[News] Morales Confronts the Insurrection
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon Sep 15 13:02:09 EDT 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach09152008.html
September 15, 2008
Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende
Morales Confronts the Insurrection
By ROGER BURBACH
As Bolivia teeters on the brink of civil war,
President Evo Morales staunchly maintains his
commitment to constructing a popular democracy by
working within the state institutions that
brought him to power. The show down with the
right wing is taking place against the backdrop
of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the overthrow
of Salvador Allende, the heroic if tragic
president of Chile who believed that the formal
democratic state he inherited could be peacefully
transformed to usher in a socialist society.
Like Allende, Morales faces a powerful economic
and political elite aligned with the United
States that is bent on reversing the limited
reforms he has been able to implement during his
nearly three years in power. Early on,
Morales--Bolivias first indigenous
president--moved assertively to exert greater
control over the natural gas and oil resources of
the country, sharply increasing the hydro-carbon
tax, and then using a large portion of this
revenue to provide a universal pension to all
those over sixty years old, most of whom live in poverty and are indigenous.
The self-proclaimed Civic Committees in Media
Luna (Half Moon)--Bolivias four eastern
departments--have orchestrated a rebellion
against these changes, demanding departmental
autonomy and control of the hydro-carbon
revenues, as well as an end to agrarian reform
and even control of the police forces. The Santa
Cruz Civic Committee, dominated by
agro-industrial interests, is supporting the
Cruceño Youth Union (UJC), an affiliated group
that acts as a para-military organization,
seizing and fire bombing government offices, and
attacking Indian and peasant organizations that
dare to support the national government.
Morales efforts to transform the institutions of
the country have focused on the popularly elected
Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution.
The assembly was convened in mid 2006 with
representatives from Morales political party,
the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) holding 54
percent of the seats. In the drafting of the new
constitution, the right wing political parties,
led by Podemos (We Can), insisted that a
two-thirds vote was needed even for the working
committees to approve the different sections of
the constitution. When they were overruled and a
new constitution was close to being approved in
November, 2007, members of the assembly,
including its indigenous president, Silvia
Lazarte, were assaulted in the streets of Sucre,
the old nineteenth century capital where the assembly was being held.
Using words that evoked Allendes last stand in
the Chilean presidential palace, Evo Morales
declared dead or alive, I will have a new
constitution for the country. He quartered the
assembly in an old castle under military
protection where it adopted a constitution that
has to be approved in a national referendum.
Labeling Morales a dictator, the civic
committees and the departmental prefects
(governors) of Media Luna were able to stall the
vote on the referendum, and instead organized
departmental referendums for autonomy in May of
this year that were ruled unconstitutional by the National Electoral Council.
Taking recourse in democracy rather than force,
and searching for a national consensus, Morales
then held up the vote on the new constitution,
and instead put his presidency on the line in a
recall referendum in which his mandate as well as
that of the prefects of the departments could be
revoked. On August 10, voters went to the polls
and Morales won a resounding 67 percent of the
vote, receiving a majority of the ballots in 95
of the countrys 112 districts with even the
Media Luna department of Pando voting in his favor.
However, the insurgent prefects also had their
mandates renewed. Based on the illegal,
departmental plebiscites held in May, they moved
to take control of Santa Cruz, the richest
department. UJC shock troops roamed the streets
of the city and surrounding towns, attacking and
repressing any opposition by local indigenous
movements and MAS-allied forces. Not wanting to
provoke an outright rebellion, Evo Morales did
not deploy the army or use the local police,
leaving the urban area under the effective control of the UJC.
Simultaneously, the right wing--led by the Santa
Cruz Civic Committee--began sewing economic
instability, seeking to destabilize the Morales
government much like the CIA-backed opposition
did in Chile against Salvador Allende in the
early 1970s. As in Chile, the rural business
elites and allied truckers engaged in strikes,
withholding or refusing to ship produce to the
urban markets in the western Andes where the
Indian population is concentrated, while selling
commodities on the black market at high prices.
The Confederation of Private Businesses of
Bolivia called for a national producers shutdown
if the government refused to change its economic policies.
The social movements allied with the government
have mobilized against this right wing offensive.
In the Media Luna, a union coalition of
indigenous peoples and peasants campaigned
against voting in the autonomy referendums, and
have taken on the bands of the UJC as they try to
intimidate and terrorize people. In the Andean
highlands, the social movements descended on the
capital La Paz in demonstrations backing the
Morales government, including a large
mobilization in June that stormed the American
embassy because of its support for the right
wing. In July, the federation of coca growers in
the Chapare, where US anti-drug operations are
centered, expelled the US Agency for International Development.
This past week the Civic Committees stepped up
their efforts to take control of the Media Luna
departments. In Santa Cruz on September 8, crowds
of youth lead by the UJC seized government
offices, including the land reform office, the
tax office, state TV studios, the nationalized
telephone company Entel, and set fire to the
offices of a non-governmental human rights
organization that promotes indigenous rights and
provides legal advice. The military police, who
had been dispatched to protect many of these
offices, were forced to retreat, at times
experiencing bloody blows that they were
forbidden from responding to due to standing
orders from La Paz not to use their weapons. The
commanding general of the military police, while
angrily denouncing the violent demonstrators,
said that the military could take no action
unless Evo Morales signed a degree authorizing the use of firearms.
What was in effect occurring was a struggle
between Morales and the military over who would
assume ultimate responsibility for the fighting
and deaths that would ensue with a military
intervention in Media Luna. The armed forces do
not support the autonomous rebellion because it
threatens the geographic integrity of the
Bolivian nation. Yet they are reluctant to
intervene because under past governments, when
they fired on and killed demonstrators in the
streets of La Paz, they were blamed for the bloodshed.
On September 10, as violence intensified
throughout Media Luna, Evo Morales expelled US
ambassador Philip Goldberg for conspiring
against democracy. The month before, Goldberg
had met with the prefect of Santa Cruz, Ruben
Costas, who subsequently declared himself
governor of the autonomous department and
ordered the formal take over of government
offices--including those collecting tax revenues.
Costas is the principal leader of the rebellious
prefects, and the main antagonist of Evo Morales.
September 11, the 35th anniversary of the coup
against Allende, was the bloodiest day in the
escalating conflict. In the Media Luna department
of Pando, a para-military band with machine guns
attacked the Indian community of El Porvenir,
near the departmental capital of El Cobija,
resulting in the death of at least 28 people. In
a separate action, three policemen were
kidnapped. The Red Ponchos, an official militia
reserve unit of Indians loyal to Evo Morales,
mobilized its forces to help the indigenous
communities organize their self defense.
The next day Morales declared a state of siege in
Pando and dispatched the army to move on Cobija
and to retake its airport that had been occupied
by right wing forces. Army units are also being
sent to guard the natural gas oleoducts, one of
which had been seized by the UJC, cutting the
flow of gas to neighboring Brazil and Argentina.
General Luis Trigo Antelo, the commander in chief
of the Bolivian Armed Forces declared: We will
not tolerate any more actions by radical groups
that are provoking a confrontation among
Bolivians, causing pain and suffering and
threatening the national security. In signing
the order authorizing the use of force in Pando,
Morales stated that he felt responsible for the
humiliation of the military and the police by
radicals and vandals because he had not
authorized them to use their weapons. This was
the quid pro quo for getting the military high command to act.
After sustained fighting with at least three
dead, the army took control of the airport and
moved on the city. An order for the arrest of the
prefect of Pando was issued for refusing to
recognize the state of siege and for being
responsible for the massacre in El Porvenir. In
Santa Cruz, the police arrested 8 rioters of the
UJC. Peasant organizations have announced they
will march on the city to retake control of the
government offices. The dissident prefects, led
by Costas, are still demanding departmental
autonomy and refusing to accept a national vote
on the referendum for the new constitution.
Evo Morales refuses to back down, declaring in a
meeting with supportive union leaders, we will
launch a campaign to approve the new
constitution. He did, however, indicate he may
modify the draft to accommodate some of the
demands for autonomy by the prefects. Like
Allende, Morales continues to search for a
democratic solution to the crisis in his country.
For the moment, he has the backing of the
Bolivian armed forces along with overwhelming
popular support, thereby avoiding the ultimate fate of the Chilean president.
Roger Burbach is Director of the Center for the
Study of the Americas (CENSA) based in Berkeley,
CA. He has written extensively on Latin America
and is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1842774352/counterpunchmaga>The
Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice.
Freedom Archives
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