protests, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada resigned in favor of his Vice President, Carlos Mesa. Mesa resigned in 2005 and new elections were organized under the caretaker presidency that followed.
In December of 2005, Evo Morales was elected, as he most certainly would have been in 2002 had the MNR not run the crisis-branded campaign authored by the GCS Group.
Other reviews here, here and here.