Carlos Mesa OCA OSP OMAA OMM
Official portrait, 2004
63rd President of Bolivia
In office 17 October 2003 – 9 June 2005
Vice President	Vacant
Preceded by	Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada
Succeeded by	Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé
37th Vice President of Bolivia
In office 6 August 2002 – 17 October 2003
President	Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada
Preceded by	Jorge Quiroga
Succeeded by	Álvaro García Linera
Leader of Civic Community
Incumbent
Assumed office 13 November 2018
Preceded by	Alliance established
Official Representative of Bolivia for the Maritime Claim
Ad honorem
In office 28 April 2014 – 1 October 2018[a]
President	Evo Morales
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Position dissolved
Personal details
Born	Carlos Diego de Mesa Gisbert (1953-08-12) 12 August 1953 (age 70) La Paz, Bolivia
Political party	Revolutionary Left Front (2018–present)
Other political affiliations	Independent (before 2018)
Spouses	Patricia Flores Soto ​ ​ (m. 1975; div. 1978)​ Elvira Salinas Gamarra ​ ​ (m. 1980)​
Children	Borja Ignacio Guiomar
Parents	José de Mesa Teresa Gisbert
Education	San Calixto School San Estanislao de Kotska School
Alma mater	Complutense University of Madrid Higher University of San Andrés
Occupation	Historian journalist politician
Awards	List of awards and honors
Signature
Website	carlosdmesa.com bibliotecavirtualcarlosdmesa.com
Carlos Mesa's voice Academic presentation delivered to a session of the Argentine Council for International Relations, 13 March 2019.

Carlos Diego de Mesa Gisbert^[b] (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈkaɾlos ˈðjeɣo ˈmesa xisˈβeɾt] ^ⓘ; born 12 August 1953) is a Bolivian historian, journalist, and politician who served as the 63rd president of Bolivia from 2003 to 2005. As an independent politician, he previously served as the 37th vice president of Bolivia from 2002 to 2003 under Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and was the international spokesman for Bolivia's lawsuit against Chile in the International Court of Justice from 2014 to 2018. A member of the Revolutionary Left Front, he has served as leader of Civic Community, the largest opposition parliamentary group in Bolivia, since 2018.

Born in La Paz, Mesa began a twenty-three-year-long journalistic career after graduating from university. He rose to national fame in 1983 as the host of De Cerca, in which he interviewed prominent figures of Bolivian political and cultural life. His popular appeal led former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) to invite him to be his running mate in the 2002 presidential election. Though Mesa's moderate left-wing sympathies contrasted with centre-right policies of the MNR, he accepted the offer, running as an independent in a hotly contested electoral campaign. The Sánchez de Lozada-Mesa ticket won the election, and, on 6 August, Mesa took charge of a largely ceremonial office that carried with it few formal powers save for guaranteeing the constitutional line of succession. Shortly into his term, conflict between Sánchez de Lozada and Mesa arose. By October 2003, the increasingly tense situation surrounding the ongoing gas conflict caused a definitive break in relations between the president and vice president, leading the latter to announce his withdrawal from government after clashes between protesters and military personnel led to several deaths. Crucially, Mesa opted not to resign from his vice-presidential post and succeeded to the presidency upon Sánchez de Lozada's resignation.

Mesa assumed office with broadly popular civic support but leading a government without a party base and devoid of organic parliamentary support left him with little room to maneuver as his public policy proposals were severely restricted by the legislature—controlled by traditional parties and increasingly organized regional and social movements spearheaded by the cocalero activist and future president Evo Morales. As promised, he held a national referendum on gas which passed with high margins on all five counts. Nonetheless, widespread dissatisfaction resurged, and his call for a binding referendum on autonomies and the convocation of a constituent assembly to reform the Constitution failed to quell unrest. Mesa resigned in June 2005, though not before ensuring that the heads of the two legislative chambers renounced their succession rights, facilitating the assumption of the non-partisan Supreme Court judge Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé to the presidency. With that, Mesa withdrew from active politics and returned his focus to various media projects and journalistic endeavors. In 2014, despite previous animosity, President Evo Morales appointed him as the international spokesman for the country's maritime lawsuit against Chile before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a position he held until the final ruling at The Hague in 2018.

Mesa's work for the maritime cause propelled him back into the national consciousness, and he soon emerged as a viable alternative to Morales as a contender for the presidency, even surpassing the president in electoral preference polls. Shortly after the ruling by the ICJ, Mesa announced his presidential candidacy. In the 2019 election, Mesa was defeated by Morales, who failed to garner a majority but won a wide enough plurality to avoid a runoff. However, irregularities in the preliminary vote tally prompted Mesa to denounce electoral fraud and call for mass demonstrations, ultimately ending in Morales' resignation and an ensuing political crisis. The following year, snap elections were held, but numerous postponements and an unpopular transitional government hampered Mesa's campaign, resulting in a first-round loss to Movement for Socialism (MAS) candidate Luis Arce. Mesa emerged from the election as the head of the largest opposition bloc in a legislature that does not hold a MAS supermajority for the first time in over a decade.

Early life and career

Early life and education

Carlos Mesa was born on 12 August 1953 in La Paz.^[3] Through his father, José de Mesa, he is of Spanish descent; his grandfather, José Mesa Sánchez, emigrated to Bolivia from Alcalá la Real in 1910. Due to his heritage, in 2005, the city's council unanimously designated Mesa as the adoptive son of the municipality.^[4] His mother, Teresa Gisbert, was of Catalan descent; her father and mother emigrated from Barcelona and Alicante.^[5] Together, de Mesa and Gisbert were two of the most prominent Bolivian architects, historians, and museologists of their time.^[6] He has three younger siblings: Andrés, Isabel, and Teresa Guiomar.^[7]

Between 1959 and 1970, Mesa completed primary and began secondary studies at the all-boys private Catholic and Jesuit San Calixto School in the Següencoma barrio of La Paz.^[8] In 1970, he traveled abroad to Spain, completing his high school education at the San Estanislao de Kotska School in Madrid. After graduating, Mesa entered the Complutense University of Madrid, pursuing majors in political science and letters. After three years, he returned to Bolivia, where he enrolled in the Higher University of San Andrés (UMSA), graduating with a degree in literature in 1978.^[9] During his stay there, in 1974, he directed the UMSA's Faculty of Humanities magazine.^[10]

At the age of twenty-two, Mesa married Patricia Flores Soto, though they divorced three years later. Two years after that, on 28 March 1980, he married Elvira Salinas Gamarra, a psychologist and environmental consultant with whom he has two children: Borja Ignacio and Guiomar.^[11]

Journalistic career

Film critic and archivist

On 12 July 1976, while still a student of the UMSA, Mesa, along with Pedro Susz and Amalia de Gallardo, helped found the Bolivian Cinematheque. With the support of Renzo Cotta of the Center of Cinematographic Orientation and La Paz Mayor Mario Mercado, the group secured a small amount of space on the fifth floor of the La Paz House of Culture in order to start their film archive. The first addition to the collection was a short film directed by Jorge Ruiz Laredo about the violinist Jaime Laredo, which was donated by the pianist Raúl Barragán.^[12] Along with Susz, Mesa served as the cinematheque's executive director from its foundation until 1985, remaining a member of its board of directors after that.^[10]

Radio host and producer

Mesa's first foray into radio occurred in 1969, concomitantly his first journalistic endeavor. Through his father, he secured a three-month internship for Radio Universo, where he would haul portable tape recorders to ministerial press conferences before returning and cutting the recorded material for broadcast use. In 1974, with the help of Universo head Lorenzo Carri, Mesa became the independent producer and host of a program on Radio Méndez. After a brief return to Universo in 1976, Mesa moved on to Radio Metropolitana, where, together with Roberto Melogno, he produced the morning newscast 25 Minutos en el Mundo. In 1979, Mesa's meager cinematheque salary pushed him to seek more dedicated journalistic work. Together with Carri, he joined Radio Cristal, owned by Mario Castro. The pair's presentational style evolved from simple news coverage to commentary and analysis and, finally, opinion journalism. Abruptly shuttered by the military government of Luis García Meza, the station was reopened after his fall and, between 1982 and 1985, had grown to become the country's top news network.^[13]

Television presenter

After a brief stint as sub-director of the evening periodical Última Hora between 1982 and 1983, Mesa made his first television debut. In that period, the only major competition to state outlets came from university television. Channel 13 Televisión Universitaria (TVU), directed by Luis González Quintanilla, played a particularly important role in the country's political process. In 1982, amid the country's democratic transition and the reopening of independent media, González invited Mesa to a panel on one of TVU's programs. Impressed by the young journalist, González called on him to take charge of a culture-themed talk show. Though Diálogos en Vivo ran for only three months, it proved to be the basis for what later became the program that spotlighted Mesa as a national television personality.^[14]

The name of that program came to be known as De Cerca. The concept of the show—formulated by Bolivian National Television officials Julio Barragán and Carlos Soria—combined formal interviews of Bolivian political figures with a section in which recorded questions from ordinary citizens were relayed by the host to the guest. In mid-1983, Mesa was called on to host the show, an offer he "accepted without question". De Cerca premiered on 15 September 1983, with Minister of Planning Roberto Jordan Pando as its first guest. The show premiered at a time of a severe hyperinflation crisis in the country; Mesa's salary frequently spent long periods through the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Finance, often being delivered two or three months late. His final payment from the company, delivered in July 1985, totaled b$63.5 million due to inflation.^[15]

Save for the eventual removal of prerecorded questions, which Mesa stated "broke the continuity of the program, and also limited the topic of the conversation to excessively circumstantial issues", the style and presentation of De Cerca remained largely unchanged for two decades and between four channels, lending it a sense of "permanence in time". Throughout its run, the program spotlighted a large majority of the most relevant political actors of the period; to be invited onto the show eventually became a mark of national prominence. Of those interviewed included every president of the country who governed during the show's run, as well as some prior ones, with the exception of Víctor Paz Estenssoro and Hernán Siles Zuazo, neither of whom, with few exceptions, ever accepted invitations to any television program. For Mesa, the omission of these two figures was "a great void in De Cerca that I will never finish regretting".^[16]

Foundation of PAT

On 1 August 1990, Mesa, together with fellow journalists Mario Espinoza and Amalia Pando and financially assisted by Ximena Valdivia, launched Associated Journalists Television (Periodistas Asociados Televisión; PAT). The concept of the network, then an audiovisual production company, came from the hope of establishing a newscast free of government oversight and censors. Starting from 15 September, PAT began broadcasting public news coverage to the country. In 1992, the government of Jaime Paz Zamora closed the State television company in favor of a contract with PAT, ratified by the succeeding government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Despite the State's financial support, Mesa's team of journalists took great care to maintain a level of objectivity in their reporting. Responding to questions regarding bias, Pando admits that both she and Mesa supported many of the policies of Sánchez de Lozada's first term but rejects the notion that this constituted "a tie" to the government.^[c]

Despite its early success, a compounding set of issues began to mount onto the channel. Viewing the newscast as an outlet for the opposition, the government of Hugo Banzer initiated a boycott. This, coupled with an economic recession and a series of well-done but largely unpopular new programs, sent PAT into a financial crisis. According to Pando, Mesa's vice-presidential candidacy had "devastating consequences" for the channel's credibility as an independent news source. In 2007, the company was sold to businessman Abdallah Daher, who thereafter sold it to Comercializadora Multimedia del Sur. Only the name remains with the original channel.^[17]

Press columnist

Mesa's longest-held editorial post was as a regular contributor to the sports supplements of the morning papers Hoy, Presencia, Viva, and La Prensa; he published for these outlets between 1976 and 2002. Between 1979 and 1986, he worked as a film critic for the La Paz prints Apertura (1979), Hoy (1981–1982), and Última Hora (1983–1986). From 2010 to 2017, he remained a regular editor-at-large for the morning newspapers El Deber, El Nuevo Sur, El Potosí, Correo del Sur, La Palabra, La Patria, Los Tiempos, Página Siete, and Sol de Pando. In addition, Mesa has written columns for international outlets such as the Spanish Diario 16 and El País, the American Foreign Policy, and Germany's Der Spiegel.^[10]

Vice presidency (2002–2003)

Entry into politics

As a prominent journalist in the field of politics, the prospect of actually participating in affairs of state was an option often proposed by outside voices but which Mesa—a staunch independent despite his moderate left-wing sympathies—routinely refused to consider. His first experience refusing the call to serve came in 1986 when President Paz Estenssoro invited him to be a component of his cabinet as minister of information. Despite his stated admiration of the president, Mesa declined the offer the following day, citing his perceived inadequacy to hold the position. In the ensuing years, on various occasions, Mesa declined offers by various parties to run for vice president, mayor of La Paz, or senator. In the 1993 election, then-candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada had placed Mesa on a list of pre-candidates for the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR)'s vice-presidential nomination. The Aymara activist Víctor Hugo Cárdenas was ultimately chosen and elected as the country's first indigenous vice president.^[18]

From no to yes: Mesa accepts

With elections set for June 2002, the possibility of being presented as a political candidate was once again laid on Mesa. Seeking a turnaround after its electoral defeat in the 1997 general election, the MNR opted to renominate its national chief, ex-president Sánchez de Lozada, as the party's presidential candidate. For his new bid, Sánchez de Lozada surrounded his campaign with American political consultants of the Greenberg Carville Shrum (GCS) strategy group, who employed focus groups and public opinion polls to revitalize his public image.^[19] In January, Mesa received a call from the ex-president asking him to meet with members of the GCS team to discuss the results of a recent poll. Mesa's suspicions that the subject of the survey would regard political candidates were confirmed when two consultants—Jeremy Rosner and Amy Webber—met him at his office at PAT, presenting the journalist with results showing him with the highest favorability among a list of a dozen national figures.^[20]

For Mesa, the festering social conflicts of twenty-first-century Bolivia necessitated a political renewal: "Paz Zamora and Sánchez de Lozada were history, their political cycle had finished, and they were prolonging it artificially and unnecessarily". If he were to become a contestant in electoral politics, he reasoned, it would be under a movement of his own design and certainly not as vice president, a post he described as "the stupidest position of all ... An office with a single objective, that of succession, with few clear powers". In meetings with Sánchez de Lozada, Mesa expressed this point, emphasizing that the MNR required younger generations among its ranks and suggesting himself as a possible alternative presidential candidate, an idea that the MNR shot down due to his political and economic inexperience.^[21]

Among other considerations for Mesa were the notion of ending an almost twenty-five-year career in journalism—including the abandonment of PAT—and the perceived adverse effects assuming the vice presidency would have on his family. For these reasons, on 31 January, Mesa informed Sánchez de Lozada that he would not join the ex-president as his running mate. Two days later, however, Mesa was called to one last meeting with Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, the MNR's campaign manager, who outlined three final arguments for consideration: Sánchez de Lozada was the only candidate with the capacity to alleviate the ongoing economic crisis; Mesa could not continue in his comfortable position commentating on the sidelines of politics; the MNR's campaign team considered the inclusion or exclusion of Mesa as the deciding factor in the party's electoral outcome. It was either "with me or with me ... everything else was a disaster". These points renewed doubts in Mesa, who, ultimately, apprehensively accepted the invitation just a day before the National Convention of the MNR was set to announce its presidential binomial.^[22]

The PAT factor

According to Mauricio Balcázar—former minister and son-in-law to Sánchez de Lozada—the MNR paid Mesa over US$800,000 in ten installments between the 2002 campaign and October 2003 in exchange for his vice-presidential candidacy. As alleged by Balcázar, on the day of the MNR Convention, Mesa demanded the payment and an initial guarantee check of US$200,000 for his television channel PAT, threatening to withdraw his nomination if the party did not comply. For Balcázar, this constituted "extortion"—although he did not realize it at the time—because the MNR had no time to seek an alternative candidate.^[23][d] An investigation carried out by analyst Carlos Valverde uncovered documents proving deposits totaling Bs6 million (US$831,454) into the bank account of PAT starting in mid-2002 and ending in October 2003. A majority of the transactions were recorded as loans to PAT by the Itaca company, the owner of ninety-nine percent of the channel's share quotas; in effect, a self-grant that raised money laundering concerns.^[25] For his part, Mesa refused to make a definitive statement on the allegations during his 2019 presidential bid, asserting that he would not respond to the "dirty war" being waged by his electoral opponents. At the same time, he affirmed that it was "based on false testimonies, on false investigations, and on the fact that, if it was an irregular act, it was carried out more than sixteen years ago".^[26]

2002 general election

The MNR closed its Extraordinary National Convention on 3 February with the announcement of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada as the party's presidential candidate, accompanied by Carlos Mesa as his non-partisan running mate. Accepting the nomination, Mesa cited resolving the economic crisis and fighting institutional corruption as the main factors in his decision to join the electoral binomial.^[27] At first glance, election day on 30 June yielded an electoral victory for the Sánchez de Lozada-Mesa ticket amid a well-conducted and orderly process, generally accepted by the contending parties and their supporters. But with a plurality of just 22.5 percent, the MNR emerged as the only traditional party that could claim a modicum of popular support. Second and third place, respectively, went to the Movement for Socialism (MAS-IPSP) of the indigenous cocalero activist Evo Morales and the New Republican Force (NFR) of Cochabamba Mayor Manfred Reyes Villa; each of them took a twenty percent share of the vote. Paz Zamora's Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) came fourth with 16.3 percent, while Nationalist Democratic Action (ADN)—the party holding the incumbent presidency—did not even reach four percent.^[28] The blow to the country's traditional party system resulted in a tense runoff in which Sánchez de Lozada was forced to form an unlikely coalition with Paz Zamora in order to shore up a majority of congressional support. With eighty-four votes in their favor, Congress elected Sánchez de Lozada and Mesa as the constitutional president and vice president on 4 August, taking office two days later.^[29][30]

A frustrated vice presidency

The fight against corruption

In keeping with his campaign promise to make fighting corruption the central point of his administration, Mesa, on 11 August 2002, launched the Technical Unit against Corruption under the leadership of the journalist Lupe Cajías. The unit was set as a component of the Vice Presidency, operating independently of the Prosecutor's Office.^[31] In addition to Cajías, it was composed of a "petite cabinet" consisting of José Galindo, Jorge Cortés, and Alfonso Ferrufino.^[32] On 12 August 2003, the post was refounded as the Secretariat of the Fight against Corruption, which Mesa credited to be "without doubt the greatest contribution of my management".^[33] Two days after his assumption to the presidency, Mesa elevated the secretariat to the high executive level as the Presidential Anticorruption Delegation.^[34]

Mesa's anti-corruption efforts were not without criticism. A year into her administration, Cajías admitted that her team had "barely scratched corruption" and that the post suffered "structural issues".^[35] One such issue was the lack of coordination between the secretariat and other parts of the judicial system; prosecutors annulled various cases presented by her office, and the ambiguity of the office's functions eventually relegated it to issuing opinions and periodically publishing public reports on alleged acts of corruption.^[36]

Mesa attributed many of the shortfalls of his anti-corruption work to a lack of cooperation from the president. One example came in July 2003 when Secretary Cajías issued Report N° 13. A contingent of conscripts and 180 soldiers of the Bolivian Army had been illegally forced to work harvesting Macororó on the Santa Monica farm in the Chiquitos Province of Santa Cruz for no wage and in conditions of general servitude.^[37] The case implicated Minister of Defense Freddy Teodovich and Santa Cruz Prefect Mario Justiniano. For this reason, on 10 July, Mesa met with Sánchez de Lozada to request the dismissal of Teodovich, an action the president refused to take because the minister was an influential component of the cabinet and the MNR. Mesa considered this a revocation of the president's promise to allow him to freely take anti-corruption measures, and the incident served to aggravate festering grievances between the two.^[38]

Black February

February 2003 presented the first significant ordeal that shook Mesa's confidence in the government. On the ninth, President Sánchez de Lozada, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to significantly reduce the country's fiscal deficit, presented a new tax bill that, among other factors, imposed a salary tax on workers making a certain threshold of income. The response was near-universal outrage and a series of protests that after a few days were joined by the National Police Corps.^[39][40] Given the absence of law enforcement, the demonstrations quickly devolved into riots, which eventually forced government officials to flee their offices. In his account of events, Mesa states that "what I saw was hell". At 5:00 p.m. on 12 February, Mesa, sequestered at the president's private residence, was informed that the Vice Presidency had been set aflame by vandals, an action he describes as "my apocalypse". "It seemed to me that all the illusions of public service I promised on 6 August upon taking office were shattered".^[41]

Black October: Mesa pulls out

By September, the simmering popular grievances of the time, mainly related to the export of natural gas to the United States through Chile, had ignited into nationwide social unrest. On 12 October, Mesa arrived in La Paz for a meeting with the president, flying in by helicopter due to the ongoing blockades making accessing the capital by land impossible.^[43] At 1:34 p.m., Mesa ate lunch with Sánchez de Lozada at the presidential residence in San Jorge, where he pleaded with the president to call a referendum on gas and open up the possibility of a constituent assembly. Sánchez de Lozada, whom Mesa describes as "the most stubborn man I have ever met", remained steadfast in his refusal to give in to social demands, causing the vice president to snap at him that "the dead are going to bury you".^[44] Amid their heated discussion, the government's bloody suppression of demonstrations in El Alto began to count its first deaths. Reports of the massacre of protesters, which Mesa learned from the media, definitively ruptured relations between him and Sánchez de Lozada.^[45] The following day, the vice president publicly withdrew his support for the government. In his statement, Mesa outlined that the cost of human lives was something that his "conscience as a human being cannot tolerate", and he implored the government to "seek a position of dialogue and establish peace".^[46] At a press conference held three days later, he ratified his refusal to cooperate, stating: "I do not have the courage to kill, nor will I have the courage to kill tomorrow. For that reason, it is impossible to think about my return to government".^[47]

Between the thirteenth and the seventeenth, Mesa withdrew to his private residence. Crucially, however, he determined not to resign from the vice presidency. He later recounted that the decision came from his memory of the 2001 crisis in Argentina. During that time, President Fernando de la Rúa resigned, causing a crisis of succession because Vice President Carlos Álvarez, in protest, had vacated the office the year prior. According to Mesa: "If there was any value in the position, I thought, it was precisely guaranteeing democratic continuity in extreme cases".^[48] Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Carlos_Mesa
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