The latest reports, Amy Goodman reported at 8AM ET, indicate “the situation could rapidly deteriorate into a bloodbath or a civil war.”
“The situation is so volatile [in La Paz] that the Congress has been unable to convene and so lawmakers are headed to the historical capital of Sucre to hold emergency meetings today.” More on U.S. involvement (it’s about the gas reserves!):
In a statement that has worried veteran Bolivia analysts, he said ”I am absolutely convinced that the armed forces will back us.”
Meanwhile, veteran Bolivia analyst Jim Shultz of the Democracy Center in Cochabamba is reporting that his sources are telling him that the US embassy is now in talks with Vaca Diez, helping to pave the way for his taking over the presidency. He also reports that just before Mesa resigned earlier this week, he met with the US ambassador. Shultz writes “Vaca Diez is a close ally of the deposed and reviled ex-President, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. He comes from Santa Cruz, the region whose demands for autonomy have helped spark this crisis. He is an opponent of returning the country’s gas and oil to public hands. He has also called chillingly for Mesa “to govern”, again, shorthand for using the military to crush protests.”
Meanwhile, the country’s indigenous groups, labor unions, agricultural workers and others who have poured into the streets and shut down Bolivia have vowed to resist Vaca Diez and say they will engage in “civic resistance” against police and army troops if the government attempts to impose martial law. Here is one of the country’s leading opposition figures, Congressmember Evo Morales:
“And if Hormando Vaca Diez becomes president instead of rejecting the constitutional succession, we will call for a united and organized resistance to prevent the government of Hormando Vaca Diez who will only serve the interests of the transnationals. We will call for a civil disobedience in order to demand the respect of Bolivia.”
Bolivian opposition leader Evo Morales. He is now calling for early elections to be held. Meanwhile, as the country’s future remains in the balance, the protests are continuing. Twenty six miners were injured when they were fired on by police and the mayor of La Paz, Juan del Granado, announced yesterday that he was beginning a hunger strike to protest Vaca Diez. del Granado spoke to reporters yesterday:
“There are more that twenty institutions in La Paz that have started a hunger strike and we are calling on all residents of the capital to join us in solidarity to say to the country and to Hormando Vaca Diez that he cannot succeed as president of the republic. He represents, sadly, the old way of thinking and we Bolivians demand change, renovation and transformation.” …
Read all at Democracy Now!
For more background, read our June 6, 2005 BooTrib story on Bolivia: Uprising in Bolivia; President to Resign and Democracy Now!’s feature story on June 7, “Mass Indigenous-led Rebellion Forces Bolivian President to Resign.
Of note from the BooTrib story on June 7:
what American companies may have an interest in those gas fields?
I’m taking my daughter to the doctor today but it’d be great if someone did some more snooping on this. We could even start with Democracy Now!’s archives since they have a pretty good search engine.
Repsol (Spain), Petrobras (Brazil), Exxon Mobil (USA), Total (France) Pluspetrol (Argentina), and British Gas (UK).
see Le Monde: La carte énergétique en Amérique du Sud est en plein bouleversement
and also La montée du nationalisme bolivien inquiète les pétroliers étranger
The demonstrators in Bolivia are acting a lot like Chavez’ opponents in Venezuela at the time of their general strike. They are refusing to accept the normal democratic process. They have now forced out two presidents and are saying they will try to do so to a third one. Many of their leaders are also saying that they won’t stop until the oil and gas industry is nationalized. In other words they are seeking to blackmail the democratic authorities. In doing so they are increasing the chances that if and when the left does win elections their right wing opponents will do the same to them. After all, if it was ok for the left to reject the decisions of the elected parliament when they were in opposition why shouldn’t the right do so when they find themselves in a minority. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
Yet the oil and gas will still be there a year from now when elections are scheduled. If they win they could enact their policies. A year’s delay will cause no irreparable harm. The precedent the Morales and company are setting will.
That’s a good idea, but not so easy to do when you’re living in the abject poverty of many of these people. Their elected leaders have not been doing what they were elected to do.
People are desperate. Bolivia’s infant mortality rate is second only to Haiti’s. It takes less than a year to die of starvation.
I watched The Corporation several weeks back. It featured the story of a small city in South or Central America (I can’t remember the name) that had it’s water resources privated by a large multinational company.
Poor people were expected to pay 1/3 of their income for the privatized water, and forbidden by law to gather rainwater. HOW CAN YOU MAKE LAWS ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO WITH RAIN IN ORDER TO LINE THE POCKETS OF THE RICH.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of anything so immoral. These people know what privatization means. I’d riot, too.
Exactly. Susan quoted Jim Shultz in her Jun 7 post (I.M.F. is the International Monetary Fund):
“Bolivia did it all, privatization of water, privatization of oil and gas, relaxation of labor standards, all of the deficit reduction coming in from the backs of the poor. All of this has been done at the command of the I.M.F. and the World Bank.
“And Bolivia doesn’t have a lot of choice. When the I.M.F. and the World Bank tell Bolivia, “Thou shalt privatize your water” or “Thou shalt privatize your oil and gas,” those are commandments that are very difficult for a poor country like Bolivia to say no to. The fact is it hasn’t worked.
then you get to change the laws. Doing it this way means you no longer have any moral standing to complain about the local elites sabotaging left wing policies enacted by an elected left wing government. And if you lose the election then accept that. The issue here is not whether or not specific policies are unjust, it is about a respect for democracy. Again, how is what the Bolivian left doing any different from what the Venezuelan opposition did during the general strike? Was seeking to cripple that country because the opposition disliked the elected government’s policies a legitimate tactic?
No, I don’t see how it’s that different from the other. You say to win an election — what happens when that no longer has any meaning? What to do when all power is no longer working for the people? We won an election here in 2000 — did it do any good?
Not that I’m saying our situations are at all comparable, but how would you feel if Florida was repeated nationwide for decades while the middle-class disappeared and over half the nation fell into abject poverty? What do people do when their government is no longer working for them at any level?
Here, we are protesting the war and administration currently. In the past, the women’s movement, labor movement, and civil rights movement have all used organizing and peaceful protest to reach their goals. This is what people do when the political process isn’t working.
That’s what’s been happening in Bolivia. The people have been using the time-honored tradition of peacefully assembling. Does that lose them moral authority? I don’t think so. This isn’t an ideological left-wing movement. It isn’t a coup. It’s a demonstration of the masses who are trying to gain access and influence a political system in which they have no real power except for their numbers.
It is the shutting down of the entire economy. If all they were doing was holding regular mass demos I’d have no problem. If the next election had significant fraud and they resorted to these sorts of methods then I’d think they were justified. But what they are doing now is simply undermining their own legitimacy if they do come to power. As for ideological left – if you read French I suggest you take a look at that article on the Bolivian Left that I linked to.
But I’m beginning to get the feeling that we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
You’re correct — it’s a popular uprising and we probably will have to agree to disagree. I can’t read French, but I do know the ideological left down there isn’t wonderful either. But they’re not the ones doing or orchestrating this.
This is thousands of people with the support of most of the mayors and virtually every civic, labor and social leader. So, if all of the poor and all of the workers, and all of the people who are the leaders, all think that this is a good thing — if all those are saying hold the strikes, stay in the streets, then who exactly would these people be going back to work for?
To what purpose and whose benefit is the economy in that country running or not running?
I’m not trying to be a smart ass, I’m honestly asking. It seems to me these same arguments about keeping the economy running and the people only hurting themselves have been made before when the workers shut down the coal mines and factories, when the buses were boycotted, etc.
elections – so no one has an opportunity to change the laws.
I commented in haste on this one, because I have to confess I don’t know much of the particulars on this particular uprising. It’s just that the story in the Corporation so upset me that I’m very sensitive about multinationals coming in to privatize natural resources in Latin America (is Latin America accepted parlance?).
So you may be right about this. I do know, though, that if I was paying one-third of my income for water, I’d riot without waiting for an election. Whence comes my (perhaps misplaced) sympathy for a situation I probably don’t know enough about.
of this from narconews:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/
Al Giordano writes:
“It is 4:30 in the morning somewhere in a country called América, the coffee percolates on a lucky stove where there is still gas: Authentic Journalism cannot sleep. A day of reckoning is upon us.”
this is towards the end of Al Giordano’s article:
“In late May, in the nearby country of Paraguay, that nation’s Congress was convened in secret, after midnight, according to a May 31 report by the Argentine correspondent for the Mexican daily La Jornada. The reason: to rush through a law “that will permit United States troops to enter this South American country for 18 months, with immunity for all personnel that participate in activities of training and advising, including civilian personnel.”
“Remember, kind readers, that under U.S. law, the number of North American troops who can be in nearby Colombia is limited to the hundreds: and they’re busy enough there already with a fifty-year civil war.
“What Vaca Diez is attempting is nothing less than creating the justification for the U.S. military to invade his own country of Bolivia, perhaps to protect strategic oil supplies, perhaps to “strenthen democracy,” as Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush harped about on Tuesday in Florida at the Organization of American States meeting, or perhaps in the name of the “war on drugs” and eradicating the humble coca leaf once and for all.
“From the State Department to Sucre, they’ve all gone mad with power, and any bestiality is possible when Vaca Diez seizes control with his Doctrine of Authoritarian Government that seeks to blame tyranny on its victims.”
Bolivia has a long standing gas export agreement with PetroBras, the state oil company of Brazil. There have been some disagreements over the take-or-pay terms of that contract, but I believe that it is generally accepted in Bolivia. The real dispute is over plans to export liquified natural gas (LNG) to the US through a port in Peru or Chile. According to the US Energy Infomation Agency’s Country Brief on Bolivia,
The original terms for this deal were widely viewed as unfair by the leftist opposition, and that led to last year’s referendum on energy policy.
In contrast, Venezuela has always exported most of it production. There, the dispute is over the terms of engagement with internation oil companies. Here is a short summary from the
Houston Chronicle –
The Venezuelan left sneered when energy giants, such as Houston-based ConocoPhillips, profited while boosting the country’s oil output. But with the leftist Chavez now solidly in power — ratified by a resounding victory in a recall referendum last August — the government is doing everything possible to roll them back.
Last October, it pushed up the royalty it collects on four multibillion-dollar heavy crude projects from 1 percent to 16.6 percent. Thirty-two operating service contracts — where the international oil company is reimbursed for investment and production costs — have been given six months to convert to joint ventures with PDVSA under the tougher terms of the Hydrocarbons Law decreed by Chavez in 2001. Those agreements have faced an income tax hike of 34 percent to 50 percent, which will be applied retroactively for four years.
A later article said that Venezuela was claiming back taxes of 3 billion dollars.
In my opinion, both countries face the same basic problem – how to utilize the expertise of big oil companies, while keeping the excess profits for themselves, and simultaneously avoiding a culture of corruption. Brazil did pretty well for itself, by building a world class state oil company, and also developing a strong biofuels industry based on sugar cane. On the other hand, Mexico’s state oil company is widely viewed as corrupt and incompetent. Now that their largest field, Cantarell, is in decline, Mexico faces some serious choices.
There’s a Le Monde article from a couple days ago which says that the left is divided into two main camps. One is Evo Morales’ MAS which is trying to keep one foot in the democratic process and another in the street. The second grouping is the COB led by Jaime Solares which rejects democracy and is calling for a left wing military coup d’etat. Le Monde argues that Morales has been becoming more radical in his methods in order to avoid losing left wing activists to his rival.
They also quote a former ally of Morales’ who complains that Morales is making a major mistake by becoming more radical in that he is completely alienating the middle class. He says that in general the current left wing leadership is making the same mistakes he and his friends made a half century ago leading to countless deaths.
see: Les surenchères entre leaders attisent les divisions de la gauche bolivienne
Here’s a link to some photos from Bolivia:
http://bolivia.indymedia.org/es/2005/06/19177.shtml
These were posted 2 or 3 days ago.
Luis Gomez on NarcoNews is reporting “Senator Hormando Vaca Diez, president of the Congress, suspended all legislative work, without any date or time given to resume it.”
It’s on CNN that Boliva has sworn in Supreme Court Justice Eduardo Rodriguez as president:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/06/09/bolivia.ap/
After the president resigned, the other two, including Vaca Diez, rejected the post.