Report from Bolivia on popular insurrection

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bolivia: Aymara Rebellion And Democratic Dictatorship


by Forrest Hylton
October 13, 2003 Print-Friendly Version Email This Article To A Friend





BOLIVIA WATCH

?We?re going to count up how much you owe us in back taxes since 1532!
You?re just tenants! We?re the rightful owners of this country!? Since
you can?t govern, give us back the power!? Let us govern!?

Opposition Senator Germán ?El Inca? Choquehuanca to Bolivian
Vice-President Carlos Meza, October 9, 2003

With rumors of an impending State of Siege and/or coup attempt
circulating through the body politic, on October 10, twenty-one years
after the end of its last dictatorship, Bolivia?s citizens were
comparing dictatorship and democracy.

After the October 12 massacre in El Alto, an Aymara city of
800,000 on the upper edge of La Paz, which left at least twenty-five
dead and one hundred injured, millions of Bolivians have concluded
that dictatorship and democracy are not mutually exclusive, but
complementary. The opposition demands a new democracy in the form of a
Constituent Assembly, in which the majority will enjoy
political/cultural equality and decide the fate of its natural
resources?gas in particular. The time of the domination of
multinational corporations and pseudo-multiculturalism?the time of
neoliberal democracy?is in its death agonies.

If a State of Siege has yet to be declared, it is because the military
high command fears a barracks revolt. The situation in the police
force is no less unstable: on the evening of October 10, for example,
six police officers were arrested on charges of plotting rebellion
under the direction of ex-police officer David Vargas, who led the
police revolt that triggered the urban uprising of February 12/13.

Once again, this time ironically, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez
de Lozada has summed up the situation succinctly: a tiny minority is
trying to divide the country. Sánchez de Lozada?whose approval rating
stands at
8%--and his inner circle have dug in their heels, raised their voices
in contempt, and adopted bellicose postures. The US Embassy, the
media, and the upper layers of the military and police are the only
remaining supports of the regime.

The opposition sectors insist on the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada
and his draconian ministers, Carlos Sánchez Berzaín and Yerko Kukoc,
as well as a change in the law regulating petroleum multinationals
(D.S.
24806).

Throughout the afternoon of October 10, at the wake of the 22 year-old
Aymara bricklayer, Ramiro Vargas, held in the middle of Avenue 6 de
Marzo in Ventilla, on the outskirts of El Alto, the mourners chanted,
?Now for sure! Civ-il war! Now for sure! Civ-il war!? Police shot
Vargas on October 9 for no reason other than that 500 miners had
arrived from Huanuni to join the civic strike in El Alto, rejecting
the FTAA and the export of Bolivian gas to the US via Chile.

Following the killing of Ramiro Vargas, neighborhood committees in El
Alto gave the police in 24 hours to leave their houses and called on
them to join the uprising. Otherwise they would become victims of
popular justice. On October 11, one policeman was captured by
neighborhood residents in El Alto and held for seven hours before
being rescued by fellow police. Other policemen and women have either
gone into hiding or stayed at home; none dares to patrol the streets
of El Alto.

On the evening of October
11, part of El Alto was without electricity as a result of an attack
on Electropaz, a multinational company targeted by rebels on February
12/13, and because soldiers shot out streetlights to make way for the
gas tankers destined for La Paz. Earlier, the army killed two
civilians?twenty-seven year-old Walter Huanca Choque and five year-old
Alex Mollericona?during an operation designed to bring the tankers to
La Paz (then suffering from a severe shortage of gas and cooking
fuel).

The operation failed, and La Paz was without gas until October 12,
when, as a result of the massacre in the neighborhood of Senkata, gas
tankers, under military escort, arrived in the capital with 32,000
liters (5% of daily consumption). On October 13, La Paz will be
without bread or meat, since the bakers and butchers have decided to
join the protest against the proposed export of Bolivian gas; it will
also be without public transport, because a departmental transport
strike has been declared in solidarity with the citizens and martyrs
of El Alto.

In spite of the tanks, planes and soldiers and helicopters strafing
randomly, more than 90% of El Alto, entering its fifth consecutive day
of a civic strike, remains under control of neighborhood associations,
market vendors, public university students, and the Regional Workers?
Central
(COR), led by Roberto de la Cruz, an Aymara militant of the Indian
Revolutionary Movement (MIP), and follower of Felipe Quispe, leader of
the Aymara peasant trade union federation (CSUTCB).

Quispe and the Aymara peasant trade union leaders continue their
hunger strike at Radio San Gabriel in El Alto, and the blockades
continue north of La Paz as well; for the first time, the insurgent
altiplano?Huarina, Warisata, Acacachi and Sorata?is politically
connected to the upper edge of the nation?s capital in what has become
the most important Aymara uprising since 1899. The ?surrounding of La
Paz? (el cerco a La Paz), a tactic not effectively employed since
1781, has become a material possibility rather than an empty piece of
radical rhetoric.

The media insists that the COR and de la Cruz are obligating people to
participate in the blockades, which, to some extent, is true: in
Aymara community politics, the minority is obliged to respect majority
decisions on pain of expulsion from the community. No one should be
surprised that this non-liberal pattern is being repeated in El Alto,
which is overwhelmingly Aymara.

The degree of coercion should not be overemphasized, however: in the
wake of the massacre of October 12, even people initially opposed to
the civic strike are participating of their own free will.

Though the axis of revolt straddles the western highland region, the
sub-tropical Yungas region northeast of La Paz, loyal to Evo Morales
and the leading opposition party, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), was
completely blocked through the week of October 6-13.

Hundreds of vehicles and thousands of people were stranded in transit,
but since none were foreigners, there were no rescue missions in the
Yungas?and, as yet, no massacres like the one carried out on September
20 in Warisata, in which six Aymara peasant/workers and a police
official were killed so that tourists could return to La Paz.

In the southern highlands and valleys of Sucre and Potosí, blockades
have not been constant, but are set to intensify on October 13.

In Yapacaní, Santa Cruz, there have been sporadic blockades, but the
eastern part of the country is under government control.

The Chapare lowlands?Evo Morales? stronghold?have been completely
militarized by day, but by night burning tires and trees block the
roads, and after five hundred delegates of the coca growers? trade
union federations met in Cochabamba on October 11, a massive blockade
was declared for October 13 in coordination with a rally in Cochabamba
to commemorate the nationalization of Bolivian petroleum during the
National Revolution of 1952.

The coca growers, like the citizens of El Alto and the highland Aymara
communities, are calling for the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada, the
repeal of the laws regulating multinational exploitation of petroleum
resources, and the nationalization of Bolivian gas. In addition, the
coca growers demand an end to the forced eradication of coca.

It remains to be seen whether the opposition movements, led by the
highland Aymara, will succeed in overthrowing Sánchez de Lozada,
implementing a Constituent Assembly, and forging a new Bolivia, or
whether rightwing authoritarianism a la Uribe will be imposed with the
aid of the US Embassy.

The situation is unfolding with such rapidity that predictions are of
marginal utility, but one thing is certain: the Aymara working class
and peasantry of the western highlands; the coca growers of the
eastern lowlands; the Quechua-speaking Indian peasantry of the
southern highlands and valleys; the working class of La Paz and
Cochabamba; in other words, the people who produce Bolivia?s wealth
are demanding an end to 511 years of looting, exploitation, and
political domination. They insist on becoming the beneficiaries of
their labor, on taking the political decisions that affect their lives
and exercising sovereignty over natural resources.

But not for themselves: as one neighborhood leader in Santa Rosa, El
Alto, put it on the evening of October 12, ?Mr. Journalist, we will
not move until the gringo is gone. He is no longer president here in
El Alto. We run things here. We will not let anyone export our gas,
much less to the US via Chile. The gas is ours, and we want it for our
children and grandchildren, so they won?t have to live like this. Our
gas is for their future.?


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