|
CounterPunch
March 8,
2003
Business as Usual in Bolivia?
Rumors of a
Hard-Right Turn
By FORREST HYLTON
"This is a worker-boss conflict."
-Representative of the Bolivian Police
As suddenly as it had materialized on the afternoon
of February 12 in La Paz and El Alto*, dual power vanished on
the afternoon of February 13. On television, President Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada announced that "constitutional
order and public security" had been restored, as police
rounded up some 180 alleged looters, 60 of them minors, only
three of them with priors.
The Special Security Group of the police,
which triggered the uprising on February 12, constituted the
lone armed wing of a movement from below that destroyed, in less
than 24 hours, the symbols of capitalist authority: the vice-president's
office, the headquarters of the four major political parties
(MNR, MIR, ADN, UCS), the National Brewery, Bancosol, Coca Cola
and Pepsi (El Alto), the mayor's office (El Alto), the water
and electric companies (El Alto), and the Ministries of Labor
and Sustainable Development. However, as soon as the lower and
middle ranks of the police agreed to accept the deal their superiors
brokered in the early morning hours of February 13, which included
a repeal of the proposed 12.5% tax on income (the IMF-imposed
impuestazo) and a pay raise, the repressive organs of
the state began to function once again as a relatively coherent
whole. "Order" was restored.
In less than 36 hours, government gunmen
from the Military Police of Miraflores and the Colorado Regiment
killed 33 people and injured 205. Some of the snipers stood
posted on the tops of buildings, having been lowered onto rooftops
in Air Force helicopters on the morning of February 13 so as
to fire on the unarmed civilians who concentrated in the Plaza
San Francisco in the early afternoon. Among those killed were
Ana Colque (23), an intern nurse, and Wilmer Collanqui (23),
a maintenance assistant in the "San Francisco" building.
Carla Espinoza (29), a doctor, took a bullet to the jaw.
Thus army gunfire, coupled with the absence
of organized political response to it from Evo Morales and MAS
(Movement Toward Socialism), brought the rebellion in La Paz
and El Alto to a quick standstill on the afternoon of February
13, even as crowds massed in Santa Cruz and Oruro and repeated
the pattern of destruction set the day before. By the time Felipe
Quispe, leader of the highland Aymara peasantry and its political
party, MIP, had returned from Mexico on February 14, it was apparent
that no coordinated collective action would issue from the call
made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the People, led by Quispe,
Morales and Oscar Olivera (the factory worker who led the fight
against the privatization of water in Cochabamba in April 2000),
as well as delegates of social movements with fewer possibilities
for mass mobilization. At present, cooperation between the two
most powerful movements from below in Bolivia-the lowland coca
growers and the highland Aymara peasantry-exists only at the
level of rhetoric, and the third piece of the puzzle-the movement
that grew out of the privatization of water in Cochabamba, now
in deep crisis-is missing. Opposition unity in practice,
then, is only dimly visible on the horizon.
Portraying the largest proletarian uprising
in La Paz since the national revolution of 1952 as the work of
roving bands of juvenile delinquents-as a coup attempt by the
opposition parties, NFR (New Republican Force) and MAS-the media
has outdone itself to restore a tottering regime. Images of young
men, high school students and people under 21, were circulated
endlessly, their brown bodies pressed tight into stores with
smashed windows, or they were featured running from the scene
of direct appropriation with commodities cradled in their arms.
In the official version, the revolt was a clear-cut case of
"looting and vandalism," which demonstrated the need
to take strong police measures with the brown young men from
the working class neighborhoods that climb the jagged hillsides
surrounding La Paz.
The legitimate fear of petty merchants
and shopkeepers was stoked into hysteria by the tape-looped scenes
of destruction, throwing the fractures that define the human
topography of the city into high relief-ruling race/class nightmare
visions of dark hordes descending from the hills, swarming down
into the city center, destroying and looting property with the
kind of impunity normally reserved for members of the police
and armed forces and militants of the political parties whose
headquarters were set alight. In El Alto, however, the friction
between rioters and the merchants who make up a significant sector
of the Bolivian working class and petit bourgeoisie was much
less marked; a fact that went unreported in the media.
In a country in which 65% of the population
is under 25, young people with dismal prospects in the labor
market and precarious access to higher education (which, for
many of them, is the only buffer against racial discrimination)
took charge of the rebellion. Students from the University of
El Alto, created in 2000, played a directing role in a revolt
that was more radical and thoroughgoing than the one in La Paz.
The authorities have viewed the University of El Alto as a nest
of guerrillas since its creation. Because of their Aymara working
class and peasant roots, many of the students sympathize with
the parliamentary opposition, MAS and MIP (Revolutionary Indian
Movement), but neither MAS nor MIP led the uprising. Likewise,
the high school students from Colegio Ayacucho who attacked the
Presidential Palace with stones at noon on February 12 organized
themselves in conjunction with the wives of insurgent policemen
and the moribund COB (Bolivian Workers' Central), not with MAS
or MIP. Colegio Ayacucho students, it is worth remembering,
were active in the national revolution of 1952 and valiantly
resisted military dictatorships in the 1970s and 80s.
As it turns out, the Bolivian Army was deeply divided throughout
the crisis, with a conspiratorial rightwing national populist
sector opposed to the sale of Bolivian natural gas to Chile unwilling
to repress the revolt. Military intelligence knew that a police
riot was coming, but did nothing to stop it. In conjunction
with a sector of the police and the Sánchez de Lozada's
MNR, this faction could conceivably mount a civic-military autogolpe
on the model that Fujimori established in Perú.
If he is to stay in power, Sánchez
de Lozada knows he must command the undivided loyalty of the
armed forces, and if that means that he has to defy the U.S.
embassy, which supports the export of Bolivian gas through Chilean
ports, then most likely he will do it, on this if no other issue.
Whether he can contain police discontent is another, thornier
issue, and the leaders of the recent police riot have taken prominent
places alongside their commanding officers and Sánchez
de Lozada. They appear to be the chief beneficiaries of the
conflicts of February 12 and 13, and have attained a degree of
power unthinkable prior to the uprising. The most prominent
among them, Major David Vargas, led the police riot against low
salaries in 2000, and has openly declared that if the export
of Bolivian gas-to be decided in the next two months-passes through
Chile, there will be another police riot.
For the first time, Sánchez de
Lozada has made concessions: he suspended the impuestazo and
dismissed his entire cabinet, including the Rasputin-like figure
of Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, ex-Minister of the President,
who, as Minister of the Interior in the first Sánchez
de Lozada administration (1993-97), bore ultimate responsibility
for the massacre of miners and peasants in Amayapampa y Capasirca
in 1996. The new Minister of Government, Yerko Kukoc, was Prefect
of Potosí at the time, so he, too, has the blood of massacred
miners and peasants on his hands. And he is part of Sánchez
Berzaín's inner circle.
The Minister of Defense, Freddy Teodovic,
who bears direct responsibility for the murders of twenty-six
unarmed civilians and six armed policemen on February 12 and
13, has not been removed. Teodovic is the U.S. Embassy's man
in Bolivia, and on November 18, 2002, he attended a meeting in
Santiago convened by the Pentagon in order to define a hemispheric
"defense" strategy that would deepen the involvement
of the military in the formulation of domestic policy. Thus
Teodovic stands for the deepening militarization of Latin American
democracy in the long imperial shadow cast by September 11, 2001,
the most extreme example of which is Álvaro Uribe's "communitarian
state" in Colombia.
There is to be no change in the direction
of economic policy, either: Finance Minister Javier Comboni is
still in charge of dealing with the IMF. Pressure to reduce
the budget deficit from 8.5% to 5.5% in order to meet "the
terms of conditionality" of IMF loans is not going to let
up significantly-now the target is 6.8%. In one form or another,
the impuestazo will be back. Since no one has suggested
taxing creceño agro-buisness or the multinationals, who
else will pay the piper except those who can least afford it?
The man behind the impuestazo, former Minister of Economic
Development José "Chacho" Justiniano, has been
promoted to Minister of the President, and George Grey continues
as head of the government think-tank for economic policy, UDAPE.
Former Colombian President and General
Secretary of the OAS, César Gaviria, arrived in La Paz
on March 6, though not to investigate the state terrorism on
display February 12 and 13. Rather, he is to investigate "terrorism"
in general-an ominous sign. Earlier in the week, a Peruvian
minister made the far-fetched claim that Evo Morales was lined
to the Peruvian coca growers' movement and the Colombian FARC,
which, in the wake of September 11, 2001, the U.S. State Department
has named as the principal "international terrorist"
threat in the Western Hemisphere. Although a Bolivian minister
was quick to deny the allegation, it is clear that the Sánchez
de Lozada administration is bent on criminalizing social protest
in the name of the "fight against terrorism." In a
recent interview with the Brazilian daily O Globo, Sánchez
de Lozada went so far as to affirm that the events of February
12 and 13 in Bolivia are analogous to those of September 11.
Gaviria, then, is providing cover to those within government
and media circles insisting that NFR and MAS were behind the
uprising.
There are rumors that a hard right turn
is percolating in the military and police, though it is not yet
clear whether Sánchez de Lozada and the MNR will be overthrown
or, more likely, allowed to remain in the capacity of puppets.
There can be little doubt that the Sánchez de Lozada
administration has come through its second major crisis in worse
shape than it emerged from the first in January, and its only
remaining pillars of support are the U.S. Embassy, sections of
the Bolivian military and the media. Yet the opposition, tenacious
as it is, is a long way from developing a concrete, coordinated
political alternative that would lead to social transformation.
Nevertheless, the neoliberal model is in its final death agonies,
and it is anyone's guess what will replace it.
*An Aymara city of 700,000 on the upper
rim of La Paz.
Forrest Hylton
is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia and can
be reached at forresthylton@hotmail.com.
Yesterday's
Features
The Black Commentator
All
About Clarence
Ben Granby
Nightmare
in Rafah
Fidel Castro
Bush's
War on the Dark Corners of the World
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Riding
the Tiger in India: Will the World's Largest Democracy Become
a Religio-Fascist Purgatory?
Linda Heard
Make Way for Reality Politics
Alex Lynch
Tragedy of the Ridiculous War
Paul D'Amato
Obey
the US or Pay the Price
Ron Jacobs
Peace Treaties, Nukes and North Korea
Shulamit Aloni
Murder
Under the Cover of Rigtheousness
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti----War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|