HOME
your socialist home on the internet
ABOUT US
who we are, what we do
NEWS & VIEWS
newspaper, articles, statements
THEORY
what is socialism, marxism
JOIN US!
joining, getting active
CONTACT US
branch directory
Y.S.A.
youth 4 socialist action
F.I.
socialists around the world
CULTURE
poetry, reviews, commentary
HISTORY
events & people from the past
SCIENCE
science, dialectics & more
LINKS
other important sites
WHAT'S NEW
listing of what's been recently added
Rage Still Boils in Bolivia After New Regime is Installed
By ROBERTO RODRIGUEZ and CARLA PUNKOYA
LA PAZ, Nov. 11—In Bolivia, is “everything calm now,” as Carlos
Gardel’s old
tango says? Someone arriving in La Paz and seeing the people walk
calmly
walking down the avenues or stopping to chat in the Plaza Murillo,
seeing
the marvelous street fairs and the “gringo” bag carriers who are
returning
to fill the hotels, might get that impression. But you just have to
scratch
the surface a bit to reveal another reality.
The enormous social tensions that led to the recent rebellion are still
there. They are being expressed in a multitude of demands, going from
stopping delivery of the natural gas to calling for the release of an
Aymara
peasant jailed for applying the law of his community against a horse
thief.
All these demands came together in October in the single slogan, “Down
with
Goni, the murderer.” [That is, the then president Gonzalo Sanchez de
Lozada.]
Behind all of this, the core of the social tensions was and is the
tremendous and growing poverty to which 80 percent of the Bolivian
people
have been condemned by the colonial capitalist system. The issue of the
natural gas assumed such importance because the Bolivian people thought
that
its use to develop industry in the country was a way of mitigating
their
poverty.
We have seen a profound consciousness of this problem of poverty, not
among
the “political experts” and other charlatans who abound here, but among
the
workers, the people of the poor neighborhoods, and the ordinary
peasants.
Every conversation, no matter how it begins, always come to the same
conclusion, “We are not going to put up with this poverty any more.”
And a
good many add, “We prefer to die from a bullet than to die from
hunger.”
That is, we are going to continue rebelling, if this is not solved.
And it is not being solved. The present government headed by Carlos
Mesa in
this regard is a continuation of the previous one. The only changes
have
been in forms and “gestures.”
However, there are other no less significant factors in this social
genocide. In October, although the masses did not succeed in taking
power,
they did not return to their homes with a feeling of being defeated or
demoralized. To the contrary, the general sentiment is one of pride,
power,
triumph.
This is notable above all in El Alto, the revolutionary capital of
Bolivia,
a city that borders on La Paz [the capital], the same way that Greater
Buenos Aires borders on our national capital.
A student from El Alto who is studying in La Paz told us, “Before we
were
ashamed to say at school that we lived here. Today, I say with pride
that I
am from El Alto.
Not a minor aspect is that a good part of these masses are organized.
Different forms of organization, some of them with ancient roots, are
interwoven into a tight network. The Central Obrera Boliviana [COB-the
Bolivian trade-union federation], the provincial and regional
federations,
the neighborhood committees, the CSUTCB (peasants), the indigenous
peoples’
communities, community and/or “private” radio stations, and so on.
“In El Alto,” Miguel Pinto, a journalist, a leader of the journalists’
association, and a leader of the La Paz labor federation, told us,
“class
and nation have begun to fuse in an interesting way.” This fusion has
been
determined not only by a combination of organizational forms—in which
there
is an interweaving of elements coming from the ancient ayllu (the basic
community organization of the Aymara nation) with the modern
organizations
of the working class (above all those provided by the miners), as well
as
territorial organizations (neighborhood committees).
In addition, this organizational network has a special character. The
people
have a very strong community feeling. This impressed us, coming from
Buenos
Aires, where capitalism has had much more success in imposing
individualism
among the exploited, as a “war of all against all.”
Bolivia turns around this question. The perception that “next time, it
is
going to be against everything,” is something that many activists and
neighbors in El Alto share with a lot of bourgeois who live in the
other
geographical and social extreme, the fancy neighborhoods in the south.
So the Yankee embassy, the various sectors of the bourgeoisie, the
government, the parliament, the Church—and lamentably, also a section
of the
leaderships of the mass movements—have taken up the task of separating
the
components of this mixture and removing the detonators.
Facing this, a large part of the “anonymous” fighters who led the
October
struggles are orienting in the opposite direction. With more confusion,
without a leadership to unite them, and with great uneveness, the
majority
of them, however, are not satrisfied with seeing the encumbent
government of
Carlos Mesa as the result of the struggle and the fall of Goni.
With regard to this, we noted that in talking to many people, we could
find
that the spectrum of opinions got redder as we went up from the 3600
meter
level of La Paz to the 4100 meter level of El Alto.
Different layers of opinion
Sections of the La Paz middle class that joined the mobilization late
(but
which turned the pendulum toward the fall of Goni) are today in their
great
majority partisans of Carlos Mesa, who has become a sort of Bolivian
Kirchner. These “democratic” sections of the bourgeoisie and the middle
class, typical of the Andean plateau (in Argentina we call them
progressives), are the social sector that most directly supports the
new
president.
An emblematic leader of this sector, which led the hunger strike and
the
mobilization of the middle class, is the former public defender, Ana
Maria
Romero de Campero, head of the Bolivian human rights association
(APDH).
Today, she is a fervent “Mesista.”
In the other extreme of those who mobilized, among the activists of El
Alto,
the opinions are the opposite. The majority have no confidence in the
new
president. There is a combination of a wait-and-see attitude without
illusions, “let’s see what he does,” with a “let us prepare better for
the
next time.”
This rejection is also directed against the leaders who are giving
“critical” support to Mesa, or “letting him do what he can,” In the
first
place, Evo Morales [leader of the MAS, the Movement toward Socialism, a
tendency based mainly on the coca-growing peasants]. However, to a
lesser
degree the doubts of this vanguard also extend to “Mallku” himself
[that is,
Felipe Quispe, the radical Indian leader known as “Mallku,” the Condor,
the
spirit of the earth].
What is typical of these activists (especially the youth) is, as one of
them
told me, that they only believe in those that they have seen fight
alongside
them, facing bullets.
Between the two extremes, there is a broad middle layer, probably the
majority, which neither shares the support for Mesa of the “democratic”
bourgeoisie and middle class nor has given him the thumbs down like
most of
the vanguard of El Alto. It believes (or wants to believe) that Mesa is
“different” from Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. And so there are some hopes
that
through demands and pressures, the situation can be oriented in a way
favorable to the working people.
You can see a reflection of this in the last plenum of the COB, held on
Nov.14. There they voted a “List of Demands” including 20 points.
In principle, it is a correct tactic to make demands on a government
that
enjoys a certain support or expectations from a section of the masses.
However, from the debate and all the opinions that you could catch in
the
corridors, the tactic of issuing this list of demands was not resorted
to in
the framework of a clear characterization of the Mesa government as an
government hostile to the working class, the continuer of the same
neoliberal policies, a government that only because of its extreme
weakeness
is making some formal changes and “gestures” to delay Goni’s genocide.
Nor is this list of demands incorporated into a strategy for fighting
the
Mesa government, based on such a characterization. Rather, without
saying so
clearly, the possibility was left “open” that Mesa would take a more
“progressive” direction than Goni.
Moreover, to this has to be added the fact that the demand for a
workers’,
peasants’, and popular government has not yet been raised in a unifying
way.
Felipe Quispe and his CSUTCB, independently of the COB, are raising an
old
list of 72 demands. For his part, Evo Morales, who is in conflict with
Quispe, has been holding in his Chapare region to advocate that there
should
be negotiations instead of confrontations with the government. The MST
(Movimiento de Trabajadores Sin Tierra, the Movement of Landless
Workers)
has been mobilizing, but on its own account, occupying some estates.
Once again, the vanguard
The situation of “calm” that we mentioned at the beginning, therefore,
is a
result of this situation of the mass movement, the vanguard, and the
policy
of the various leaderships, as well as of the attempts of the
bourgeoisie,
the Church, and the U.S. embassy to disarm the bomb left by the October
uprising.
In this picture, we would venture to say that the key to the situation
is in
the hands of this broad vanguard of fighters that arose and and was
forced
in the heat of October. They were the real organizers and leaders of
the
fighting in the streets, when many of those who appeared as leaders on
TV,
like Evo Morales, were miles from the bullets.
The big question is whether a revolutionary political alternative will
emerge from this heroic vanguard in opposition to the reformist and
procapitalist alternatives such as are being presented by Evo Morales
and
other leaderships. The immense authority won by this vanguard in the
eyes of
the sections of the masses that it led in October, its intimate link
with
them, is a solid starting point for the emergence of such a
revolutionary
political alternative.
It seems to be that a revolutionary political alternative credible for
the
masses of workers, indigenous peoples, and peasants—that is an
alternative
revolutionary leadership—cannot emerge directly from the POR [Partido
Obrero
Revolucionario, Revolutionary Workers’ Party], Bolivia’s traditional
Trotskyist party or from the small groups that claim to represent
revolutionary Marxism.
The POR has the great historical merit, from the time of the Theses of
Pulacayo [adopted in 1946 by the miners’ union] of having taught the
Bolivian workers to speak the language of Trotskyism. This impressed me
when
I began to chat in the street with an old peasant who had come to La
Paz to
settle a legal matter. Talking about October, he began to talk about a
long
struggle between “the bourgeois class” and the “proletarian class.”
However, aside from its historical contribution, the POR today is alien
socially and politically to this new vanguard, on which it exercises no
attraction. We found the other groups also to be marginal.
However, Trotskyism can play an immense role if every group that lacks
a
social base instead of claiming that the revolutionary party is going
to
develop directly from it, put itself humbly at the service of this
vanguard
to help it politicize itself, to educate itself in Marxism, and above
all,
to assume a role of political leadership. If Trotskyism fuses with this
vanguard, it can play a role of outstanding importance.
In the meetings, educationals, and debates that we attended, we saw
this El
Alto vanguard (which has a much higher political level than the social
movements in Argentina) debate passionately and seriously a range of
questions from the problems posed in October to international
questions, and
above the question of perspectives.
In general, these debates are linked to two crucial points: Why didn’t
we
manage to take power in October? What should we do the next time?
Although they are not clear about the need for a party or a
revolutionary
leadership, these activists are a thousand miles from the
semi-anarchist
drivel that we hear so often in Argentina. An extremely harrowing
experience, hundreds of dead and wounded, has taught them the value of
conscious preparation, organization, leadership, centralization, and
discipline for the fight.
This heroic vanguard now holds the keys to the Bolivian revolution. We
are
confident that it will know how to use it.
The following article is from issue no.32 (end of November) of
“Socialismo o
Barbarie,” the publication of the Movimiento al Socialismo, a
Trotskyist
party in Argentina. It is the authors’ account of their political
reporting
trip to Bolivia shortly after the October uprising that forced the
flight of
President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who was replaced by his vice
president,
Carlos Mesa. The article was also printed in the December 2003 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
(415) 255-1080 -- socialistact@igc.org |
(715) 394-6660 -- mnsocialist@yahoo.com |