Bolivia: an Indian-led movement

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

LA Times, October 19, 2003
Across the Americas, Indigenous Peoples Make Themselves Heard
By Hector Tobar , Times Staff Writer

EL ALTO, Bolivia ? Above the rocky bowl of La Paz, this vast township of 
brick and adobe homes stretches across a dry plain. This is where the 
Aymara Indians of western Bolivia come to live and work when their farms 
can no longer feed them.

For the past week, the hardscrabble order of El Alto gave way to a fervor 
of rebellion. Armed with the traditional weapons of the Aymara people ? 
sticks, slingshots and muscle ? its residents fought the army, built 
barricades and derailed a train, cutting off and shutting down the capital 
below them.

"We are not going to allow ourselves to be pushed around anymore," said 
Bernaldo Castillo Mollo, a 37-year-old Aymara bricklayer and 
jack-of-all-trades who was shot in the foot during the protests. "So that 
our children have a better life than us, we are willing to die."

The Indian-led movement that brought down Bolivian President Gonzalo 
Sanchez de Lozada last week was only the most recent and startling 
expression of a growing militancy and political assertiveness among the 
native peoples of the Americas.

full: http://www.latimes.com/



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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