Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 12:52:08 +1100 (EST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?anthony=20hayes?= <antyphayes-AT-yahoo.com.au>
Subject: AUT: Working-Class Revolt In Bolivia


Working-Class Revolt In Bolivia
by Forrest Hylton; February 13, 2003
http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm

    Dual power has come to Bolivia most suddenly: not, as expected, in
the form of a coordinated uprising of coca growers, highland Aymara
peasants, and Quechua speaking peasants under the direction of Evo
Morales, Felipe Quispe, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the People;
instead, high school students and the working class of La Paz and its
satellite city, El Alto, rose up spontaneously in the largest urban
insurrection since the National Revolution of 1952.

    On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 12, students from Ayacucho
high school attacked the Presidential Palace in the Plaza de Murillo
with stones, and after the Military Police shot and killed members of
the police's Special Group, crowds burned the headquarters of the major
neoliberal political parties (MNR, MIR, ADN) as well as a
privately-owned television station, the vice-president's office, the
Ministry of Labor, and the Ministry of Sustainable Development, the
last of which was created under the first Sánchez de Lozada
administration (1993-97). They looted supermarkets, stores, ATMs, the
Central Bank, destroyed a café frequented by many of Bolivia's
notables, and burned a car that was carrying the son of the leader of
MIR. In El Alto, rioters burned and looted the water company, the power
company, Banco Sol, the customs office, and the mayor's office, and on
the morning of February 13, they took over the Coca Cola and Pepsi
bottling plants.

    The second Sánchez de Lozada administration, teetering on the
brink, has responded once again with a display of violence, though it
does not yet control the proletarian areas of La Paz and El Alto that
voted for Evo Morales and MAS. Armed with clubs, residents there have
organized neighborhood watch groups to guard against looting and have
blocked off main roads as well as selected side arteries to keep the
military out.

    As in the National Revolution of 1952, the police are part of the
popular revolt, though it is anyone's guess as to how long the unity
will last. What detonated the uprising-which has since spread to
Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, and could easily reach Sucre-was the violence
that the Military Police unleashed against the police's Special Group,
which had marched peacefully on the Presidential Palace to protest
proposed tax measures that threaten to further reduce their meager
$105/month salaries. By the end of the Wednesday, February 12, there
were more than 100 injured, and the death toll was 18, with 13 in La
Paz and 5 in El Alto, including a young girl. To put this figure in
regional perspective, since Bolivia has just over 8 million
inhabitants, a proportionate number of dead in Colombia would be
roughly 95 and in Venezuela, 60. To situate it in national historical
context, the most violent contemporary administration was that of
former IBM executive Jorge Quiroga (2000-2001), which killed roughly
forty people in less than a year. In six months the Sánchez de Lozada
administration is already responsible for 44 civilian deaths.

    Since the major TV stations ceased broadcasting at 7 PM, the first
night of the uprising was not televised, but it was atmospheric: close
to midnight, with a dense fog covering El Alto (the Aymara city of
500,000 above La Paz), people met in groups of several hundred to
discuss strategy, decide on appropriate tactics, and come up with a
division of labor as rumors of an imminent coup circulated. Human
concentrations were strongest on the bridges in La Ceja and at the toll
that separates El Alto from La Paz. Old women, children over 12, young
couples--nearly everyone participated. The streets, empty of traffic
and smoking from the bonfires that rebels had set, were full of broken
glass and large metal objects like desks, road construction signs and
iron rods. In the hillside neighborhoods of northwestern La Paz below
El Alto, the scene was much the same, except that certain secondary
routes were deliberately kept open to traffic and people concentrated
in smaller groups, with larger groups battling the military behind
barricades in the city center immediately below. In La Paz as well as
El Alto, the army fired live ammunition and tear gas into the crowds
through the day and night.

    Because it faced the military's tanks, bullets and tear gas in the
Plaza San Francisco, on Thursday, February 13, a march of more than
10,000 people was dispersed within hours. By early afternoon eight were
dead and more than ten injured with bullet wounds from shots fired by
army snipers posted on the rooftops of buildings and in the streets
around the Presidential Palace. One of the dead was a nurse from the
Red Cross who entered a building to help someone who had been shot.

    The lower and middle ranks of the police who led yesterday's revolt
do not recognize the agreement signed by the government and the
leadership of the police in the early morning of February 13, and have
called for Sánchez de Lozada's renunciation-a demand first voiced by
Evo Morales in January. They did not participate in the repression of
the march or the assault on El Alto's barricades (though the Judicial
Police rounded up looters).

    Morales, absent from the march that he and MAS had called, plans to
marshal his forces in Joint Chiefs of Staff of the People, and though
Felipe Quispe is in Mexico, he returns on Friday, February 14. He and
Morales have agreed that the highland Aymara will join the coca growers
in a solidarity blockade. Though it is impossible to predict anything
more specific than a broad spectrum of possibilities, unless the
government manages to bring the lower ranks of the police into line,
and quickly, the extension of dual power in time and space is one of
the possibilities. More likely, the requisite co-ordination across
regional, ethnic, and class barriers will not materialize in time to
overthrow the government. Whatever the short-term outcome, however, the
question of dual power has arisen again in Bolivia, and this time not
only in the countryside. It will not likely disappear anytime soon.


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