Bolivia: One Step from Insurrection

original article: http://ainfos.ca/ainfos08624.html

One death per week, one wounded per day, dozens of reports of tortures, dozens
of persecuted unionists, a hundred political prisoners, the closing of radios
stations related to social and union movements. In less than six months, that
is the balance of the regime, more atrocious than it has been in Bolivia since
the fall of the military dictatorships, 20 years ago.

The tone of these days is complemented by the media attacks which criminalize
all social protest, orchestrating the state's imposition of an economic and
political system of society. Everything under the rule of capitalist
imperialism, which exerts a rapacious incursion of geopolitical domination,
which clashes with the mobilized wrath of the Bolivian proletariat.

The working-class, which has been on the ascent since 2000, is progressively
fortifying its unity and clarifying its objectives. Although the ineffable
bureaucracy has at no moment varied its chauvinist and conciliatory positions,
the push of the working masses have forced union leaders to join the ever more
radicalized fight of the class which is freeing itself in Bolivia.

Facing the violence of the State/Capital, the proletariate is defending itself.
In the last month, three soldiers and a policeman have been finished off in
Chapare; while in Sucre a group of small debtors, defending themselves from
foreclosure, threw gasoline at a squad of police and set them on fire. In the
locality of Pocitos, thousands of border workers made a group of elite police
flee and burned the border post with Argentina; on 2nd February last, a march
of thousands of workers, cocaine farmers, college students, small debtors,
teachers, health-workers, water-workers and workers without retirement, ended
up throwing stones, firecrackers and paint at the police station in the city of
Cochabamba, in protest at the ferocious repression exerted by the elite forces
- the "dálmatas" - accused of torturing political prisoners with electrical
charges applied to the gums, finally a group of young people dressed in black
threw a homemade bomb, which injured five policemen, including a senior
officer.

Over the last 2 weeks, Cochabamba has become the epicentre of the protests,
with thousands taking to the streets, raising barricades, making bonfires,
setting vehicles on fire in some cases and attacking shops selling luxury
goods, as well as the court building,laying barbed wire and glass to stop the
passage of the brutal body of police, that finally arrived, capturing even
children of 11 years of age and using heavy arms, a fact that was cynically
accepted by the government minister, who explained it by saying that they had
finished their supplies of gas.

The social movement in Cochabamba, which includes coca growers, demands the
abolition of parliament and the formation of a popular assembly. The
disturbances exploded after the expulsion of a member of parliament, the farmer
Evo Morales, who is the union leader of the coca producers; the so-called
cocaleros, who are spread over the whole Chapare region and engage in the
growing of coca leaf, the buying and selling of which the government recently
decreed illegal in the zone, thereby condemning over 35,000 families to hunger.
All this under the orders of Washington and in the frame of the phoney war on
drugs.

Traditionally, coca has been used for over a thousand years, and at present
large sectors of indigenous and mestizo people use it habitually as a part of
their culture. That is why the movement of coca growers has described the
campaign as one of eradication and commercialization of coca, like a cultural
genocide, not only humanitarian. So, the troops of the military and police
have assassinated, in this region alone, more than eighty coca growers,
shooting and torturing several hundred, besides pillaging and burning whole
towns.

The true intention of capitalist imperialism, the financier of this campaign,
is the control of the Amazon and Andes regions, and is one part in the
strategy of eliminating any social resistance in the region.

The iron resistance of the cocaleros movement, is partly explained by the
flexible organization it practices, being based on horizontal communitarian
traditions of the ayllu and ayni, which have a self-managing tradition.

A similar organization has also been developed by the natives of the plateau,
who this week have added to the mobilizations by cutting the routes, together
with farmers of other regions, demanding among other things the expulsion of
ENRON from the country. Transport routes of almost all regions of Bolivia
appear to be blocked to different degrees. Nevertheless, the great majority of
routes are cleared until noon by soldiers, only to become quickly
re-obstructed. The significance of the interruption is not in the permanence of
the barricades, but in the distrust that it generates for travelling by road.

Several peasant organizations and those of indigenous people have warned that
the battle for land will be more serious than for that of coca, because it will
favor the large landowners of the east as a result of the reforms of the
Political Constitution of the State.

The social movement in struggle involves many sectors - four days ago even the
police of Santa Cruz rebelled, demanding food vouchers - and although it does
not act in a very premeditatedly coordinated manner, solidarity between the
different sectors is a constant and is bordering the government and the faith
in bourgeois democracy.

The government of President Quiroga is a corpse that continues to govern thanks
to the support of the American embassy. Its existence is paradoxical in a
convulsed country with such a great tradition for coups. It is an expression of
the times that Latin America is living under the capitalist imperialistic yoke.
The presence of an opposition rooted in the proletarian movement is imperative,
one which is directed towards burying not only the corpse of the Quiroga
government, but also the State/Capital. None of the leaders of the different
movements that are shaking the country are directing their fight beyond the
level of revenge, which eliminates all historical perspective the fight which
they face the workers to subsist in a regime that does not have another
alternative than to unload the weight of its crisis on the backs of the
workers. Tricked by imperialist and bourgeois propaganda these leaders take for
granted the futility of socialism and just look after their own privileges.

The bureaucracies must be overcome, otherwise we will become victims of the
capitalist crisis that lies on the horizon and whose consequences we have
already felt. Only a social revolution and the construction of a new society
can offer a future to the workers who fight, not only to solve their immediate
problems, but also to construct their self-managed, horizontal, libertarian
communist future.

The social struggle that is developing in Bolivia, is part of the same war of
classes that the proletariat historically faces against the capital state; for
that reason, this must be recognized in the fights that will free the Bolivi@n
workers and promote internacionalist actions worthy of the circumstances.

THE FIGHT AGAINST THE STATE/CAPITAL WILL BE COMMUNIST, SELF-MANAGED,
INTERNACIONALIST AND ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN OR IT WILL BE NOTHING.

February 6th, 2002

Juventudes Libertarias, Bolivia
jjll_bolivia [at] nodo50.org
http://www.nodo50.org/jjll.bolivia/jjll/jjll.index

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