[News] A Closer Look at The Far-Right in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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A Closer Look at The Far-Right in Santa Cruz, Bolivia
January 14, 2023
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*By Cindy Forster*

The far-right is again trying to unleash devastation from their stronghold
in Bolivia’s largest city, Santa Cruz, in the lowland department of the
same name, this time to liberate from jail the department’s governor, Luis
Fernando Camacho. The governor shut down the city for over a month in late
2022 just after the courts had summoned him, and not for the first time, to
declare his version of events during the coup of 2019. He refused to
respond. Without his deposition, according to the justice system, there is
no way to move forward with the case called “Coup d’Etat I” that charges
coup leaders with crimes of terrorism. Camacho was finally arrested on
December 28th for failure to comply with four summons. In response, another
shutdown of Santa Cruz is now being attempted by his loyalists.

Many crimes exist for which Camacho could be charged, but he is awaiting
trial in a maximum-security prison for the coup carried out over three
years ago. That coup took the lives of dozens of civilians –most of them
Indigenous– and ousted leftist president Evo Morales, also Indigenous.
Camacho led the coup in the year 2019, assisted by the country’s oligarchy
that mounted an elaborate scheme of lies. Camacho’s histrionic and
hate-filled speeches whipped millions of anti-Indigenous citizens into a
frenzy across the country. As they poured into the streets, Camacho was
able to activate the well-oiled paramilitary machinery of the coup. In
recent days, we learned he also apparently funded the betrayal of the
police and the army. The time of terror began months before the ouster of
socialist president Evo Morales, and Camacho was always at the center of
planning. De facto president Jeanine Áñez –now serving a sentence for
usurping the presidency– was groomed by Camacho. Because she feels that he
abandoned her, Áñez just revealed that Camacho was a critical member of her
government from behind the scenes. Camacho is awaiting trial in the
department of La Paz.

One year after the violent expulsion of Evo Morales, the prodigious
organizing of Bolivia’s Indigenous majority forced a presidential vote that
freed Bolivia of the coup regime, in 2020. Since then, new coup attempts
with Camacho at their helm have been constant. The Right managed to get him
elected governor in Santa Cruz and are now insisting that he continue to
govern from prison.

Camacho brought mayhem and mourning to Santa Cruz last November. The city
came to a standstill with paramilitary violence in the working-class
neighborhoods. Camacho’s thugs torched the regional headquarters of two of
Bolivia’s leading social movements –the Federation of Campesino Workers of
Santa Cruz and the Workers Federation of the Department– as well as the
agency that protects public lands and forests. The building of the
government TV channel in Santa Cruz was also stormed, terrorizing
journalists and workers. In an echo of the burning of electoral tribunals
during the coup of 2019, paramilitaries attacked the institute responsible
for the census and for gathering statistics. As they set these fires,
paramilitaries in the pay of Santa Cruz elites declared their intention to
kill people.

Some analysts say Camacho’s paramilitary forces number around 5,000,
contracted by the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee. That far-right club of
businesspeople –led by Camacho during the coup– is now directed by Rómulo
Calvo who was under house arrest and giving speeches at his front door.
They use the Nazi salute. Elite youth are part of its paramilitary wing
called the Union of Santa Cruz youth or UJC in the Spanish acronym. The
attackers had also been recruited from “underneath the bridges” as a
working-class individual said to the news cameras – from the criminal
underworld. Journalists state that gangs controlled the right-wing
blockades. Their practice of extortion was whitewashed as donations to the
cause. On one newscast, a skinny, small child who had been collecting such
donations managed to shimmy up the side of a bus through the window and
into the bus driver’s lap, seeking refuge, as the bus was stopped at the
blockade.

Police defense of the poor in Santa Cruz has been lukewarm. The city’s
police commander was in a press conference with Camacho on the day the
workers’ headquarters were pillaged and burned. As that destruction was
taking place, Camacho asserted to the news cameras he was being persecuted.
Reversal of the facts is a standard operating procedure for the right,
though its efficacy seems to be wearing thin. Police are instructed to
provide a barrier between the people and the paramilitaries, a crucial
role, and a striking difference from the year of the coup when repression
reigned from November 2019 to November 2020 and police served as the
right’s hired thugs. In Santa Cruz, the right now insult the police as
“traitors” because they have arrested a few aggressors at different moments.

Camacho is a master of false news and fascist rhetoric. He is a hero to the
Right in Miami as well as Bolivia. He called his mercenaries burning
buildings “neighbors,” then said that the social movements inflicted the
damage on their own offices (where campesinos stay free of charge when they
visit the city). Some 230,000 middle-class people packed the political
meeting that consummated the paralysis of Santa Cruz in November, according
to experts that measure the size of crowds. *Cabildos* or assemblies are
the tool Camacho uses to claim a supposedly democratic mandate. MAS senator
William Tórrez, an elder, explained, “On the 13th of November a new
*cabildo* took place that violated Article 11 of the Constitution.” In
theory, Article 11 “establishes a form of direct democracy with the
people,” and in so doing, “the *cabildo* possesses an essential
characteristic which is deliberation.” Collective discussion “makes known
the people’s opinions, their demands and their conceptions.” Yet in the
Santa Cruz *cabildo*, “there was absolutely no intervention uttered by a
single person” from the crowd gathered there. One of the *cabildo*’s
resolutions, incredibly, gave constitutional power to the so-called
Interinstitutional Committee that called the assembly. The resolution
charged the private-sector Interinstitutional Committee with carrying
forward a federalist project. They also demanded freedom for prisoners who
had committed outrages in the preceding days. In the subsequent weeks, the
federalism of which they spoke came to sound more and more like a separate
nation of Santa Cruz.

Across recent decades, the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee has been beating
people bloody on every occasion it has taken the streets. The Committee’s
mass appeal rests on racism. Paramilitaries rape and kill their own, much
less their enemies. Since the era of the coup that ended in November 2020,
international human rights experts have called for arrests and trials of
the UJC based on their cruel and deadly actions. Most of them remain free
persons under the protection of the elite.

Not the entire Right of Santa Cruz stands with Camacho today. Conservative
politician Vladimir Peña, a former Secretary General of the department of
Santa Cruz, critiques him for believing he could “wrestle down” the
national government, by repeating the street violence that greased the
wheels for the overthrow of a constitutionally elected president in 2019.
“He’s thinking only of his own political and personal advantage,” said
Peña, at a moment when Camacho was defying a court summons and challenging
the state to come arrest him in Santa Cruz. “Camacho has been in a bad
situation for quite some time, with a terrible record of governance in
Santa Cruz, problems of corruption, his Secretary [of Health] in
clandestinity – he fled after the revelation of a compromising audio
recording. With hospitals closed, precarity across the system of
governance, institutional deterioration.” Peña concluded, “across the
course of one year and a half” as governor, Camacho “did nothing at all.”

Santa Cruz Mayor Jhonny Fernández, a right-wing politician who has revealed
the corrupt practices of other politicians on the right, is another
outspoken critic of Camacho. For that, his home was attacked, and his
family terrorized, including his pregnant daughter with a high-risk
diagnosis. He said he will not participate in Calvo and Camacho’s latest
call for shutting down the metropolis “because somebody has to work in this
city.” Leaders of the main business associations of Santa Cruz recently
said the same, as they watch factories flee the city for other regions of
Bolivia after losses of 780 million U.S. dollars caused by the November
blockades.

Even if the Right is fractured, its most fascist pole led by Camacho is
nothing to scoff at. Chaos is always the lever Camacho uses to revive his
political relevance. Last year he launched the city’s shutdown supposedly
to shorten the length of time required to prepare an accurate census. That
was the point of disagreement on which Camacho parted company with all the
mayors and governors of Bolivia –many of them on the Right– to launch a
so-called “civic strike.” It was a shutdown of the city by the oligarchs.
It brought hunger to the poor, while the elites kept their factories
running.

With constant calls for negotiation, the national government showed that
Camacho’s insistence on a distinct census date ran counter to the advice of
international experts and the decision of every other politician in the
country. And in advance of the census results, MAS authorities conceded
greater apportionment of political offices and resources to Santa Cruz. A
leaked audio recording demonstrated the date of the census was merely a
pretext, when right-wingers in a meeting recognized that their demand for a
census in 2023 “was an impossibility.”

*Reconfiguring mass resistance:  Encirclement*

In the department of Santa Cruz and also nationally, the masses are
creating new strategies that mark a change from the coup year, and may
signal a way out of the dominion imposed by the far Right in the city of
Santa Cruz.

The poor did not try systematically to remove the right-wing blockades.
Instead, neighborhood residents with their greater numbers encircled the
blockaded streets.

Right-wing shock troops receive pay (and also liquor and illicit drugs
which have led to gang rape and injuries –even death– in fights among
themselves). They extort bribes at street blockades to allow individuals to
pass through. Governor Camacho is the intellectual author of this behavior,
together with the city’s far Right, and their call for escalation raised
the number of injuries, as they knew it would.

“As women, we are standing guard here,” said a working-class woman on the
barricades erected a bit distant from the blockades. “We, too, have the
right to work. Our children have the right to study. They can’t just come
here and attack us in this way,” she said, surrounded by other women. “We
are not armed, unlike them,” showing to the camera the razor-sharp blades
of a pinwheel the size of the palm of her hand and the munitions that had
been thrown at them. “They say this is a ‘civic’ work stoppage. Lies! Look
at what they have brought us, with the intention to kill.”

In October, news outlets barely reported Camacho’s characterization of the
city shutdown he was planning – before it started, he declared it would be
“beautiful.” A master of confusion, he insists paramilitary actions are
peaceful and that he and his forces are the ones who are wronged.

By contrast, an uproar ensued in corporate media when the poor across
Bolivia went to the aid of their brothers and sisters in Santa Cruz,
peacefully, claiming their right to do so as Bolivians. The UJC attacked
them as they arrived. They brutalized the marchers. When residents of Santa
Cruz demanded the right to work, paramilitaries unleashed their fury
against them in their home communities. The marches did not stop. From
across the vast department, thousands of people with white flags mobilized.
Their sheer numbers seem to have stayed the hand of the paramilitaries at
various points.

*Shutting down for real*

Accomplishing the shutdown of the city “with greater seriousness” was
another working-class strategy, though largely symbolic. The city is the
location of the nation’s largest industrial sector and it stayed in
business, at full operational capacity, through all the preceding shutdowns
of the Right in Santa Cruz. This time, the poor declared they would monitor
the elite closure of the city “for real,” and proceeded to close down
access to the plants of the corporate oligarchs, mentioning Coca-Cola and
national producers of cooking oil and milk products. The rich cried foul.
They took their denunciations to the international forums of the global
Right, demanding that the elite’s right to work be respected while denying
that same right to the majorities.

The Right stays afloat with the backing of the United States. Even though
the poor who vote for socialism massively outnumber the neo-fascist
followers of Camacho, the present government brings charges gingerly.
Criminals among the Right in Santa Cruz have largely evaded jail. To this
point, the justice system has been unable to mount successful trials in
cases of egregious human rights crimes committed during the coup year.

*United in struggle, the socialist majority versus the fascist Right *

On alert practically for the last two years, social movements have foreseen
scenarios such the shutdown of cities by the Right. “We will not wait until
it’s too late,” said a local leader to the state TV channel. Delegations of
hundreds of people made their way to Santa Cruz and ringed the city.

Ovidio Mamani, regional executive of the leadership formation of the Andes
called the Ponchos Rojos –an Indigenous vanguard of sorts that has led
insurgencies historically and, in the present, served as a presidential
guard and first line of defense for the MAS government– informed the
nation: “The army of the youth of the Ponchos Rojos has been established.”
They have joined in alliance with the organized youth of the department of
La Paz and the youth of the city of El Alto. As a unit, the youth wing of
the Ponchos Rojos are in training alongside their peers in El Alto. The
same is true of the working-class organization of “motorcyclist youth in
the Southern Zone of K’ara K’ara” in the city of Cochabamba, which protects
the poor rather than attacking them like the paramilitary motorcyclists.
“They are on alert, having declared a state of emergency … to protect our
nation of Bolivia.”

This initiative responds to realities such as that described by a woman in
Plan 3000 –a vast working-class sub-city of Santa Cruz– where “twenty
hoodlums appeared in my neighborhood shouting, ‘We’re going to rob
everything.’ They’ve recruited Venezuelans, Colombians, who knows from
where all they’re bringing in these criminals.” Footage from a security
camera showed Camacho’s paramilitaries shattering and breaking the camera.
For all the crimes they committed that night in Plan 3000, “There was not a
single person arrested. Nobody says a word.”

Neisa Najaya, Beni’s Departmental President of the Movement toward
Socialism–Political Instrument, was furious: “This trampling and abuse of
our brothers in Plan 3000 has to stop. Please, brother Lucho,” –she was in
an assembly of women where President “Lucho” or Luis Arce was the honored
guest– “help these brothers, because they will defend the Political
Instrument to the death.” The speaker, an older woman, wore the green
Indigenous dress of Beni. Thousands echoed her demands across the country
in the meetings of the social movements.

Flora Aguilar, the national head of the Bartolina Sisas Confederation of
Indigenous and Campesina Women –she is always cradling or breastfeeding her
daughter as she addresses the public or raises her fist in the photos–
asked President Arce the question being repeated everywhere outside of
Santa Cruz: “Why aren’t you sending in the army?”

On October 28th, Indigenous Ayoreos on their ancestral lands were
threatened by Daniel Velásquez with a whip in his hand. He is a
sub-governor directly appointed by Camacho. Many of the Ayoreos have
managed to avoid contact with outsiders in their nomadic life in the scrub
forests of Santa Cruz, that are being bulldozed by rightwing ranchers. The
sub-governor called the Ayoreos “an open sore.” Most of his victims were
women. In various rural communities, the shirtless and furious Velásquez
was burning down the homes of people protesting the elite shutdown.

The Ayoreo women did not retreat. In fact, they grabbed his traditional
whip or *chicote* and gave him a small puncture wound in his back that he
claims is a human rights violation. The Ayoreos have filed a case charging
racism in the courts of the Interamerican human rights system.

With the attacks on social movement buildings, the anger of workers and
peasants across Bolivia reached a fever pitch. Former president Evo Morales
–who is now the head of the governing party, the Movement toward Socialism
or MAS– urged people to avoid “provocations” by the Right. MAS politicians
at the national and regional levels demanded respect for the lives and
institutions of the people. María Nela Prada, the Minister of the President
and highest-ranking member of the cabinet, said to the nation that
“Governor Camacho and Rómulo Calvo have their hands stained with blood,”
citing the deaths, suffering, racism, intolerance and hunger they caused in
the elite shutdown of Santa Cruz.

President Luis Arce insisted the national government would not treat Santa
Cruz with the brutality exercised by the coup regime. A certain inaction
from the highest levels of MAS suggests they believe a stronger response
would play into Camacho’s hand and rally the international forces of the
Right to the defense of Camacho.

Camacho and his henchmen continue to announce they are on the path to
overthrowing the national government, most recently via a separatist
blueprint. The Indigenous take them at their word. The poor are not in any
degree conciliatory. Alongside the Bartolina Sisas, other social movements
demanded the militarization of the city of Santa Cruz and a state of
emergency decreed by the national government.

“Today we stand in resistance to this launching of another coup d’etat,”
said Flora Aguilar of the Bartolina Sisa Federation. “We cannot afford to
wait and see what they will do next. We want prison for Camacho. We want
prison for Calvo. We want prison for all of them who are killing our
people. What they want is to create total chaos in our country to carry out
another coup d’etat. The government has to wake up. The social movements
cannot be fragmented. We must join forces and defend our democracy, our
revolution, and our vote that we recuperated in the ballot boxes.”

So far, the patience of the national government and the principled stand of
the social movements have held the line. Camacho’s civilian supporters are
deciding to stay home, rather than join the marches called to liberate
their hero.
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