Bolivia Rising

International Climate Justice Tribunal Preliminary Hearing, Cochabamba, Bolivia 13th and 14th of October 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:55:00 +0000

In the city of Cochabamba in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, on the 13th and 14th of October 2009, the International Climate Justice Tribunal held a Preliminary Hearing, receiving with great respect the initiative of the Bolivian social organisations and the international networks. The condemnation of seven cases regarding the impact of climate change and the violation of communities', peoples' and Mother Earth's rights was heard.

Preamble

The Earth's climate is changing at an accelerated speed due to (in)human action. The effects of the global temperature increase can be seen throughout the planet, and they are even higher than the scientists' forecasts. Climate change is the greatest problem mankind will face, not only due to its direct impacts but also because other existing problems will become more serious, such as poverty, famine, violence, gender inequality, land and food control, access to water and sanitation, amongst others. Therefore, climate change represents a serious threat against the basic elements of human life in different parts of the world: access to a water supply, food production, health, use of land and environment.

The current economic and political system, as well as the international set-up of trade, finance and investments which support exaggerated levels of consumption, are the main causes of the increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases, generated mainly by the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas and others). These are used to produce energy and for transport which maintains the current development model, as well as deforestation, industrial agriculture and the mining industry.

Climate Justice is based on the understanding that, whilst climate change requires global actions, the Northern Industrial Countries are historically responsible for having produced the greatest part (80%) of greenhouse gases over the last 250 years. Low cost energy -oil, coal and gas- has been the power behind their quick industrial and economic growth, without recognising the ecologic, social, financial and historical debt to the southern communities and nature, for which they are responsible. Southern communities and low income communities of the Northern Industrial areas have taken the toxic "burden" of mining and fossil fuels, their transport and production. Now these communities are facing the worst impacts of climate change.

Foundation and background of this Tribunal

Although this duty has not been entrusted to us by any formally constituted legal authority, we have become responsible for it in the name of mankind and in defence of civilisation and Mother Earth.

The initiative of this Tribunal reacts to the needs of responding to a lack of mechanisms and institutions which sanction climate crimes that have taken place so far. It does not have any binding state character, because its constitution and functioning do not originate from judicial power but from organised civil society. Its decisions seek ethical, moral and political meanings and wish to become the necessary force which requests that governments and multilateral bodies assume their responsibilities within the framework of equality and climate justice.

We are inspired by the initiatives of the people to establish Ethical Opinion Tribunals, such as the Russell Tribunal (1967), established to judge and condemn war crimes committed by the United Estates in Vietnam and which later on (1974-1976) prosecuted the crimes and human rights violations committed by the dictatorships in American countries. Also the Permanent People's Tribunal, founded in 1979 which, throughout the more than 30 years it has been functioning, has followed, anticipated and supported the communities' struggles against the wide range of violations of their basic rights, including the refusal of their self-determination, foreign invasions, new dictatorships and slavery of the economy and the destruction of the environment. We are also inspired by the work of other independent tribunals such as the International People's Tribunal on Debt and the Water Tribunal. They are all trying to highlight and qualify those situations in which the massive abuse of basic rights does not have recognition or an institutional answer and are legitimised by the tremendous will of the population, in contrast to the power of governments and companies.

Cases submitted at the First Hearing

Throughout this preliminary Hearing, the International Climate Justice Tribunal has seen the following cases:

CASE 1 "Accusation of violations of human rights resulting from global warming due to actions or omission of the countries included in Annexe I of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change". The proceedings are submitted by the Khapi community, La Paz, Bolivia.

CASE 2 "Victims of climate change and the negligence of El Salvador, in impoverished northern communities in the municipality of Jiquilisco". The proceedings are submitted by the Association of United Communities of Bajo Lempa". El Salvador.

CASE 3 "FACE PROFAFOR" proceedings against the Dutch foundation Forest Absorbing Carbon Emissions and others. Submitted by Ecologist Action of Ecuador.

CASE 4 "Climate impacts caused by the Initiative for the Regional Integration of South America (IIRSA)", proceedings submitted against the three members of Technical Coordination of IIRSA (Inter-American Bank for Development, the Andean Development Corporation, and the Financial Fund for the Development of Cuenca de Plata), as well as financial entities such as National Development Bank of Brazil, the European Union, Banco Santander (Santander Bank). Submitted by the Bridge Between Cultures Foundation, Bolivia.

CASE 5 "Violation of Human, Environmental, Culture and Labour Rights due to the application of the false solution to climate change, Agrofuel-Ethanol manufactured from sugar cane in Valle del Río Cauca". Proceedings submitted against the government of Colombia by the Sugar Cane workers of Cauca, Colombia.

CASE 6 "Boys and girls with a high level of lead in their blood in Cerro del Pasco (Peru) due to polluting gases and particles", proceedings against the Mining Company Volcan S.A. and the State of Peru. Submitted by the Civil Association of Centre of Popular Labour Culture, Cerro de Pasco, Peru.[1]

CASE 7 "DOE RUN PERU" proceedings against the Peruvian government and the company Doe Run Perú, due to the pollution caused in the Junin area. The case is submitted by CooperAcción, Peru.

General Comments:

The capitalist economic system has generated the climate change that we are currently suffering and prevents a quick and effective answer to its impacts. The international agreements about trade, finance and investments promote the increase of industrial fields of the intense use of fossil fuel and other natural resources, as well as the growth of industrial agriculture and livestock (including monoculture). All these activities produce large quantities of carbon and contribute to the destruction of forests which regulate the climate.

Considering the undeniable fact that Climate Change affects and will affect billions of people, systematically infringing all Human, Civil, Cultural, Economic, and Political Rights, we can define Climate Change as a Crime Against Nature. Likewise, due to its seriousness and systematicness, we consider that crimes against the rights of nature can be called "Crimes Against Nature".

There is first hand proof that the following Human Rights, which constitute the foundations for a dignified life for populations, of the most vulnerable groups have been violated by Climate Change:

- The right to life and safety: "Every citizen has the right to life, to freedom and personal safety". (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Act 3).

- The right to health "The Partner States in this current Agreement recognise the right of each person to enjoy the highest level of physical and mental health" (International Agreement of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Act 12).

- The Right to Water: "The human right to a water supply provides everyone with the right to enough water, at a reasonable price, physically accessible, safe and of an acceptable quality for personal and domestic use" (Committee for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment 15).

- The right to food: "The Partner States in the current agreement recognise the fundamental right of each person to be protected against famine..." (International Agreement of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 11)

- The right to a suitable quality of life: "Each person has the right to a suitable quality of live which ensures, as well as for his family, health and well-being, and in particular food, clothing, housing ..." (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Act 25).

- The right to subsistence: "In no case should a community be prevented of its own means of subsistence." (International Agreement of Civil and Political Rights, Article 1.2 and International Agreement of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 1.2).

- The right to the freedom of choice: "Every community should have free access to its natural resources... " (International Agreement of Civil and Political Rights, Act 1); "Every community has the right to freedom of choice..." (International Agreement of Civil and Political Rights, Act 1)

- The right to culture: "Each person has the right to participate in the cultural life of its community..." (American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Mankind, Act 13); "People who belong to minorities (ethnic, religious or linguistic) will not be denied their corresponding right, which is the same as for those other members in their group, to have their own cultural life." (International Agreement of Civil and Political Rights, Act 27) and the Universal Declaration of UNESCO on Cultural Diversity.

- The right to ownership: "Each person has the right to private ownership corresponding to the essential needs of a respectable life, and which helps to maintain the dignity of the person and home" (American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Mankind, Act 23); "Each person has the right to individual and collective ownership." (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Act 17).

- Right to freedom of movement and residence: "Each person has the right to establish their residence in their home country, to freely move around said country and to not have to leave unless it is their own choice". (American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Mankind, Act 8).

- Women's Right: "The Partner States should take into account the particular problems that rural women face and the important role that they represent for the economic survival of their families." (CEDAW, Act 14).

- Children's Right: "Every child has the right to life ...the Partner States will guarantee as much as possible the survival and development of children." (Convention on the Rights of the Child, Act 6).

- Right to a healthy environment: "Human beings: have the right to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature." (Declaration of Rio, Act 1).

- Right to prior consultation: (act 6, 13 and 14, International Labour Organization Convention no. 169).

- Rights of Indigenous Communities (Established in the Declaration of the United Nations on the Rights of Indigenous Communities)

- Right to public demonstration and freedom of association (International Agreement of Civil and Political Rights).

- Rights against racism and discrimination (Established in the CERD of the United Nations Declaration and in the International Convention on the Eradication of all kinds of Racial Discrimination).

- American Convention on Human Rights

- Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Matters, "San Salvador Protocol".

- Right to work and Right to Strike.

- Various National constitutions.

It has been proved that Climate Change increases and deepens the existing injustices, including in particular, discrimination against indigenous communities and nations and women.

The application of the extractive and exporter development model - approved by governments and transnational corporations - is generating permanent and systematic conflicts against collective rights, misuse of land and the violation of nature's rights. Likewise with the Traditional Higher Right or Personal Right of indigenous ancestral knowledge for the handling of everything material and spiritual, whose fulfilment guarantees the balance of the Pachamama and the permanence of life.

There is a great need to provide an answer to problems caused by climate change, because the life of many communities and towns depend on this, as well as the welfare of Mother Earth. We can therefore see the need to provide an answer to the absence of regulations, mechanisms and institutions which sanction the breaches of the Kyoto Protocol and other compulsory commitments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as those responsible for climate crimes we are now facing.

Human rights are relevant to tackle matters regarding the effects of climate change, therefore the research should be on the foreign environmental damage carried out from this perspective; how responsibility should be shared, as well as the rights and duties of the perpetrators and victims of disasters, both in the public and private fields; this problem also poses the challenge of how to create effective mechanisms to ensure responsibilities are fulfilled.

We would also like to state that the criminalisation and prosecution of the social struggle and for climatic justice has become a systematic and permanent fact.

Specific Comments

The responsibility of governments, international financial institutions - including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, The Andean Development Corporation, the Financial Development Fund for Cuenca del Plata, the International Monetary Fund, other banks, transnational corporations and other actors has been highlighted with regards to the promotion of the plundering of Mother Earth and climate change through the granting of credits, technical consultation, conditions and other policies which contribute to the configuration, imposition and maintenance of a production and consumption model, called a development model, which generates financial, ecological and social debt and is unsustainable.

The responsibility was condemned above all, regarding the design and implementation of the Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America, which includes more than 500 projects, including, in particular, the construction of the bi-oceanic Santa Cruz-Puerto Suárez road, the construction of a huge hydroelectric dam on the River Madera, the expansion of the mining industry in Peru, as well as in the case of Cerro de Pasco and La Oroya, and the exporting agro-industry in El Salvador. These projects not only contribute to the expansion of the model generating climate change, but they also significantly increase the vulnerability of the communities affected by the climate change impacts, violating both all the above-mentioned human rights including the most basic right of the use and control of the land by the people, which affects their survival.

The role of some governments, International Financial Institutions, businesses and corporate interests is highlighted in promoting and financing "false solutions" for climate change, including implementing in Ecuador single crop farming of trees by the Dutch company FACE, in order to generate carbon credits to compensate the non-reduction of emissions in the North, and the expansion of sugar cane farming in Valle de Cauca, Colombia, for the production of agro-fuel. These "false solutions" not only lead to serious social and ecological impacts, including the indiscriminate use of water, the effect on strategic ecosystems, the movement of communities, famine, diseases associated with the burning and use of agro-chemicals and the criminalisation of those persons and organisations who attempt to defend their rights and those of nature, but also increase the climate crisis by not offering real solutions to the energy problem and increasing emissions which affect the greenhouse effect.

In these cases, the lack of effectiveness of the so-called "market solutions" to solve the problems derived from climate change has been highlighted.

In the case of the Khapi community in Bolivia, the consequences of global warming underlined imply the violation of the right to land, life, culture, self-determination and health, as well as the imminence of the forced medium-term displacement of the community due to the melting of the Illimani glacier; this situation warns us of the extent and perversity of the impacts of climate change.

Likewise, it was highlighted in the ACUDESBAL cooperative case in El Salvador, how the demand for payment of the external debts accumulated illegally and the imposition of the Structural Adjustment Programme, have had a negative impact on the government's ability to prevent, protect and repair the damage caused by climate change.

Recommendations

Follow up the cases and formal complaints submitted to this Preliminary Hearing, analysing in-depth and coordinating the action of indigenous people and nations, social movements, popular networks and organisations in Latin America and the Caribbean and at a global level towards the constitution of the International Tribunal of Climate Justice and Ecological Debt, an initiative of the people which contributes to the efforts of some governments to make a real effort to stop climate change.

Incorporate in this Tribunal's action an in-depth examination of the different aspects of the problem whose proceedings have been submitted to this Preliminary Tribunal, including:

* The causes, impacts and consequences of Climate Change;

* The criminal absence of adequate and appropriate answers from the governments in developed countries, transnational corporations, International Financial Institutions and other interests unrelated to the Good Life to ensure the necessary reductions of gas emissions causing the greenhouse effect in the North, the transformation of the production and consumption model and the Southern countries' payment of the climate debt;

* The "false solutions" that these same actors offer with the consequential aggravation of climate change and violations of Human Rights and the Rights of Populations and Nature.

We also recommend the defenders of all the cases which investigate the possible infringement of the ILO Convention no.169 to submit the cases to the Defenders of the People, the Inter-American system of Human Rights, the Attorney General's Office of the Nation and the UN Commission on Human Rights.

The Tribunal also recommends:

1. Demanding that the governments in the industrialised countries in the North repair the climate and environmental debt which they have accumulated throughout history, based on the complaints and proposals raised in this document and based on the complaints generated by the people affected by climate change.

2. Urgently demanding the promotion and adoption of cautionary measures from governments which may avoid the repetition of crimes reported in this document, including:

· Not commodifying life and nature and the application of the principle of precaution in relation to "false solutions" to climate change;

· Suspending the participation of the International Financial Institutions in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as other financial mechanisms which have aggravated climate change and increased the Environmental Debt

· Not generating new debt as a response to the financial and economic crisis raised.

3. That all governments take on the proposal set out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations by the Bolivian Government together with other countries regarding the recognition and payment of the Climate Debt through a large, fast reduction of emissions in the industrialised countries in the North, as well as fulfilling their obligation to cover the costs of adaptation and mitigation in the countries in the South with resources and technology; that the resources should be channelled through an International Climate Justice Fund under the democratic, transparent control of the United Nations.

4. Progress on the in-depth analysis and development of a Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, incorporating the contributions of the indigenous people and nations as well as social movements, popular organisations and organised civil society throughout the world.

5. Support the proposal of the Bolivian President, Evo Morales, to found a Climate Justice Tribunal in the UN multilateral system to control and sanction the crimes against Mother Earth.

Suggestions for the following institutions:

1. The Organisation of American States should be more pro-active in its research, pursuit and, when appropriate, prevention with precautionary measures, or by bringing, if appropriate, trials before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, due to cases of ecological crimes and victims of Climate Change.

1. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights should promote research in the regions with communities worst affected by Climate Change, in order to compile the report and evidence, as well as progressing on the sanctioning of those responsible and the need to implement adaptation, mitigation and repair policies and measures.

2. The Inter-American Commission Human Rights should promote research in the regions with communities worst affected by climate change, in order to compile the proceedings and evidence, as well as progressing on sanctioning those responsible and the need to implement adaptation, mitigation and repair policies.

3. The UN, as well as the States accused in this tribunal, should start as soon as possible their exhaustive research to clarify the impacts of the extractive industry on Climate Change and how it affects the vulnerability of the populations affected by it.

4. The UN should take the need to research and work on a Declaration of the Rights of Mother Nature seriously and its consequential binding entities to construct an ideal and collective regulations to respect our planet.

5. The Governments, associations of lawyers and judges, the State Attorney General's Offices, the Inter-American Systems and the UN's requests to study the legal basis to judge the cases of violations of Human Rights due to the effects of Climate Change, as Crimes Against Humanity.

6. Finally, the governments responsible where the rights of the defenders of the people's and nature's rights are being violated, as for example Columbia, subject to proceedings in this court, or Peru, Honduras, El Salvador and other countries should end the systematic violation of rights and the criminalisation of those who campaign for human and environmental rights.

The Jury acknowledges the communities, the organisations and the social movements which have submitted these cases, and the social mobilisation and participation over the two days of the preliminary hearing of the International Climate Justice Tribunal in Cochabamba. We would also to like to express our deep respect, admiration and solidarity for the courage in which they face these extreme and dramatic situations caused by Climate Change. Thus we commit to continue the joint search for truth, justice and amends, and to continue fighting for climate and environmental justice and the development of an International Tribunal on Climate Justice and Ecological Debt.

Presented in the city of Cochabamba on 14th of October 2009.

Members of the Jury:

Brid Brennan, Coordinator of the Alternative Regionalisms Programme of the Transnational Institute (TNI), (Holland)

Nora Cortiñas, member of the "Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora" (Argentina)

Beverly Keene, Coordinator of the "Jubileo Sur" Tri-Continental Network (Argentina)

Tom Kucharz, member of the Confederate Department of "Ecologistas en Acción" (Ecologists in Action) and of the Campaign "¿Quién debe a quién?" ("Who owes who?") (Spain)

Alicia Muñoz, President of the "Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Rurales e Indígenas" (National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women) and of the "Vía Campesina" (Rural Way) (Chile)

Ricardo Arnoldo Navarro Pineda, Co-founder of the "Centro Salvadoreño de Tecnología Apropiada" (El Salvador Centre of Suitable Technology) and "Amigos de la Tierra Internacional" (International Friends of the Earth) (El Salvador)

Miguel Palacin Quispe, Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations (Peru)

Joseph Henry Vogel, Professor of Economics at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras and of the Latin American Department of Social Sciences-Ecuador (Puerto Rico)

Notes

[1] In the case "Violation of Human, Environmental, Cultural and Labour Rights by the implementation of a false solution to climate change, Agrofuel-Ethanol manufactured from sugar cane in Valle del Río Cauca" Mr. José Oney Valencia Llanos, director of the Association of Sugar Cane Cultivators, was absent due to his arrest by the Colombian Administrative Department of Security when about to board the plane to Bolivia to present the case to this hearing.

Indian political awakening stirs Latin America

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:53:00 +0000

FRANK BAJAK (AP), JESUS DE MACHACA, Bolivia — In Ecuador, the Shuar are blocking highways to defend their hunting grounds. In Chile, the Mapuche are occupying ranches to pressure for land, schools and clinics. In Bolivia, a new constitution gives the country's 36 indigenous peoples the right to self-rule.

All over Latin America, and especially in the Andes, a political awakening is emboldening Indians who have lived mostly as second-class citizens since the Spanish conquest.

Much of it is the result of better education and communication, especially as the Internet allows native leaders in far-flung villages to share ideas and strategies across international boundaries.

But much is born of necessity: Latin American nations are embarking on an unprecedented resource hunt, moving in on land that Indians consider their own — and whose pristine character is key to their survival.

"The Indian movement has arisen because the government doesn't respect our territories, our resources, our Amazon," says Romulo Acachu, president of the Shuar people, flanked by warriors carrying wooden spears and with black warpaint smeared on their faces.

A month ago, the Shuar put up barbed-wire roadblocks on highway bridges in Ecuador's southeastern jungles to protest legislation that would allow mines on Indian lands without their prior consent, and put water under state control. On Sept. 30, an Indian schoolteacher was killed in a battle with riot police.

"If there are 1,000 dead they will be good deaths," says another Shuar leader, Rafael Pandam.

The Shuar won, at least this round.

A week after the killing, President Rafael Correa received about 100 Indian leaders at the presidential palace and agreed to reconsider the laws. Correa had earlier called the Indians "infantile" for their insistence on being consulted over mining concessions. But he didn't need to be reminded that natives — a third of the population — have become an indispensible constituent and helped topple an Ecuadorean government in 2000.

___

Indians make up one in 10 of Latin America's half-billion inhabitants. In some parts of the Andes and Guatemala, they are far more numerous.

Yet they remain much poorer and less educated than the general population. About 80 percent live on less than $2 a day — a poverty rate double that of the general population, according to the World Bank — while some 40 percent lack access to health care.

The threats to Indian land have grown in recent years. With shrinking global oil reserves and growing demands for minerals and timber, oil and mining concerns are joining loggers in encroaching on traditional Indian lands.

"Indians have been progressively losing control and ownership of natural resources on their lands," says Rodolfo Stavenhagen, a prominent Mexican sociologist who spent most of the past decade as the U.N.'s chief advocate for Indians. "The situation isn't very encouraging."

Hence the revolt rippling up and down the Andes.

In Peru, south of the Shuar's lands, the government has divided more than 70 percent of the Amazon into oil exploration blocks and has begun selling concessions. Fearing contamination of their hunting and fishing grounds, Indians last year began mounting sporadic road and river blockades.

On June 5, riot police opened fire on Indians at a road blockade outside the town of Bagua, where jungle meets Andean foothills. At least 33 people were killed, most of them police. The Indians were unapologetic for resisting.

"Almost everything we have comes from the jungle," says one of the protesters, a wiry elementary school teacher from the Awajun tribe named Gabriel Apikai. "The leaves, and wood and vines with which we build our homes. The water from the streams. The animals we eat. That is why we are so worried."

Farther south along the world's longest mountain chain, Chilean police are protecting 34 ranches and logging compounds that Mapuche Indians have targeted for occupations or sabotage.

The Mapuche, who dominated Chile before the Spanish conquest, now account for less than 10 percent of its people and hold some 5 percent of its land — among the least fertile.

Mapuche activists agitating for title to more lands and greater access to education and health care stepped up civil disobedience this year. In August, riot police mounting an eviction killed one Mapuche, and eight were injured.

"If the government and the political class doesn't listen to our demands the situation will get a lot more difficult," Mapuche leader Jose Santos Millao tells the AP in Santiago. He rejects as a "smoke screen" President Michelle Bachelet's creation of an Indian Affairs Ministry in September.

Nowhere is Indian power so evident as Bolivia, which elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in December 2005. Morales dissolved the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and Original Peoples, calling it racist in a country where more than three in five people are aboriginals.

In February, voters approved a constitution that creates a "plurinational" state and accords Bolivia's natives sovereign status. Time-worn models of aboriginal government, community justice and even traditional healing are now legally on equal footing with modern law and science.

In the capital of La Paz, "cholitas" — Indian women in traditional bowler hats and embroidered shawls — now regularly anchor TV newscasts. "Miss Cholita" beauty pageants are in vogue and native hip-hop stars headline at nightclubs.

At the presidential palace, Morales — a former Aymara coca farmer who knew hunger as a child — makes a point of lunching periodically with the lowliest of palace guards. Morales is ensuring that profits from natural gas and mineral extraction are distributed equitably and that water — whose privatization in the city of Cochabamba spurred an uprising in 2000 — is never again privatized. He's also pushing to make electrical utilities public.

Morales has founded three indigenous universities, formalized quotas for Indians in the military and created a special school for aspiring diplomats with native backgrounds. And he is promoting a campaign to demand that all public servants be fluent in at least one native tongue.

"There is no way to return to the past," says Waskar Ari, an Aymara who changed his name to Juan in the 1970s so he would be accepted to a private high school in La Paz. Now a University of Nebraska professor, Ari likens his country's "rebirth" to the casting off of apartheid on another continent two decades ago.

"Finally," he says proudly, "Bolivia is no longer the South Africa of Latin America."

___

The legal groundwork for the empowerment drive by Latin America's Indians was crowned by a September 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Though nonbinding, it endorses native peoples' right to their own institutions and traditional lands. It has been almost universally embraced by Latin American governments.

It has also helped Indians win some major legal victories.

_In 2007, the Supreme Court of Belize ruled in favor of Mayan communities that challenged the government's right to lease their lands to logging interests.

_A similar ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on behalf of the forest-dwelling Saramaka maroons in Suriname reinforced that indigenous groups must give consent to major development projects.

_Last December, Nicaragua's government finally granted collective land titles to the Mayagna people, complying with a landmark 2001 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that it had no right to sell logging concessions on Indian land.

_The following month, Colombia's Constitutional Court deemed more than 1 million indigenous people "in danger of cultural and physical extermination" and told the government to protect them.

_And in May, Brazil's Supreme Court ordered rice farmers to leave the long-disputed Raposa Serra do Sol reservation — 4.2 million acres (1.7 million hectares) inhabited by 18,000 Indians in the Amazon's northernmost reaches.

Despite the legal rulings, Indians remain second-class citizens.

Only one indigenous representative has ever been elected to the national congress in Brazil, according to the government office that oversees issues related to Indians, who occupy vast areas of the Amazon though they account for less than 5 percent of the population.

In Guatemala, where nearly half the population is of Mayan descent, not a single Indian has ever made it to national office.

Educational disadvantages perpetuate the inequity.

In Guatemala, three in four indigenous people are illiterate, the U.N. says. In Mexico, where 6 percent of the population is illiterate, 22 percent of adult Indians are. Even in Bolivia, only 55 percent of indigenous children finish primary school, compared to 81 percent of other kids.

___

Efforts to "decolonize" remain fragile.

In eastern Bolivia — where the United Nations says several thousand Guarani Indians, including children, work as virtual slaves on large estates — Morales has promised autonomy. But the area's elite, Morales' fiercest opponents, won't let that happen without a fight.

Obtaining autonomy should be less contentious for Indians in western highlands towns like Jesus de Machaca, in part because the land in question yields so little.

Jesus de Machaca is a hardscrabble farming town near Lake Titicaca that is more than 96 percent Aymara Indian. It is among 12 Bolivian municipalities, mostly Aymara and Quechua, whose inhabitants will vote Dec. 6 on becoming autonomous. Under self-rule, they would legalize governing practices that precede the Inca empire.

Local leaders called mallkus are democratically elected by their communities in public votes, then choose senior town officials. Terms in office are restricted to a year. The system is closer to socialism than capitalism.

Deputy mayor Braulio Cusi says autonomy will hugely benefit a community where nearly all the 13,700 residents live in adobe brick homes and use cow manure as cooking fuel, where most homes lack running water and babies are born at home because there's no hospital or clinic.

"Dairy cooperatives, cheese processing. There will be jobs," says Cusi, who slings a white leather whip over his poncho as a symbol of authority. He envisions a slaughterhouse, and hopes to attract a veterinarian.

The town's more than 900 square kilometers (350 square miles) are devoted mostly to cattle, llamas and sheep grazing, potatoes and quinoa. Purchased in the 16th and 17th century by natives who refused to become tenant farmers, they are communally owned but parceled out. Selling to outsiders is prohibited.

Jesus de Machaca took its first step toward autonomy when it became an independent municipality in 2002. It later elected its first mayor, also a mallku.

The national government more than doubled the town's budget. More than 70 percent of homes now have electricity — up from one in ten in 2001 — and construction just ended on a three-story municipal building with parquet floors and oak doors.

The town is even building a soccer stadium — with astroturf, one councilman proudly notes.

"Before, we were forgotten," Cusi says after watching the Wiphala banner of the Andes' indigenous peoples raised up a flagpole in the shadow of an imposing Spanish colonial church.

"Now we're going to define, in our way, how we live — according to our own customs and practices."

Associated Press writers contributing to this report included Mark Stevenson in Mexico City; Eva Vergara in Santiago, Chile; Jeanneth Valdivieso in Macas, Ecuador; Carlos Valdez in La Paz, Bolivia; Juan Carlos Llorca in Guatemala City; Ian James in Caracas, Venezuela; and Bradley Brooks in Rio de Janeiro.

Evo Morales: How to change the world from a bicycle

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:47:00 +0000

As the leader of his people, Evo Morales celebrates his 50th birthday on Monday, having become one of the most prestigious leaders in the world. Regarding the date, he said, "That means that I’m a militia member, too"

Luis Báez and Pedro de la Hoz

The first time we talked with Evo Morales, on a cold winter night in La Paz in 2008, after learning the date of his birthday, one of us observed, "On that same day, Fidel in Havana called upon the people to create the National Revolutionary Militias." The Bolivian president nodded his head and after a brief silence commented, "That means that I’m a militia member, too."
Fifty years after having been born on October 26, 1959, Evo will most likely arrive at his birthday involved in one of his usual busy days. He will rise at 4 a.m., see to the first matters one hour later, and immerse himself in a whirlwind of work that will continue until late at night.
He might travel to somewhere in the country to inaugurate a construction project, supervise a program, converse with residents, correct perspectives, right some wrongs, and envision new possibilities for his people.

Since January 2006, Evo has been president of all the Bolivian people. He assumed office with more than 53% of the vote, which was ratified in an August 2008 referendum by an overwhelming majority.

In the upcoming December 6 elections, the first to be held under the country’s new Constitution, no other candidate has appeared that could displace him. What speaks for Evo is unprecedented progress in the country’s history in terms of social justice, productive incentives, education and health. There is the recovered dignity of a people that finally has the benefits of the exploitation of hydrocarbon and mineral resources. And the dignity of the descendants of the indigenous peoples — Aymara, Quechua, Guaraní and another 30 indigenous communities — who, under his government, have gone from being invisible and denied for so long to playing a central role in a heroic collective effort.

Senator Antonio Peredo, who is also a political analyst for the media, commented to us on that:
"At this point I do not see a figure other than Evo who is consistent and serious. Because the only program that the rightists have is to go backwards. There is no other program except to get the United States to accept us; to have the DEA attack the coca farmers again; that nationalization is good in theory but why nationalize if you don’t have capital; to hand over our national resources to the lowest bidder, and other old ideas. The opposition has been left without arguments. They cannot tell people that they are going to continue to bring changes, and the people are convinced that the road forward is change, and that the only one who can do it is Evo Morales."

This does not mean that the road is clear. On the contrary, maneuvers are being plotted and threats are hovering. In an exclusive interview, Juan Ramón Quintana, minister of the presidency, gave us his assessment:
"When considering one’s main enemy, one should be cautious in knowing that such an enemy does not have the virtue of political transparency; rather, he has the shrewdness to not present himself as the main enemy and to use third parties. I would say that our adversaries are digestible, politically speaking, because they are incapable of producing an alternative project to the one we have. They are adversaries ashamed of their reality; they have no identity; they lack their own doctrine. Their proposals are more the result of external lucubration; they have a script to follow. Therefore, they don’t worry us much. What worry us are the main enemies of this revolution: at some point they were the transnational corporations, until we struck a blow at them one day. Later, they dispersed out into pro-secession political projects and dropped anchor there. Today, they act in the shadows, but we know they are putting together their conspiracy. Of course, they are using every imaginable method to undermine this process, and of course, they have gone from the coup-plotting adventure to the separatist terrorist adventure. I would warn that they could end up in a suicidal adventure."

Evo received a magnificent birthday present shortly before the ALBA Summit held last weekend in Cochabamba. Compañero Fidel’s Reflection entitled "A Nobel Prize for Evo" offered readers in Cuba and around the world a very precise profile of the merits of the Bolivian leader.
During another evening of confessions, Evo told us that he sometimes dreamed of Fidel, and as he had learned from his ancestors, these were premonitory dreams. We asked him to recall the first time that he saw the Commander in Chief:
"It was at an event in Havana in 1992," he told us. "With the help of various friends, I managed to get together the money for the one-way ticket to Havana. I only went to Havana to learn about Cuba and Fidel. I made a three minute speech, Fidel was chairing the meeting. I didn’t get to meet him personally but afterwards, I found out that he had noticed me. The return journey was very complicated. They managed to get me a ticket as far as Lima. I got there with just a dollar in my pocket which I changed into soles. Luckily, a Peruvian friend Juan Rojas, lent me $100 so that I could make it back to Bolivia."

And later on?

"I’ve had several meetings with Fidel. He is a wise older brother, whose basic principal is solidarity and the struggle for dignity and justice. Fidel is the best doctor in the world. You should see how concerned he is over the health of others, but he is also a great teacher. I feel that Fidel is the Commander of the libertarian forces of America."

The day that Evo was elected leader of his trade union in the coca plantations in Chapare – prior to that he was secretary of sports and then, and to date, president of the six trade union federations in the Trópico de Cochabamba – he didn’t even have enough money to reach the meeting in Villa Tunari by bus.

"I went by bicycle," he tells us. "It was several kilometers away. I went pedaling away and thinking at the same time. Ideas spring to mind when you’re out in the open air. I would think about how the world could not continue in this way, just a few ‘haves’ and the vast majority, ‘have-nots.’ It came to me clearly that the fight must be an anti-imperialist one."

In the international arena, Evo has consolidated notable prestige for his unambiguous positions and his ethical stance on defending the dispossessed and Mother Earth. He has even merited the evaluations of politicians who are diametrically opposed to his way of thinking, such as the case of former U.S. President William Clinton. According to a report by EFE dated May 16, 2006, Clinton was asked during a press conference in New York what he thought of the nationalization of the hydrocarbons industry and the situation in the South American country. Clinton likewise responded with a question: "What would you do if you were a Bolivian miner working 60 hours a week, with four children to feed and no prospects for improvement? Who would you have voted for?"

Evo also considers Hugo Chávez as a brother. Chávez feels the same. At the recent bicentennial event commemorating the first cry of liberation in La Paz, Chávez said:
"I see Evo as stronger than ever, clearer than ever, a greater leader than ever. Support him, don’t listen to the voices of the oligarchy, who are trying to demonize him and confuse the people every single day. (…) Come together with love, and design and build together the great Bolivia of the 21st century."

Many things in this world amaze Evo. For him, the most important values are openness, honesty, honor and respect for the elderly. He cannot abide vanity or dishonesty. He likes to hear different people’s opinions before making a decision. He confided to us that he would only make one personal request of Cuba: "That Silvio comes here to sing."

Translated by Granma International

Letter by Evo Morales Ayma to the Bolivian people

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:21:00 +0000

Bolivians today we begin to walk down a new path towards the consolidation of the democratic and cultural revolution. When we arrived in government in 2005, history made us face the challenge of pushing forward a process of change to refound the country. We had to undertake important tasks: the nationalization of our hydrocarbons, the Constituent Assembly, autonomy as part of the new constitution, the end of illiteracy, the redistribution of land, an end to discrimination, the redistribution of wealth with the Bono Juancito Pinto, la Renta Dignidad and the Bono Juana Azurduy.

These important tasks have been fulfilled, that is why now we have to propose new measures to give a vital boost to the country. We have developed the Government Program "Bolivia Advances" which incorporates the suggestions and proposals made by social movements, workers, the professional colleges and the organised middle class, all pointing to a common goal: to advance in the process of change to develop Bolivia and so that those who inhabit this land full of history and culture live well.

In the next five years, Autonomous Bolivia will take a Great Industrial Leap and we will leave behind being an exporter country of raw materials, the Great Highway Revolution will definitively integrate and unite our regions, the Tupac Katari satellite will allow us to communicate to all ten million Bolivians; we will be a productive nation, the peasants will have Universal Agricultural Insurance; education, security and social justice will reach each communities and families across the country.

To consolidate this set of plans and programs and projects, the country needs the combined efforts of all. So I invite the citizens to be part of this historical process and today we can build our dreams and the dreams of our children.

We are convinced that all measures we propose in our Government Program "Bolivia Advances" are viable and possible to achieve, we just have to undertake them together because ultimately, change has no party, the change is in the heart of all Bolivians who wants to see a Grand, United and Solidarity-based Homeland.

Juan Evo Morales Aima
Presidential candidate of the MAS - IPSP (Movement Toward Socialism - Instrument for the Sovereignty of Peoples)

Translated by Kiraz Janicke

Fidel Castro: A Nobel Prize for Evo Morales

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:37:00 +0000

Fidel Castro

If Obama was awarded the Nobel for winning the elections in a racist society despite his being African American, Evo deserves it for winning them in his country despite his being a native and his having delivered on his promises.

For the first time, in both countries a member of their respective ethnic groups has won the presidency.

I had said several times that Obama is a smart and cultivated man in a social and political system he believes in. He wishes to bring healthcare to nearly 50 million Americans, to rescue the economy from its profound crisis and to improve the US image which has deteriorated as a result of genocidal wars and torture. He neither conceives nor wishes to change his country’s political and economic system; nor could he do it.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to three American presidents, one former president and one candidate to the presidency.

The first one was Theodore Roosevelt elected in 1901. He was one of the Rough Riders who landed in Cuba with his riders but with no horses in the wake of the US intervention in 1898 aimed at preventing the independence of our homeland.

The second was Thomas Woodrow Wilson who dragged the United States to the first war for the distribution of the world. The extremely severe conditions he imposed on a vanquished Germany, through the Versailles Treaty, set the foundations for the emergence of fascism and the breakout of World War II.

The third has been Barack Obama.

Carter was the ex-president who received the Nobel Prize a few years after leaving office. He was certainly one of the few presidents of that country who would not order the murder of an adversary, as others did. He returned the Panama Canal, opened the US Interests Section in Havana and prevented large budget deficits as well as the squandering of money to the benefit of the military-industrial complex, as Reagan did.

The candidate was Al Gore –when he already was vicepresident. He was the best informed American politician on the dreadful consequences of climate change. As a candidate to the presidency, he was the victim of an electoral fraud and stripped of his victory by W. Bush.

The views have been deeply divided with regards to the choice for this award. Many people question ethical concepts or perceive obvious contradictions in the unexpected decision.

They would have rather seen the Prize given for an accomplished task. The Nobel Peace Prize has not always been presented to people deserving that distinction. On occasions it has been received by resentful and arrogant persons, or even worse. Upon hearing the news, Lech Walesa scornfully said: “Who, Obama? It’s too soon. He has not had time to do anything.”

In our press and in CubaDebate, honest revolutionary comrades have expressed their criticism. One of them wrote: “The same week in which Obama was granted the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Senate passed the largest military budget in its history: 626 billion dollars.” Another journalist commented during the TV News: “What has Obama done to deserve that award?” And still another asked: “And what about the Afghan war and the increased number of bombings?” These views are based on reality.

In Rome, film maker Michael Moore made a scathing comment: “Congratulations, President Obama, for the Nobel Peace Prize; now, please, earn it.”

I am sure that Obama agrees with Moore’s phrase. He is clever enough to understand the circumstances around this case. He knows he has not earned that award yet. That day in the morning he said that he was under the impression that he did not deserve to be in the company of so many inspiring personalities who have been honored with that prize.

It is said that the celebrated committee that assigns the Nobel Peace Prize is made up of five persons who are all members of the Swedish Parliament. A spokesman said it was a unanimous vote. One wonders whether or not the prizewinner was consulted and if such a decision can be made without giving him previous notice.

The moral judgment would be different depending on whether or not he had previous knowledge of the Prize’s allocation. The same could be said of those who decided to present it to him.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile creating the Nobel Transparency Prize.

Bolivia is a country with large oil and gas depots as well as the largest known reserves of lithium, a mineral currently in great demand for the storage and use of energy.

Before his sixth birthday, Evo Morales, a very poor native peasant, walked through The Andes with his father tending the llama of his native community. He walked with them for 15 days to the market where they were sold in order to purchase food for the community. In response to a question I asked him about that peculiar experience Evo told me that “he took shelter under the one-thousand stars hotel,” a beautiful way of describing the clear skies on the mountains where telescopes are sometimes placed.

In those difficult days of his childhood, the only alternative of the peasants in his community was to cut sugarcane in the Argentinean province of Jujuy, where part of the Aymara community went to work during the harvesting season.

Not far from La Higuera, where after being wounded and disarmed Che [Guevara] was murdered on October 9, 1967, Evo –who had been born on the 26th of that same month in the year 1959—was not yet 8 years old. He learned how to read and write in Spanish in a small public school he had to walk to, which was located 3.2 miles away from the one-room shack he shared with his parents and siblings.

During his hazardous childhood, Evo would go wherever there was a teacher. It was from his race that he learned three ethical principles: don’t lie, don’t steal and don’t be weak.

At the age of 13, his father allowed him to move to San Pedro de Oruro to study his senior high school. One of his biographers has related that he did better in Geography, History and Philosophy than in Physics and Mathematics. The most important thing is that, in order to pay for school, Evo woke up a two in the morning to work as a baker, a construction worker or any other physical job. He attended school in the afternoon. His classmates admired him and helped him. From his early childhood he learned how to play wind instruments and even was a trumpet player in a prestigious band in Oruro.

As a teenager he organized and was the captain of his community’s soccer team.

But, access to the University was beyond reach for a poor Aymara native.

After completing his senior high school, he did military service and then returned to his community on the mountain tops. Later, poverty and natural disasters forced the family to migrate to the subtropical area known as El Chapare, where they managed to have a plot of ground. His father passed away in 1983, when he was 23 years old. He worked hard on the ground but he was a born fighter; he organized the workers and created trade unions thus filling up a space unattended by the government.

The conditions for a social revolution in Bolivia had been maturing in the past 50 years. The revolution broke out in that country with Victor Paz Estensoro’s Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR, by its Spanish acronym) on April 9, 1952, that is, before the start of our armed struggle. The revolutionary miners defeated the repressive forces and the MNR seized power.

The revolutionary objectives in Bolivia were not attained and in 1956, according to some well-informed people, the process started to decline. On January 1st, 1959, the Revolution triumphed in Cuba, and three years later, in January 1962, our homeland was expelled from the OAS. Bolivia abstained from voting. Later, every other government, except Mexico’s, severed relations with Cuba.

The divisions in the international revolutionary movement had an impact on Bolivia. Time would have to pass with over 40 years of blockade on Cuba; neoliberalism and its devastating consequences; the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the ALBA; and above all, Evo and his MAS in Bolivia.

It would be hard to try summing up his rich history in a few pages.

I shall only say that Evo has prevailed over the wicked and slanderous imperialist campaigns, its coups and interference in the internal affairs of that country and defended Bolivia’s sovereignty and the right of its thousand-year-old people to have their traditions respected. “Coca is not cocaine,” he blurted out to the largest marihuana producer and drug consumer in the world, whose market has sustained the organized crime that is taking thousands of lives in Mexico every year. Two of the countries where the Yankee troops and their military bases are stationed are the largest drug producers on the planet.

The deadly trap of drug-trafficking has failed to catch Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, revolutionary countries members of ALBA like Cuba which are aware of what they can and should do to bring healthcare, education and wellbeing to their peoples. They do not need foreign troops to combat drug-trafficking.

Bolivia is fostering a wonderful program under the leadership of an Aymara president with the support of his people.

Illiteracy was eradicated in less than three years: 824,101 Bolivian learned how to read and write; 24,699 did so also in Aymara and 13,599 in Quechua. Bolivia is the third country free of illiteracy, following Cuba and Venezuela.

It provides free healthcare to millions of people who had never had it before. It is one of the seven countries in the world with the largest reduction of infant mortality rate in the last five years and with a real possibility to meet the Millennium Goals before the year 2015, with a similar accomplishment regarding maternal deaths. It has conducted eye surgery on 454,161 persons, 75,974 of them Brazilians, Argentineans, Peruvians and Paraguayans.

Bolivia has set forth an ambitious social program: every child attending school from first to eighth grade is receiving an annual grant to pay for the school material. This benefits nearly two million students.

More than 700,000 persons over 60 years of age are receiving a bonus equivalent to some 342 dollars annually.

Every pregnant woman and child under two years of age is receiving an additional benefit of approximately 257 dollars.

Bolivia, one of the three poorest nations in the hemisphere, has brought under state control the country’s most important energy and mineral resources while respecting and compensating every single affected interest. It is advancing carefully because it does not want to take a step backward. Its hard currency reserves have been growing, and now they are no less than three times higher than they were at the beginning of Evo’s mandate. It is one of the countries making a better use of external cooperation and it is a strong advocate of the environment.

In a very short time, Bolivia has been able to establish the Biometric Electoral Register and approximately 4.7 million voters have registered, that is, nearly a million more than in the last electoral roll that in January 2009 included 3.8 million.

There will be elections on December 6. Surely, the people’s support for their President will increase. Nothing has stopped his growing prestige and popularity.

Why is he not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

I understand his great disadvantage: he is not the President of the United States of America.

Fidel Castro Ruz

October 15, 2009

4:25 PM

Russia, Bolivia to launch gas joint venture

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:36:00 +0000

F. William Engdahl

The latest news report that Russia will sign an agreement with the Bolivian government to explore and produce natural gas is a significant setback for US domination of its traditional Latin American sphere of influence. Since it was declared in 1823 as the Monroe Doctrine, the United States, especially its banking elites have regarded South America as a de facto 'American plantation.' The move by Russia's state-owned Gazprom into Bolivia must be seen as Moscow's asymmetric geopolitical response to US expansion of NATO to the doorstep of Moscow in recent years. The US is ill-prepared to counter with any economic incentive.

Gazprom Deputy CEO, Alexander Medvedev, announced at a recent energy conference in Argentina that they would sign a final agreement in the coming weeks with the Bolivian state oil and gas company, YFBP, for a major joint venture to develop Bolivia's huge natural gas reserves. Bolivia has the second largest gas reserves (1.5 trillion cubic meters) in South America after Venezuela. Its key gas reserves are concentrated in the country's southeast in Santa Cruz.

The Russian gas deal follows talks with Moscow on increased Russian military aid to the Bolivian armed forces following a US cut-off of all aid.

Bolivia's President, Evo Morales, the country's first fully indigenous head of state in the 470 years since the Spanish Conquest, has been on the target list of Washington since his popular election in 2005. In September 2008 Morales expelled the US Ambassador, accusing him of fomenting opposition riots and protests against Morales. One week later, the Bush Administration responded by putting Bolivia on the "counter-narcotics" blacklist, cutting all US foreign aid. Curiously, the list is small, including only three countries, all firm opponents of US policies-Bolivia, Venezuela and Burma (Myanmar). Countries such as Mexico, Afghanistan, Colombia are not cited by Washington suggesting there might be another agenda there.

In January 2009 Morales again won a decisive national referendum allowing him to run for re-election and to take steps to control large landholdings. With a 60 per cent "Yes" vote, Morales can seek re-election in December 2009. As well, under the new powers, rich landowners may be targeted for dispossession as the state now only allows private ownership of large estates, Latifundistas, if the land is put to 'social use.' If not, the land may be seized by the state and redistributed. As well the referendum gave the state more power over its energy resources.

War over water and energy

The US interest in Bolivia is little other than crass exploitation of that country's huge resources. Washington sent Harvard "shock therapy" economist Jeffrey Sachs to Bolivia in the 1980's to impose his radical therapy which killed inflation and did nothing to alleviate the severe poverty. It did open up the resources of the country to cheap exploitation by foreign multinationals like BP and ExxonMobil as well as British and American water companies.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm Halliburton had plans to exploit Bolivia's natural gas for export. In 2002 popular outrage over the generous terms given by an earlier pro-US government to Halliburton led to nationwide protests, dubbed the "Bolivian Gas War" by media.

With growing popular protests and national strikes against foreign exploitation of the country's resources, the Bolivian Congress passed a new Hydrocarbons Law in 2005 that partially re-nationalized the energy resources, while allowing foreign companies to lease, albeit on less generous terms. YPFB had been privatized in 1996 and British firms BP and BG along with Halliburton and ExxonMobil immediately came in then to build a multi-billion dollar gas pipeline to export LNG to California. Cheney's Halliburton was the main construction contractor.

Morales won a landslide election victory in December 2005 on a pledge to use the country's resources to develop the country's economy, one of the poorest in South America. Since that time Washington has covertly been supporting various opposition groups in Santa Cruz province in the region of the gas and huge fresh water resources.

On May 1, 2006, President Morales signed a decree stating that all gas reserves were to be nationalized: "the state recovers ownership, possession and total and absolute control" of hydrocarbons. Since then the government's energy-related revenue doubled and has increased six-fold from 2002. Foreign companies were either compensated for their holdings as with Shell, or continued to work but as minority partners with the state.

Bush finds a 'retirement' ranch

Shortly before leaving office, according to South American media reports, then President George W. Bush drew considerable attention in Bolivia with reports he had arranged to buy a huge tract of land on the Triple Frontier border of Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia "to retire." Bush reportedly bought some 40000 hectares of land in Chaco, Paraguay, near a US military base. Significantly, the land is reportedly located in Paso de Patria, near Bolivian gas reserves and the Guarani indigenous water region, within the Triple Border. The Guarani Aquifer is one of the largest underground water reserves in South America, running beneath Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and larger than Texas and California together.

South America is now all but lost to US influence, with only Colombia, a stalwart ally, and Peru considered still in Washington's geopolitical orbit. The rest of the region has now swung against US influence, led by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has cultivated anti-US allies like Iran and Cuba, and has now invited the Russian air force and navy to exercise in the Caribbean. Bolivia's Morales has strong ties to the governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and recently of Paraguay, where former Bishop Fernando Lugo won an upset victory in April 2008 breaking the 61 year domination of the right-wing military Colorado Party.

The Bolivia-Russia Gazprom deal further secures a degree of economic independence for Bolivia from the historical US economic domination. For Russia, it offers an excellent chance to up pressure on the United States in its backyard, its traditional "sphere of influence" in the Americas, long considered a Rockefeller family plantation. Given its deepening domestic economic crisis, the Obama Administration has few cards to play beyond trying to create chaos in the region. It has little positive to offer Bolivia or any of its neighbors. The process is like a 'Grade B' rerun of the collapse of the British Empire in Africa and the Indian Subcontinent after the Second World War.

F. William Engdahl is the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order

Republished from Global Research

Evo Morales proposes world youth summit against capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:54:00 +0000

EFE, October 11 - Bolivian president, Evo Morales, proposed his country as host for an international summit of “revolutionary youth” who defend the environment with the aim of “putting an end to capitalism.”

The head of state, who is seeking reelection in the December 6 poll, raised the proposal during an event in which youth groups aligned with his government announced their support for his candidature in the eastern region of Santa Cruz.

The event also counted with the participation of youth from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, followers of the guerrilla, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who arrived in the country this week to participate on Thursday [October] 8 in the event to mark 42 years since the death of the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary.

In the midst of songs and chants, Morales announced that he would “urgently” convoke a meeting of youth of America that “are with the people and not with the empire”, referring to the US government.

He added that they would also organize another event to bring together the “youth of the world” who supported “revolutionary processes to put an end to capitalism.”

“To advance in the defense of humanity, to save mother earth, we will convoke a meeting of the revolutionary youth of all the world in Bolivia,” he said.

Moreover, the head of state ratified his government’s rejection of foreign military presence in South America and reiterated “if any president or government allows US bases, they are the worst traitor of Latin America and the world.”

Morales was alluding to the agreements between Bogota and Washington, which include the use of Colombian military bases by US troops and which has been discussed by the member countries of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).

Bolivia to publish Che Guevara diaries before ALBA summit

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:08:00 +0000

MOSCOW, October 5 (RIA Novosti) - Bolivia's Culture Ministry will publish over 1,000 copies of legendary Argentinean revolutionary Che Guevara's diaries dating back to his 1966-1967 Bolivian campaign, Latin American media reported Monday.

Culture Minister Pablo Groux said the diaries were written by Guevara from November 7, 1966 to October 6, 1967. They were digitized in 2008 and will form the basis for the book, to include illustrations and material of political interest.

"We are publishing a facsimile copy of Comandante Che Guevara's diaries. The document has had the status of a state secret in the archives of Bolivia's Central Bank since 1985 and now people can have a look at them," Groux said.

Ernesto Che Guevara spent the last years of his life in Bolivia. He flew there in November 1966 to organize a guerilla movement, was taken captive in October 1967 and shot dead in the La Higuera village.

The diaries will be published ahead of an October 16-17 summit of the leaders of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), to be held in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba.

The Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America was established in 2004 on the initiative of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, with "alternative" later replaced by "alliance."

ALBA comprises Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Honduras, Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Haiti, Iran and Uruguay have observer status.

Bolivian President Evo Morales is expected to personally present the book to ALBA leaders and foreign ministers. Copies will also be given to libraries and cultural establishments of ALBA members.

Bolivia: In a spooky development, mainstream financial newswire actually does its job for a change and reports facts about Evonomy

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:52:00 +0000

Republished with original introduction by Otto Rock from Inca Kola News Blog

Hats off to Eduardo Garcia of Reuters Bolivia (we've feted the dude before due to his better-than-the-rest reports on Bolly) who published the following report on Reuters newswires last week (h/t reader PD).

To finally see some credit given by serious financial media (not just sillyblogs like this one) to the Bolivian economic success story is a refreshing change, but Garcia gets into the nitty-gritty as he explains how Evo's radical communist idea of "giving money to the poor" actually helps the economy.....wild huh? It also has wild'n'crazy things called "facts" that include:

Bolivia's record international currency reserves
How Bolivia is on track to be the fastest growing country in the whole of Latin America this year
The manner in which children are getting better schooling
The communist conspiracy of giving retirement aged people a pension
The red-in-bed way of "helping pregnant mothers"
The way economic growth brings social stability (neocons: read&weep, dumbasses)
The absence of bad debts in Bolivia's macroeconomic make-up

So here's Garcia's piece. By the way, it's unlikely you've seen it before, because although it was a strong note on the Reuters newswire service, strangely and weirdly not a single open web service picked up on the note so strangely and weirdly it has managed to miss the eyes of those of us not equipped with a U$1,500/month Reuters terminal. It's almost as if they didn't want to you read it...strange'n'weird that, innit?

LA PAZ, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Bolivia's economy is healthy despite the global slump because leftist President Evo Morales is redistributing soaring state revenue as subsidies to the poor, the country's finance minister told Reuters on Thursday.

The Bolivian economy grew 3.2 percent in the first six months of this year, despite lower export income for natural gas, which is key to the Andean country's economy.

The International Monetary Fund says Bolivia is likely to post the highest growth in gross domestic product, in Latin America at 2.8 percent.

Finance Minister Luis Alberto Arce is even more optimistic. He expects GDP to grow 4 percent this year, largely because Morales has handed out money to the country's poor majority, which is boosting their spending.

"Our policy was to make the cake bigger for Bolivians with the nationalization policies, to increase state revenue. Our second policy was to divide the cake better in order to give more to those who have less," said Arce.

Arce said the subsidies are the "small engine of growth" that has allowed Bolivia's economy to grow despite lower export revenue caused by drops in demand and prices for natural gas.

Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings upgraded Bolivia's credit ratings last month, citing the country's good macroeconomic performance.

But they noted that years of above-trend growth, the benefits of external debt forgiveness, limited foreign banking interests in the Andean nation and the absence of bad debts prevalent in developed markets helped Bolivia to avoid a direct fallout from the global crisis.

CASH FOR THE POOR
Morales, an Aymara Indian from a poor background who took office in 2006, has increased taxes on foreign investors and has nationalized energy, mining and telecommunications firms.

State revenue from the key natural gas sector boomed to $2.65 billion last year, from just over $1 billion in 2005, and revenue from the mining sector increased fourfold in the same period to $128.1 million.

The country's foreign reserves have rocketed to around $8.5 billion from $1.7 billion at the end of 2005.

Morales' government is spending some $320 million a year in grants to encourage parents to keep their children in school, in pensions for the elderly and in cash handouts to persuade pregnant women and mothers to go through health checks.

Earlier this year the government said that in 2008 nearly 2.4 million Bolivians received cash subsidies, roughly 25 percent of the country's population.

That is on top of the nearly $200 million donated by Morales' main Latin American ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, that Morales has spent in hundreds of small education, sports and health projects since 2006.

Although critics have said the government is giving subsidies to buy support from poor Bolivians, Arce says the stipends are a good way to redistribute wealth.

"These are policies to redistribute income ... tomorrow when the poor of today are no longer poor, of course we're going to have to stop giving this support," Arce said.

But the economist said that the government is likely to continue giving subsidies in the medium term because they stabilize the country.

"We can't stop ... because it's something that brings social stability. Social conflicts have decreased greatly with our government because we're solving the social problems that people have," Arce said.

Before Morales took office, three presidents in three years were forced to step down amid social unrest.

Evo Morales at the UN: The cause of the crisis is capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:03:00 +0000

Statement by H.E. Evo Morales Ayma, President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, delivered to the United Nations General Assembly last week at UN headquarters in New York City

Thank you to the President of the United Nations General Assembly, greetings fellow

presidential brothers, to the distinguished delegation of this global forum, reunited at the United Nations to share problems, concerns and solutions to serve our fellow people of the world.

This morning I listened carefully to the speeches, beginning with the Secretary-General of the United Nations. There exist enormous similarities in expressing problems such as the financial crisis, the environment and the stability of the institution of democracy. There have been many positive suggestions, beginning with the Secretary-General’s humble request for unity between the presidents of the United Nations.

I agree with the importance for governments of the world to unite in order to successfully tend to our peoples demands and resolve these crises. Unity within the United Nations to solve profound economic differences, asymmetries between continents, families and countries is paramount for the equality, dignity and resolution of the demands of our people.

There exists an ongoing debate about the financial crisis, climate change and democracy. We cannot forget the food and energy crises. I applaud the addresses, which focus on the origins of the crisis. However, the majority of the speeches only speak of effects, never the cause. I came here today to speak plainly with you all. The origin of this crisis is the exaggerated accumulation of capital in far too few hands. It is the permanent removal of natural resources and the commercialization of Mother Earth. The origins come from the system and an economic model of Capitalism. If we don’t share the truth of this crisis with one another nor the international community, we will disseminate a lie to our people whom expect more from their presidents, governments and these kinds of forums.

We must securely establish and seek peace. Social peace cannot exist if economic inequalities still remain. Worse even, where there are foreign military bases in countries. In many continents, especially in Latin and South America, the presence of U.S. military bases provokes distrust among our people.

I can briefly relate my experiences as the victim of a foreign military presence operating in my country. This was before I assumed office of the president and before the social movements would become actors in a new country with equality and social justice. We were all victims of the U.S. military presence in Bolivia and as victims we know what U.S. soldiers in different countries of South America do. When there is a U.S. military base in Latin America especially, I don’t know what will be their behavior in Europe or other continents, but in Latin America U.S. military bases do not guarantee social peace, they do not guarantee democracy, they do not guarantee the integration of our countries and less of the people who organize themselves in pursuit of profound economic, social, and cultural structural changes.

Here we have Honduras, if there is a U.S. military base in Honduras why can’t that military base guarantee democracy?

I salute the valor of our colleague, the president of Honduras, Zelaya, who peacefully perseveres towards a democratic recovery. Also, I must extend my respect and admiration to the rebellious people of Honduras in defense of democracy. It would be wonderful if the Assembly President of the United Nations, this grandiose global organization, would arrive with a resolution where an ultimatum assures the dic tatorship in Honduras is abandoned, returning and acknowledging Zelava as the sole president. I am convinced the U.S. Southern Command does not accept presidential nor governmental heads in Latin American countries seeking liberation. My brothers and colleagues who’ve supported the direction of Bolivia and Latin America have commented to me, that the only reason there isn’t a coup in the U.S. is because there is no U.S. embassy within the United States. I want you all to know, presidential brothers, that last year there was a coup attempt in Bolivia. Thankfully, because of the forces of organized union and the international community, especially from UNASUR, we civilly halted a coup without use of military force. The coup failed to succeed. We are convinced military bases do not guarantee democracy, or integration, or social peace.

Also in debate is the topic of climate change. I want to take this opportunity to propose a few themes that are very important to the inhabitants of Mother Earth. For the indigenous movement, not only harmony with human kind, but harmony with Mother Earth is sacred.

Mother Earth gives life, water, natural resources, oxygen and everything that supports the well being of our people. If we talk, work and fight for the well being of our people we first have to guarantee the well being of Mother Earth; otherwise it will be impossible to guarantee the well being of our citizens. Mother Earth, Planet Earth, will exist without human life, but human life cannot exist without Mother Earth.

After hearing many speeches, I’ve concluded that in this new twenty- first century, defending Mother Earth will be more important than defending human rights. If we do not defend the rights of Mother Earth, there is no use in defending human rights. I am willing to debate this concept, but now or later it will be proven that the rights of Mother Earth supersede the rights of human beings. We must protect what gives us life. Coincidently, as we are in the climate change debate, we want to propose, dear presidents, delegates from distinct countries, to the brothers of the world that are listening, a very simple proposal which can be summarized in 3 points.

First: Developed countries must honor and pay the climate debt they owe to mankind and planet earth.

Second: We currently do not have a structured manner in which we can quantify the damages committed by nations. My dear presidents, it is of utmost importance to create a Court for Climatic Justice, in which countries will be tried and punished assuming they do not follow international laws and continue to destroy the earth.

Third: A proposal derived mainly from Indigenous farmers: nations must declare and expand the rights of Mother Earth’s natural regeneration. Nations must also declare rights on behalf of the right to life, a clean life and the right to harmony and equilibrium for all and everything.

Hopefully these proposals will be taken into account and debated in Copenhagen, Denmark. We hope the discussions in Copenhagen will provide us with short and long term solutions over the enormous problems that our distinguished countries endure.

I want to also take this opportunity to gather proposals from other presidents. If we first want to change the world then we must first change the configuration of the United Nations. If within our
countries we strive for equality through change then why not begin with changing the structure within the United Nations?

While listening to many presidents speak in the United Nations Security Council, I’ve noticed many coincidences. We need true democratization; toward this we have established the following:

The permanence of membership in the Security Council, similarly the right to veto, should be eliminated. It cannot be possible that in the twenty-first century we are still practicing the style of totalitarianism from a monarchy era. All countries have the same rights within the UN. Those that proclaim themselves as leaders of Democracy should resign their privileges and accept true democracy from the Security Council. Let us be responsible to the promise of democracy, and let us start with the democratization of the UN.

To end this speech, and not abuse my allowed time, is a discipline of truth and respect that we follow in Bolivia. I apologize if by speaking the truth, the U.S. government may feel slightly bothered. I have confidence in President Obama and congratulate him for closing Guantanamo.

That is progress and we congratulate it, but don’t only close the Guantanamo prison, you must end the economic blockade of Cuba. This is a respectful request to the President and the American people.

In Bolivia and Latin America, the United States initially granted tariff preferences. Former President Bush eradicated these tariff preferences with Bolivia and falsely accused that there is no war against drug trafficking nor a struggle against poverty in Bolivia. I knew that these allegations were political decisions. Former U.S. President Bush never observed Bolivian norms, and much less Bolivia’s Political Constitution. Now, in this new government of Mr.

Obama, there are reports published on the developments and concerns of Bolivia’s Political Constitutional State. I know that this observation was made to Article 56 of the New Bolivian State Constitution on private property, which for the first time in 183 years of republican life of the Bolivian people was approved with their vote. This seems to be an open interference by the U.S. government to the Constitution that I do not accept and reject outright.

We do not want interference with diplomatic relations but diplomatic relations of cooperation and investment. The New Political Constitution of Bolivia guarantees private property, guarantee state ownership, but fundamentally, for the first time, ensures collective ownership, partnerships, cooperatives, community land of the original indigenous movements. For the first time Bolivia’s new Political Constitutional State guarantees private property and state property. Fundamentally, it incorporates a guarantee of collective cooperation of associations, corporations and collective property of the original indigenous peoples.

Besides that, they accuse me and say in their document: "current challenges include explicit acceptance and encouragement of the production of coca leaf in the upper echelons of the Bolivian government.” I promote coca cultivation. I want you to know that one thing is the coca leaf, the planting of coca leaf, cocaine is something else. Cocaine we do not defend, we will fight cocaine. Our proposal is zero cocaine. But there cannot be free cultivation of coca leaf. This inits natural state is good, is healthy for human life. You know that we are campaigning to decriminalize the traditional consumption of the coca leaf. I guarantee there will never be free cultivation of coca leaf, nor zero coca, but rather, zero cocaine. You cannot tell me that I incentivize the planting of coca in Bolivia. This is false.

Most worrying, you know that I come from the union struggle, from a social, trade union leader but I was also president momentarily. The document says the government may dissolve unions by administrative decree. I do not wish to stop the unions. The force of this government - that of Evo Morales - is of social and union forces. Even though I’ve created and constructed union headquarters, donated automobiles to unions, forces still accuse me of subverting them. I can be sure that President Obama may not know this document and it may come from the Department of State of the United States. Sometimes we change presidents, but it is difficult to change the structure of states. I understand this deeply, after reading this document.

In Latin America those called afro-bolivians, those called indigenous Indians, are the most disadvantaged sectors of society. In popular terms we say black, Indian. I can’t understand how a black person discriminated against, an excluded black person, discriminates or excludes another Indian. It really is a huge concern that we live with. Hopefully, these historical wrongs can be corrected, not just for the sake of the President of the Bolivian people but also by the good image of nations like the United States. I fully understand that it is sometimes not easy to change these structures and perhaps work against our people.

Finally, to conclude dear presidents, president of the Assembly, in Bolivia in order to resolve some historical demands, like the demand to return to the sea, I would like to inform you that two sister Republics, Chile and Bolivia, are building trust with one another in order to resolve oceanic matters. I have high hopes in resolving bilateral relations. It is important that the international community intervene if a solution has not been reached. Although there has been headway in building mutual trust in order to solve matters, trust continues to be of great importance. But it does not end with trust; further important steps must be taken.

Brothers and Sisters, I thank you for listening and considering my words and the message of my people. I want to continue sharing your experiences, your proposals and your worries for the collective well being of the human race.

Thank you very much.

Republished from MaximsNews

Bolivia to nationalize Hydroelectric dams owned by French and British companies

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:10:00 +0000

Momento 24 - The Bolivian government is now promoting the nationalization of two hydroelectric dams operated by French companies as part of the change process to provide greater benefits for the population.

President Evo Morales stated that this is Corani and Santa Isabel plants, both in the central region of Cochabamba.

Corani, Guaracachi and Valle Hermoso hydroelectric plants were transferred 12 years ago to the private sector, and provide 1,146 megawatts of energy to the major Bolivian cities.

Corani is controlled by the French group GDF Suez, through its subsidiary Inversiones Ecoenergy Bolivia and Guaracachi, by the British group Rurelec PCL. Valley Hermoso is operated by The Bolivian Generatings Group, a subsidiary of Panamerican Bolivia.

Also, Bolivia has received a commitment from the Inter-American Development Bank, or IDB, for a $100 million loan to finance the construction of a hydroelectric plant in the central part of the country.

The plant is part of the Misicuni project in the province of Cochabamba.

Bolivia is very close to being able to export energy because there are places along its rivers where hydroelectric plants can be built to increase the production of electricity by 2,000 MW, the president said.

The Andean nation’s power plants currently produce 1,070 MW to fulfill nationwide demand of 940 MW.

Bolivian president says coup against Zelaya intimidation to ALBA

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:32:00 +0000

PORLAMAR, Venezuela, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Sunday that the coup against deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya means an intimidation to the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA).

The coup of June 28 is a reminder of the American empire, under the doctrine to prevent further widening of the ALBA, said Morales at a news conference held in the Hilton hotel, venue of the Second Africa-South America Summit (ASA).

For Morales, the alliance established in 2004 is considered by some as the axis of evil, when in fact, it is the core of humanity.

It is the product of historic struggles of Fidel Castro, and most recently, of Hugo Chavez, he said.

Concerning the situation in Honduras, he called upon the interim Honduran government to restore the constitutional order. "Not just the ALBA, but also the international community in general, support the return of democracy in Honduras," he said.

On Saturday, heads of state and government of ASA countries have approved a joint statement condemning the coup in Honduras.

Evo Morales at UN press conference: The capitalist systems should recognize and pay for their climate debt

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:58:00 +0000

During a press conference at United Nations Headquarters this morning, Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma declared that “capitalist lifestyles” were at the root of climate change problems, as he discussed key proposals to protect the environment and bring to justice those who contributed to pollution.

In New York to take part in the Secretary-General’s Climate Change Summit ahead of the General Assembly’s annual general debate, Mr. Morales focused exclusively on environmental responsibility, arguing that “Mother Earth” was sacred and should not be turned into private enterprise by the “capitalist system”.

“We must change the capitalist lifestyle,” he said, since the capitalist system favored obtaining the maximum profit possible, without taking into due consideration the lives of others or the environment.

It was necessary to stop living for the purpose of pillaging or looting the Earth, as today, improving living standards was seen first and foremost as an accumulation of capital. Rather, we must consider in detail the “well-being” of human individuals while also guaranteeing the well-being of Mother Nature, he said, adding: “Mother Earth can exist without human life, but not the other way around.”

Noting the “deep divergence” of views between the West and other nations on protecting the rights of Mother Nature, Mr. Morales said he nevertheless planned to use the opportunity provided by the Climate Summit to submit three proposals, on: the responsibility of industrialized countries and transnational companies to acknowledge and pay their “climate debt”; the establishment of a climate change tribunal; and a declaration on “protecting the rights of Mother Earth”.

With respect to his proposal for a climate change tribunal, he said such a body would deal with those who failed to recognize the error of their ways. He went on to say it would be “very interesting” to discuss such issues in Copenhagen. As there was no permanent investigative body that could “bring to justice” Governments or companies that had harmed the environment, an authority must be established to protect the planet, and indeed “save humankind”. He added that, thus far, Northern countries had not extended their full cooperation to address climate debt.

Mr. Morales also said a declaration protecting the rights of Mother Earth must be developed within the United Nations. In Bolivia, every day there was a loss of biodiversity and a decline in the snow-capped peaks, and research into protecting these areas must be conducted.

While the twentieth century had seen the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, recently, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the new struggle must be to protect and uphold the rights of Mother Earth. He said that in order to have a clean existence, we must keep the planet clean and protect the right to harmony between all forms of life, as well as establish a community based socialism “in all countries of the world”.

When asked why indigenous peoples had more of a “moral stand on the planet”, Mr. Morales said that such groups lived in harmony with Mother Earth, and that theirs was a lifestyle which should be emulated. He said that in some places, water had been privatized, as transnational companies had taken possession of waterfalls to sell water to the people.

“Water cannot be planted, cannot be produced”, he said. “In our communities, we can live without candles but not without water.” That was why indigenous peoples find Mother Earth so essential. Development models which privatized and eliminated natural resources were thus a form of plunder, he added.

Regarding a question about the position of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) on the shared environmental burden of developing and industrialized countries, Mr. Morales said there was not yet a coordinated position on the issue.

Asked how he planned to present his proposal that capitalist systems should recognize and pay for their climate debt, Mr. Morales said the idea “is like a warm up” leading to Copenhagen, where a thorough analysis into which countries were hurting the environment could be made. Focus should be on those nations which bore the major responsibility, and who “hurt the environment in the name of industrial development”.

Responding to a question about the proposed tribunal to judge contaminating countries, Mr. Morales said there should not only be a court to defend the environment, but a team to investigate and study violations on a scientific basis.

Bolivia: The president's football team

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:43:00 +0000

Evo Morales's plan to nationalise Bolivia's football team says a lot about his economic vision – and his love of the sport

Benjamin Dangl, Saturday 19 September 2009

Every Sunday night in La Paz, Bolivia the football stadium comes to life, with its bright lights dimming the stars. After the game, fireworks pound at the cool air and fans roam the streets shaking banners and cans of beer. This happens regardless of what political crisis or triumph the country is going through.

"Whether it's something we celebrate together, or a shipwreck that takes us all down, soccer counts in Latin America, sometimes more than anything else," Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano writes in Soccer in Sun and Shadow.

So when Bolivia's football team recently failed to qualify for the World Cup, devoted fan and socialist President Evo Morales suggested an approach he's taken when other businesses haven't thrived. To solve the team's problem, he said: "What better thing than the intervention of the state?"

Putting the football industry under state control would follow in the footsteps of other nationalisations the popular president has carried out in the gas, tin and telecommunications sectors.

"We're sorry about the performance of our team in the qualifiers," Morales told reporters in Bolivia. "Until now [football] has been [controlled] by private, autonomous entities ... but they aren't getting results." He said nationalisation would "dignify" the national team.

Though not always a fool-proof solution, recent history in Bolivia shows that state control of certain industries and companies has been more efficient than private control. Under Morales, the Bolivian state has often acted in the people's best interest more than, for example, a foreign gas corporation. State-controlled industries have also generated revenue for the impoverished government, providing funds for much-needed social programmes and development work.

Morales's plan for the country's football team says a lot about his economic vision for the country, a vision that buoys his popularity and, according to recent polls, ensures he will be elected president again by a wide margin in the December elections. It also speaks of his love for football, a sport that led him to the presidential palace.

When he was 13, Morales, a child of poor farmers, began a team called Fraternidad (Brotherhood) in his small community in the Bolivian highlands. He took on the role of captain, player, referee and fundraiser. Morales explained: "I was like the owner of the team. I had to do the sheep shearing, for the llama wool. My father helped me. He was really a sportsman, we sold the wool to buy balls, uniforms."

When his family was forced by drought to migrate to the Chapare region to become coca farmers, he was quickly elected as the director of sports for the local coca union. That role led to other union positions as he rose through the ranks of the political left, eventually becoming president in 2005.

He has since played in La Paz with Argentine football legend Diego Maradona, sending the ball used in the game to Fidel Castro, signing it: "With admiration for Fidel." Later, he skipped a dinner with Chilean President Michele Bachelet to play a game in Santiago. His team beat the Chilean pros by 8 to 1.

Morales is right in seeking to put Bolivia's football team under state control. This multi-billion dollar business has favoured corporate elites for decades, separating the sport from the Latin American working-class culture that embraces and sustains it.

"Soccer is an integrator," Morales told Fox News last year. "It doesn't just have to do with championships, trophies or medals. It means much more than that. Soccer makes us forget the politicians who are our specific problems. Even poverty, if only for 90 minutes, gives way to this social phenomenon."

Republished from The Guardian

Evo Morales Closes an Old Wound – The Bolivian President’s Speech at Leganés, Spain

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:54:00 +0000

Speech by Evo Morales Ayma, Constitutional President of the Pluri-national State of Bolivia, at Leganés (Madrid), September 13, 2009, translated by Machetera

Listen to Evo Morales and the public reaction to his speech at Leganés, here:

Honorable Mayor, Rafael Gómez, the city of Leganés, city officials, Spanish government officials, beloved Ambassador of Bolivia in Spain, greetings to all our Bolivian brothers. Many thanks for your presence and for receiving me here in Leganés, in Spain. I’m surprised by the presence of thousands and thousands of Bolivians, Ecuadorans, Uruguayans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Peruvian brothers, Cuban brothers, so many Latin Americans here together tonight. I want to give you my greatest thanks for this great mobilization, this great integration of all Latin Americans in Europe. But I also want to express our respect to the Spanish people. Thank you very much for your presence and for having organized this large meeting of people of the world.

Listening to the speeches given by various sisters and brothers from Spain, I’m surprised by how they’ve followed the process of liberation in Bolivia and in Latin America, surprised by their following of the deep social, economic and political transformations. Surely many of you here now know how we organized, first through the unions, socially and communally, in order to change Bolivia, and of course, to change Latin America. If we speak of change, one of the changes, justly, is the liberation of the people of Latin America.

In Bolivia, together with the Bolivian Worker’s Central, the different social movements, [it is] a permanent struggle against the economic models that have so damaged Bolivians. If we recall the situation of the policies implemented during the republic, before the republic, the original indigenous people, the Quechua, Aymara, the Guaraní, it is a permanent struggle against the looting of our natural resources, a permanent struggle for equality between indigenous, mestizos and criollos of those times, for a new way of life, of equality and dignity, but also a permanent struggle for the respect of our rights, the right above all of the indigenous people, the most abused sector in Bolivian history and the history of Latin America. A tough resistance, a rebellion against the colonial State, a rebellion of the people against the looting of our natural resources, a permanent rebellion against the forms of subjugation. And these struggles, I want to tell you, brothers and sisters of Bolivia, have not been in vain; from the union struggle, the social struggle, the communal struggle we went to an electoral struggle.

I remember perfectly well when I arrived at Chapare in 1980, when there were negotiations with the governors and when the union leaders, ex-union leaders brought up the idea of structural changes, and the response of the neoliberal governors was that the campesinos, the indigenous, had no right to political action and that our proposals to change the subject or the agenda of the negotiations were questioned, that they were of a political character. I remember that they told us (I was a delegate from the base), they told us, you are making political proposals and they will not be heard; they told us that the politics of the indigenous campesino movement in the tropical zone of Cochabamba were the axe and the machete. In other words, manual labor, and we did not have the right to political action. And in the altiplano, it was the shovel and the hoe; the shovel to work and the hoe to work as well. Little by little that social movement went about breaking the fear of politics. A few had the right to political action and the majority, the workers and laborers, we didn’t have that right and when a worker, a miner, during the sixties, seventies, eighties acted politically, he was accused of being a communist. We salute the Spanish Communist Party, the Socialist Party, we salute the humanists here, many thanks for having taught me how to defend life. We’ve had so many meetings, but I want you to know, brothers and sisters of Latin America, of Europe, social movements of this continent, our union leaders, in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s they were accused of being communists and persecuted, the coups d’etat, the military coups, in order to do away with the union leaders from the mining sector. So then, the doctrine of North American imperialism was to accuse them of being communists, and with that motive, there were massacres in the mining centers and many of the brothers who were mining leaders escaped, sometimes to Europe. I want to express my deep respect and admiration for the accommodation that was given to many of those mining brothers, campesinos who escaped to Europe in order to survive. Surely the humanist, communist, socialist governments have given them the shelter here of political asylum.

Afterwards there came another doctrine. This was the fight against drug trafficking. I remember perfectly well how in the eighties and nineties, the union leaders were [called] drug traffickers, another persecution by the empire, and after September 11, 2001, the union leaders were accused of being terrorists. Surely some brothers will recall that some said that Evo Morales was the Andean Bin Laden, that the cocaleros were the Taliban, and with this pretext, [came] another political doctrine of zero coca, as a way of expelling the campesino movement from the coca producing zone, and to say – I want you to understand me – that we’ve borne permanent interventions, at times of a military character, to attack this rebellion of our people in Latin America. These struggles, whether they be of workers or indigenous, these mestizo struggles, these struggles of intellectuals such as Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, these struggles of revolutionary fathers such as Luis Espinal, a Spaniard who gave his life for the poor of Bolivia and, like Luis Espinal, this struggle of military patriots such as Germán Busch, such as Lieutenant Colonel Gualberto Vallarroel, I want to tell you, brothers and sisters, it has not been in vain. A struggle, of course, peaceful, democratic, in order to reach the government, the Palacio Quemado,[2] and from there to change economic and social policy. Something happened, I want you to listen, Bolivian sisters and brothers: since 1940, Bolivia has never had a fiscal surplus, not until 2005, before I became president. Afterwards, in 2006, we nationalized and recovered our hydrocarbons, and in Bolivia in the first year of our government, 2006, we had a fiscal surplus. Bolivia’s status as a beggar, that had to borrow money to come up with petty cash, is over. In 2005 Bolivia’s international reserves were $1.7 billion. The day before yesterday, we were at the Bolivian Central Bank signing an internal loan and the president of the Central Bank of Bolivia told me that now we have $8.5 billion in international reserves. From $1.7 billion in international reserves. Imagine, sisters and brothers, during the twenty years of neoliberal government, how much money went out and where it went, surely to economists, experts in financial subjects in Europe and Spain and Latin America. I’d like you to help me investigate the looting of our natural resources. How much money has Bolivia or Latin America lost, in recent years, how much money have we lost, at the expense of so many social benefits? It wouldn’t take much but it would be a relief for many Bolivian families. Now we have the reserves and now we have the surplus.

Since last year we’ve been told that there’s an economic crisis of capitalism, a financial crisis. They’ve frightened us, they’ve brought fear to see how we will face it. I thought truthfully, sisters and brothers, that this financial crisis would affect us terribly. I imagined we’d not have a commercial surplus. I want to tell you, Bolivian sisters and brothers, that on July 30 of this year, the positive commercial balance was $300 million. Bolivia has never had a positive commercial balance. And this is why, sisters and brothers, I’m convinced about democratic structural changes, and when there is a sector in opposition, it’s better to take it to the Bolivian people, in a referendum. Now, Bolivians don’t only have the right to choose their national leaders or their departmental leaders, in addition to municipal leaders. Now the Bolivian people have the right to decide through any referendum, economic policies for the Bolivian people. They are referendums that we never had before. But also, thanks to the new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, Bolivians don’t only have the right to select their national, departmental, municipal or parliamentary leaders. Now with the vote, the same people have the right to revoke any president, vice-president, parliamentarian, prefect or mayor doing badly in their area, they have the right to revoke them through their vote. This is a deep democracy that is not just representative, it is participative, where decisions are taken with the vote of the conscience of the Bolivian people. But I also want to tell you, sisters and brothers, the norms, the procedures to administer the state may also be changed in Bolivia. For the first time in 183 years of republican life, the Bolivian people approved a new Constitution; that had never before been done, it was only the political class, the parties or in the end, the party with parliamentary representation who had the right to make reforms to the Constitution. Now the people with their vote have approved a new constitution for the Bolivian state. That is, we even change Constitutions.

I want to tell you, sisters and brothers, we have a great weakness, which is changing the mentality of public officials. There are still some who do not understand what it means to be a public official. I’ve said, I don’t need ordinary public officials, I need revolutionaries at the service of the people. There’s a mentality, I’d call it a colonial mentality, an inheritance of paternalism, of bosses, of looters, of exploiters; that mentality is not easily changed and it’s one of the weaknesses that Bolivia still has. However, despite these weaknesses we are beginning to change, it’s not enough, surely the participation of the social movements in these profound transformations will continue to be important. Recently our foreign minister from Spain said to me, “There’s a lot of movement happening in Bolivia, election after election, campaigns for referendums, sometimes revocations, sometimes to approve a new Constitution.” My answer was that before, there were coups and military coups, now there are elections and elections. I am very content, although there may be elections and referendums every year, but not coups d’etat.

But I also want to tell you, in our new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, approved by the Bolivian people, no kind of foreign military base whatsoever, even less one from the United States will be allowed. And I want you, brothers from Europe, from Spain, to understand me. In Latin America, where there are U.S. military bases, there are military coups, the peace is not guaranteed, democracy is not guaranteed, and I speak with great authority, because I have been a permanent victim throughout the ‘90’s and part of the ‘80’s, part of first decade of this century, of the presence of foreign armed military, particularly from the United States. Happily, thanks to the conscience of the Bolivian people, that has come to an end. I must ask the social movements of Europe and the world: help us to do away with military bases in Latin America. All in the interest of life, democracy and peace and social justice.

Thank you very much, sisters and brothers, I think you care for me more here in Spain than in Bolivia, thanks very much. I’m sure, sisters and brothers, the process of liberation, the process of profound transformation, not only in Bolivia, but in Latin America, is a one way path. The process of transformations in democracy is unstoppable in Bolivia. Why do I say this? You, as brothers who live here, ought to be aware, a number of times neoliberal groups from the fascist, racist rightwing, tried to remove me from the government and I remember it perfectly. The first year of my government, they said, poor little Indian, he’ll be there three, four, five, six months, he won’t be able to govern and then he’ll go, they’ll get rid of him. That was in 2006. In 2007, what did these groups say? I believe that this Indian is going to stay quite awhile, something’s got to be done. 2008. In 2008 they did something. And what did they do? First they tried to get me out by the vote of the Bolivian people – the vote to revoke my mandate. I accepted: let’s go to a vote. You know that we had won the elections with 54%. In this revocation referendum the Bolivian people ratified us by 67%. When they failed at that, when the revocation failed and they couldn’t revoke me through the conscience of the people, last year they tried with a civil, not military coup d’etat. And now I’d like to salute the European countries, defenders of democracy, UNASUR, and the United Nations for defending democracy – with their civil prefectural coup d’etat they failed as well. And so we have the great triumph of the Bolivian people in politics and constitutionally. And this year, thanks to the efforts and conscience of the people, a new Constitution has been approved. Now we are obliged to apply and implement this new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, which honestly, some European countries tell me that in regard to its social rights, is more advanced than any European country.

And of what rights do we speak? We’re not just talking about individual rights, we’re not just talking about political rights; this new political constitution of the Bolivian state also respects collective rights. For example, all basic services are a human right, and if it is a human right, it may not be a private business, but a public service.

Sisters and brothers, I can talk a lot about this new Constitution of the Bolivian state, but I’m also sure that there are some demands that we’ve been unable to resolve, particularly in foreign service. I found that the Bolivian state, as it is now known worldwide, is the pluri-national state; in this pluri-national state is the diversity of the human beings who inhabit this land of Bolivia. I found, for example, barely two [Bolivian consulates] in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona. Now we are opening another consulate in Murcia – I know it’s not sufficient; we’re talking about extending the consulates to six, in four or five cities in Spain, including the Canary Islands, Tenerife, or finally, Majorca, Menorca, that at times I’ve been able to visit, sisters and brothers, to attend to the problem that we have, the subject of migration and corresponding documentation. But I also want to tell you, sisters and brothers, surely from the embassy in Spain, where all the consulates report, thanks to the understanding of the Spanish government, about certain important subjects. The subject, for example of drivers’ licenses is well underway, even an agreement about reciprocal voting; that is, Bolivians resident in Spain may have the right to vote in municipal elections. We hope to reach agreement on that during this visit, the vote in Spain.

A subject that has been a permanent concern; the vote from abroad. I want you to know, sisters and brothers, that from the [presidential] palace, we are directing a project that resulted from a 2005 law in the National Congress. Happily, the chamber of deputies approved the vote from abroad without any limitation. But from 2006 to 2009 the Senate has not approved it and you know furthermore, why the Senate has not approved it: the neoliberal Senators are very afraid of the brothers who left Bolivia in search of better living conditions. At last, with so much pressure in Bolivia and Argentina, I know that here you’ll also mobilize to pressure the National Congress to approve a law that will allow for voting outside Bolivia, that was approved for the first time, even though it’s not as extensive as I wanted. It was approved up to a certain limit, but that will be fixed, sisters and brothers, the moment in which congressional representatives who share the feelings of many brothers who live outside Bolivia, now we’ll dedicate ourselves to seeing that the vote from abroad is not limited. I am not in agreement with the idea of limiting it; it’s a way of moving against human rights, the right of Bolivian citizens living abroad. But we will start this year, this year with the foreign, although limited, vote.

Sisters and brothers, until now you’ve listened to the subject of migration. I want to tell the countries of Europe and the world, especially of Europe, its governments, that there will also be a debate, as before, Europeans, Spaniards, came to Bolivia and our grandfathers never said they were illegal. Now that Latin Americans come to Europe they cannot be declared illegal, because everyone, we all have the right to inhabit any part of the world, we all have the right to live in any part of the world, respecting the norms of each country, but to declare us illegal is a great mistake; this is where I differ from the United Nations. Happily many countries are joining us in our proposals, and we hope that soon the United Nations will establish norms that will allow for these so-called immigrants to be recognized as legal persons, I repeat, respecting the norms of each country, whether they are investors or people who come looking for better living conditions, rest assured, sisters and brothers, this will be another battle, another battle for our sisters and brothers, whether they are Europeans in Bolivia, Latin America or Latin Americans in Europe. They must be declared legal persons who live by their labor, who live to improve their economic or social condition.

There’s another central subject, sisters and brothers, the subject of the environment. Surely there are plenty of Paceños[3] here. Imagine that Chacaltaya, our Chacaltaya has no more snow. In Potosí, Chorolque, there’s no more snow – I’m sure there are Potosinos here as well. These mountains of the Bolivian altiplano, of the La Paz altiplano, are daily losing their white poncho. We must ask ourselves who’s responsible. The capitalist development model, the exaggerated and unlimited industrialization of certain western countries [is responsible]. However, this problem affects all of humanity. Therefore I want to tell you, I’ve reached the conclusion, the following conclusion: right now, in this new millennium, it’s more important to defend the rights of mother earth than the rights of human beings. If we don’t defend the rights of mother earth, it’s useless to defend human rights. To our humanist brothers, to so many social movements, groups, intellectuals, personalities who dedicate themselves to defending the environment, as well as mother earth, I want to say, let’s come together, let’s work together, let’s help our presidents, our governments who defend the rights of mother earth and everyone who defends the environment, as well as the rights of the earth; defending planet earth in order to save humanity. If we do not come together, if we do not orient ourselves, if we don’t work together, 20, 30, 50 years from now, what will be the situation of any human being? I mean, whether they’re indigenous, laborers, business owners, corporations, life is not assured. The only way to guarantee the life of the human beings who inhabit this planet earth is by defending mother earth.

It’s time to take on this huge responsibility and we all have this noble and sacred assignment of defending the environment. I call on the so-called industrialized countries to begin to think seriously of canceling the climate debt, a historical debt resulting from having caused so much damage to the environment. I feel that in this millennium we must assume this responsibility in order to defend humanity.

Sisters and brothers, I know that you have come from many different places. Greetings to brothers who came from faraway cities in order to see us, to greet us, to applaud with everyone here, to the brothers who came from the islands, to the Latin American compañeros who came to share this moment and to the organizers, thank you to the mayor of Leganés for allowing us to gather here. For my part, I want to tell you, brothers, sisters, thank you very much for everything. Until we meet again, we will continue working for equality, for dignity and for the good of Bolivians and all Latin Americans, for their liberation that is beginning in South America. Thank you very much.

Notes

[1] The Diablada is a South American dance that was created in the Andean Altiplano but holds auto sacramental origins in Spain. The dance is practised throughout the Andean region, and is an important part of the cultural festivities of the nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. The dance stands prominent during the Fiesta de la Candelaria in Peru, the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia, and the Fiesta de la Tirana in Chile. However, the dance is also practiced in Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama. (Wikipedia)

[2] Bolivia’s presidential palace.

[3] A person from La Paz.

Morales: U.S. Has No Right to Judge Bolivia’s Anti-Drug Fight

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:19:00 +0000

LA PAZ – Bolivian President Evo Morales said Wednesday that the United States “doesn’t have the authority or moral standing to question” his country’s battle against drug trafficking and he urged Washington to offer an accounting of its own anti-drug efforts.

Such was Morales’ response when asked at a press conference about a U.S. State Department report citing Bolivia for having failed to demonstrate its commitment to international counter-narcotics accords.

Bolivia, the president told reporters, is committed to a “all-out battle” with the drug trade, even though the U.S. government no longer provides anti-narcotics aid to La Paz.

Morales said that Bolivian authorities have seized 19.4 tons of cocaine and coca paste so far in 2009, compared with 11 tons during all of 2005, the year before he took office.

Bolivia’s interior ministry says that police have also destroyed 3,709 drug laboratories since Jan. 1.

The president stressed that all of those operations were carried out without any help from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which he expelled from Bolivia late last year after accusing DEA agents of engaging in unauthorized activity.

Downplaying the importance of the U.S. government’s annual evaluations of other countries’ performance in the war on drugs, he said that Washington used political considerations when deciding to label nations as cooperative or uncooperative.

He then asked why there is no certification of whether the United States is reducing its demand for illegal drugs.

“As long as there is a market for cocaine, however much we reduce coca leaf, part will always be diverted (to cocaine production): that is our reality,” the Bolivian president said.

He also repeated his proposal for a coordinated regional anti-drug policy and suggested that the 12-member Union of South American Nations could “certify or decertify the United States.”

“The struggle against drug trafficking cannot be an instrument of political control and geopolitical control,” Morales said.

Bolivia, like neighboring Peru, allows cultivation of coca in limited amounts to meet demand for legal, traditional uses in cooking, folk medicine and Andean religious rites.

Morales, who entered public life as the leader of a coca-growers union, came to office in January 2006 promising to end forced eradication of the leaf, a U.S.-directed program that had led to violent confrontations. EFE

Evo Morales: "Wherever a US base exists, there are military coups"

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:47:00 +0000

Telesur, September 13, 2009 - Bolivian president Evo Morales said this Sunday in Spain that wherever US military bases exists, so do coups. He asked the social movements of Europe and the world to help put an end to foreign military bases in Latin America.

“In Latin America, wherever a US base exists, there are coups… they do not guarantee peace or democracy” assured Morales, which is why he asked the social movements of Europe and the world to support an end to foreign intervention in Latin America.

In front of 5 thousand Bolivians and citizens of other nationalities, the head of state recalled that the constitution of his country “does not allow any foreign military base, less so one belonging to the US.”

The polemical agreement between Washington and Bogota for the installation of 7 military bases, supposedly orientated at fighting narcotrafficking and “terrorism”, has sparked off a wave of protests and concerns in neighbouring countries. Among those, Bolivia, which has stated that this agreement is a threat to the sovereignty of the nations (of South America).

Regarding Europe’s immigration policy, Morales was of the opinion that it was a grave error to declare foreigners who arrive in Europe without having passed through the legalisation process as illegal.

“We want to say to the countries of Europe and the world, especially Europe, to the governments: just as Europeans and Spaniards arrived in Bolivia and our grandparents never said they were illegal, today the Latin Americans that come to Europe cannot be declared illegals” he said.

The Bolivian head of state indicated that “everyone has the right to live in any part of the world, respecting the norms of each country,” and recalled that his government was working with the United Nations (UN) in support of the proposal of universal citizenship.

During his stay in Europe, which will last two days, Morales will meet with King Juan Carlos, and with the president of the Spanish government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

It is also expected that he will meet with business owners to sign various bilateral agreements.

This is the third time that the Bolivian head of state has carried out an official visit to Spain, the first was in September 2005, as head of the Movement Towards Socialism (MÁS), three months before his overwhelming victory in the general elections, while in January 2006 he travelled to the country as president-elect.

Bolivian Vice President defends MAS government’s record in office

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:07:00 +0000

Interview with with Álvaro García Linera, Vice-President of Bolivia, by Maristella Svampa, Pablo Stefanoni and Ricardo Bajo. Translation and notes by Richard Fidler

What is the explanation for the weakening of the opposition after more than two years of confrontations?

For President Evo’s government, the Constituent Assembly offered the possibility of arming a broad collective ensemble of all the country’s social forces. We placed ourselves at the head of this effort to build a new constitutional consensus. Internally, within the people, we had to pull together the popular bloc — not an easy task, because there was a lot of corporate diversity — and then we had to follow this up with the opening to the other social sectors, who are an important opposition albeit a minority.

And in doing so we indicated our willingness to be flexible in our political positions, to yield in our demands, and to include everyone. But the opposition social bloc had defined a strategy of blocking or suspending the constituent process, that is, of blocking a resolution of the power structure, and opted to reject the Assembly agreements in one way or another. Its objective was to prolong the crisis of the state that had first developed in 2000, to weaken the government in the hope that at some point the correlation of forces would allow the resolution of the crisis in its favour.

And even so, we for our part were insistent. The debate on the so-called “two thirds” at the end of 2006(1) was an initial symptom of what was at stake, and of the decision of a sector that was ill-disposed to accept its position as a democratic political minority. And in the two thirds and in the issue of the Constituent Assembly’s paramountcy, we yielded, we retreated, but at the same time, in return, we pushed for the consolidation of a social and political majority that also developed into a decision-making majority in the Assembly.

The second major moment of confrontation was on the issue of making Sucre the capital. It revived a century-old issue that had led to a civil war in 1899, spearheading efforts to bring about a suspension of the Constituent Assembly. Here the right-wing opposition bloc of civic leaders and prefects [department governors] revealed just how far it was willing to go — to jeopardize the lives of Assembly members and frustrate the possibility of reaching a national agreement. Confronted with this scenario, we again offered enormous concessions.

Viewed from a distance, the civic leadership in Sucre, backed by the elites in Santa Cruz, was gaining a large number of victories: almost one third of the sessions of the Congress to be held in Sucre; the offices of the Ombudsman, the Attorney General, perhaps the National Electoral Court, a set of institutions that endowed Sucre with administrative and economic relevancy, as well as more rapid access to construction of a set of infrastructure projects. But we weren’t going to accept that. And, realizing that nothing was to be gained by agreeing, or by battling indefinitely over this, we threw ourselves into the process of approving the New Constitution, in plenary in La Calancha, and then in Oruro(2). That is, we resolved to define the structure of state power, using our majority in the Constituent Assembly.

And at that time you talked about a “point of bifurcation”.

Yes, I am getting to that. Despite all this, we made a new attempt and we went looking for Rubén Costas, for Leopoldo Fernández at his estate, we went looking for Branko Marinkovic and, lastly, we proposed a process of détente to the people around Jorge Quiroga. At that point it was crystal clear that there was a minority sector that was going to impede by every means possible a solution via the national-popular project to the governmental crisis initiated in 2000.

And frankly, we needed the Constituent Assembly to build the new state, to anchor in enduring state institutions and relations of command the new correlation of forces reached by the Indigenous popular movement in the 2000-2005 cycle of mobilizations. Basically, what a Constitution does is to solidify a series of irreversible points of support, conquests and controls historically achieved through a society’s power struggles. And the ultimate proof of this commitment to confrontation of the minority right-wing opposition came when they initiated the call for departmental referendums on the autonomy statutes to be carried out in May 2008. What they were trying to do was to find a way to dispute, de facto, the regional political power, in the hope of achieving a regionalized dual power or hostile vertical split in the structure of the state. It had come to that, there was no point of return. The right wing was not prepared to be included in the national-popular project as a minority and subordinate force, and opted for territorial conflagration.

The struggle for power was being brought closer to the moment of its belligerent or ultimate resolution, in the sense that, in the last analysis, the state power is coercion. To what we have termed the “point of bifurcation”, or the moment when the crisis of the state, which began eight years earlier, would now be resolved either through a restoration of the old state power or through the consolidation of the new bloc of popular power. This is the moment when the new state order begins replicating itself.

And all this through the deployment, measurement or confrontation of naked force of the two polarized blocs. The point of bifurcation is the exceptional moment, of short duration, basic but decisive, when the “prince” abandons the language of seduction and asserts his authority through his belligerent coercive tactics. So the arrival of this day of force was a now a question of time and between May and September of 2008 we prepared for that moment.

It was a belligerent, or potentially belligerent, moment. The golpista [coup-mongering] right wing carried out its referendums and gradually began to form small regional powers that refused to recognize the government’s authority. We understood this signal and we resorted to an encircling strategy, as the military calls it, using both the coercive mechanisms of the state and social mobilization.

By May of 2008 we were engaged in an analytical evaluation, together with the social organizations and our Armed Forces, of the major risks that existed in the country and preparing contingency plans to confront a possible radicalization of the right-wing golpista strategy.

We drew up an initial contingency plan involving a huge national mobilization in defence of democracy that was not executed but was now elaborated on both the social and military planes. In August, they were betting on an electoral defeat of the government that would deprive us of democratic legitimacy, but we won the recall referendum. The government’s democratic support, far from receding, increased, from 54% [in the December 2005 presidential election] to 67%, consolidating a social majority throughout the national territory including in regions previously dominated by the opposition.

This unhinged the right. After two years of a strategy of constituent blockade, they had been hoping for a rapid return to power, starting from their base in some departments. But the recall vote expanded the national legitimacy of President Evo’s government and spread the political force of the Indigenous-popular bloc to all of the departments.

Instead of understanding the moment, the right decided to attack. The rules of war — and politics is the extension of war by other means — teach us that when an opponent is strong he should not be attacked directly, and when an army is weak it should never promote or agree to embark on a battle against a stronger army. Everything the right did was exactly the contrary of this ABC of the struggle for power. It blindly threw itself into a confrontation at the very moment when the government was strongest politically and electorally and the right was least likely to extend its base of support; and that was when its defeat began.

After the results of the August recall referendum, the civic-gubernatorial bloc began to escalate its golpista strategy: they seized institutions, we waited; they attacked the police, we waited; they destroyed and dismantled public institutions in four departments, we waited; they disarmed soldiers, we waited; they seized airports, we waited; they destroyed pipelines, we waited. They were running riot in a blind alley. They used violence against the state, providing the moral justification for a crushing response to them from the state, which it then began to deploy on a huge scale. And when they set fire to public institutions and destroyed them they lost their legitimacy in the eyes of their own social base, exposed in a matter of hours as a handful of violent punks. And then came the incidents in Pando....(3) The governor triggered the massacre in Pando in an attempt to provide a warning signal to the leaders of the mass movement — and in doing so exceeded the level of tolerance of Bolivian society as a whole.

The massacre of campesinos placed the governors on an equal footing with their mentors [former presidents] Sánchez de Losada or García Meza, and placed in the hands of the state the legal obligation to intervene quickly and overwhelmingly in defence of democracy and society.

And without a moment’s hesitation, it was to do so in the weakest link of the golpista chain, Pando. This was the first state of siege declared in defence and protection of the society, with the full support of the people horrified by the action of the golpistas.

Together with the international rejection of the golpistas, this stopped the civic-gubernatorial initiative in its tracks, resulting in its disorganized retreat. This was the moment of a popular counter-offensive, with the social and popular organizations in the front lines even in the department of Santa Cruz. It was not only the campesinos and colonizers [settlers] who mobilized but the inhabitants of the plebeian neighborhoods of Santa Cruz, and especially urban youth who, in memorable days of resistance to the fascist gangs, defended their districts and broke the clientelist domination of the Santa Cruz lodges.

The government’s firm and overwhelming political and military response to the coup, together with the strategy of social mobilization in and around Santa Cruz created a virtuous articulation of social and state forces seldom seen in Bolivia’s political history.

That was the dimension and general extension of the “army” and the “mobilized divisions” in opposition to the coup. That was the shock force that the Indigenous-popular project deployed for the defining moment of force.

The right wing saw that its shock forces were isolated and disorganized, realized that the Indigenous-popular command was politically prepared to go all the way, and chose instead to renounce its intentions and surrender. This brought to a close the cycle of state crisis and political polarization, and imposed, in a violent confrontation between the respective social forces, the lasting structure of the new state. Something similar happened in 1985, when the miners, who were the nucleus of the nationalist state, surrendered to the army divisions defending the neoliberal project.(4)

This time it was the turn of the business and landlord bloc to be defeated and give way to a new correlation of political forces in the society. In its own way, September-October of 2008 had the same state effect as the defeat of the “march for life” of the miners in 1986. Except that now it is the plebeian bloc that is celebrating the victory and the wealthy elites have to accept their historic defeat. And this was followed by the political validation by the parliament of this popular triumph. On top of the series of electoral and military victories, the Indigenous-popular government has institutionally entrenched the correlation of forces achieved in the moment of the “point of bifurcation”. And it did so through the congressional approval of the New Political Constitution of the State.

The Congress was transformed for several days into a kind of constituent Congress that combined the work completed by the Constituent Assembly nine months earlier, the government’s agreements with the minority bloc of conservative governors reached in the previous weeks, and the popular deliberation of the march from Caracollo to La Paz undertaken by the worker, Indigenous, compesino and popular organizations with president Evo at their head.(5) In the new circumstance it was clear that the Indigenous-popular axis of the government was imposing itself by its own weight on the constitutional order of the state. But at the same time, the remaining social sectors (middle classes, small and medium-sized business interests, etc.) were interacting on the basis of their own debate in the Constituent Assembly. Even the conservative bloc living off rents from the land, expressed politically by the governors and civic organizations, was taken into account, but of course as a social subject led by the new Indigenous-popular governmental nucleus, and to a lesser degree than it would have been had it accepted the call for a formal agreement issued by the government in 2006-2007. It cannot be overlooked that this political work also would serve to snatch from the right the banner of autonomy behind which it had concealed its defence of large estates and business profiteering.

That is how the national-popular bloc not only consolidated itself materially in the state structure, but took control of the three discursive axes of the new state order that will guide all the political debates of the following decades: plurinationality, autonomy, the leading role of the state in the economy. Seen from a distance, notwithstanding all the conflicts of the last three years, in terms of the enduring results, things could not have worked out better for the national-popular bloc now in power. In the end, the conditions conceded to the adversaries might have been much greater in an agreement reached in the Constituent Assembly than those recognitions and inclusions conceded to a defeated and retreating adversary, which proves that history is not always on the wrong side, as Hegel thought.

So the electoral victory was consolidated in August, the military victory in September, and the political victory in October, with the congressional approval of the constitutional referendum. And with that, the constituent cycle was definitively closed and from then on the structure of unipolar order of the new state order began to operate.

To what degree might this obvious debilitation of the opposition redirect tensions toward the interior of the pro-government bloc, given that an ambushed opposition is always very effective at uniting its own bases?

I do not think the opposition has been definitively routed, however. The opposition now has no agenda for power, it lacks a mobilizing discourse at the state level, but it still has great economic power, great power in the media and a huge veto power over many things.

It continues to be a dangerous adversary. In the economic sphere the state has certainly dealt it some powerful blows, dismantling some of the economic power of the conservative strata: the rentier and intermediary bourgeoisie no longer has the oil and gas enterprises as its generous financiers. The agrarian clientelist network that the rentier class have created in the agro-industrial sphere has been enormously weakened with the presence of EMAPA, the state company supporting food production(6), and the public presence in the soybean, wheat and rice chain, which accounts for some 20 to 30 percent of production. But the hard-line opposition bloc still retains other important spaces of agrarian, commercial and financial power, and that gives it an extensive capacity for combining forces, lobbying and confrontation. But today, and this can last for several years, what it lacks is an agenda for government; for how long this will be the case, no one knows, but it is committed to stopping the further progress of the popular agenda.

While the popular classes were defeated in 1985 and materially destructured, followed by a slow cycle of reorganization, the right is in a different situation. The right has suffered a political blow, it has lost its control of the state, it has lost the capacity to seduce the society through state power, but it still has great economic power. The form of consolidation of the point of bifurcation differs when it is the popular sector that is defeated politically and materially, because when it is the business sector that undergoes defeat it can lose politically but retain economic power that enables it to hold a permanent veto power. So this is a broken and disoriented adversary but one with a capacity to block things. Now, in this scenario, in which the fundamental contradiction has been smoothed over, weakened, there arise greater possibilities for temptations within the central nucleus, that is true.

But why should those splittist tendencies in the history of many parties not be expected to thrive within the leading nucleus?

For various reasons. In the first place, no doubt, because of the overwhelming leadership of President Evo in the political and social structure of the state and in society itself. The character, charisma and support brought by President Evo is now so great that it is an objective limit on the existence of any other leadership that might contest the social base of the government and society.

But there is another relevant factor that explains the material limits on factionalism within the government: the absence of factions with economic power. The control over government departments that might have influence, networks, that allow the formation of economic factions.

It should be borne in mind that ours is a state with a budget that has increased from 600 million to 2,300 or 2,400 million dollars, and it is normal that, in some place or other, factions of economic power, nuclei that control investments, decisions, factories, revenues, manpower, will arise. This has happened in Brazil, in Argentina, in Venezuela. But here there has been created, up to now, and in a systematic and supervised way, a governmental working structure that impedes, that has impeded, the strengthening of consolidated nuclei of influence and economic power, not to mention property, with an operational capacity and autonomous political presence within the government. A number of factors have been at work: a high degree of rotation of public employees, presidential control over the day-to-day functioning of the government departments, but also an internal morale, a kind of governmental Spartanism demanding an ethic of public service that has up to now limited the crystallization of the factions of economic power that would potentially introduce political factionalism.

Because of that, there is a very hard and unified nucleus around the President that helps to ensure that centrifugal tendencies do not emerge internally. This is the intention, to build a morale of public service in the decision-making core of the government. But what is happening at the base? Víctor Paz Estenssoro ascribed the end of the National Revolution to the existence of too many members of the MNR to fill the jobs available.

Couldn’t the same thing happen with the MAS government?(7)

Paz Estenssoro accepted this pressure of the self-seeking militant as a political habit, a perk in continuity with a political logic that he never tried to overcome. In Bolivia, ever since the 19th century, political activity has been seen as a means of social ascendancy more than a means to provide service to the res publica. In fact, the material structure of the social classes in Bolivia operates so that the processes of transition to and from a class depend not on whether or not one has the cultural capital for social advancement but on one’s political capital, that is, the political networks and influence that guarantee access to private property. That was an exclusive monopoly of caste and lineage until 1952, when it was extended to the middle classes and leadership levels of the trade unions.

Nowadays, there are sectors that press for greater “democratization” of this system and demand the right to public office as a perk for belonging to some regional leadership of the MAS. The government has responded to this pressure and degeneration of political militancy by severely rejecting and sanctioning it. Why did we expel Adriana Gil in 2006? Because a nucleus of MAS members had formed who would occupy an institution in order to demand that positions in it be awarded to them.(8)

In April of that year, we expelled some people who wanted to continue with the old practice of public office being contingent on party membership. From that time on, the President himself not only established a political ethic of public administration as a service, but made it very clear that the compañeros who joined the MAS should not hope to be part of the administrative structures of the state and that, on the contrary, they should strive to strengthen the organizational and ideological structure of the party.

If the changes in the personnel of the state are compared historically between our management of government and those before us, it will be found that we have not made 20 percent of the changes that previous administrations implemented. In the days of the MIR, ADN and the MNR(9), neither the caretakers nor the drapes in the Presidential Office were spared the party “sweep”. So it is of no concern to us that there are many members and few positions; on the contrary, you are a member, so you do not have a position. And we have emphasized this, consistent with the conception of politics as a kind of lengthy “military service” in the interest of society.

But doesn’t that impede the formation of cadres within the MAS itself?

This is a major problem, but not so much because of that. One of the major weaknesses of our political structure, of this process, is the absence of political and technical cadres. In the world revolutions the parties that formed the government have previously had decades of preparation and selection of cadres that enabled them to shoulder the changes in the society with greater organizational muscle.

The MNR itself, which was formed in the 1930s, had more than 15 years of training before acceding to government. But the MAS, which arose in 1995 as a local political structure, only recently, in 2000-2001, set out to build a national structure aimed at taking power, and by 2005 was elected to government.

It had barely four years of preparation. And that has generated difficulties, since in the basic political nucleus the MAS is not a cadre structure but a flexible coalition of social movements. It has worked to promote the organizational aspect of the cadres, but the rapid growth in urban levels has forced it to reassert the trade union membership discipline in the face of more liberal and patronage-ridden practices characteristic of urban levels. When the party was formed, the structure, for want of a better word, of functional urban cadres was parallel to the agrarian union structure and shared the political decision-making levels. But once in government, a part of the urban structure devoted itself to seeking posts, which is why, in order to limit this type of deviations and practices, it was decided in 2007 that in the national, departmental and regional levels the party structures would be under the control of the social organizations.

So how are positions filled?

Since we have become the government, the mechanisms for selection based on merit have been reinforced in the technical levels of the civil service, and politically sensitive positions are screened by the national social organizations. Since 2007, appointments to such positions are no longer processed through the departmental management lists.

What effect has the Santos Ramírez affair had on the government’s economic agenda, given that YPFB is an emblematic company in that process?(10)

YPFB is not only the emblematic company, it is the company that sustains the country economically and the material basis of our reconquered sovereignty. It has a cash flow of some 3,500 million dollars, and for Bolivia that is a lot of money. In terms of assets, YPFB controls between 2,200 and 2,300 million dollars on behalf of the state. Today, 50 percent of our exports are oil and gas and those exports go through YPFB. It is the crown of the Bolivian economy and must be one of the twenty largest businesses in Latin America.

The initial news about the corruption in YPFB was a very harsh blow since it struck the country’s emblematic business, but on top of that it was the work of a compañero who was potentially one of the most likely successors to President Evo in the MAS political leadership.

And we responded immediately and just as harshly: removing Ramírez forthwith from control of the company and publicly supporting the investigations by the state prosecutor. In doing so, we broke with the old tradition of the traditional parties of concealing, delaying or covering up corruption by their politically influential members. We decided to signal something new: in this government, and where the people’s interests are involved, there are no friends, no families, no militants, no pals or flunkies. There are those who serve and those who are corrupt, and the latter will be sent to jail, regardless. We cannot allow the least inkling of error or suspicion in the leading cadre. The order was clear: that justice take its course and that no one should exert pressure. Great care was taken to ensure that no level of the state would interfere, pressure, or suggest anything at all in favour of Santos. But the damage is done. It will take months before the wound is healed. But again, there is a notable lack of cadres.

That’s why we have had to adopt a law that allows salaries higher than the President’s for technical staff in strategic enterprises. It’s our local form of the Leninist NEP — the New Economic Policy in post-revolution Russia. The goal of the NEP, in addition to the alliance with the peasants, was fundamentally to recruit technicians to administer the subordinate levels of the state, given that while the state is a political structure it has bureaucratic-administrative and technical-scientific levels that require knowledge and skills that cannot be rapidly acquired or transformed.

To put an end to the economic catastrophe he faced in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, Lenin had to rehire the technicians from the old state, until a simpler administration was gradually created. And he ordered that below each technician there be placed a youth who would learn, and we are doing the same thing.

We began this back in 2006, changing the organization and individuals at the decision-making levels of the civil service (ministers, deputy ministers and some managers), but we did not touch the secondary structure of the state administration until younger staff could be trained to substitute for the older ones. Now we have new challenges: state-owned companies that are getting much bigger within one, two or three years.

We need competent people, who have to be recruited in the labour market. Hence the route we have taken: political control vested in the decision-making levels and excellent technical staff, with salaries many times higher than the managers of the companies in which they are working. An example is Carlos Villegas, who makes 13,000 Bolivianos, and a manager in Andina can earn 60,000 Bolivianos....; at this point we have no other option, until we have managed to train a new generation of public service workers with substantial technical efficiency but, in addition, a political commitment that allows a new equalization of the salary scale.

There is a very strong narrative in the government concerning decolonization. How does this objective translate in terms of cultural and educational policies?

There are various dimensions to decolonization and it is a major component in the politics of the social movements. We have inherited a society that is colonized through and through: economically, we had to beg foreign countries to pay salaries; politically, we had to ask permission from foreign embassies to appoint ministers; spiritually, the people thought that power was an argument over skin colour and family names; mentally, people thought that whatever came from foreign universities was knowledge and the rest was folklore. To smash this crockery clogging the vital energy of Bolivians, the first step we took was political decolonization: to make decisions as a country without consulting foreign governments. In the past, a government minister had to get the approval of the United States embassy; the minister of housing, the approval of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

A second moment is economic decolonization, which generally speaking means breaking with the outward flow of the surplus: the society generates a surplus in various ways — poetically, the open veins of Latin America — and this surplus would be transferred abroad in huge amounts.

So decolonization means staunching those bloodflows so that the surplus that is generated is reinvested within the country, which is what we have done with the nationalization decree and the gradual recovery of the public companies and the foreign exchange policies, the tax policies governing remittances of earnings, etc. The best example is the government take on oil and gas revenues. It varies between 65 and 77 percent, while previously it was 27 percent, that is, only 27 percent of the hydrocarbon profits remained in Bolivia. Today, for every 100 dollars in profits, between 65 dollars in the smaller fields and 77 dollars in the larger ones remains in the country. This is the material basis of economic sovereignty. Still to come is the other aspect, more enduring and more complicated, which is the cultural and spiritual decolonization of the society. This society broke with the colonizing paradigm by electing, for the first time in the history of this country, an Indigenous President. And from that moment on, all of the colonial system of symbols that imprisoned life and soul began to shatter irreversibly.

Now we have a campesino Indian governing Bolivia. Soldiers have to stand to attention before him; civil servants have to carry out his instructions; business people have to request audiences with him; and courts and rulers pay homage to him. Cultural decolonization has two axes, therefore, that must be addressed as complements. One has to do with the diversity of cultures, languages, histories and memories. And the other refers to the diversity of civilizations, that is, modes of production of the meaning of life, time, politics. Decolonization in the first of these axes, the cultural, is easier to achieve, and we now have experiences in other multicultural societies, such as Belgium, India or Canada: education in various languages, plurilingual public administration, plural historical narrative within the common national history, which comes to be a national history of various nations, etc. It will be mandatory for the schools and universities to teach such languages as Castilian Spanish (as a language of integration), a foreign language (as a language of communication with the world), and an Indigenous language that is dominant in the region (Aymara in La Paz, Quechua in Cochabamba, and Guaraní in Santa Cruz).

Within the state sphere, the civil servants have to learn one Indigenous language as well, depending on the region. Similarly, in government services, publications, speeches by public officials. And also in the realm of culture, the decolonization of memory, the official vindication or recovery of other heroes, and the dates commemorated by the Indigenous peoples. The diverse mestizo and Indigenous history must be officially recognized in textbooks. What is more complicated is decolonization from the civilizing standpoint; that has to be viewed now within the organizational and cognitive matrix of individuals. In the educational field, it involves reclaiming other knowledges, other discursive constructions, not necessarily written ones, of knowledge. How we are going to achieve this is part of a debate within the government; how we are going to preserve as public heritage what is written in the textiles (Aymara weavings), as state wisdom. It is a complicated debate.

In the area of healthcare, we have taken bigger steps, for example joining the doctor with the practitioner of traditional medicine, or placing the midwife alongside the nurse, for people to choose in the medical clinic. This is a prototype of wisdom and medical procedure that the state is beginning to institutionalize, even though there is no regulation yet of this local knowledge which is dispersed but corresponds to another civilization, not only to another culture.

Another logic, to understand what is death, life, blood, food. Politically, as well, we have made progress in incorporating communitarian democracy as one of the legitimate democracies in the mode of production of decisions in the state. Or the incorporation of social control via the trade-union, partnership and communitarian structures and even the state administration.

And in the economic sphere, we have incorporated, recognized, promoted and financed the communitarian structures as part of the productive area that must be decided on as a portion of the TGN investment.(11) This is a long and complicated process. But we have already begun to take decisive steps.

“Along with the law of the communities is the law of the state.” Listening to Evo Morales, we notice a discrepancy between his speeches in defence of Pachamama, the land and the territory, directed more toward the outside world, and a more developmentalist discourse within the country, including denunciations of the NGOs that promote a petroleum-free Amazon. How do you explain this?

Clearly, the campesino and communitarian productive logic is based on a type of productive rationality that is locally sustainable with nature, because it has as a foundation a logic of advances and returns between generations. Involved here is a material fact, that in order to guarantee the food that is present today, it is necessary to preserve the nutritional conditions for those who come after, which is conducive to a dialogical reading and a long-term sustainable relationship with nature.

The form in which this is rationalized and verbalized leads to the ritualized dialogue with nature, as a living body providing, by leave, whatever is necessary for reproduction, which is later returned and maintained to guarantee in the long term that metabolic exchange between human beings and nature. Adopting a concept of Marx in studying the rural commune in India in the Grundrisse, in the campesino civilization nature is presented, therefore, as an organic externalization of subjectivity. You cannot destroy your own body, therefore, as that would be suicidal. The campesino movement has defended and is going to defend a form of use of nature that we now call rational, as opposed to the processes of depredation peculiar to the civilization of surplus-value.

That’s why in Lain America, in the Indigenous-campesino movement, there has been a discursive construction of militant defence of the powers of nature in opposition to the expansive depredation of capitalist exploitation. With time, this agrarian and campesino productive logic became a political logic of confrontation with the neoliberal developmentalist state. The subject becomes more complex when the Indigenous campesinos, previously excluded from citizenship and economic power, become the leading bloc in the state and the communities become a part of the state, which is what has happened with us in Bolivia.

So, on the one hand, this logic of the dialogue with nature leads to state action; but at the same time, in as much as you are the state, you need resources and growing surpluses in order to meet basic necessities of all Bolivians including those most in need such as the Indigenous and popular urban and rural communities. And there, obviously, tension arises. Accordingly, you have to tread carefully. To expand environmental protection and the sustainable use of nature as a state policy, but at the same time you need to produce on a large scale, to implement processes of expansive industrialization that provide you with a social surplus that can be redistributed and support other processes of campesino, communitarian and small-scale modernization.

In the case of the gas and oil exploration north of La Paz, we are trying to produce hydrocarbons to balance geographically the society’s sources of collective wealth, to generate a state surplus and simultaneously preserve the spatial environment in coordination with the Indigenous communities. Today we are not opening a passage in the northern Amazon to allow the entry of Repsol or Petrobras. We are opening a passage in the Amazon to allow the entry of the state.

And who will ensure that the state will not be as destructive as the transnational companies?

We have to take care that it is not. Of course there will be a tension between social-state logic and a sustainable use of nature, and the social-state need to generate economic surpluses that are the state’s responsibility. It involves some tension, just like the “state of social movements”, between the democratization of power and a monopoly of decisions (social movement/state). We have to live with that vital contradiction of history. There are no recipes. Is it mandatory to get gas and oil from the Amazon north of La Paz? Yes. Why? Because we have to balance the economic structures of Bolivian society, because the rapid development of Tarija with 90 percent of the gas is going to generate imbalances in the long run.(12) It is necessary, accordingly, to balance in the long term the territorialities of the state. Likewise, we need economic surpluses in order to strengthen community structures, to expand them, to find means of modernization that are distinct alternatives to the destruction of the communal structures, as has been happening up to now. And at the same time it is necessary to promote, in agreement with the communities, a hydrocarbon production that is not destructive of the environment.

If the communities say no, is the state still going to enter?

Here is where the debate lies. What has happened? When we consulted the CPILAP(13), we were asked to go to negotiate in Brussels with its horde of lawyers and that we comply with some environmentalist statements published by USAID. How is that? Who is preventing the state from exploring for oil in the north of La Paz: the Tacanas Indigenous communities, an NGO, or foreign countries? That is why we have gone to negotiate community by community and there we have encountered the support of the Indigenous communities to drive ahead in petroleum exploration and development. The Indigenous-popular government has strengthened the long struggle of the peoples for land and territory.

In the case of the minority Indigenous peoples in the lowlands, the state has consolidated millions of hectares as historic territoriality of many peoples with a low population density. But combined with the right of a people to the land is the right of the state, of the state led by the Indigenous-popular and campesino movement, to superimpose the greater collective interest of all the peoples. And that is how we are going to go forward.

Published in Le Monde Diplomatique, Bolivian edition, in August 2009, original under the title “El punto de bifurcación es un momento en el que se miden ejércitos” (“The point of bifurcation is a moment when armies gauge their respective forces”). The Spanish text is also available at http://tinyurl.com/kle4vt.

Notes

(1) The opposition parties in the Constituent Assembly argued that each individual article in the new Constitution, as drafted, had to be adopted by a majority of two-thirds of the votes, that is, more than the combined vote of the MAS deputies and their allies.

(2) Owing to right-wing harassment and threats, the Assembly met for a while in La Calancha, a military base, and then in Oruro, where the new Constitution was adopted in December 2007 without the attendance of the opposition. Following departmental autonomy referendums and the presidential recall referendum in 2008, which registered a shift in the political relationship of forces in favour of the MAS government, the draft Constitution was adopted with amendments by the Congress, then ratified in a popular vote throughout Bolivia in January 2009.

(3) Bolivian rightists organized violent antigovernment demonstrations in several departments in September 2008. In Pando a massacre that resulted in dozens of deaths, mainly of campesinos, led to charges of genocide against the governor, who had allegedly promoted the clashes.

(4) In 1985, a collapse of tin prices led the MNR government of Paz Estenssoro to lay off 20,000 miners and implement a “shock treatment” austerity program.

(5) The reference is to a mass march of many thousands from Caracollo in the department of Oruro to La Paz, the capital — a distance of 200 kilometres — in support of the new Constitution adopted in 2007 by the Constituent Assembly.

(6) EMAPA: Empresa de Apoyo a la Producción de Alimentos.

(7) Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement toward socialism).

(8) Adriana Gil, a former supporter of the MAS in Santa Cruz, has since organized her own party, the Social Democratic Force, to campaign against the MAS government.

(9)Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR – Revolutionary Left Movement); Acción Democrática Nacionalista (ADN – Nationalist Democratic Action); Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR – Revolutionary Nationalist Movement).

(10) Santos Ramírez, the president of YPFB, the state oil and gas company, was fired and arrested in February 2009 following reports that he had received payments from a shell company represented by a Bolivian oil industry executive who had recently signed a multimillion dollar contract with YPFB.

(11) TGN is an Argentine gas pipeline carrier that transports gas from Bolivia.

(12) Tarija is the southernmost department of Bolivia.

(13) Central de Pueblos Indígenas de La Paz.

Bolivia: ‘It is possible to build a better world’

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:12:00 +0000

Federico Fuentes, Sao Paulo

5 September 2009

As Bolivia heads towards its December 6 national elections, the right-wing opposition has again turned to violence and disinformation to try to halt the process of change led by the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales.

On August 11, letter bombs sent to social movements were discovered and deactivated.

One of the bombs detonated in the hands of the wife of Fidel Surco, a leader of the National Coalition for Change, which unites most of Bolivia’s indigenous, peasant, worker and popular organisations. She was hospitalised and treated for severe damage to her hands and eyes.

Sergio Loayza, vice president of Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism party (MAS), said “[these] violent acts of terrorism are aimed at frightening our leaders” because the right wing knows “that they cannot win the elections”.

Together with Rosaria Apaza, from the MAS national leadership, Loayza spoke to Green Left Weekly at an international seminar organised in Sao Paulo, Brazil by the Socialism and Liberty Party over August 17-18.

The letter bombs came only months after a terrorist cell made up of foreign and Bolivian mercenaries was disbanded in April in the city of Santa Cruz, the heartland of the right-wing opposition.

The mercenaries were found with plans to assassinate Morales and members of his cabinet. A cache of rifles, munitions, and plastic explosives was also discovered.

Since then it has been revealed that right-wing opposition leaders had funded the terrorist cell.

In September 2008, the rich elites of Santa Cruz, together with right-wing prefects (governors) from the other opposition controlled departments (states) in Bolivia’s east, were involved in violent takeovers of government buildings in the region, as part of a coup attempt against the Morales government.

After the massacre of dozens of indigenous peasants in the state of Pando, the Morales government ordered the military to move in against the coup-plotters. At the same time, the nation’s progressive social movements mobilised to go to Santa Cruz, threatening to take over the city.

The combined action by the government and the social movements caused the defeat of the coup attempt.

This opened the way for the approval of a new constitution, which was ratified in a national referendum with 60% support in January.

The new constitution radically increased the rights of indigenous people and recognised state control of Bolivia’s natural resources.

“For us, the December 6 elections are very important”, said Loayza. “We want to ratify our indigenous President Evo Morales and our vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera, and above all guarantee a two-thirds majority” in the national assembly.

“Until now, although we have controlled the executive power, the government, this has not been enough. The judiciary is controlled [by the right wing]; they control the Senate too.

“That is why more than 100 laws that the executive has sent to the Senate have been blocked. It has only been due to the mobilisation of the social movements that we have been able to approve some laws. That is why it is important that we win a majority in the Senate.

“This is the body where we will be able to put the new constitution into practice. We want to consolidate this process and we will only be able to do this as long as we have the necessary support at the national level.

“That is why they know perfectly well that for them this is do or die, and for us as well.”

In this context, “the social organisations have begun to unite and become stronger than ever”, added Apaza.

“There is hope that the social organisations, the middle class, intellectuals and everyone united can guarantee the necessary two-thirds [needed] to approve the many laws we need to pass.”

According to a recent Gallup poll, Morales has 57.7% support among voters. His next closest competitor, millionaire Samuel Doria Media, has 9.7% support, followed by the former prefect for Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa, who was revoked from his post in a recall referendum in 2008, with 8.6%.

Loayza told GLW that the right wing has “no solid candidates <193> they don’t have political arguments.

“But we cannot underestimate them: they have economic powers, logistical powers and, what’s more, they count on the support of US imperialism.”

Private corporations control most of Bolivia’s media. Loayza said that they had used this power to “confuse and misinform the population”.

“The only thing they do is try to create confusion and disinformation. That is also why they appeal to terrorist acts to try to halt this revolutionary process.”

However, Loayza said, “we believe that these deep transformations have to be extended throughout all the Americas. This process, headed by Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, has to radiate throughout all of Latin America and transcend the borders of Latin America.

“We believe it is possible to build a better world and that is what the US empire does not want to understand.”

Republished from Green Left Weekly

Morales named "World Hero of Mother Earth" by UN General Assembly

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:25:00 +0000

EFE. August 31, 2009.

La Paz, Aug 29, 2009 (EFE via COMTEX) -- The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Rev. Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, on Saturday declared Bolivian President Evo Morales as "World Hero of Mother Earth" in a ceremony at the presidential palace in this capital.

With a medal and a parchment scroll, the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization named Morales "the maximum exponent and paradigm of love for Mother Earth" in the resolution for his decoration that was read during the ceremony.

The document added that the decision was taken "after extensive consultation" among representatives of the General Assembly's member countries.

D'Escoto recalled that Morales "was the one who most helped" the United Nations declare last April 22 as International Mother Earth Day, or "Pachamama" as Mother Earth is said in Bolivia's Aymara Indian tongue.

For his part, the president said that the honor is not for Evo Morales, "but for our ancestors and the native peoples" that "have always defended Mother Earth." He added that he will continue trying to get the international community to acknowledge the rights of Mother Earth.

Besides Morales, the former Cuban head of state Fidel Castro has been named "World Hero of Solidarity" and the late ex-president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, will be honored as "World Hero of Social Justice." "What we want to do is present these three people to the world and say that they embody virtues and values worth emulation by all of us," said D'Escoto, who like the socialist Morales is a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

D'Escoto was elected president of the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly on June 4, 2008, and was Nigaraguan foreign minister during the first Sandinista government from 1979 to 1990.

Knowhow of Andean Peoples on Offer at Bolivia Universities

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:11:00 +0000

By Victor Sancho

LA PAZ – The ancestral knowledge of the Aymara, Quechua and Guarani Indians forms part of the curriculum of Bolivia’s first three indigenous universities, whose inaugural class includes 480 students from rural communities.

Studies in oil and natural gas, highland and tropical agronomy, veterinary and zoo-technical science, the textile industry and aquaculture are some of the 12 degree programs offered at these new institutions of higher learning promoted by the government of socialist President Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state.

But the universities are striving to do more than promote an appreciation for the knowledge of the country’s main indigenous communities; the goal instead is for students to apply that knowledge to practical projects in rural areas as part of their advanced studies.

One of the universities, an Aymara establishment named Tupac Katari in honor of an Indian leader who led an 18th century rebellion against Spanish colonial rule, is located in a building in the town of Warisata – about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from La Paz – that in 1931 became the first indigenous school in the Bolivian altiplano (high plain).

More than 160 students at Tupac Katari live on campus from Monday to Friday, while 320 other students are enrolled at the other two indigenous universities: Casimiro Huanca, a Quechua institution in the central province of Cochabamba; and Apiaguaiki, a Guarani university in the southern province of Chuquisaca.

Edgar Mamani, 26, arrived in Warisata from a rural community 600 kilometers away – having been selected from among a group of young people there – but said he plans to return home and apply all the knowledge he has acquired.

But rather than studying law, architecture or medicine, Mamani said he will specialize in food engineering because that will better prepare him to give back to his region.

“I’ve always wanted to go to university and I’d always thought about something that had to do with the countryside. I can’t leave my region, and this university has a vision of productivity that is necessary for the changes Bolivia is experiencing,” the student, wearing a typical Andean wool cap, told Efe.

Celso Anaya, 25, attends his Aymara Agronomy class each day wearing a scarf featuring the colors of the Whipala indigenous flag, which after the approval of Bolivia’s new constitution – aimed at empowering the Indian majority and narrowing the 90-1 gap in wealth between the richest and poorest sectors of the population – became a national symbol.

Anaya told Efe he chose Tupac Katari for its “basic, philosophical principles,” and because he will be surrounded by his native culture while pursuing his university studies.

The rector of Tupac Katari, Benecio Quispe, an Aymara Indian from the southwestern province of Oruro, said the university is part of President Morales’ “decolonization” goals.

“One might think this university was founded so Indians can keep being Indians, but no. It’s not about creating ethnocentric universities, universities that turn Indians into a type of walking museum,” Quispe said.

Instead, educational authorities want to train top-notch professionals in every field, and to do that they have devised courses of study that combine the recovery of Indians’ language and culture with the study of Spanish and English.

The objective of the indigenous universities is for students to return to their communities once their studies are complete and apply the traditional knowledge they acquire to improve the productivity of their region.

For that reason, half of study time is devoted to practical matters, with students tasked with creating a project applicable to their home community.

Students at Tupac Katari – like at any other university – also take time for recreation activities such as playing traditional Aymara instruments or dancing to Huayño folk music before lunch hour.

Republished from LAHT

Bolivia proposes continental referendum on US-Colombia military deal

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:42:00 +0000

AP, August 27

Bolivian President Evo Morales proposed Wednesday that South Americans vote in a continentwide referendum on Colombia's plan to give the U.S. military greater access to its military bases.

Morales said he will take the proposal to Friday's meeting of the Union of South American Nations, or UNASUR, which will discuss negotiations between Bogota and Washington to allow increased U.S. military presence at seven Colombian bases through a 10-year lease agreement.

"If the Colombian president wants his bases to be used, I say I want a referendum in South America so the people of Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina _ all 12 countries _ can decide," said Morales, who called the proposal a provocation by the U.S. to create conflict and stall integration in the region.

The leftist governments in Venezuela and Ecuador also have criticized the pending deal, which the U.S. says is necessary to help Colombia fight drug trafficking and leftist guerrillas.

Ecuador's national assembly passed a resolution Tuesday saying the U.S. use of Colombian military bases would undermine peace in the region.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez referred to the pending base deal as "a declaration of war against the Bolivarian Revolution," referring to his socialist political movement.

Colombian officials deny the agreement is a threat to its neighbors, and say it is necessary to more effectively help Colombia's security forces fight drug traffickers and leftist rebels.

U.S. diplomat Christopher J. McMullen, speaking in Uruguay Wednesday, said no one is proposing a U.S. base on Colombian soil, and the agreement is clear in that the U.S. will respect territorial sovereignty and not intervene in the affairs of other countries.

"We don't think it's responsible for a leader such as President Hugo Chavez to speak of the winds of war because it doesn't serve the cause of peace in the hemisphere," said McMullen, deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.

UNASUR meets in Bariloche, Argentina.

Morales Annuls Forest Exploitation Concessions, Turns Land Over to Indians

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:39:00 +0000

LA PAZ – The government of Evo Morales on Sunday annulled the concessions to exploit forest areas in a portion of eastern Bolivia and handed over more than 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of those lands to the Guaraya Indians.

Morales attended the ceremony to turn over the lands and forests in the town of Ascension de Guarayos, in Santa Cruz province, which borders on Brazil.

In his speech at the event, Morales emphasized that his agrarian reform plan is part of his effort to provide “equality” to Bolivians, and he asked the Indians to organize themselves to defend their lands.

Land Vice Minister Alejandro Almaraz said that the lands that were turned over to the Guarayas had been in other hands for some time despite the fact that Bolivian law protects the community property of the country’s ethnic groups.

Almaraz said that “there can be no private companies” in the region, no matter how much they might be practicing sustainable exploitation of the forests, because the Indians’ right to the land overrides that consideration.

“Those forests have to serve to ensure the future of the Guaraya people and should be exploited but at the same time be conserved,” said Almaraz, who justified the government’s decisions within the framework of Morales’ “agrarian revolution.”

However, he also announced that the titles to more than 30,000 hectares (75,000 acres) would be given to agri-businessmen in the same region because they were adhering to and helping carry out the agrarian law.

Republished from LAHT

Bolivia Prescribes Solidarity: Health Care Reform under Evo Morales

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:19:00 +0000

Jason Tockman, Aug 16 2009

The first time Mario Terán faced a doctor from Cuba, he killed him. He heard Che Guevara utter his famous last words: "Shoot, coward; you are only going to kill a man," and in October of 1967, in a small schoolhouse in rural Bolivia, Sergeant Terán fired a round of bullets into the revolutionary's body.

Forty years later, Terán walked into a medical clinic staffed by Cuban physicians. Disguising his identity, he requested medical attention. His cataracts were corrected, his sight restored.

Like hundreds of thousands of other Bolivians, Che's killer is a beneficiary of Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle), the cornerstone of Cuba's programs of social solidarity in the country. In addition to almost 2,000 Cuban medical personnel in Bolivia, aid from Cuba and Venezuela has funded the opening or expansion of at least 20 hospitals and 11 eye clinics across the country.

The support falls under the rubric of what President Evo Morales calls the "Peoples' Trade Agreement" (TCP)-also known as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) or TCP-ALBA-a regional integration accord signed in April 2006 that seeks to depart from the free trade model. Based upon principles of solidarity, cooperation and complementarity, the agreement recognizes asymmetries between countries and provides the greatest advantages to those with the smallest economies-in this case Bolivia.

What Cuba has, and is uniquely able to deliver under the framework of the TCP-ALBA, is a massive surplus of skilled physicians that the socialist country has been sending abroad since its first medical mission to Algeria in 1963.

Much as they do at sites across Bolivia, Cuban doctors work side-by-side with Bolivian physicians at the San Francisco de Asis Hospital in the rural town of Villa Tunari, nestled in the tropical El Chapare region. A Bolivian administrator explains that the hospital staff is comprised of 68 Cubans integrated with the 72 Bolivians who work there. Of the three surgeons, two are Cuban. The government of Cuba covers all of the expenses of their doctors, and they do not charge for services. One of the Cubans on site proudly asserts that in the span of one year his team had seen more than 30,000 patients, and conducted 400 surgeries.

At a national level, Bolivia's TCP-ALBA Coordination Team documented that in 2007 Cuban medical personnel had provided services to around three million Bolivians. The following year, a BBC article reported the number of consultations had surged to nine million. Government figures from 2009 indicate that more than 260,000 Bolivians had undergone eye surgeries through Operación Milagro.

But not everyone in Bolivia is thrilled about the Cubans' presence. Foremost among the critics is the profession's trade association, the Bolivian Medical College, which claims that the Cuban physicians are unqualified and ignorant of Bolivian customs related to matters of health. Moreover, the College argues that the influx of foreign doctors deprives Bolivians of work.

The proposition of substituting Bolivian for Cuban doctors has resonated with many in the medical community. In an outlying neighborhood of El Alto, a Bolivian doctor, speaking anonymously, expressed that, while he does not oppose the Cuban teams, he shares the sentiment of the Medical College: "This money should go to Bolivian doctors, not to Cubans, we say. There are unemployed Bolivian doctors. They should give the work to them, not to foreigners."

Many doctors contest the profession's official narrative, including Cochabamba physician Godofredo Reinicke, once El Chapare's Human Rights Ombudsman, and now director of the human rights group Puente Investigación y Enlace. Reinicke explains: "The Medical College has rejected the Cubans' presence because... it lacks the solidarity that it once had with the people; the doctor has become some sort of mercantilist. For me, the presence of [Cuban] doctors in particular is aid of utmost importance. [They are] advancing the theme of solidarity for doctors and common citizens to see how people can work without the necessity of pressure, conditionality or money."

Nationality aside, few would contest that the Bolivian health care system suffers from insufficient facilities and personnel. According to a 2004 World Bank report, the number of Bolivian medical practitioners per capita was half of the Latin American average, with only 6.6 doctors and 3.4 nurses for every 10,000 people. The Bank estimated that an additional 8,850 health professional and many more health facilities were needed in Bolivia.

"Seventy-seven percent of the population is excluded from health services in some manner," explained Bolivia's former Health Minister Dr. Nila Heredia in her 2006 presentation before the World Health Organization. "This reproduces in the field of health those inequalities and injustices of the economic structure."

Under Bolivia's system, the country's elite nets five times more in health care expenditures than those with the lowest incomes. Social security and private health care, which together represent four-fifths of all health care expenditures, are highly regressive. The World Bank found that only around 4% goes to poorest 20% of the population, while almost half is enjoyed by the richest quintile. Rural residents are especially disadvantaged, with many effectively lacking any access to health care services.

While medical solidarity from Cuba, Venezuela and other donor countries has been helpful in confronting Bolivia's uneven health care landscape, it is not a permanent fix. In the end, Bolivians should be seeing Bolivian doctors, a point implicitly acknowledged by the several thousand scholarships provided to Bolivians to study medicine in Cuba and Venezuela.

The Morales government has also initiated a series of domestic programs to increase health services. A newly announced mother-child subsidy called "Juana Azurduy" provides cash payments to pregnant women and mothers with babies through their second year, so long as they maintain pre- and post-natal checkups. Nutritional and vaccination campaigns have been initiated and expanded to combat malnutrition and diseases such as yellow fever and rubéola (measles). And in an effort to transcend the dominance of the "biomedical" model, the newly approved Constitution (January 2009) guarantees and promotes the use of indigenous medicines and "ancestral knowledge and practices."

Although these reforms signify important advances, there remain significant structural, budgetary and ideological challenges fundamental to the design of Bolivia's health care system. Debates over privatized care, unequal access, lack of funds, and the prioritization of biomedical disease treatment over the promotion of health and traditional medicines are by no means unique to Bolivia. Yet they sit uncomfortably at odds with the new Constitution's promise of "universal, free, equitable, intracultural" access to health care for all Bolivians.

Lifting Bolivia from close to the bottom of the hemisphere's health indicators will be a difficult task for Morales, much as it was for his predecessors. The initiatives he has implemented to date provide, at best, partial answers. But while Bolivia awaits more durable solutions, the government's immediate approaches have won accolades from many Bolivians, with the importation of Cuban medical professionals being a particularly popular measure.

"The Cubans are well received by those who have visited them and been attended as patients," the mayor of a town in El Chapare told me. "I welcome them because they are the support the population needs."

Republished from NACLA

Morales Ally’s Wife Wounded in Bolivia Bombing

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:03:00 +0000

LA PAZ – The wife of a grassroots leader who is an ally of Bolivian President Evo Morales was seriously wounded by a letter bomb.

Arminda Colque, who was waiting with four other people for a meeting to begin, opened an envelope she had just received about 3:00 p.m. Wednesday in the waiting room of a union headquarters in La Paz, triggering the blast, eyewitnesses said.

Fidel Surco, head of the Conalcam umbrella organization of grassroots groups loyal to the government, told Erbol radio that the envelope was addressed to him.

Colque and the other four people in the room were taken to La Paz’s Arco Iris Hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery.

Police gathered evidence at the crime scene and are trying to determine if the blast was linked to an explosion that occurred around midday Wednesday at a construction company office, wounding two firefighters.

Bolivia’s deputy interior minister, Marcos Farfan, said the government was concerned about the incident and refused to rule out a link between the explosions.

Surco’s relatives and lawmakers from Morales’s socialist MAS party condemned what happened to the grassroots leader’s wife and said it was a politically motivated attack.

The attack was staged by “a new terrorism network” linked to Bolivian-born Croatian citizen Eduardo Rosza Flores, who was killed in an April 16 police operation, Sen. Felix Rojas said.

Morales said Thursday that the Bolivian right recently started hiring Peruvian mercenaries to stage attacks to destabilize his government.

The president spoke in a press conference at which he condemned Wednesday’s bombings, though he did not blame those attacks on the alleged mercenaries.

“It goes well beyond that. Obviously, it is under investigation, but I want you to know that the opposition is hiring some Peruvians to attack life, that is the most serious thing,” Morales said, adding that he could not provide more information for the time being. EFE