Bolivia - a cunningly deceptive peace (Translation)
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 17:03:40 -0700

Hi Jim,

I'm posting this on some lists but also sending it to you in case you want
to send it around yourself.

Yours for a new world,

Robby

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A CUNNINGLY DECEPTIVE PEACE IN BOLIVIA

Libertarian Youth (Anarcho-Communist)

As a result of the government's negotiations with several social groups that
had been paralyzing the country for more than three weeks, a sort of peace
now prevails in Bolivia.  The crisis was threatening to put an end to the
government of President Banzer.

Under the "democracy," General Banzer's government bears political
responsibility for more than ten deaths, which have resulted from
confrontations between workers and the military forces it dispatched
throughout the country.

The President of the Republic, Banzer, after his time as dictator in the
1970s, worked at a comeback for two decades and returned to power by a
loophole in the Constitution. There is no doubt that  he would be capable of
triggering a bloodbath.  He also had the public encouragement of President
Clinton and the U.S. Senate.

This year alone there have been more than 15 murders resulting from the
government's violent responses to social demands. Five died in April and 10
in black September.

During the three weeks that small farmers, teachers and coca growers were
able to put the Banzer government in check, voices calling for the
resignation of the Head of State were heard among several sectors of the
society--not only those in conflict, but also within the political system
itself.

But despite the recent actions of the State, the social crisis showed that
the groups which are confronting the government are not represented in the
present political system.

The executive secretary of CSUTCB (National Small Farmers Union), Felipe
Quispe, gave notice that he will wait 90 days for the government to fulfill
the 50 points to which it agreed as a way of meeting the demands of farmers,
teachers, truckers, tradespeople and other groups.  Minister of the
Presidency Walter Guiteras gave his assurance that the government will do
all it can to continue working in committees on specific problems.

The INRA land reform law was suspended.  Rural people had called for a
system of land tenancy favoring small farmers as opposed to large
landowners, and respecting indigenous communities, especially in the eastern
part of Bolivia.

The urban and rural teachers also will have to meet with the minister of
Education to analyze the salary structure which, in consensus with officials
of the teachers' union, is to be modified during the next year.

But the tactics used by the authorities against the cocaine-cultivating
farmers was something else. The government took advantage of the fatigue of
the ordinary growers, but was unable to surround the region of cultivation.
So, it sent in 8,000 soldiers armed to the teeth and with orders to shoot
point blank. During Banzer's previous dictatorial administration (in the
1970's) there was a similar situation in the districts of Epizana and
Tolata. At that time the military went in with tanks and murdered more than
a hundred unarmed farmers.  The murderers have gone unpunished to this day.

The government also proceeded to cut telephone and electric power lines, as
it did with Radio Sovereignty, owned by the Six Federations of the Tropics.

Under the circumstances, the cocaine growers essentially had to sign an
agreement, with rifles at their backs. Even though the agreement grants some
of their demands, they are still condemned to poverty.

The strike-breaking bureaucrats, such as the leader Evo Morales Ayma, are
guilty. The coca growers of the Chapare region are now begging the
government to let them cultivate a k'atho (1.5 hectares) of cocaine per
family. Even though the coca grower's leader and national deputy, Morales,
has denounced the drug eradication program as a gimmick to get international
aid, he has now reduced the coca growers to the absurd position of
participating in the world-wide  war on drugs. He continuously presents
himself as the champion of the fight against drug trafficking, and has gone
so far as to offer to guarantee that cocaine cultivated on authorized plots
would not find its way into the hands of drug traffickers. He has also
offered to help the government find foreign financing for alternative
development.
 Maybe he thought that the coca growers could somehow figure out how to
outwit those carrying out the eradication.

Let's be clear: The main market for cocaine leaves is not traditional
consumption, but drug trafficking. For the coca grower, the problem is an
economic problem. Coca is the only product that has an assured market and
that yields an income. The coca growers are not addicted to the drug. They
are producers who respond to the demand for the product. No other product
exists that can replace the income from coca production. Alternative
development is a fraud.


The governments of the developed countries are tolerant of the
money-laundering and profiteering of the big drug dealers. They also
tolerate use of illicit drugs among the affluent. But at the same time, the
imperialistic bourgeoisie is determined to destroy coca production in the
producing countries through blood and fire. The war against drugs is a war
against the poor and powerless both in the developed and underdeveloped
countries. Inside the United States the national and local governments wage
the war on drugs as a war on the poor and a war on brown-skin and black-skin
people.

The American bourgeoisie has gotten the most out of the drug trade, which is
a product of Capitalism. The drug war is nothing but a sham, used to justify
itself before public opinion in the industrialized countries. Chomsky has
clearly demonstrated this.

The Bolivian government and bourgeoisie, which have nurtured the narcotics
traffickers, cannot accede to the demands of the coca growers because it is
nothing more than a straw man at the orders of the North American embassy.

The coca growers will have to defend themselves with arms and with the
conviction that we have the right to produce coca without restriction.  For
the rural people of the Bolivian valleys the cultivation of coca is not a
matter of choice; it makes the difference between starvation and survival.

With regard to the mobilization of the farmers of the plateau, we should
note some relevant facts. In the 18th century an army of indigenous people
engaged in a struggle against  the Spanish colony and the native Creoles
surrounded the city of La Paz. After 200 years this has been repeated. This
time, at the turn of the twenty-first century, several cities  have been
affected. The urban centers have been nearly asphyxiated by a revolt of
rural people. It is the backwardness and poverty of the country that drives
the farmers to revolt against a regime that condemns them to such a
predicament. This is a rebellion of large numbers of people who have been
marginalized and discriminated against. They are struggling to raise
themselves out of degradation, to take their rightful place in the history
of humanity.

We Bolivians are witnessing a phenomenon of cosmic proportions, which
announces the birth of a new society. The uprising of the rural people comes
out of the depths of history. With its Indian roots it is oriented to
putting history aright and burying five hundred years of colonialism.

History teaches that rural uprisings are the background of class struggle in
our country. But, in order to triumph, the rural uprisings must unite with
the class struggle of workers in the cities. Their goal must be the
destruction of large-scale bourgeois private property, and the restoration
of social property of freely organized and federated producers.

The reformist left parties have disappeared from the political scene. The
insurgent rural people have silenced those who asserted that the masses
favor bourgeois democracy and that socialism is a utopia.

The union bosses, in their submission to the bourgeois parties, reduced the
COB and the labor movement to passivity. This shouldn't surprise anyone,
because the union bureaucracies have been made the most directly responsible
for maintaining the status quo of elite privileges. The reformist left
politically disarmed the labor movement and deactivated the university
student movement. The collaborationist politics of the Bolivian Trotskyists
is no surprise; they are champions of nationalistic chauvinism. The
Trotskyists have not hesitated to spread the suicidal illusion of the
existence of a mythical progressive  officer corps in the military--the same
one which has had workers shot point blank, and has had the roads littered
with cadavers. The officer corps has a long tradition of subjugating the
population. The army has proven itself to be the enemy of the exploited,
always and everywhere. It should dissolve itself and disappear completely.

In September, as in April, the bourgeois democratic institutions
(Parliament, Prefects, Mayors, Councilmen) disappeared from the national
scene. They were replaced by the direct democracy of town meetings and union
meetings. The people are demanding to be the government. There is only one
alternative: to institute a government of workers and small farmers.

Due to the sharpening of the class struggle, fascist groups have pushed
their way onto the scene, recruiting armed militants to murder rural people.
Carlos Valverde, a Falangista and former minister in Banzer's government,
called them to murder indigenous people. He did this in the name of
defending Bolivia's development, a fiction in light of the actual state of
affairs. The ridiculous military hierarchy is reaffirming its vocation as
murderer of Indians.

The road blockages are the only method of struggle that the rural farmers
can use, since, as small producers, working for themselves, they can't use
strikes. The blockages have shown their effectiveness by paralyzing the
country's economy. The blockades hit the bourgeoisie hard in their wallets,
and they never stop complaining about the harm the blockades have caused
them.

The events of September have shown the need to develop an alliance between
the workers and the small farmers to unite the struggle in the countryside
and the cities.

It should also be noted that the movement of the rural farmers, in
denouncing the discrimination  against and oppression of indigenous peoples,
has touched one of the sorest and most festering wounds of the bourgeois
society in which we live.

The white minority that discriminates against and oppresses the majority
indigenous peoples cannot deal with the "insolent" attitude of the movement.
The Aymara and Quechua peoples, who live in the countryside or on the
outskirts of the cities, identify with the expressed attitude of the
farmer's leader, Felipe Quispe.

The nationwide oppression of the indigenous majority is an ongoing problem
that has lasted more than 500 years.

Capitalism came to Bolivia as an invading power, motivated by imperialism.
It laid the basis for an economy which combined capitalist forms of
production in some sectors with pre-capitalist forms in the less developed
sectors. The great majority of indigenous peoples remain stuck in the
pre-capitalist sectors.

The bourgeois imperialists penetrated the country, not in order to lift it
out of underdevelopment, but in order to subordinate an ruin our human and
natural resources for their own purposes. They rely on the native ruling
class, which was developed to exploit Indians. This native ruling class is
weak, inefficient, and corrupt. It is servile to the imperialists, and
destructive of the nation's labor force.

In Bolivia, the problem of the national demands of the indigenous peoples is
intimately bound up with that of the demands made by the small farmers. The
indigenous peoples  suffer from both nationwide discrimination and
repression, and they are in great need of land. The "Indians" are rural
farmers or they come from the countryside. So they are not outsiders to the
small farmers' rebellion, which has a national scope.

Bolivia is a conglomeration of oppressed nations, subjugated by the white
minority which has usurped power and improperly calls itself the "Bolivian
nation."

The movement of the rural people loses its way when they fail to understand
the need for a worker-farmer alliance. in order to destroy the prevailing
bourgeois order and its state, and to create a socialist society of freely
associated producers, the rural peoples' struggle must be connected to that
of the exploited in the cities.

We want to make it clear that  simply replacing Banzer with another
representative of the bourgeoisie won't change anything. Now, it is
necessary to remove the bourgeoisie from power altogether, and do away with
the neoliberal policies which are destroying society.

The heroic and difficult struggle of the exploited was partially frustrated
by the selfish actions of the rural farmers' leader, Felipe Quispe, who
signed an agreement with the government that left some groups out. He mainly
abandoned the coca growers, as well as the "landless" who are continuing to
fight.

One farmer involved in this  struggle declared: "This is only an
intermission. If the government does not fulfill the commitments it made to
the rural people within 90 days, we will return to the cities of Cochabamba,
Sucre and La Paz, with millions of Aymaras and Quechuas. We will take very
radical stands even if it costs us the spilling of more blood.

Juventudes Libertarias, October 14, 2000

Contact:  juventudes_libertarias@latinmail.com