Waves of Protest Shake Bolivia

Waves of Protests by the Poor Keep a Divided Bolivia on
Edge

======================================

Fueled by poverty and Indian discontent, demonstrations
have been turning violent. Many fear the unrest may
lead to a civil war.

By Andrés D’Alessandro and Héctor Tobar Times Staff
Writers

Los Angeles Times

October 7, 2003

EL ALTO, Bolivia - Parts of this impoverished, teeming
community on the outskirts of La Paz are a kind of
liberated territory, patrolled by men in helmets
emblazoned with "Workers Police." Their leader is
Felipe Quispe, an Aymara Indian leader who has
announced that he and his followers might soon carve an
"Aymara Republic" out of the western half of Bolivia.
Down the road, in La Paz, the country’s biggest labor
confederation has gone on strike, demanding the
president’s resignation. "We can’t negotiate with this
government," says Jaime Solares, a union leader. "If
the president doesn’t quit, there will be blood on the
streets."

A series of protests has left 64 people dead in Bolivia
this year, and many fear that the scattered violence
may be the prologue to a more violent and widespread
conflict. The words "civil war" are increasingly on
people’s lips here, with talk of bands of youths arming
themselves and training in guerrilla tactics in the
Altiplano highlands.

The strife is being fed by this country’s rampant
poverty, the growing restiveness of its Indian majority
and also by a plan to export natural gas through Chile.
The gas plan has stirred Bolivian nationalism - Chile
invaded and annexed Bolivia’s corridor to the Pacific
Ocean in the 19th century.

Food shortages and almost daily demonstrations rock La
Paz, the administrative capital, which is occasionally
cut off from the rest of the country due to blockades
set up by protesting peasants. In recent weeks, the
prices of vegetables and other foodstuffs in the city
have risen by 50% to 100%.

In the face of so much disorder, President Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada has remained defiant.

"Sure, there are problems, but the protests are being
created by a radicalized group of society that thinks
it can govern from the streets," the president told
foreign journalists last week. "There are radical
elements who don’t want me to finish my term. But I
will not resign."

Sanchez de Lozada, a Chicago-educated former film
producer who speaks Spanish with a noticeable American
accent, took office last year. Under Bolivia’s arcane
electoral system, he was elected president by Congress
after getting just 23% of the vote.

A recent poll put his approval rating at 9%.
Goni, as the president is known here, assembled a loose
coalition of centrists and moderate leftists to win the
vote in Congress. The election left Evo Morales and his
Movement Toward Socialism as the largest opposition
party in Congress.

Morales’ base of support is among the Quechua Indians
and the coca farmers of east-central Bolivia. A strong
critic of globalization and neoliberal economics, he
has called for the nationalization of Bolivia’s gas
reserves.

The natural gas fields have been developed by an
international consortium, Pacific LNG, which is backing
the Chilean pipeline plan. The gas could be shipped, in
liquefied form, to electricity plants in California.

"Our demand is the same as that of the majority of
Bolivians," Morales said last week. "We don’t want to
see our wealth usurped by multinationals again."

Morales announced Friday that his supporters would join
the growing blockade of the nation’s highways, a move
that could worsen the shortages in the capital.

Quispe, the Aymara leader whose base is here in El Alto
and other towns near La Paz, has promised to step up
his own group’s protests too. He said his movement is
"preparing people, little by little" for a
revolutionary war should the government fail to accede
to his demands for expanded social services and
employment.

"The whites and the mestizos are going to have to
respect us in this country," he said.
A week ago, an estimated 60,000 people marched in La
Paz carrying red flags, one of a series of
demonstrations organized by the Bolivian Workers
Central labor federation demanding the government’s
ouster.

The class and ethnic divisions of Bolivian society were
on display, as the demonstrators - many in traditional
Aymara clothes - taunted passersby in suits and ties
with cries of "filthy rich!" and "Chileans!" A few
protesters threw rocks and engaged in fistfights with
business owners who had declined to close their stores
in solidarity with the labor federation’s strike.

"The government shouldn’t sell the gas like that, at a
giveaway price," said one of the protesters, Eleuterio
Paudimani. "We’re doing this for the future of our
children. That’s why the people are very mobilized."
The government says it has uncovered evidence of armed
guerrillas training in the Altiplano and Chapare
regions. Bolivian television broadcast images last week
of teenagers training in the use of rifles and
submachine guns.

The footage was jolting in a country that hasn’t seen a
serious guerrilla movement in decades.
In 1967, Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia and his
followers crushed. Attempts to revive a resistance
movement in the years that followed were also failures.
On Sept. 20, five peasants and two soldiers were killed
in the town of Warisata about 80 miles north of La Paz
when protesters tried to block an army caravan
escorting tourists who had been trapped in the Lake
Titicaca region by a weeklong Aymara roadblock.

The army said the soldiers were ambushed. The
protesting peasants said the soldiers opened fire on
them first.
Javier Gomez Aguilar, an economist with the La Paz-
based Center for the Study of Labor and Agrarian
Development, fears that the violence will only
intensify. The poverty rate in Bolivia stands at 70%,
and the government has launched an austerity program
that precludes investment in health, education and
other needs.

"Bolivia historically has not been fertile ground for
the development of guerrilla groups, but the lack of a
government plan to address these inequalities is
helping to generate these very serious confrontations,"
he said.

"The government’s ability to stay in power is based
increasingly on the armed forces."

D’Alessandro reported from El Alto and Tobar from
Buenos Aires.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bolivia7oct07,1,1676712.story

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times