[News] The Paramilitary Massacre in Bolivia
Anti-Imperialist News
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Wed Sep 17 11:48:18 EDT 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/
September 17, 2008
The Paramilitary Massacre in Bolivia
Reactionary Rampage
By FORREST HYLTON
Bolivian President Evo Morales expulsion of US
Ambassador Phillip Goldberg on September 10 for
alleged coup plotting sparked the latest
diplomatic crisis in the Americas. But the
diplomatic fallout has overshadowed the internal
dynamics that led to the massacre of some 30
campesinos with perhaps as many as 40 more
disappeared in El Porvenir, Pando, near Bolivias
northeastern border with Brazil. The massacre
coincided with the 35th anniversary of the
violent overthrow of socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile.
The massacre in El Porvenir was the worst in
Bolivia since right-wing President Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada presided over the slaughter of
more than 70 unarmed protestors in October 2003.
This time, however, the violence was not
orchestrated by the central government, but by
regional officials: departmental prefects in
league with civic committees. Administratively
organized similar to France, Bolivia is divided
into nine departments, each run by a prefect,
while civic committees are made up of a handful
of unelected, local, commercial-landed elites who
preside over one of the most unequal
distributions of land and wealth in the world.
These public- and private-sector authorities, in
turn, are allied with cypto-fascist paramilitary
youth gangs armed with baseball bats, clubs,
chains, guns, and in the case of the massacre at
El Porvenir, official vehicles. These groups have
made Bolivias eastern lowlands ungovernable for the Morales administration.
It may be helpful for U.S. readers to consider
Bolivias eastern lowlands as analogous to Dixie.
In the 1950s and 60s, working with governors and
mayors of states and localities, white
supremacist paramilitary groups terrorized
African Americans. The campaign of terror was
intended to preserve a status quo that benefited
a tiny class of wealthy white landowners, against
which the federal governmentunder Eisenhower and Kennedyhesitated to act.
Imagine, though, that African Americans had
comprised an overwhelming majority of the U.S.
population, that Kennedy was Black, and that he
had come to power on the back of serial
insurrections led by African Americans. Imagine
that, in response, white supremacists not only
massacred Blacks, but also blockaded roads, blew
up oil pipelines, and burned and looted federal
government offices and installations.
The limits of the analogy with the Jim Crow south
are significant, but another analogyfrom a
century earlier, the 1850s and 60stranscends
them. The southern secessionist movement sought
to preserve the republic of slavery and extend it
through the west to the Pacific. The movement
mobilized a mass following and mounted an armed
challenge to the federal government. Such
analogies help convey the virulence of what one
commentator has labeled a revolt of the rich,
as well as the scope of the challenge posed by a
wealthy white minority to a government backed by
a majority of workers and campesinos of Indian
descent, a government without historical precedent.
Massive support for the central government was
ratified as recently as August 10 in the recall
referendum in which Morales increased his overall
share of the vote to 67%up from 54% when he was
elected president in late 2005. Morales improved
his standing in his strongholdsthe cities and
countryside of the western highlands and valleys,
as well as the coca-growing regions in the Yungas
and the Chapare. But more importantly, he made
inroads in the heart of opposition country in
Beni, Pando, and Tarija, where he won an
additional 20% compared to 2005. In Pando, nearly
half the population voted in favor of Morales. No
Bolivian president has ever has ever had such broad appeal across the nation.
On the heels of victory, Morales spoke of
dialogue and reconciliation with the opposition.
But opposition prefects, led by Rubén Costas from
Santa Cruz, and empowered by their substantial
gains in the same recall vote, announced their
intention to implement the statutes approved in
autonomy referendums in May and June 2008. The
autonomy referendums were de facto voting
exercises, lacking any legal standing in Bolivia,
were not recognized by any foreign government,
and were not overseen by international observers.
Yet opposition prefects claimed a mandate to
install their own police, tax collection
services, and departmental legislature. The
implementation of this mandate could only come about through the use of force.
Then came September 11. Death squads armed with
sub-machine guns massacred unarmed Morales
supporters on their way to a mass meeting in El
Porvenir. The meeting had been called to discuss
possible responses to increasingly violent
attacks on government supporters. The central
government was slow to react and hesitant when it
finally did. It could not safeguard the property
and lives of its supporters or defend its own
offices and functionaries; it could not even
offer humanitarian aid to survivors, many of
whom, fearing for their lives, hid in the
mountains. In a televised interview, the
presidential delegate in Pando, Nancy Texeira,
asked in a halting voice choked by pain and
sadness, Why doesnt the government in La Paz do
anything? We have been abandoned here.
Over the past several years, Morales has
cultivated good relations with the police and
armed forces, yet he has been mostly unwilling or
unable to use either since the crisis that began
in August. Armed opposition forces have
overwhelmed both police and military in the
lowlands, thus far with impunity. The Bolivian
security forces have therefore been humiliated
according to their shared institutional code. And
yet, as the opposition ups the ante of violence
and illegality, the central government becomes
increasingly reluctant to monopolize legitimate
use of force, and the opposition becomes ever
more brazen in persecuting Morales supporters.
This, at least, has been the dynamic in Pando.
Opposition prefects in Beni, Santa Cruz, and
Tarija have pulled back to some degree from their
onslaught, and ostensibly agreed to dialogue
with the Morales government, but the damage is
done. Morales declared martial law in Pando and
ordered the arrest of the departmental prefect
Leopoldo Fernández on September 12. Many of
Morales supporters will be asking why he is
pursuing dialogue with opposition prefects in
Beni, Santa Cruz, and Tarija, when theyand their
supporterscould be legitimately brought to trial for their crimes.
The emergency meeting of the South American Union
(Unasur) convened in by President Michelle
Bachelet in Chile on September 15 is a sign of
changing times in the Western hemisphere.
Military dictators like Chiles Augusto Pinchet,
Bolivias Hugo Banzer, and their bastard
offspring, such as Leopoldo Fernándezwho got his
start in the late 1970s as a paramilitary
operative under successive dictatorshipsbelong to the past.
This new regional diplomacy exercised through the
Organization of American States (OAS), the Rio
Group, and now Unasur has successfully confronted
diplomatic crises triggered by the U.S.
government and its local allies on the right.
Although Hugo Chávezs expulsion of the U.S.
Ambassador from Venezuela grabbed headlines in
the United States, the Bolivian crisis played
quite differently in the regional media. Bolivia
sells most f its natural gas to Brazil and
Argentina, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva and Argentine President Cristina
Fernandez denounced the separatist movement in
unusually strong terms. The outcome of the Unasur
meeting further proved that Morales has robust
support from neighboring governments and the
major inter-state organizations to which they belong
Given regional repudiation of secessionist
movements in Bolivia and Morales overwhelming
support at home, opposition forces have little
chance of toppling Morales and installing a
right-wing government. Furthermore, they must
contend with formidable and rising resistance
within their own departments, not only in the
countryside but also in the cities: the northern
part of Beni is controlled by indigenous groups
that back the Morales government, for example,
while peasant supporters of Morales fought
pitched street battles against the opposition in
Tarija (the capital city of the department with the same name).
The reactionary rampage in the lowlands is the
result of a desperate, cornered minority that has
been given considerable breathing room by a weak,
vacillating central government that nevertheless
enjoys massive popular backing. Since it cant
take back the central government and is isolated
internationally, the oppositions last weapon is
to bleed the Morales administration of legitimacy
by making the country ungovernable.
The opposition has demonstrated the central
governments inability to impose the rule of law
amid public-private terror against its
supportersa spectacular triumph for any
right-wing movement. Since Augusts recall
referendum, the arc of illegality and violence
traced by the opposition has been unmistakable.
While no one anticipated the scale of the
massacre in El Porvenir, it was all but certain that one would occur.
What if the Bolivian government had tried to
prevent this tragedy by sending in the army and
riot police before any of its supporters were
killed, instead of reacting weakly and hesitantly
ex post facto? Will the government rise to the
occasion in the future, or are there more massacres to come?
If the Morales administration is not able to
guarantee the lives and property of supporters,
some of them may be tempted to take justice into
their own hands, in which case the media cliché
of pending civil war, until now a mere figure
of rhetoric, could become reality. Regardless of
what happens in the future, there is now one more
massacre to commemorate on September 11, and the
dilemma signaled by Allendes tragic example remains as daunting as ever.
Forrest Hylton is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844675513/counterpunchmaga>Evil
Hour in Colombia (Verso, 2006), and with Sinclair
Thomson, of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/184467097X/counterpunchmaga>Revolutionary
Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics
(Verso, 2007). He is a frequent contributor to <http://news.nacla.org/>NACLA.
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