Finally, MacLean was returning to office with more practical experience in governing under his belt and with less dire circumstances to contend with. "I didn't face as much of a crisis in the alcaldia itself," he explains. "There was some money to pay salaries. I could survive .... Things were not as bleak as they were back in '85 because I knew what had to be done."
Back in office, MacLean not only sought to reinstitute many of his early initiatives, he began what he calls his "second generation of reforms," which, he adds, were "much bolder," and focused largely on pushing ahead with privatization. Thus, for example, the city gave a forty-year concession to a French firm to manage La Paz's water works, and Coopers and Lybrand was hired to take over the city's accounting functions. MacLean once again whittled away at the municipal workforce, which had crept back up to 4,000; but this time, using city funds, he helped laid-off workers acquire tools and equipment so that they could contract with the city to do the same tasks-tending the parks, for instance, or cleaning the streets-as private entrepreneurs that they had done as city employees.
But MacLean's tenure as mayor proved short-lived. At the end of 1996, the fragile coalition he had put together in the city council began to crumble; in a series of complicated maneuverings¬involving, among other things, the virtual arrest of one councilor - MacLean was voted out of office by the council. It was, says, MacLean, "totally illegal. ... It was a civilian municipal coup, but it was a coup [nonetheless]."
A Sign of Hope. After his ouster, MacLean left La Paz for a research post at Harvard, but subsequent events in La Paz gave him some consolation and reason to hope for the city's future. In 1998, his successor as mayor, Gaby Candia, was charged with complicity in a fraudulent land deal paid for from city funds. She was tried and sentenced to jail (pending her appeal) - the first time, MacLean points out, that a mayor in Bolivia was punished for corruption. But perhaps more important, in his view, was the way the scandal had come to light in the first place: city employees had documented the illegal land transaction and sent the evidence to the city's leading newspaper, La Rason. In the past, MacLean says, people were either too afraid or too pessimistic about the outcome to speak out against corruption. "And so my guess is that, in a way, the institution is learning that [it] can fight back," he reflects. " ... I think there is the feeling that impunity is no longer guaranteed."
Still, MacLean acknowledges, the battle against corruption was hardly over: after he was removed from office, his reforms were once again halted or dismantled by his successor. But, he argues, it should be seen as a "long-term fight," where the gains were small and setbacks inevitable. "You take ten steps forward," he says, and with luck "only go back four." Meanwhile, he observes, the next mayoral election in La Paz would take place in December 1999, and "I'm ahead in the polls."