Bolivia rebels against U.S., IMF regime
By Andy McInerney
The tide of protest that has swept Latin America,
threatening U.S. client regimes from Argentina to Colombia, has
reached the Andean nation of Bolivia. In recent weeks thousands
of workers, students and peasants have staged strikes,
roadblocks and street battles against the U.S.-backed
government of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.
The protests have already had two im portant effects. First,
the Bolivian state apparatus--the armed forces that protect the
tiny ruling class and U.S. interests there-- has split. The
police are siding with the popular demonstrations while the
army has remained loyal to the government.
Second, the working-class opposition, including peasants and
students, has coalesced into a "General Staff of the Bolivian
People," united around the goal of unseating Sánchez de
Lozada.
The current round of protests has its roots in coordinated
actions that began in mid-January. Farmers growing coca clashed
with army troops at roadblocks set up to demand that the
government allow coca growing for limited non-narcotic use and
that it end a U.S.-sponsored defoliation campaign against coca
crops.
Farmers have grown coca in the Andean highlands for
centuries. The plant is part of the traditional Indigenous
culture. The international drug market has turned the leaf into
a commodity, but the billions of dollars in drug profits do not
reach the coca growers.
At the same time that the coca-growing peasants blocked the
main highway from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz, some 10,000
pensioners gathered in Calamarca to block the highway between
the capital La Paz and Oruro, a link to Chilean trading ports
on the Pacific Ocean. The retirees were protesting the falling
value of their pensions due to a peg linking pensions to the
U.S. dollar.
The demonstrators also protested Bolivian government plans
to join the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The FTAA is the
proposed U.S.-dominated market that would eliminate the ability
of countries in the region to protect their economies from U.S.
domination.
Bolivia is among the poorest countries in Latin America.
Seventy percent of the people live below the poverty line. Many
survive on less than $1 per day.
The pensioners managed to win some concessions from the
government. But the coca growers' protest continued, drawing
wider support from leaders of Aymara Indigenous
communities.
On Feb. 9, Sánchez de Lozado poured more gasoline on
the fire. He decreed a new economic austerity program, cutting
government spending by 10 percent and raising taxes. The
economic program was designed to reduce the government deficit
from 8.5 percent to 5 percent, a requirement imposed by the
International Monetary Fund.
The austerity plan provoked angry responses. "The government
prefers that the poor bear the burden of the crisis," Evo
Morales told the Associated Press on Feb. 10. Morales, a
Congressional deputy from the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)
party and winner of the popular vote for Bolivia's presidency
last June, is a leader of the coca growers' protest.
Broader forces joined the opposition movement. Union leaders
called for a one-day strike. Even business leaders opposed the
proposed tax increase.
On Feb. 12, police in La Paz split from the government and
sided with the protests. Police took over the building housing
the foreign ministry and joined a demonstration laying siege to
the presidential palace.
The mutinying officers fired rounds of tear gas into the
detachments of government military troops deployed against the
protests. At least 17 people were killed in clashes with the
army.
Within days, Sánchez de Lozada withdrew the unpopular
tax plan. But the MAS, the Bolivian Workers Federation (COB),
and other groups continued to pressure for the president's
resignation.
The center of the opposition is now the General Staff of the
Bolivian People, formed in late January. The General Staff was
formed by "MAS, the COB, and unions of teachers, peasant
farmers and students," according to a Jan. 20 Inter Press
dispatch.
A Feb. 15 statement by the General Staff analyzed the
current struggle. "The social crisis that the country is going
through originates in authoritarianism, the incapacity of the
government, and its submission to policies dictated by foreign
powers (the U.S. embassy, the World Bank, and the IMF)," the
manifesto begins.
It goes on to call for the resignation of the Sánchez
de Lozada government and the formation of a transitional
government to change the neoliberal economic model, regain
control of the country's national resources and redistribute
land.
The Bush administration reacted to the developments in
Bolivia with alarm. Bush himself was "deeply concerned," White
House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said Feb. 13. A Feb. 14 State
Department release called for "all Bolivians to respect the
constitutionally elected government and refrain from violence."
A State Department official was sent to Bolivia for meetings
with the government on Feb. 17.
The stakes in Bolivia are heightened by the fact that the
country is one link in a chain of Latin American countries
where the traditional political elites have proved unable to
impose the dictates of Wall Street and the IMF on the backs of
the working class. Millions of workers across the
continent--from Colombia to Argentina, from Venezuela to
Ecuador and Brazil--feel the struggle of the Bolivians as their
own.
Reprinted from the Feb. 27, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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