October 15, 2003
War and Peace in Bolivia
"Like Animals They Kill Us"
By FORREST HYLTON
"Like animals they kill us. They come to surround us at us with planes and helicopters and tanks, not even animals are killed like this, there are children here yet they're entering people's houses, to look for leaders. Here's the proof--the bullets.
Aymara woman from Rio Seco, El Alto
Since October 12, at least fifty-nine civilians have died in Bolivia as a result of government repression. More than two hundred have been injured, and the number of detained and disappeared is unknown. Instead of negotiating with a non-violent Aymara movement based in El Alto, which now extends to the hillside neighborhoods of Upper Miraflores, Munaypata, Villa Victoria, Villa del Carmen, Villa Fatima and the Cemetery of La Paz, President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada went on CNN to declare that the protests were being financed with foreign funds from well-intentioned NGOs, whose naive sympathies with the plight of indigenous people has led them to support terrorist leaders like Evo Morales, who has visited Libya, and Felipe Quispe, an ex-guerrilla of the EGTK (Guerrilla Army Tupak Katari). According to Sanchez de Lozada, the alternative to his reign would be an "authoritarian, trade union dictatorship." Just as Alvaro Uribe accused human rights NGOs of supporting terrorism in September, so Sanchez de Lozada accuses indigenous rights NGOs of supporting terrorism in October. He contends that Sendero Luminoso as well as the Colombian FARC and ELN are operating in Bolivia, and on October 9, District Attorney Rene Arzabe brought coca grower Mercelino Janko to jail in La Paz in connection with the "drugs and terrorism" case of Pacho Cortes, Carmelo Penaranda and Claudio Ramirez, peasant leaders who are currently detained (illegally) in the Chonchocoro Maximum Security Prison.
On October 13, Condi Rice expressed the Bush administration's support for the democratic, constitutional rule of Sanchez de Lozada, as did the OAS. Rice's declaration needs to be placed in context: Bush called Ariel Sharon a "man of peace"; Colin Powell is impressed with Alvaro Uribe's "commitment" to human rights. The semantic pattern is clear. Of course the evidence for anything other than imperially supported state terror_of the type that characterized Bolivia's worst dictatorships (Garcia Meza and Natusch Bush)_weighs heavily against Sanchez de Lozada, but didn't Rumsfeld say, "The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence?" Didn't Bush insist that Saddam Hussein had a connection to the events of September 11, although the "intelligence" agencies of the North Atlantic, including the CIA, insisted he did not?
The average marcher from El Alto earns no more that $105 per month, and many earn less. Few have contacts with NGOs, and neighborhood organizations are funded with what little residents can contribute, since municipal funds are embezzled and misspent by the mayor. Poverty does not adversely affect the collective discipline of the Altenos, however. Looting and property destruction were not permitted. Since the march was organized by neighborhood, marchers knew one another and did not allow unknown people to participate or provoke the police or military. The response of neighborhood residents below the cemetery and descending to the city center was to applaud and offer food and water to the marchers. Street corners were plastered with homemade signs expressing solidarity with the pain and aims of the marchers, and the poorer neighborhoods of the northern hillsides and southern outskirts of La Paz marched toward the center to show their support. Perhaps as many as 100,000 filled the city center, forming an oblong-shaped chain bisected by those who filled El Prado (the main street in La Paz), from the Plaza del Estudiante to Perez Velasco, calling for the renunciation of Sanchez de Lozada, the industrialization of Bolivian gas for Bolivians, the repeal of privatization laws, as well as the re-foundation of the country along participatory democratic lines, via a Constituent Assembly. By early afternoon, the 4th regiment of the police waved white banners from their post just below the Plaza de San Francisco, and other regiments ceased to patrol the city.
In the October 13 march from El Alto to La Paz, protestors, armed only with wooden clubs and poles, took no lives, and destroyed only one building, Shopping Dorian's, on the corner of Sagarnaga and Murillo behind the Plaza de San Francisco_from the top of which a sniper had killed a young, unarmed man who was running from tear gas. Two other buildings were burned_the seats of two political parties, NFR and the ruling MNR_but both had been destroyed in the uprising of February 12, and neither had been rebuilt. Protestors attempted to occupy the residence of former president Jaime Paz Zamora in Cota Cota, but Paz Zamora_leader of MIR, the principal coalition partner of Sanchez de Lozada's MNR_was rescued by US intelligence operatives. In El Alto, backed by protestors, a cousin of Paz Zamora's forced the military to pull back, and Altenos proceeded to burn a tank. As this incident demonstrates, a considerable number of rank-and-file militants in the ruling political parties are in conflict with their leaders. Nor is dissent within the military confined to the high command: private Edgar Lecona was shot and killed by his superior for refusing to murder his Aymara brothers and sisters. (snip/...)
http://www.counterpunch.org/hylton10152003.html
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