Slavery in the Americas?! The 'opposition' to Morales using forced work and generational debt

Teresa Barrio was born on a patch of scrub on a Bolivian plantation. This is where she has lived and worked. This is where she expects to die. But she has no affection for this place.

The 65-year-old grandmother knows little of other people's lives but she knows her own has been harsh: toiling in fields for a pittance, sleeping in a mud hut, losing sight in one eye and losing five of seven children to disease.

There is no cash in the pockets of her ragged skirt, nor, she says, does she feel free to leave the vast farm where she has worked hard all her life.

"All my life I've been here and at the end of it I have nothing and have nowhere else to go," she says.

Her hamlet of 13 Guarani families - all workers on the plantations near the town of Camiri in Alto Parapeti region in the eastern province of Santa Cruz - built a school but ranchers destroyed it, she says.

"They didn't want us to learn, they want things to be like they always have been," Teresa's granddaughter, Deisy, says.

Beside the ruins is the replacement school - five desks beneath a blue tarpaulin draped from an algarroba tree.

Over the past two years, Bolivia's government and several indigenous groups, have been giving a controversial name to Teresa's type of existence - slavery.

They and some international organisations say conditions are still akin to bonded labour, making these peasants the de facto property of rich landowners in one of South America's poorest countries.

Accusations of forced labour have circulated for decades, with little result.

Over the past two years, Bolivia's government and several indigenous groups, have been giving a controversial name to Teresa's type of existence - slavery.

They and some international organisations say conditions are still akin to bonded labour, making these peasants the de facto property of rich landowners in one of South America's poorest countries.

Accusations of forced labour have circulated for decades, with little result.

"Some have debts owed by their fathers," Wilson Changaray, a Guarani leader, says in the dusty town of Camiri.

"The idea that there is slavery here is absurd … Offering loans and selling food is not a debt trap but a favour because there are few banks and shops in the region," says Eliane Capobianco of the rancher's association Fegasacruz, in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, the opposition heartland.

Yet, over the past year some landowners have blocked government inspectors, sometimes violently. That has only hardened suspicions that some ranchers have something to hide.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8047960.stm

I really hope our government still doesn't consider Morales to be the bad guy in Bolivia.