[Marxism] Bolivian President Resigns

["Tony Tracy" <tony@xxxxxx>]

There's an excellent article by  Jeffery Webber and Susan Spronk on the 
resignation of the Bolivian president on ZNet's site at:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=52&ItemID=7388
Some of Jeff Webber's previous writing on the situation in Bolivia is available 
in the magazine archives section of the New Socialist website at 
http://www.newsocialist.org - the magazine will be running another current 
piece on Bolivia in our forthcoming issue (may/june 2005 - issue #51) by Jeff.

- Tony Tracy, Toronto

---

Bolivian President Resigns Amidst Blockades Of The New Left And A Belligerent 
Old Right

by Jeffery R. Webber and Susan Spronk; March 07, 2005

In the early hours of Monday morning, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the
right-wing of La Paz's middle class are mobilized outside the president's
palace in the Murillo Plaza chanting slogans in support of Carlos Mesa
Gisbert who has just announced that he will resign from the presidency
before Congress later today.

In October 2003, Mesa, the former vice-president under the hated and
murderous regime of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada ("Goni"), rode to the
presidential palace on a popular wave of mobilization emanating out of the
altiplano (western high-plains), and the massive shantytown of El Alto. The
protests eventually reached their apogee with more than 500,000 people in
the streets of the capital, La Paz.
Goni fled the country as a result, and is still exiled in the United States.

Mesa, meanwhile, assumed the presidency, promising to fulfill the central
demands of what came to be known as the October Agenda: (a) a new
hydrocarbons law to reclaim the sovereignty of the Bolivian state over the
second largest reserves of natural gas in Latin America, which aims to
enable an national industrialization project that will benefit the poor
indigenous majority rather than the transnational corporations and their
local bourgeois affiliates; (b) a Constituent Assembly, still vaguely
defined, but which promised to threaten centres of power in the areas of
indigenous autonomy, land distribution, and the future of natural resources,
among other areas of social, political and economic reform; and finally, (c)
a trial of responsibilities which would see Goni and the closest members of
his ministerial team brought to justice for ordering the military to open
fire on unarmed civilian protesters in October of 2003, the "Gas War" of
Bolivia.

Above all, however, October symbolized both the popular rejection of the
neoliberal model first introduced in 1985, and the forceful demand of the
indigenous majority for an end to centuries of apartheid-like social and
political life.
 - clip -

full article online at 
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=52&ItemID=7388




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