------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Feb. 27, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
BOLIVIA REBELS AGAINST U.S., IMF REGIME By Andy McInerney The tide of protest that has swept Latin America, threatening U.S. client regimes from Argentina to Colombia, has reached the Andean nation of Bolivia. In recent weeks thousands of workers, students and peasants have staged strikes, roadblocks and street battles against the U.S.- backed government of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. The protests have already had two important effects. First, the Bolivian state apparatus--the armed forces that protect the tiny ruling class and U.S. interests there-- has split. The police are siding with the popular demonstrations while the army has remained loyal to the government. Second, the working-class opposition, including peasants and students, has coalesced into a "General Staff of the Bolivian People," united around the goal of unseating Sanchez de Lozada. The current round of protests has its roots in coordinated actions that began in mid-January. Farmers growing coca clashed with army troops at roadblocks set up to demand that the government allow coca growing for limited non-narcotic use and that it end a U.S.-sponsored defoliation campaign against coca crops. Farmers have grown coca in the Andean highlands for centuries. The plant is part of the traditional Indigenous culture. The international drug market has turned the leaf into a commodity, but the billions of dollars in drug profits do not reach the coca growers. At the same time that the coca-growing peasants blocked the main highway from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz, some 10,000 pensioners gathered in Calamarca to block the highway between the capital La Paz and Oruro, a link to Chilean trading ports on the Pacific Ocean. The retirees were protesting the falling value of their pensions due to a peg linking pensions to the U.S. dollar. The demonstrators also protested Bolivian government plans to join the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The FTAA is the proposed U.S.-dominated market that would eliminate the ability of countries in the region to protect their economies from U.S. domination. Bolivia is among the poorest countries in Latin America. Seventy percent of the people live below the poverty line. Many survive on less than $1 per day. The pensioners managed to win some concessions from the government. But the coca growers' protest continued, drawing wider support from leaders of Aymara Indigenous communities. On Feb. 9, Sanchez de Lozado poured more gasoline on the fire. He decreed a new economic austerity program, cutting government spending by 10 percent and raising taxes. The economic program was designed to reduce the government deficit from 8.5 percent to 5 percent, a requirement imposed by the International Monetary Fund. The austerity plan provoked angry responses. "The government prefers that the poor bear the burden of the crisis," Evo Morales told the Associated Press on Feb. 10. Morales, a Congressional deputy from the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party and winner of the popular vote for Bolivia's presidency last June, is a leader of the coca growers' protest. Broader forces joined the opposition movement. Union leaders called for a one-day strike. Even business leaders opposed the proposed tax increase. On Feb. 12, police in La Paz split from the government and sided with the protests. Police took over the building housing the foreign ministry and joined a demonstration laying siege to the presidential palace. The mutinying officers fired rounds of tear gas into the detachments of government military troops deployed against the protests. At least 17 people were killed in clashes with the army. Within days, Sanchez de Lozada withdrew the unpopular tax plan. But the MAS, the Bolivian Workers Federation (COB), and other groups continued to pressure for the president's resignation. The center of the opposition is now the General Staff of the Bolivian People, formed in late January. The General Staff was formed by "MAS, the COB, and unions of teachers, peasant farmers and students," according to a Jan. 20 Inter Press dispatch. A Feb. 15 statement by the General Staff analyzed the current struggle. "The social crisis that the country is going through originates in authoritarianism, the incapacity of the government, and its submission to policies dictated by foreign powers (the U.S. embassy, the World Bank, and the IMF)," the manifesto begins. It goes on to call for the resignation of the Sanchez de Lozada government and the formation of a transitional government to change the neoliberal economic model, regain control of the country's national resources and redistribute land. The Bush administration reacted to the developments in Bolivia with alarm. Bush himself was "deeply concerned," White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said Feb. 13. A Feb. 14 State Department release called for "all Bolivians to respect the constitutionally elected government and refrain from violence." A State Department official was sent to Bolivia for meetings with the government on Feb. 17. The stakes in Bolivia are heightened by the fact that the country is one link in a chain of Latin American countries where the traditional political elites have proved unable to impose the dictates of Wall Street and the IMF on the backs of the working class. Millions of workers across the continent--from Colombia to Argentina, from Venezuela to Ecuador and Brazil--feel the struggle of the Bolivians as their own. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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