Ever since he won the Bolivian presidency in 2005, Evo Morales has been a thorn in America’s side. He once said, “The worst enemy of humanity is U.S. capitalism.” Originally a coca farmer himself, he has tried to block U.S. intervention in eradicating coca farming in his country. In 2006, he partially nationalized Bolivia’s oil and gas industry. Last month both countries recalled their ambassadors and tensions remain high between La Paz and Washington. AlJazeeraEnglish

July 22, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism Prepares for Recall Referendums

Dandelion Salad

By Federico Fuentes
http://www.socialistvoice.ca
July 21, 2008

With the victory of an unlikely opposition candidate in the June 29 election for prefect (governor) of Chuquisaca, the number of opposition-controlled prefectures increased to seven out of nine. The result came as the right-wing opposition plots the extension of its regionalized resistance against Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales.

Sabina Cuellar — a former peasant leader, indigenous woman, graduate of the government’s literacy program and former constituent assembly delegate for the governing party, Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) — will replace evangelical pastor and former MAS prefect David Sanchez.

Sanchez is now living in exile in Peru after resigning earlier this year following violent clashes between urban mestizo (mixed blood) sectors and indigenous peasants in the department’s capital, Sucre.

Racist attacks against indigenous constituent assembly delegates meeting in Sucre to draft a new constitution for the country forced the assembly to reconvene, without the presence of opposition delegates, in a military compound where they finally approved the controversial document in December last year. The draft still awaits popular approval at the polls.

Heading an anti-Morales alliance that campaigned in favour of greater regional autonomy, Cuellar won with 55% of the vote; the MAS candidate obtained 41%. Although in the city of Sucre, Cuellar won 71% to 24%, in the rural area the vote was the reverse, 33% to 64%.

Pro-autonomy prefect

Not long after winning the vote, Cuellar publicly refused to meet with Morales, stating she would push for a vote on autonomy in Chuquisaca.

In the 2006 national autonomy referendum, Chuquisaca voted overwhelmingly against autonomy, with 62% voting “No”. However, the pro-autonomy forces hope that the new situation can consolidate Chuquisaca as part of the pro-autonomy bloc of departments.

Cuellar’s victory comes as the national MAS government gears up for the August 10 recall referendums on the president, vice-president and remaining eight prefects. Still uncertain is the date for the vote on the new constitution, aimed at institutionalizing the government’s indigenous and national-popular project. The central plank of this project is the inclusion of Bolivia’s historically excluded indigenous majority within a “plurinational” state, and greater state control over natural resources.

However, strong resistance from the right-wing elites threatens to slow down, if not halt, the progress of MAS’s self-proclaimed “democratic and cultural revolution”.

Since May 4, the four departments that make up the opposition-controlled “half moon” in the east — Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni — have organised referendums on autonomy statutes, deemed unconstitutional by the government and National Electoral Court.

While the opposition have claimed overwhelming victories, with “Yes” votes of 70-85%, the national government has been quick to highlight the abstention rates of 35-45%, in the context of threats and violent attacks against opponents of the autonomy push.

The proposed “autonomy” statutes are aimed at undermining the power of the central state by handing over enormous power to the prefectures — including control over natural resources and distribution of land titles.

The push has been driven by the elites tied to large agribusiness and gas transnationals located in Santa Cruz (origin of 30% of Bolivia’s GDP and over 50% of tax revenue, and home to 47.6% of foreign investment in the country). These elites have gradually been displaced from national power as indigenous, peasant, worker and social movements have surged forward, overthrown presidents and united behind MAS’s national project for change.

Retreating to their trenches in the east, where they continue to maintain a strong political, social and cultural hegemony, the elites have been able to mobilize significant sections of the population in the half moon through a discourse that combines railing against “La Paz centralism”, promoting long-held sentiments of “crucenista identity”, and outright racism.

When the sensitive issue of where Bolivia’s capital should be located was brought up in the constituent assembly, the eastern-based opposition was quick to stoke controversy about the issue in order to gain influence in yet another department. While Sucre is the historic capital of Bolivia, all the state powers were shifted to La Paz following the 1899 Federal War between conservative forces based in the south and liberals in the west around La Paz.

The hope that returning the political capital to Sucre could help fuel development and employment mobilized important sectors of the city, particularly students and middle class. This led to violent clashes, as peasant MAS supporters marched on Sucre to defend the government and assembly.

Two economic models

Following Cuellar’s victory, the prefects of the half moon, organized through the National Democratic Coordinator (CONALDE), announced they would reverse their June 23 decision to oppose the recall referendums on the president, vice-president and remaining prefects.

The Senate, controlled by the opposition party Podemos, after allowing MAS’s law on holding the referendums to gather dust for over four months, approved the law in May. This move surprised the pro-autonomy forces and raised excitement in the presidential palace about the prospects of removing at least two opposition prefects, with a further two in serious jeopardy.

Speaking in Santa Cruz on July 17, Morales said that what was at stake in the August 10 referendums was more than just who would be president or prefect. “Here there are two economic models at play, two economic programs: neoliberalism or the process of change. That is what is in discussion”, he stated as he handed over funds for the implementation of 21 potable water projects in the department worth US$1.8 billion.

Counting on a solid voting base of some 90% in the Chapare coca region, 70% in El Alto, similar proportions in the countryside, and a base vote of 30% in Santa Cruz, the government is pretty sure it will match its 53.7% vote obtained in the 2005 presidential elections.

However, the vote in Chuquisaca reflects the growing tensions between the MAS government and urban middle-class mestizo sectors, many of whom voted for Morales with the hope of returning stability to the country.

It also reveals the advances made by the right in pushing back MAS’s drive for national hegemony.

To counter this, MAS has been working to shore up some fragile alliances built since 2005, particularly with the Movement of those Without Fear (MSM), grouped around La Paz mayor Juan Del Granado and made up of middle-class professionals and intellectuals.

International attacks

Meanwhile, tensions between the government and Washington have been rising, as more information comes out regarding the funding of opposition groups in Bolivia via the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Last month, Washington recalled its ambassador to Bolivia following massive protests outside the US embassy, which the US accused Morales of inciting.

The protests were over the decision to give asylum in the US to former minister of defence Carlos Sanchez Berzain, known as the “minister of death” for his role in brutal repression that left some 70 people dead during an October 2003 uprising that overthrew President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

The Bolivian government has requested the extradition of both men to face trial over their roles in the massacre.

Attacks have also come from transnationals. The government faces legal challenges from Telecom Italia following the May 1 nationalization of its subsidiary Entel, which controlled 80% of the long-distance market and 70% of the country’s mobile telephone services.

The move was the latest in a wave of nationalizations in strategic sectors such as gas, telecommunications and railways.

In response, Bolivia seized some $49 million transferred by Telecom Italia from Entel to a British bank. It is also seeking to seize another $31 million transferred to a US bank prior to the carrier’s nationalization, because of the company’s failure to meet investment commitments and to pay its $645 million debt to the state in fines and back taxes.

Bolivia has refused to allow the World Bank to arbitrate the dispute, citing the fact that it withdrew from the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes last year.

The nationalization of Bolivia’s largest tin smelter has also been challenged by its former owner, Glencore, with which the government is also in discussions regarding two other mines.

In June, to deal with these conflicts, Morales created a new ministerial post to defend the country from attacks against its nationalization policies.

On July 14, Bolivian gas minister Carlos Villegas announced that Venezuela would spend $883 million to boost Bolivian oil and natural gas output by 2013 — nearly 50% more than it originally promised its Andean ally.

AP reported that “about three-quarters of the Venezuelan money will finance exploration and production at southern Bolivian fields run by Petroandina, a joint enterprise between Bolivia’s and Venezuela’s state oil companies”.

On July 17, at a public rally with Morales in Santa Cruz, Brazilian President Inácio “Lula” da Silva and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced that they would contribute loans of $230 million and $300 million respectively to aid integration of the departments of La Paz, Beni and Pando through constructing highways.

Earlier in the day, clashes involving police, the opposition and government supporters occurred as Morales arrived in the city.

Extremist youth opposition groups have vowed to not allow Morales to campaign in the east over the three weeks leading up to the referendum.

Federico Fuentes is a Latin America correspondent for Green Left Weekly. He also edits Bolivia Rising, a major source of information, analysis and opinion on events in Bolivia.

Socialist Voice is a forum for discussion of today’s struggles of the workers and oppressed from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism. Readers are encouraged to distribute Socialist Voice as widely as possible.

July 18, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Bolivia: Power to the People by Lawrence Goodman

Dandelion Salad

by Lawrence Goodman
http://boliviarising.blogspot.com
July 18, 2008

Evo Morales’ extra-ordinary rise from impoverished peasant to the first indigenous president of Bolivia began on a soccer field. It was 1980, and Morales along with his family had just moved from their hometown in Bolivia’s western highlands to the central tropics in search of work. He went to a local soccer field where, as it turned out, members of the local cocoa growers union were playing.

“I said ‘Can I play?’ They said, ‘Sure,'” Morales recalled in a speech at Brown in late April. “It turns out I was the best player on the field.” He was made head of the squad, but more importantly, as he said, “it was the beginning of my being involved in the union.”

Over the next two decades, Morales, now forty-eight, forged a career for himself as a union organizer, activist, politician, government dissident, and thorn in the side of the United States. He has expressed admiration for Che Guevara and Fidel Castro; joked that the coca leaf, which is used to produce cocaine, should be his country’s new national flag; and called U.S. capitalism “the worst enemy of humanity.”

…continued at http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2008/07/bolivia-power-to-people.html

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July 8, 2008 by dandelionsalad

An open letter from Evo Morales to the European Parliament

Dandelion Salad

By Evo Morales
http://axisoflogic.com
Jul 6, 2008, 11:40

Up until the end of the World War II, Europe was an emigrant continent. Tens of thousands of Europeans departed for the Americas to colonize, to escape hunger, the financial crisis, the wars or European totalitarianisms and the persecution of ethnic minorities.

Today, I am following with concern the process of the so called “Return Directive”. The text, validated last June 5th by the Interior Ministers of 27 countries in the European Union, comes up for a vote on June 18 in the European Parliament. I feel that it is a drastic hardening of the detention and expulsion conditions for undocumented immigrants, regardless of the time they have lived in the European countries, their work situation, their family ties, or their ability and achievements to integrate.

Europeans arrived en masse to Latin and North America, without visas or conditions imposed on them by the authorities. They were simply welcomed, and continue to be, in our American continent, which absorbed at that time the European economic misery and political crisis. They came to our continent to exploit the natural wealth and to transfer it to Europe, with a high cost for the original populations in America. As is the case of our Cerro Rico de Potosi and its fabulous silver mines that gave monetary mass to the European continent from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The people, the wealth and the rights of the migrant Europeans were always respected.

…continued

July 3, 2008 by dandelionsalad

The Rise of Food Fascism: Agrarian Elite Foments Coup in Bolivia

Dandelion Salad

By Roger Burbach
ICH 07/03/08
Bolivia Rising 06/30/08

Like many third world countries Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations. With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta–including wheat, rice, corn, soy oil and potatoes, as well as meat—has risen twenty-five percent over the past year with prices gyrating wildly in the local markets.

As in most other countries affected by the food crisis, the overall rise in food prices is attributable to the workings of the free market—when the price of one or several commodities goes up, the consumers turn to other food stuffs, thereby driving up these prices as well. In an effort to halt the effects of this unregulated market, the government has enacted price controls and even prohibited the export of beef, most of which is produced on haciendas. But these measures have been largely ineffective: A black market flourishes as agrarian commercial interests openly flaunt the central government’s price controls, even directly exporting commodities like beef and cooking oil at higher prices to the neighboring countries of Chile and Peru.

This is taking place as Bolivia’s first Indian president, Evo Morales, is facing a sustained challenge by a right wing movement for autonomy that is integrally linked to the very agribusiness corporations that are profiting from the upsurge in food prices. Based in the eastern province of Santa Cruz, a powerful agrarian bourgeoisie is determined to upend the government’s agrarian reform program and to halt Morales’ efforts to more equitably distribute the wealth that flows from Bolivia’s oil and gas fields. Its ultimate goal is to topple Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) that backs him.

The corporate dominated agro-industrial complex in Santa Cruz is centered on the growing, processing and export of soy beans. Two of the world’s largest agribusiness multinationals, ADM and Cargill, play a major role in the regional economy. They are primarily exporters of Bolivian soybeans and sunflower seeds while ADM co-owns with a Bolivian firm the largest vegetable oil processing plant, Sociedad Aceitera del Oriente. (1) Giant agribusiness corporations like John Deere have commercial outlets in Santa Cruz as Bolivia manufactures no heavy agricultural machinery. Multinational companies supply most of Bolivia’s agrichemicals, while Monsanto and Calgene are promoting genetically modified seeds. Peruvian and Colombian agribusiness interests have also set up processing plants in Santa Cruz, including the Romero Company from Peru which has joint international operations with Cargill, while large soy growers from the neighboring Brazilian state of Mato Grosso have settled on Bolivian lands.

The agrarian bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz is orchestrating the movement for provincial autonomy in order to seize control of the region’s extensive resources from the national government. The referendum on autonomy that was unconstitutionally voted on and approved in Santa Cruz on May 4, 2008 would allow the provincial administration to write its own contracts with multinationals and to exercise direct control over the police and law enforcement agencies. Autonomy would also enable the province to override national legislation promoted by Morales and MAS on agrarian reform and the control of public forests and subsoil rights, including natural gas and oil.

The economic policies favoring the rise and consolidation of the agrarian bourgeoisie allied to global agribusiness took shape in the mid-1980s when the International Monetary Fund stepped in with a structural adjustment program. Hyper-inflation had gripped the country from 1983-85 and in exchange for the refinancing of Bolivia’s public and international debt the government agreed to a series of “market reforms,” including the reduction of tariffs and the slashing of state subsidies and assistance for the growing of basic food commodities. (2)

These measures overturned the strong role the state had come to play in the economy with the Bolivian revolution of 1952. Along with the nationalization of the tin mines, the worker and peasant backed revolution led to an agrarian reform that broke up the hacienda system in the Andean highlands which had bound much of the Indian population to the land in virtual servitude. With the takeover of the large estates by peasants, rural unions and Indian communities, the production and marketing of basic food stuffs increased, particularly in the 1950s and early 60s. (3)

But another agrarian dynamic began to take shape in the eastern part of the country during these years. Bolivia has three main geographical zones; the Andean highlands or plateau in the west where the agrarian reform was concentrated; the valleys located more in the center and to the south; and the plains or low lands that extend into the more humid and tropical regions in the east.

In the 1960s and 70s, a new landed class emerged in the low lands centered in the province of Santa Cruz. Seizing control of large swaths of the plains and rain forests, often illegally or through government concessions acquired through bribes, the new landed barons raised sugar cane and cotton while plundering the rain forests for lumber. The reactionary character of this region was manifested early on when General Hugo Banzer from Santa Cruz overthrew a leftist general backed by a popular assembly in 1971, ruling the country with an iron hand for seven years, much like the military regimes in other countries in the Southern cone that took power in the 1970s. (4)

The IMF reforms of 1985 privileged the role of Santa Cruz vis-à-vis other parts of the country. With the privatization and closure of many of the state tin mines in the Andean highlands, tens of thousands of miners were thrown out of work. Many migrated to the Chapare region in the south-central part of the country, becoming coca farmers, while others went to the east to squat on small patches of land and serve as an agrarian labor force for the large estates that were favored with credits and infrastructure loans backed by the World Bank. Then in the 1990s vast tracts of land were turned over to the cultivation of soybeans and by the turn of the century Bolivia’s export revenue from soy production was second in importance only to that of the natural gas and oil fields.

The rise of this agribusiness complex has plundered the natural resources of eastern Bolivia. As the frontier for soybeans advances further into the rainforests, the older depleted lands are either abandoned or turned into extensive cattle grazing pastures. Given the highly mechanized nature of soy farming, there are few employment opportunities in the countryside for either the local indigenous population or for those who migrate from the Andes searching for work. As Miguel Urioste, the director of the Land Foundation in La Paz explains: “This mono export model—promoted actively by the World Bank for 15 years—is a lamentable demonstration of how, those that decide public policies…in the third world, do not take into account the enormous environmental costs or the lamentable economic and political effects produced by this model. The monocultivation of soy has concentrated land in a few hands, it has transnationalized property rights, it has impeded new humanely planned settlements and concentrated thousands of poor peasants without lands to generate wealth, employment and well being.” (5)

While Bolivia ranks among the world’s ten top soy exporters, the production of domestic food stuffs by the peasantry has stagnated or declined and the urban population has come to rely more and more on imported grains. Today Bolivia imports sixty-nine percent of its wheat, forty-five percent of its rice, and forty-two percent of its corn. (6) In 2004, even the World Bank was compelled to admit: ‘the rural economy is increasingly polarised between the small peasant sector producing foodstuffs, on the one hand, and the agro-enterprise sector producing cash crops for export, on the other’. (7)

The Civic Committee of Santa Cruz, a business organization lead by agribusiness interests, is at the center of the drive for provincial autonomy. According to Bret Gustafson, an analyst of the Santa Cruz elite and its political and cultural institutions: “The Civic Committee is an unelected entity dominated by business and agro-industrial elites who have a long history of resisting control of, and demanding subsidization by, the central government. Typical business members include the private chamber of commerce, the cattlemen, the agro-livestock chamber, the industrialists, the forestry chamber, the soy-producers chamber, and professional organizations (doctors, lawyers, architects). Other “civic” members include representatives of provincial civic committees, of carnival comparsas, and of social clubs or “fraternities.” (8)

Branko Marinkovic, the powerful head of the Civic Committee whose parents migrated to Bolivia from Croatia in the 1950s, is the largest landowner in the country with 300,000 hectares, much of it obtained for pennies or fraudulent maneuvers under past dictatorial and oligarchic governments. (9) He also has considerable business investments, including IOL S.A., one of Bolivia’s largest soy and sunflower processing plants. A political ideologue of the autonomy movement, Marinkovic funds and sits on the board of the think tank Fundacion Libertad y Democracia that has ties to the Heritage and Cato Foundations. (10)

The Cruceño Youth Union (UJC), a junior men’s organization affiliated with the Civic Committee, is the strong arm of the Civic Committee, often acting as shock troops for the autonomy movement. During the plebiscite in May its members, mainly in their teens and early twenties, roamed the streets of the city of Santa Cruz and surrounding towns violently attacking and repressing any opposition to the referendum by local indigenous movements and MAS-allied forces. Not wanting to provoke a violent confrontation, Evo Morales did not deploy the army or use the local police, leaving the urban areas under the effective control of the UJC when the voting took place.

The other less densely inhabited provinces in the east that make up what is called the Media Luna—Pando, Beni and Tarija–have held referendums calling for autonomy under similar conditions. On the national level, the major political party of the right, Podemos (We Can) tied up the efforts of a popularly elected Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution for over a year and it is now maneuvering with other political forces in La Paz to block a national referendum to enact the constitution.

Simultaneously, the right wing lead by the Civic Committee is sewing economic instability, seeking to destabilize the Morales government much like the CIA-backed opposition did in Chile against Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. As in Chile the business elites and allied truckers engage in “strikes,” withholding or refusing to ship produce to the urban markets while selling commodities in the black market at high prices that cause alarm among the poor. The national Confederation of Private Businesses of Bolivia is calling for a national producers’ shutdown if the government “does not change its economic policies.” (11)

The social movements allied with the government are mobilizing against the right wing. In the Media Luna a union coalition of indigenous peoples and peasants has campaigned against voting in the autonomy referendums and taken on the bands of the UJC as they try to intimidate and terrorize people. In the Andean highlands, the social movements have descended on La Paz in demonstrations backing the government, including a large mobilization on June 10 that stormed the American embassy because of its support for the right wing, particularly over the US refusal to extradite a past president who ordered the shooting of demonstrators in the streets in 2003. Because of this growing unrest, the country is awash with rumors of a coup, and Morales went to a summit in Caracas in mid-June with Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Carlos Lage, vice president of Cuba, to discuss how to defend his government.

The ability of the agrarian interests of Bolivia to take the country to the brink of civil war is reflective of the powerful agrarian bourgeoisies that have arisen in many countries of the third world in tandem with global agribusiness. When national governments attempt to control the steep increase in food prices, or popular movements agitate for agrarian reform and food sovereignty, they encounter powerful internal agro-industrial interests, in effect a fifth column nurtured and developed by the multinational corporations in conjunction with the World Bank and the IMF.

This new configuration of power is particularly manifest in South America. In Argentina when President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner tried to levy an export tax on soybeans, the large growers orchestrated a rebellion that has tied up the country’s exports and food marketing system for over three months. In neighboring Brazil, the agrarian bourgeoisie is perhaps the strongest and most entrenched in the Global South. Over the years it has fought a running war with the Landless Movement, violently repressing the efforts of the poor to peacefully occupy and till idle lands. In October last year at the genetically modified seed experimental station of Syngenta (the world’s largest agrichemical corporation) five peaceful demonstrators were shot and one killed: The NT Security company that carried out the attack has close ties to the Rural Society, a right wing growers association known for repeated acts of violence against the Landless Movement. (12)

Some argue that that we are witnessing the rise of “petro-fascism” as multinational corporations and nation states struggle for control of the life-blood of the global economy. (13) Now with the efforts of the multinational agribusiness corporations and the agrarian bourgeoisies to control the very sustenance of human life we may be facing an even more violent period of repression, conflict and upheaval.

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) based in Berkeley, CA. He has written extensively on Latin America and US foreign policy. His first book, co-authored with Patricia Flynn, was “Agribusiness in the Americas.” See www.globalalternatives.org for CENSA activities and publications.

Special thanks to Isabella Kenfield for her editorial assistance.

End Notes

1. Ximena Soruco (Coordinador) Wilfredo Plata and Gustavo Medeiros, Los Barones del Oriente: El Poder en Santa Cruz Ayer y Hoy, Fundacion Tierra, Observatorio de la Revolución Agraria en Bolivia, La Paz, Bolivia, pp. 206-12. www.ftierra.org

2. For a description of how the IMF and the World Bank imposed these structural adjustment programs on other countries in the Global South, see Walden Bello, “Manufacturing a Food Crisis,” The Nation, June 2, 2008.

3. Cristóbal Kay and Miguel Urioste, “Bolivia’s Unfinished Agrarian Reform: Rural Poverty and Development Policies, ISS/UNDP Land, Poverty and Public Action, Policy Paper No. 3, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands and United Nations Development Program, New York, NY, October, 2005, p. 11-13.

4. Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Popular Struggle in Bolivia, Verso Press, London, 2007, pp. 85-6.

5. Miguel Urioste, “El Banco Mundial Promovio los Moncultivos en Bolivia Durante 15 Anos, Fundacion Tierra, May, 2008, http://ftierra.org/sitio/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=159&Itemid=118

6. Marcos Nordren Ballivian, “El Precio de los Alimientos,” Foros del Banco Tematico, June 11, 2008. http://www.bancotematico.org/smf/index.php?topic=68.0 )

7. Kay and Urisote, p. 15.

8. Bret Gustafson, “Spectacles of Autonomy and Crisis: Or, What Bulls and Beauty Queens have to do with Regionalism in Eastern Bolivia,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2006, p. 363.

9. BolPress, “Movilización para Aplastar la Conspiración Oligárquico-Imperialista en Bolivia,” Unidad de Promoción Indigena y Campesina, Boletin N. 45, 20 de Mayo, 2008, http://www.bolpress.com/art.php?Cod=2008050812

10. Bret Gustafson, “By Means Legal and Otherwise: The Bolivian Right Regroups,” NACLA Report on the Americas, January/February, 2008, p. 25. http://nacla.org/naclareport

11. La Prensa, “La CEPB Amenaza con Paro y el Gobierno Percibe Complot,” La Paz, June 21, 2008.

12. Isabella Kenfeld and Roger Burbach, “Corporate Murder in Brazil: Landless Rural Worker Shot by Security Company Hired by Multinational Syngenta,” Strategic Studies, Global Alternatives, October, 2007. http://globalalternatives.org/node/80

13. See Michael T. Klare, “Behold the Rise of Energy-Based Fascism,” Tomdispatch.com, January 20, 2007, http://www.alternet.org/story/46838

June 27, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Evo Morales: A Call for Socialism?

Dandelion Salad

Thanks to

Socialist Standard

by Stephen Shenfield
From the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 21 April, 2008, President Evo Morales of Bolivia delivered the opening address to the Seventh Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. His speech included the following passage:

“If we want to save the planet earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. Unless we put an end to the capitalist system, it is impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings and to the pillage of natural resources, to put an end to destructive wars for markets and raw materials, to the plundering of energy, particularly fossil fuels, to the excessive consumption of goods and to the accumulation of waste. The capitalist system only allows us to heap up waste. I would like to propose that the trillions of money earmarked for war should be channelled to make good the damage to the environment, to make reparations to the earth.”

Despite the striking anti-capitalist content of most of this passage, the last sentence reveals that Morales does not have a clear conception of the socialist alternative. He still thinks in terms of the money system.

The accurate way of posing the problem focuses not on the waste of money but on the waste of real resources of all kinds – the waste of nature and its bounty, of human life and labour, of knowledge and its potential. True, money represents or symbolizes some – far from all — of these real resources, but in a very inadequate and distorted manner. To substitute the symbol for the reality is a mystification.

Nevertheless, I would like to argue that Morales is a good deal closer to a true understanding of socialism than most of the so-called “left” in Latin America or elsewhere. The very fact that he is addressing a world forum about the future of the species and the planet suggests that he is seeking an alternative at the global rather than national level. Although nationalization forms part of his domestic policy (the oil and gas industry in Bolivia was nationalized in 2006), he does not equate nationalization with socialism.

The model of the ayllu

In a number of interviews Morales has been asked what he and his movement – the Movement for Socialism (MAS) – understand by socialism. Thus, Heinz Dieterich of Monthly Review (July 2006) asks him what country the socioeconomic model of the MAS most closely resembles. Brazil? Cuba? Venezuela? Morales does not like the way the question is put. (“[Socialism] is something much deeper. … It is to live in community and equality.”) He talks instead about the traditional peasant commune or ayllu of the indigenous peoples of the Andes, based on communal landholding and “respect for Mother Earth.” He himself grew up in an ayllu of the Aymara people in Oruro Province; in some parts of Bolivia such communities still exist.

In another interview, to journalists from Spiegel, Morales says: “There was no private property in the past. Everything was communal property. In the Indian community where I was born, everything belonged to the community. This way of life is more equitable.” As the World Socialist Review, published by our companion party in the United States, comments: “This is more than just a variation on the leftist copout that socialism is a goal for the distant future; it is, on some level, an acceptance of it as a real alternative to capitalism” (See here. [pdf])

Rejecting vanguardism

Another indication that Morales is closer than most of the “left” to a genuine understanding of socialism is his opposition to the Bolshevik idea of the “vanguard party.” The MAS, he tells Dieterich, “was not created by political ideologues or by a group of intellectuals, but by peasant congresses to solve the problems of the people.” It has always rejected the pretensions to “leadership” of Leninist groups of different varieties — followers of Stalin, Trotsky, or Mariategui (a Peruvian Bolshevik who has had great influence on the left in Latin America).

Of course, Morales is not only a thinker with more or less clear ideas about capitalism and socialism. He is also head of the government of an underdeveloped country that has to operate within the parameters of a capitalist world. As such he is no position to realize his more far reaching aspirations. At most, he has been able – like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela – to divert some of the proceeds from the sale of oil and gas to making some improvement to the life of the impoverished indigenous communities.

The fact remains that an internationally known figure has stood up at the United Nations and called upon the world community to bring the capitalist system to an end. Morales’ concept of socialism may be less clear than we would like, but it does at least bear some relation to the real thing. Viewed from the time when the UN and its specialized agencies are converted into the planning and coordinating centre of world socialism, this will, perhaps, be regarded as a milestone in its history.

June 22, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Bolivia: Enron and Separatism by Andrés Soliz Rada

Dandelion Salad

Andrés Soliz Rada
boliviarising.blogspot.com
June 19, 2008
ZNet
June, 10 2008

The decision of the Transredes company (the Shell-Ashmore group that took over from Enron) to hand over the expansion of their Villamontes gas pipeline to the departmental prefecture of Tarija, bypassing central government, demonstrates yet once more how that company has promoted the break-up of Bolivia, an issue of world interest. Faced with that situation President Evo Morales did the very least he could do, namely, decree the compulsory purchase by the State of the hydrocarbons transport company shares.

Thus Enron’s presence seems to come to an end. Both under its own name and under its successor’s it became a byword for corruption in Bolivia. Remember that when Enron declared bankruptcy on December 2nd 2001 it was described as one of the most corrupt businesses ever in the far-from-clean history of the United States. Enron came to Bolivia under the patronage of (then president) Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada so as to accelerate the liquidation of Yacimientos Petrolíferas de Bolivia (tr., the State hydrocarbons company). Within months of taking office in 1994, Sanchez de Lozada, in July of that year, signed a memorandum of understanding with Enron to build a gas pipeline from Bolivia to Brazil.

…continued

June 21, 2008 by dandelionsalad

From Marx to Morales: Indigenous Socialism & the Latin Americanization of Marxism

Dandelion Salad

By John Riddell
http://www.socialistvoice.ca
June 16, 2008

John Riddell is co-editor of Socialist Voice and editor of The Communist International in Lenin’s Time, a six-volume anthology of documents, speeches, manifestos and commentary. This article is based on his talk at the Historical Materialism conference at York University in Toronto on April 26, 2008.

Over the past decade, a new rise of mass struggles in Latin America has sparked an encounter between revolutionists of that region and many of those based in the imperialist countries. In many of these struggles, as in Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales, Indigenous peoples are in the lead.

Latin American revolutionists are enriching Marxism in the field of theory as well as of action. This article offers some introductory comments indicating ways in which their ideas are linking up with and drawing attention to important but little-known aspects of Marxist thought.

Eurocentrism

A good starting point is provided by the comment often heard from Latin American revolutionists that much of Marxist theory is marked by a “Eurocentric” bias. They understand Eurocentrism as the belief that Latin American nations must replicate the evolution of Western European societies, through to the highest possible level of capitalist development, before a socialist revolution is possible. Eurocentrism is also understood to imply a stress on the primacy of industrialization for social progress and on the need to raise physical production in a fashion that appears to exclude peasant and Indigenous realities and to point toward the dissolution of Indigenous culture.[1]

Marx’s celebrated statement that “no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed”[2] is sometimes cited as evidence of a Eurocentric bias in Marxism. Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov, Marxist theorists of the pre-1914 period, are viewed as classic exponents of this view. Latin American writer Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa quotes Kautsky’s view that “workers can rule only where the capitalist system has achieved a high level of development”[3] — that is, not yet in Latin America.

The pioneer Marxists in Latin American before 1917 shared that perspective. But after the Russian Revolution a new current emerged, now often called “Latin American Marxism.” Argentine theorist Néstor Kohan identifies the pioneer Peruvian Communist José Carlos Mariátegui as its founder. Mariátegui, Kohen says, “opposed Eurocentric schemas and populist efforts to rally workers behind different factions of the bourgeoisie” and “set about recapturing ‘Inca communism’ as a precursor of socialist struggles.”[4]

National subjugation

Pérez Hinojosa and Kohen both take for granted that Latin American struggles today, as in Mariátegui’s time, combine both anti-imperialist and socialist components. This viewpoint links back to the analysis advanced by the Communist International in Lenin’s time of a world divided between imperialist nations and subjugated peoples.[5] Is this framework still relevant at a time when most poor countries have formal independence? The central role of anti-imperialism in recent Latin American struggles would seem to confirm the early Communist International’s analysis.

Pérez Hinojosa tells us that Mariátegui recognized the impossibility of national capitalist development in semi-colonial countries like Peru. The revolution would be “socialist from its beginnings but would go through two stages” in realizing the tasks first of bourgeois democratic and then of socialist revolution. Moreover, the Peruvian theorist held that “this socialist revolution would be marked by a junction with the historic basis of socialization: the Indigenous communities, the survivals of primitive agrarian communism.”[6]

Subsequently, says Kohen, the “brilliant team of the 1920s,” which included Julio Antonio Mella in Cuba, Farabundo Martí in El Salvador, and Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua, “was replaced … by the echo of Stalin’s mediocre schemas in the USSR,” which marked a return to a mechanical “Eurocentrist” outlook.[7]

Writing from the vantage point of Bolivia’s tradition of Indigenous insurgency, Alvaro García Linera attributes Eurocentric views in his country to Marxism as a whole, as expressed by both Stalinist and Trotskyist currents. He states that Marxism’s “ideology of industrial modernisation” and “consolidation of the national state” implied the “‘inferiority’ of the country’s predominantly peasant societies.”[8]

Cuban revolution

In Kohen’s view, the grip of “bureaucratism and dogmatism” was broken “with the rise of the Cuban revolution and the leadership of Castro and Guevara.”[9] Guevara’s views are often linked to those of Mariátegui with regard to the nature of Latin American revolution — in Guevara’s words, either “a socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution.”[10] That claim was based on convictions regarding the primacy of consciousness and leadership in revolutionary transitions that were also held by Mariátegui.

Guevara also applied this view to his analysis of the Cuban state and of Stalinized Soviet reality. Guevara inveighed against the claim of Soviet leaders of his time that rising material production would bring socialism, despite the political exclusion, suffering, and oppression imposed on the working population.[11] (See “Che Guevara’s Final Verdict on Soviet Economy,” in Socialist Voice, June 9, 2008.)

Marx’s views

In Kohen’s opinion, the Cuban revolution’s leading role continued in the 1970s, when it “revived the revolutionary Marxism of the 1920s (simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist) as well as Marx’s more unfamiliar works—above all his later works that study colonialism and peripheral and dependent societies. In these writings Marx overcomes the Eurocentric views of his youth.”[12]

Kohen identifies the insights of the “Late Marx” as follows:

History does not follow an unvarying evolutionary path.
Western Europe does not constitute a single evolutionary centre through which stages of historical development are radiated outwards to the rest of the world.
“Subjugated peoples do not experience ‘progress’ so long as they remain under the boot of imperialism.”[13]

Latin American thought here rests on the mature Marx’s views on capitalism’s impact on colonial societies, such as Ireland. It also intersects with Marx’s late writings and research known to us primarily through Teodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Russian Road.[14] Shanin’s book can now be usefully reread as a commentary on today’s Latin American struggles.

Marx devoted much of his last decade to study of Russia and of Indigenous societies in North America. His limited writings on these questions focused on the Russian peasant commune, the mir, which then constituted the social foundation of agriculture in that country.

Russia’s peasant communes

The Russian Marxist circle led by Plekhanov, ancestor of the Bolshevik party, believed that the mir was doomed to disappear as Russia was transformed by capitalist development. We now know that Marx did not agree. In a letter to Vera Zasulich, written in 1881 but not published until 1924, he wrote that “the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.” The “historical inevitability” of the evolutionary course mapped out in Capital, he stated, is “expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe.”[15]

The preliminary drafts of Marx’s letter, included in Shanin’s book, display essential agreement with the view of the revolutionary populist current in Russia, the “People’s Will,” that the commune could coexist harmoniously with a developing socialist economy.[16]

Ethnological Notebooks

These drafts drew on Marx’s extensive studies of Indigenous societies during that period, a record of which is available in his little-known Ethnological Notebooks.[17] We find his conclusions summarized in a draft of his letter to Zasulich: “The vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies.”[18]

In her study of these notebooks, Christine Ward Gaily states that where such archaic forms persist, Marx depicts them fundamentally “as evidence of resistance to the penetration of state-associated institutions,” which he views as intrinsically oppressive.[19] The clear implication is that such archaic survivals should be defended and developed.

The Marxists of Lenin’s time were not aware of this evolution in Marx’s thinking. Thus Antonio Gramsci could write, a few weeks after the Russian October uprising, “This is the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat.”[20] Yet despite their limited knowledge of Marx’s views, the revolutionary generation of Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gramsci, and Lukács reasserted Marx’s revolutionary stance in combat with the “Eurocentrist” view associated with Karl Kautsky and the pre-war Socialist International that socialist revolution must await capitalism’s fullest maturity and collapse.

Shanin generalizes from Marx’s approach to Russia in 1881 in a way that links to a second characteristic of Latin American revolution. “The purest forms of ‘scientific socialism’ … invariably proved politically impotent,” he argues. “It has been the integration of Marxism with the indigenous [i.e. home-grown] political traditions which has underlain all known cases of internally generated and politically effective revolutionary transformation of society by socialists.”[21]

Here we have a second field of correlation with the Latin American revolutionary experience, with its strong emphasis on associating the movement for socialism with the tradition of anti-colonial struggle associated with the figures of the great aboriginal leaders and of Bolívar, Martí, and Sandino. This fusion of traditions emerges as a unique strength of Latin American Marxism.

Mariátegui captured this thought in a well-known passage:

“We certainly do not wish socialism in America to be a copy and imitation. It must be a heroic creation. We must give life to an Indo-American socialism reflecting our own reality and in our own language.”[22]

Following the October revolution of 1917, Marx’s vision of the mir’s potential was realized in practice. The mir had been in decline for decades, and by 1917 half the peasants’ land was privately owned. But in the great agrarian reform of 1917-18, the peasants revived the mir and adopted it as the basic unit of peasant agriculture. During the next decade, peasant communes co-existed constructively with the beginnings of a socialist economy. By 1927, before the onset of Stalinist forced collectivization, 95% of peasant land was already communally owned.[23]

There is a double parallel here with present Latin American experience. First, the Bolsheviks’ alliance with the peasantry is relevant in Latin American countries where the working class, in the strict sense of those who sell their labour power to employers, is often a minority in broad coalitions of exploited producers. Second, survivals of primitive communism, including communal landholding, are a significant factor in Indigenous struggles across this region.

National emancipation

A third correspondence can be found in the Bolsheviks’ practice toward minority peoples of the East victimized and dispossessed by Tsarist Russian settler colonialism. Too often, discussions of the Bolsheviks’ policy on the national question stop short with Stalin and Lenin’s writings of 1913-1916, ignoring the evolution of Bolshevik policy during and after the 1917 revolution. Specifically:

The later Bolsheviks did not limit themselves to the criteria of nationhood set out by Stalin in 1913.[24] They advocated and implemented self-determination for oppressed peoples who were not, at the time of the 1917 revolution, crystallized nations or nationalities.
They went beyond the concept that self-determination could be expressed only through separation. Instead, they accepted the realization of self-determination through various forms of federation.
They implemented self-determination in a fashion that was not always territorial.
Their attitude toward the national cultures of minority peoples was not neutral. Instead, they committed substantial political and state resources to planning and encouraging the development of these cultures.[25]

On all these points, the Bolshevik experience closely matches the revolutionary policies toward Indigenous peoples now being implemented in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.

Ecology and materialism

Finally, a word on ecology. The boldest governmental statements on the world’s ecological crisis are coming from Cuba, Bolivia, and other anti-imperialist governments in Latin America.[26] The influence of Indigenous struggles is felt here. Bolivian President Evo Morales points to the leading role of Indigenous peoples, “called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life.”[27]

This claim rests on an approach by many Indigenous movements to ecology that is inherently revolutionary. Most First-World ecological discussion focuses on technical and market devices, such as carbon trading, taxation, and offsets, that aim to preserve as much as possible of a capitalist economic system that is inherently destructive to the natural world. Indigenous movements, by contrast, begin with the demand for a new relationship of humankind to our natural environment, sometimes expressed in the slogan, “Liberate Mother Earth.”[28]

These movements often express their demand using an unfamiliar terminology of ancestral spiritual wisdom — but behind those words lies a worldview that can be viewed as a form of materialism.

In pre-conquest Andean society, says Peruvian Indigenous leader Rosalía Paiva, “Each was a part of all, and all were of the soil. The soil could never belong to us because we are its sons and daughters, and we belong to the soil.”[29]

Bolivian Indigenous writer Marcelo Saavedra Vargas holds that “It is capitalist society that rejects materialism. It makes war on the material world and destroys it. We, on the other hand, embrace the material world, consider ourselves part of it, and care for it.”[30]

This approach is reminiscent of Marx’s thinking, as presented by John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology. It is entirely appropriate to interpret “Liberate Mother Earth” as equivalent to “close the metabolic rift.”[31]

Hugo Chávez says that in Venezuela, 21st Century Socialism will be based not only on Marxism but also on Bolivarianism, Indigenous socialism, and Christian revolutionary traditions.[32] Latin American Marxism’s capacity to link up in this way with what Shanin calls vernacular revolutionary traditions is a sign of its vitality and promise.

I will conclude with a story told by the Peruvian Marxist and Indigenous leader Hugo Blanco. A member of his community, he tells us, conducted some Swedish tourists to a Quechua village near Cuzco. Impressed by the collectivist spirit of the Indigenous community, one of the tourists commented, “This is like communism.”

“No,” responded their guide, “Communism is like this.”[33]

Related Reading

Hugo Blanco. The Fight for Indigenous Rights in the Andes Today [pdf]
John Riddell. COMINTERN: Revolutionary Internationalism in Lenin’s Time [pdf]
John Riddell. The Russian Revolution and National Freedom

Footnotes

[1] “Alvaro García Linera, “Indianismo and Marxism” (translated by Richard Fidler), in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.
David Bedford, “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress,” in Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 14, no. 1 (1994), 102-103.
Hugo Blanco Galdos, letter to the author, December 17, 2007.

[2] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 1, p. 504.

[3] Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa, “La heterodoxia marxista de Mariátegui.” Rebelión, October 30, 2007..

[4] Néstor Kohan, “El marxismo latinoamericano y la crítica del eurocentrismo,” in Con sangre en las venas, Mexico: Ocean Sur, 2007, pp. 10, 11.

[5] See, for example, V.I. Lenin’s report on the National and Colonial Questions to the Communist International’s second congress, in Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 31, pp. 240-41; and the subsequent congress discussion and resolution, in John Riddell, ed., Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 216-290.

[6] Hinojosa, “Mariátegui.”

[7] Kohen, “Eurocentrismo,” p. 10.

[8] García Linera, “Indianismo.”

[9] Kohen, “Eurocentrismo,” p. 10.

[10] Ernesto Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” in Che Guevara Reader, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003, p. 354.

[11] See, for example, “Algunas reflexiones sobre la transición socialista,” in Ernesto Che Guevara, Apuntes críticos a la Economía Política, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2006, pp. 9-20.

[12] Kohan, “Eurocentrismo,” pp. 10-11.

[13] Ibid., p. 11

[14] Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the “Peripheries of Capitalism,” New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.

[15] Shanin, Late Marx, p. 124.

[16] Ibid., p. 12, 102-103.

[17] Lawrence Krader, ed., The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Assen, NE: Van Gorcum, 1972.

[18] Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989, vol. 24, pp. 358-59.

[19] Christine Ward Gailey, “Community, State and Questions of Social Evolution in Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks,” in Anthropologica, vol. 45 (2003), pp. 47-48.

[20] Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution against Das Kapital”

[21] Shanin, Late Marx, p. 255.

[22] Marc Becker, “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America,” in Science & Society, vol. 70 (2006), no. 4, p. 469, quoting from José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversario y Balance” (1928).

[23] Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, New York: W.W. Norton, 1968, p. 85.

[24] J.V. Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in Works, Moscow: FLPH, 1954, vol. 2, p. 307.

[25] See Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999;
John Riddell, “The Russian Revolution and National Freedom.” Socialist Voice, November 1, 2006.

[26] See, for example, Evo Morales, Felipe Perez Roque, “Bolivia and Cuba Address the UN: Radical Action Needed Now to Stop Global Warming.” Socialist Voice, September 26, 2007.

[27] Ibid.

[28] From a presentation by Vilma Amendra of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (Colombia) at York University, Friday, January 11, 2008.

[29] Address to Bolivia Rising meeting in Toronto, April 5, 2008.

[30] Interview with Marcelo Saavedra Vargas, April 21, 2008.

[31] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

[32] See, for example, speech by Chávez on December 15, 2006, summarized in “Chávez Calls for United Socialist Party of Venezuela.” Socialist Voice, January 11, 2007.

[33] Blanco’s remarks to an informal gathering in Toronto, September 16, 2008.

June 11, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Evo to EU: Social cohesion problems are not the fault of migrants, rather the development model

Dandelion Salad

by Evo Morales Ayma
http://boliviarising.blogspot.com
June 10, 2008

With Respect to the “Return Directive”

Up until the end of the World War II, Europe was an emigrant continent. Tens of thousands of Europeans departed for the Americas to colonize, to escape hunger, the financial crisis, the wars or European totalitarianisms and the persecution of ethnic minorities.

Today, I am following with concern the process of the so called “Return Directive”. The text, validated last June 5th by the Interior Ministers of 27 countries in the European Union, comes up for a vote on June 18 in the European Parliament. I feel that it is a drastic hardening of the detention and expulsion conditions for undocumented immigrants, regardless of the time they have lived in the European countries, their work situation, their family ties, or their ability and achievements to integrate.

Europeans arrived en masse to Latin and North America, without visas or conditions imposed on them by the authorities. They were simply welcomed, and continue to be, in our American continent, which absorbed at that time the European economic misery and political crisis. They came to our continent to exploit the natural wealth and to transfer it to Europe, with a high cost for the original populations in America. As is the case of our Cerro Rico de Potosi and its fabulous silver mines that gave monetary mass to the European continent from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The people, the wealth and the rights of the migrant Europeans were always respected.

…continued

June 2, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Washington Planning to “Checkmate” Chavez by Stephen Lendman

Dandelion Salad

by Stephen Lendman
Global Research, June 2, 2008

So says Heinz Dieterich Steffan – German sociologist, economist, political analyst and Hugo Chavez consultant who claims he coined the phrase “21st century socialism” in the mid-1990s. He currently teaches at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City and writes often on Latin American issues.

In a May 21, 2008 Kaosenlared.net article and follow-up Montevideo, Uruguay debate, Dieterich was blunt. He said “Washington does not want to lose (Latin America) in competition with India, China and Europe.” He called the situation “life or death” and that a military attack against Venezuela from Colombia is possible. Maybe likely, and Ecuador and Bolivia are also targeted.

He laid out a “checkmate” scenario:

— weaken and destroy FARC-EP and ELN resistance; under Clinton in 1999, Plan Colombia was launched to do it; the Uribe government’s March 1 attack against the FARC-EP camp was part of it; all regional aggression has Washington’s stamp on it, especially when Alvaro Uribe is involved; he’s the Bush administration’s closest regional ally and willing co-conspirator;

— neutralize Evo Morales in Bolivia as well, divide the country, and create a parallel state in its resource-rich provinces;

— use these successes to “checkmate” Chavez and Ecuador’s Raphael Correa; take further measures to do it; use Uribe’s military and gunboat diplomacy after the Fourth Fleet becomes active July 1 – after a 60 year hiatus and no regional threat to warrant it;

— since taking office in 2001, the Bush administration targeted Venezuela for regime change; it extended the timeline after its April 2002 coup failed; it made destroying Colombian resistance more urgent so Washington could use the country unimpeded as a launching platform against Chavez much like Honduras in the 1980s against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas; the scheme is vintage Washington; it’s still unfolding; it involves waging a “widespread offensive against Chavez and the Bolivarian forces from 2008 – 2009;”

— regime changes in Bolivia and Ecuador will follow; in Bolivia “through separatism, the Trojan Horse of the Constituent Assembly and the 2006 formation of CONFILAR” – an International Confederation for Regional Freedom and Autonomy; in Ecuador by fostering discontent in the CONAI indigenous movement and weakening the government through destabilization; also by stoking secessionist stirrings in Guayas, the country’s most affluent province.

Dieterich says Washington believes that “FARC and Evo Morales (weakening) are irreversible.” Time will tell if it’s so. That reasoning sets the stage for “subversion and paramilitary-military (actions) from Colombia (and) Fourth Fleet (aggression) against Venezuela and Ecuador.” In his judgment, an operation may be “close” with the Bush administration’s tenure winding down. He calls America a “bestial enemy” and this moment a “dangerous juncture.” He hopes Chavez, Correa, Morales and other Latin American leaders are up to the challenge. The threat is that Venezuelan generals will buckle under a US incursion and not sacrifice themselves “in a war against the gringos.”

He envisions a scenario much like against Cuba that led to the 1962 missile crisis – a naval blockade and sees “no cohesion” in Venezuela’s military as there was in Cuba. The antidote is Latin American unity. The entire region is targeted. “It’s time to seek what unites us,” he says, and urges a democratic alliance among regional governments and social forces. “There is no other way because the enemy is very powerful and is made up of the alliance between the oligarchies and the gringos, and backed by Europe and Japan.”

Dieterich says efforts in this direction have been proposed and rejected. Nonetheless, the need is urgent because failure is unthinkable – the end of participatory democracy and resurgence of neoliberal triumphalism throughout the hemisphere.

There’s hope and opportunity to head it off. He calls the Colombian March 1 incursion “a serious political mistake,” and that Bogota and Washington “underestimated the cost of this action.” It will strengthen calls for negotiation and “will be capitalised on by the forces that (want) a peaceful solution to Colombia’s armed conflict.” It will also improve chances for “South American integration aims of progressive countries like Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela.” Ecuador and Bolivia as well. Uribe came out of this politically weaker. He’ll “feel isolated diplomatically (and) will have to tone down his” belligerency. That remains to be seen for a hard right leader firmly in Bush’s camp with “billions” in “inducements” to stay there.

The stakes for Washington and the region are huge. A rerun of the 1990s “Golden Age of Pillage” is unthinkable. So is another defeat for the Bush administration. With a scant eight months left, it may try anything to reverse its losses. It makes for very scary prospects:

— saber rattling writ large;

— regional gunboat diplomacy;

— a naval blockade against Venezuela and Ecuador;

— a ground incursion from Colombia;

— three Latin American leaders targeted for removal;

— Cuba also;

— possible assassinations as well; CIA is expert at it; their agents infest the region, and Target One is Chavez; and

— according to an unidentified retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state, a planned air attack against Iran by summer; the idea is long-standing and goes back to the Clinton years; more recently, hawkish commanders replaced more hesitant ones; Congress is supportive, and, in an election year, major contenders practically preach it, at least in their rhetoric; they’re also hostile to Chavez and comfortable with his removal.

He’s alerted and revamping his intelligence services accordingly. The Interior and Justice Ministries will oversee a new General Intelligence Office and Counterintelligence Office in place of the current Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP). Similar military intelligence and counterintelligence components will replace the Military Intelligence Division (DIM) and will be under the Defense Ministry. Interior Minister Ramon Rodriguez Chacin announced the changes on May 28, and said they’re to counter US espionage and destabilization efforts. They’re operative under the newly enacted Law on Intelligence and Counterintelligence. It was passed on May 28 by presidential decree under the legislatively-granted enabling law.

They’ll be needed and lots more. According to Venezuelan Popular Unity (UPV) leader Lina Ron, the Chavez government is threatened. She cites a coup d’etat scheme called “Choquinaque” to oust it. It involves economic financing, psychological manipulation, and efforts to destabilize Venezuela’s economy. Senior military commanders are being enlisted and bribed and opposition candidates promoted. The aim is to influence the outcome of the November 23 regional elections for mayors and governors. Pro-Chavez officials hold most posts, and Washington-backed subversion aims to unseat enough of them to change the balance of power.

Similar schemes back secessionist movements in the most affluent parts of Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador in its Guayas province. It has regional leaders alarmed and Chavez outraged and vocal. On his weekly radio and television program, he blamed “oligarchs” and “fascists” for targeting Bolivia after its most resource-rich state (Santa Cruz) supported more autonomy in a (largely symbolic) May 4 referendum. “The CIA and its lackeys (want regional control) but we will defeat that plan through integration, political union and ideological strength.”

It’s vital because Venezuela is also threatened. It’s oil-rich Zulia state has similar secessionist ideas. Big Oil exploits them, and their local allies in the past supported a referendum to choose independence from Caracas. Its governor is Manuel Rosales. He ran against Chavez in 2006 and lost big. He backs the idea, is close to the Bush administration, and signed the infamous “Carmona Decree” after the April 2002 coup. It dissolved the National Assembly and Supreme Court, erased the Constitution, and ended Bolivarianism for the people. For now, more autonomy is enough for Rosales but unthinkable if Chavistas can help it. They condemn the idea and will fight it.

Stay tuned. November approaches in both countries. The Bush administration’s tenure is short. But it’s got plenty of time left to incinerate two continents and end the republic if that’s its plan. An inert public needs arousing. Michel Chossudovsy says we’re “at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history.” It’s part of a “war and globalization” process. The stakes for humanity are incalculable, but rogue states don’t weigh them. World communities better while there’s time.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM to 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests. All programs are archived for easy listening.

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see

Venezuela: Big stakes in November elections

The new smear against Chávez by Chris Carlson

June 1, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Bolivia: Indigenous leaders beaten and publicly humiliated

Dandelion Salad

Posted with permission by Green Left Weekly

by Franz Chavez
Green Left Weekly
31 May 2008

Bolivia may have its first-ever indigenous president, but racism is alive and well in this country, as demonstrated by the public humiliation of a group of around 50 indigenous mayors, town councillors and community leaders in the south-central city of Sucre.

The incident, which shook the country but received little attention from the international press, occurred on May 25, when President Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, was to appear in a public ceremony in Sucre to deliver 50 ambulances for rural communities and announce funding for municipal projects.

But in the early hours of May 25, organised groups opposed to Morales began to surround the stadium where he was to appear. Confronting the police and soldiers with sticks, stones and dynamite, they managed to occupy the stadium.

The president cancelled his visit, and the security forces were withdrawn to avoid bloodshed.

Right-wing violence

But violent elements of the Interinstitutional Committee, a conservative pro-autonomy, anti-Morales civic group that is backed by the local university and other bodies, continued to harass and beat supporters of the governing Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and anyone who appeared to be indigenous.

A mob of armed civilians, partially made up of university students, then surrounded several dozen indigenous Morales supporters, including local authorities who had come from other regions to attend the ceremony.

The terrified indigenous people, who had sought refuge in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Sucre, were stripped of their few belongings and forced to walk seven kilometres to the House of Liberty, a symbol of the end of colonial rule in Bolivia that was declared there in 1825.

In the city’s main square, they were forced to kneel — shirtless — and apologise for coming to Sucre. They were also made to chant insults like “Die Evo!”

They were surrounded by activists from the pro-autonomy movement, who set fire to the blue, black and white MAS party flag, the multicolour flag of the Aymara people and colourful hand-woven indigenous ponchos seized from the visiting Morales supporters.

Sucre Mayor Aidee Nava and the Interinstitutional Committee immediately apologised after the incident. Morales called on Sucre officials to bring those responsible to justice.

Entrenched racism

Indigenous people in Bolivia have long suffered discrimination. They were not even allowed to vote until 1952, when the government of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) abolished pongaje — a system of forced labour for indigenous people in rural areas.

South America’s poorest country is divided between the western highlands, home to the poor indigenous majority, and the much wealthier eastern provinces that account for most of the country’s natural gas production, industry and agribusiness. The population of eastern Bolivia tends to be of more European and mixed-race descent.

Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s richest province, is at the vanguard of an autonomy movement that involves six of the country’s nine regions. People in Santa Cruz voted in favour of regional autonomy in a May 4 referendum, and three other eastern provinces will hold similar referendums in June.

Analysts say that underlying the autonomy movement, which is spearheaded by the right-wing business and political elites who governed Bolivia for decades, is the question of control and use of Bolivia’s natural resources.

The aim of the left-wing Morales government is to distribute the nation’s wealth more evenly, in order to improve the living conditions of the country’s indigenous people — most of whom live in appalling poverty.

According to MAS representatives and an independent analyst who spoke to Inter-Press Service, the May 25 incident has encouraged Morales supporters to redouble their efforts to bring about structural changes aimed at eradicating inequality and discrimination.

“We are witnessing a backlash by the oligarchy”, Rene Navarro, a MAS representative in the constituent assembly that is rewriting the Bolivian constitution, told IPS. Navarro predicted more violence against indigenous people by the right.

The right is attempting in the media to portray the Sucre violence as part of a government-fomented campaign aimed at further polarising the country along regional lines. But Navarro argued that the racist violence is “a blow to all citizens alike”. He said that the government should publicise what it has achieved over the last two-and-a-half years.

Fighting back

MAS lawmaker Jose Pimentel, a former leader of the country’s miners’ union, told IPS that it was urgently necessary to get the draft constitution approved in a referendum, with the support of the rural indigenous peasants in alliance with the urban poor.

Independent analyst Franco Gamboa agreed that the only option open to the government is to continue forging ahead with the new constitution, the vote on which is being delayed by the autonomy referendums as well as plans for a recall referendum for Morales, his vice president, and the country’s nine provincial governors.

The aim of the new constitution, whose draft was approved by the MAS majority in the constituent assembly in a December vote boycotted by the right, is to create a unified but decentralised state that recognises Bolivia’s cultural and ethnic diversity, while ensuring greater political participation and access to land and other resources by indigenous people.

Gamboa said the reaction of conservative groups in Sucre and the autonomy movements in eastern provinces reflect opposition to the greater political independence and expanded land rights that the new constitution would grant indigenous people — which represent a challenge to the privileges enjoyed by the landowning and business elites.

The new constitution would recognise greater autonomy for the provinces, municipalities and indigenous communities, while the anti-Morales provinces only want decentralisation at the municipal and provincial levels.

Pimentel stressed that “the fact that Morales was elected as the country’s first indigenous president is not sufficient to do away with a racist, neo-colonial state, which is why it is important to reform the constitution”.

Juanita Ancieta, a leader of the Women’s Federation of the Tropico de Cochabamba, told IPS that “we are not going to allow them to divide Bolivia, and we are not going to sit back with our arms crossed, doing nothing”.

[Originally published by the Inter-Press Service on May 28, abridged from http://bolivisarising.blogspot.com.]

May 20, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Popular Struggle Intensifies in Bolivia by Federico Fuentes

Dandelion Salad

by Federico Fuentes
http://www.socialistvoice.ca
Green Left Weekly
May 19, 2008

These articles were first published in Green Left Weekly. Federico Fuentes is the editor of Bolivia Rising.

Recall referendum opens new struggle

May 17, 2008—A new period of uncertainty and opportunity has opened up in Bolivian politics following the calling of recall referendums on August 10 for the national president and prefects of Bolivia’s nine departments (states) by the opposition-controlled Bolivian senate. President Evo Morales has been pushing for this measure since last year.

The law, first introduced into the House of Deputies by the governing Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) last December, had been gathering dust due to the refusal of the right-wing opposition to approve it in the Senate. The sudden move to pass the law has left many wondering why the opposition controlled senate would take such a decision.

The initial idea behind the law had been to let the people resolve through the ballot box the “catastrophic deadlock” between the popular government of Evo Morales, backed by the social movements, and the right-wing opposition, spearhead by the elites from the eastern region tied to gas transnationals and agribusiness.

MAS and the social movements have been campaigning to approve the new constitution, finally handed over by the Constituent Assembly last December, which would dramatically broaden recognition of indigenous rights within a new plurinational state, and increase state intervention into the economy and control over natural resources.

Right-wing ‘autonomy’

In reaction, the elites based in the eastern department of Santa Cruz, in a move to defend their economic and political interests, counterposed to the new constitution their proposal for increased autonomy for the eastern regions – where they control the prefectures and where most of the natural resources are located and more than 60% of GDP originates.

Stepping up a gear in their campaign, Santa Cruz held an illegal referendum on May 4 over proposed autonomy statute that would hand enormous power over to the prefectures, including control over natural resources, distribution of land titles, and the right to sign international treaties.

The rights claimed a massive victory, with supposedly 85% support for the Yes vote. But high abstention – promoted by the government and social movements – meant that the Yes vote in reality represents just over 50% of the electoral.

Since then, the four prefects of the eastern departments have rejected Morales’ calls for negotiations, forming a united bloc that will return to the negotiating table only after the other autonomy referendums are staged. Autonomy referendums will be held June 1 in Pando and Beni, and June 22 in Tarija.

These sectors received the Senate’s decision as a cold shower. “A grave error,” “a political stupidity” and “a disservice to autonomies” were just some of the comments to come out of these quarters.

Opportunity for popular forces

Among the prefects, the opposition control six, MAS two, and one is up for election on June 29, following the resignation of the prefect of Sucre who was elected on the MAS ticket.

Moreover, to be recalled, the president and prefects have to receive a vote of rejection superior in votes and percentage to those obtained in the December 2005 general elections. So whilst the opposition will have to surpass 53.74% of votes (1,544,374 votes national) to remove Evo Morales. The prefects are left in a more complicated situation: given none of them got over 50% they could be revoked with a minority vote against them.

The most precarious case is that of opposition La Paz prefect, Jose Luis Paredes, who received only 38% of the vote in the 2005 elections, and who will have to obtain 62% to remain in his post.

Many believe the move by Podemos, the largest opposition party in the Senate, was aimed at regaining the initiative within the opposition camp, pushing the Santa Cruz autonomists to the background. Part of the thinking behind the move was the hope to put a halt to the referendum to approve the new constitution, as the law on referendums allows only one consultation per constitutional period.

MAS senator Felix Rojas, quoted on Bolpress on May 13, said however that Podemos miscalculated and that “errors in politics are made to pay.” He argued not only do recall referendums fall under different regulations; it would also be possible to hold the referendum on the new constitution in conjunction with the recall referendums.

Right-wing defiance

Responding to these events, the proclaimed “governor” of Santa Cruz, Ruben Costas, announced on May 14 the constitution of a provisional legislative assembly of the “autonomous government of Santa Cruz.”

“Following the political earthquake caused by the approval of the recall referendums … Santa Cruz had to once again put on the agenda the issue of autonomy, and to do this it needed a radical dramatization” a well-known journalist from Santa Cruz told Argentine daily Clarin on May 15.

“They can call it what they want, it is only symbolic. For us what counts is the constitution,” was the response of Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera. MAS Senator Antonio Peredo called for charges of sedition to be laid against the Santa Cruz leaders.

Meanwhile, in the presidential palace, excitement is rising for the possibility of removing at least two opposition prefects –La Paz and Cochabamba, heartlands of the MAS base – and the further opportunities in Pando and Tarija, which have a strong presence of peasant movements and where MAS mayors control the departmental capitals.

The recent mobilizations in defence of national unity and against the autonomy referendum in Santa Cruz, along with the nationalizations announced on May 1, have not only seen Morales support increase, but have acted to bring about greater unity and mobilisation of the popular sectors.

A concerted campaign of mass mobilization that builds on the greater unity and mobilisation of the popular sectors of the last few weeks in defence of national unity could ensure an important victory for Morales. The upcoming referendum may become a vote to ratify Morales and his national project for change and strengthen him both nationally and internationally.

* * *

Fraud, violence and mass resistance marks right-wing push

May 9, 2008 — “A day of violence, fraud and a ‘grand rebellion’ against the Santa Cruz oligarchy.

This is how Bolivian president Evo Morales Ayma described the result of the unconstitutional May 4 “autonomy” referendum organized by the authorities in Santa Cruz — which many feared was aimed at dividing Bolivia.

The referendum was the first in a series of proposed referendums to be held in the departments of the so-called Half Moon — Santa Cruz plus Pando, Beni and Tarija, resource-rich departments in Bolivia’s east. The Half Moon remains dominated by the white oligarchy despite the coming to power nationally of Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, on the back of a mass movement against neoliberalism led by the indigenous majority.

Illegal vote

While the National Electoral Court had ruled that the autonomy referendum — which the government had proposed be held simultaneously with a referendum to approve the new constitution — could not go ahead on May 4 due to lack of time and suitable political conditions, the prefecture and civic committee of Santa Cruz, backed by the Santa Cruz Electoral Court, decided to go ahead with what was an illegal referendum.

The referendum revolved around proposed autonomy statutes, drafted by the oligarchy without any discussion, and which less than 15% of crucenos (Santa Cruz residents) had read before May 4. The statutes hand enormous power over to the opposition-controlled prefectures, including control over natural resources, distribution of land titles, the right to sign international treaties and its own police force and judicial system.

On the day, the Yes vote received 483,925 votes, representing around 85% of the votes cast, against 85,399 No votes. However, calls by the social movements and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS — Morales’s party) national government to abstain led non-participation to rise to 39%, or 366,839 registered voters — more than double the usual abstention rate.

This result was obtained in the face of threats and intimidation by bosses who told workers they would loss their jobs if they did not vote and the menacing patrols of the fascist Union Juvenil Crucenista (UJC) — renowned for carrying out violent, racist attacks on indigenous people.

Oppressed mobilize

However, in the “other Santa Cruz” — such as the popular urban area of Plan Tres Mil and the rural areas of San Julian and Yacapani — organized resistance by the popular civic committee and indigenous campesino (peasant) organizations ensured the non-installation of voting tables.

Despite physical attacks by the UJC, which left more than 20 injured and one dead, in these areas abstention was almost total.

Across the country, massive mobilizations were organized by the powerful indigenous campesino organizations, together with trade unions and urban popular organizations. A week before, Morales had called for demonstrations in all capital cities, except Santa Cruz in order to avoid violence, behind the banner of national unity.

Underlying these events is an intense class struggle, infused with strong ethnic and regional components. The ruling elites are fighting to restore the political power they have begun to lose.

The election of Morales came on the back of five years of intense social struggle by the combative indigenous and campesino movements, which gave birth to an alternative national project based on the demands of nationalization of gas and a constituent assembly to refound Bolivia.

In December of 2005, unified behind its “political instrument” — MAS — this movement propelled former coca growers’ union leader Morales into the presidential palace.

Since then, Morales has initiated a process of returning Bolivia’s gas to state hands, begun implementing an agrarian reform and organised elections for a constituent assembly that has prepared a new draft constitution to be submitted to a national referendum.

For the oligarchy, particularly those with interests tied to the gas transnationals and agribusiness, these changes are intolerable.

Forced to retreat to its trenches in the east, the elite has run a propaganda line that combines rallying against “La Paz centralism,” tapping into the long held sentiments of a “crucenista [Santa Cruz] identity” and outright racism to regroup and mobilise a section of the white population of the east against the government — whose stronghold is in the impoverished and largely indigenous west. This campaign is receiving heavy funding from the U.S. government.

While it cannot be ruled out that the oligarchy could use these social base to move to divide Bolivia through secession, its main plan at the moment is to put a halt on the process unfolding since Morales’ election — aiming to wear down popular support for the government by forcing concessions from the government at the negotiating table and paving the way towards ultimately getting rid of him, via a coup or elections.

Post-referendum struggle

In this context, the results of the May 4 referendum were clearly not a victory for the oligarchy. Forced to rely on fraud and intimidation, the right was unable to get the resounding vote they would have required to turn the results of their illegal referendum into a legitimate mandate.

Yet nor was it a complete defeat — the large Yes vote showed that an important section of Santa Cruz continues to back the oligarchy.

For the popular movements, the important resistance of the “other Santa Cruz” represents a new phase in their struggle. This was reflected in the high abstention and the emergence of an important middle-class layer grouped around Santa Cruz Somos Todos, who, although not part of the MAS project, called for a No vote and support autonomy within the framework of the new constitution.

The actions of the counterrevolution have pushed those forces in favour of change towards greater unity. This was demonstrated in the May Day rallies where, importantly, the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), which had until now been very critical of the government, was on the main stage promoting a united front.

The oligarchy, claiming victory from the May 4 vote, will undoubtedly be calling for a return to the negotiating table to force concessions out of the government to water down the new constitution and insert its autonomy statutes.

However, these two projects are incompatible. The government needs to shift the debate back to the draft constitution by calling the referendum for its approval as soon as possible — as the social movements are demanding.

Any autonomy must be within the framework of what has been democratically decided by the constituent assembly. In this way, the movements can counterpose their autonomy based on social justice and solidarity to that of the Santa Cruz elites and win support among the Santa Cruz population.

Moreover, the government needs to continue to implement its economic program of nationalizations — such as those announced on May 1, which included recuperating majority control of four gas transnationals and total control over ENTEL, Bolivia’s largest telecommunications company.

These moves can demonstrate the role of a strong national state and build the confidence and dignity of the popular movements and middle classes to continue pushing the democratic revolution forward.

These nationalizations, along with agrarian reform and wealth redistribution, are crucial to give further momentum to the popular movements. Together with continuing to give soldiers and officials in the armed forces an active role in enacting these measures, this would make possible a strong campaign to win them over to the side of the popular movements. It is a vital to strengthen the nationalist wing of the military against those right-wing elements conspiring to overthrow Morales.

To ensure that the result of May 4 can become a real victory for the popular forces, it is necessary to continue to develop the unity that has been built over the last few weeks to continue the mobilization of the masses and deepen the revolutionary process through decisive economic and political measures.

May 12, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Bolivia: Fraud, violence & mass resistance marks right-wing push

Dandelion Salad

by Federico Fuentes
Global Research, May 11, 2008
greenleft.org

A day of violence, fraud and a “grand rebellion” against the Santa Cruz oligarchy.

This is how Bolivian president, Evo Morales Ayma, described the result of the unconstitutional May 4 “autonomy” referendum organised by the authorities in Santa Cruz — which many feared was aimed at dividing Bolivia.

Illegal vote

Oppressed mobilise

However, in the “other Santa Cruz” — such as the popular urban area of Plan Tres Mil and the rural areas of San Julian and Yacapani — organised resistance by the popular civic committee and indigenous campesino (peasant) organisations ensured the non-installation of voting tables.

Despite physical attacks by the UJC, which left more than 20 injured and one dead, in these areas abstention was almost total.

Across the country, massive mobilisations were organised by the powerful indigenous campesino organisations, together with trade unions and urban popular organisations. A week before, Morales had called for demonstrations in all capital cities, except Santa Cruz in order to avoid violence, behind the banner of national unity.

Underlying these events is an intense class struggle, infused with strong ethnic and regional components. The ruling elites are fighting to restore the political power they have begun to lose.

The election of Morales came on the back of five years of intense social struggle by the combative indigenous and campesino movements, which gave birth to an alternative national project based on the demands of nationalisation of gas and a constituent assembly to refound Bolivia.

In December of 2005, unified behind its “political instrument” — MAS — this movement propelled former coca growers’ union leader Morales into the presidential palace.

For the oligarchy, particularly those with interests tied to the gas transnationals and agribusiness, these changes are intolerable.

Forced to retreat to its trenches in the east, the elite has run a propaganda line that combines rallying against “La Paz centralism”, tapping into the long held sentiments of a “crucenista identity” and outright racism to regroup and mobilise a section of the white population of the east against the government — whose stronghold is in the impoverished and largely indigenous west. This campaign is receiving heavy funding from the US government.

While it can not be ruled out that the oligarchy could use these social base to move to divide Bolivia through secession, its main plan at the moment is to put a halt on the process unfolding since Morales’ election — aiming to wear down popular support for the government by forcing concessions from the government at the negotiating table and paving the way towards ultimately getting rid of him, via a coup or elections.

Post-referendum struggle

Yet nor was it a complete defeat — the large Yes vote showed that an important section of Santa Cruz continues to back the oligarchy.

Moreover, the government needs to continue to implement its economic program of nationalisations — such as those announced on May 1, which included recuperating majority control of four gas transnationals and total control over ENTEL, Bolivia’s largest telecommunications company.

These moves can demonstrate the role of a strong national state and build the confidence and dignity of the popular movements and middle classes to continue pushing the democratic revolution forward.

These nationalisations, along with agrarian reform and wealth redistribution, are not only crucial to give further momentum to the popular movements — together with a strong campaign to win the hearts and minds of soldiers and officials in the armed forces, it is a vital to strengthen the nationalist wing of the military against those right-wing elements conspiring to overthrow Morales.

In a sign of the battles to come in the near future, on May 8, Cuban newspaper Granma reported that the Senate, controlled by the right, had passed a motion Morales has been pushing since last year to hold a recall referendum for the presidency as well as the nine regional governors.

To ensure that the result of May 4 can become a real victory for the popular forces, it is necessary to continue to develop the unity that has been built over the last few weeks to continue the mobilisation of the masses and deepen the revolutionary process through decisive economic and political measures.

Federico Fuentes is the editor of http://boliviarising.blogspot.com. Co-author of forecoming book (in spanish) MAS-IPSP de Bolivia: Instrumento Político que surge de los movimientos sociales with Marta Harnecker.

see

Inside USA: US interference in Bolivia

Bolivia: What does Santa Cruz want? + Autonomy vote

Stalled Morales puts faith in referendum

US backs eastern seccession in Bolivia (video)

We Must Democratize Our Economic Institutions by Manila Ryce

Fight for Bolivia’s future lies behind referendum

Talk to Jazeera: Evo Morales (videos)

May 11, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Inside USA: US interference in Bolivia

Dandelion Salad

AlJazeeraEnglish

This week Inside USA looks at the Bush administration’s policies in South America’s poorest nation, and asks what the future holds for Bolivia.

see

Bolivia: What does Santa Cruz want? + Autonomy vote

Stalled Morales puts faith in referendum

US backs eastern seccession in Bolivia (video)

We Must Democratize Our Economic Institutions by Manila Ryce

Fight for Bolivia’s future lies behind referendum

Talk to Jazeera: Evo Morales (videos)

May 10, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Bolivia: What does Santa Cruz want? + Autonomy vote

Dandelion Salad

TheRealNews

More at http://therealnews.com/c.ph…
Forrest Hylton: Santa Cruz state leadership and armed street gangs are overtly racist (part two)…

***

Autonomy vote of rich province in Bolivia illegal

More at http://therealnews.com/c.ph…
Autonomy proponents in Santa Cruz claim victory as opposition boycotts referendum…

Added: May 07, 2008

see

Stalled Morales puts faith in referendum

US backs eastern seccession in Bolivia (video)

We Must Democratize Our Economic Institutions by Manila Ryce

Fight for Bolivia’s future lies behind referendum

Talk to Jazeera: Evo Morales (videos)

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