Print this post.By Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization
Editor’s Note: We regret to have to publish this piece, as we support and admire the trajectory of President Morales, and the Bolivian people. Evo Morales has been a progressive in many critical ways, including his support for the environment which certainly outstrips anything a developed country leader has said or done. But this policy of cutting through a pristine and fragile ecosystem, of endorsing more farming in the Matto Grosso—the largest surviving rainforest (and “lung”) on planet earth, is misguided, even if expedient in the short-term given the narrow choices President Morales faces at the moment. (See the update at the foot of this piece.)
A man runs for cover after riot police fired tear gas canister during a protest in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia, Monday Sept. 26, 2011.
The government of President Evo Morales carried out a bloody crackdown Sunday against a march by indigenous protesters against the building of a new highway through their lands. Some 500 paramilitary police surrounded the encampment of the thousand or more marchers, including hundreds of women and children, firing teargas, beating the protesters with clubs and fists, trampling many and handcuffing them and throwing them face first onto the ground.
The assault killed a three-month-old baby, who died of asphyxiation from the teargas. Many others were injured, and at least 37 were reported missing, including a number of children.
The surprise attack came on the same day that Morales had announced his intention to put the highway project to a referendum in Beni and Cochabamba, the two departments through which it would pass, and invited leaders of the march to meet with him in the government palace.
A police commander justified the violent attack by saying that the Indians had placed police in danger by carrying bows and arrows. They also referred to the alleged “kidnapping” the day before of Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, who was sent to initiate a dialogue with the protest leaders. Apparently, Indian women had taken Choquehuanca by his arms and persuaded him to march with them. He later claimed that he was used as a “human shield” to break through a police attempt to blockade the march.
The police had aimed to round up the protesters, load them onto planes and fly them back to where they had started. This plan was disrupted, however, when hundreds of outraged residents of the town of Rurrenabaque, near where the police assault took place, occupied the local airport’s runway blocking planes with tree trunks and burning tires. The residents surrounded the buses in which the demonstrators were being taken to the airport, chased away the police and freed their hundreds of captives.
In La Paz, Interior Minister Sacha Loretta claimed that the police had decided to free the detainees “to prevent confrontation.”
The march had begun 41 days earlier in the northern city of Trinidad. Its objective was the capital of La Paz, 500 kilometers (310 miles) to the southwest, where the marchers intended to protest the planned highway, which would be built through the Isiboro-Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park, known by its Spanish acronym, TIPNIS.
The preserve includes 3,860-square-mile of Bolivia’s Amazon basin and is inhabited by some 50,000 people from three different Amazonian Indian groups that have inhabited the area for centuries. It is the center of much of Bolivia’s biodiversity as well the source of much of the country’s water.
The crisis the confrontation has created for the Morales government became evident with the resignation Monday of the Bolivian defense minister, Cecelia Chacon. “I do not agree with the intervention in the march and I cannot justify the measure when other alternatives existed,” she wrote in a letter to Morales.
Meanwhile, hundreds of members of other indigenous groups have launched protests, including hunger strikes in Santa Cruz and Cochabamba and a vigil in La Paz. And the country’s union federation, the COB (Bolivian Workers Central), has called a general strike on Wednesday in support of the Amazonian Indians.
Morales, who was first elected president in 2005 as the leader of the Movement Towards Socialism party, or MAS, has described himself as Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state. He oversaw the rewriting of the country’s constitution to declare Bolivia a “plurinational state” and to grant a degree of political and cultural autonomy to the indigenous peoples.
From the outset, however, the name of his party notwithstanding, the Morales government has pursued a policy of promoting capitalist development both by extending concessions to foreign capital and defending the interests of the native bourgeoisie. The government has described its policy as “Andean-Amazonian capitalism.”
While initially able to win popular support through the introduction of modest social assistance programs, made possible by rising prices for Bolivian exports, over the past year it has confronted a series of general strikes and social protests fueled by soaring food prices, stagnant wages and cuts in government subsidies.
The government has attempted to mobilize indigenous groups in its support, denouncing the Bolivian workers fighting for increased wages as a “special interest” group.
Now, with the protest by the Amazonian Indians, it has tried to dismiss their struggle as an instrument of the Bolivian right and the US Embassy aimed at “defending capitalism.”
In reality, the proposed highway, touted by the Morales government as a means of developing the country’s poorer areas, is another manifestation of the overwhelming subordination of Bolivia’s economy to the interests of Brazilian capital. It is being financed by Brazilian loans and built by a Brazilian company. Its primary purpose will be to create a route for Brazilian exports, particularly soya, to the Pacific ports of Chile and Peru and, from there, to the Asian markets.
The greatest fear of the Amazonian Indians is that the highway will open up their region to exploitation for lumber and by landless Bolivians from the highlands seeking new areas to cultivate the country’s most profitable crop, coca.
The government of Morales, who was himself the former president of thecocaleros, or coca growers, union, has evidently sought to whip up support among the government’s supporters among the highland indigenous groups that have sought to farm in the Amazon area. A few dozen of them tried to block the march with barricades.
This led Foreign Minister Choquehuanca to warn of potential violence between different indigenous groups and even compare it to the genocidal conflict between Hutus and Tutsis that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda.
In reality, the brutal attack on the Amazonian Indians has been condemned by representatives of indigenous peoples throughout the country. “We feel ashamed of what is happening in our country,” said Reynaldo Flores, a spokesman for the group on hunger strike in Cochabamba.
Waldo Albarracin, the country’s former public defender, told the AFP news agency that Sunday’s police violence represented “a reprehensible act of political repression similar to those unleashed by the de facto governments” that ruled Bolivia under military dictators in the 1960s and 1970s.
NOTE: IRONICALLY, Bloomberg published an account that largely coincides with the above story.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9Q0EKKO0.htm
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UPDATE
Cecilia Chacon, Bolivia Defense Minister, Quits In Amazon Highway Dispute
Pres. Morales
RURRENABAQUE, Bolivia — Bolivia’s president late Monday suspended a planned Amazon highway that has sparked clashes between police and Indians who say the road would despoil a nature preserve that is home to thousands of natives. President Evo Morales also distanced himself from the decision to break up a protest march Sunday. His announcement came hours after police released hundreds of activists when mobs of local people blocked roads and an airport to prevent the detainees from being taken out of the area.
“We repudiate the excesses yesterday at the march,” Morales said, adding that a high-level commission including international representatives should be formed to investigate the crackdown.
Hours earlier, Defense Minister Cecilia Chacon resigned in protest over the police action against opponents of the highway, who include not just local indigenous peoples but also Bolivia’s main highlands Indian federation. In a brief televised address Monday night, Morales announced that he was suspending the highway project and would let the two affected regions decide whether to proceed with the Brazil-financed road. He offered no specifics, but on Sunday he said that a referendum on the road could be held in the two affected regions, Cochabamba and Beni.
The proposed 190-mile (300-kilometer) highway would connect Brazil with Pacific ports in Chile and Peru. Plans called for it to cross Bolivia’s 600-square-mile (12,000-square-kilometer) Isiboro-Secure Indigenous Territory National Park, which is home to 15,000 indigenous people who live off hunting, fishing, gathering native fruits and subsistence farming.
The residents fear an influx of settlers would destroy their habitat, felling trees and polluting rivers. Environmentalists say the road would mostly benefit Brazilian commercial interests such as timber exporters while endangering a pristine nature preserve. Police used tear gas and truncheons to break up a march Sunday by some 1,000 protesters who were marching to La Paz, the national capital Bolivia’s highlands.
Officers detained the protesters and loaded them onto buses planning to drive them back to the eastern lowlands provincial capital of Trinidad, where the march began in mid-August. But hundreds of people lit bonfires on the roadway, forcing authorities to detour to the airport in the Amazon town of Rurrenabaque. Residents of the town, however, had blocked the runway with barricades.
Authorities then backed down and let the detainees go.
“Given the attack by hundreds of people, the police pulled back to avoid confrontations,” Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti said at a news conference in La Paz before the president made his comments. Bolivia’s national ombudsman, Rolando Villena, told Erbol radio “there was excessive use of force” by police. Protest leaders claimed a child was killed and other protesters, including children, were missing. Bolivia’s Roman Catholic Church issued a communique saying a child had died but offered no details.
Llorenti denied that police used excessive force, saying officers acted Sunday only to “evacuate the marchers to guarantee their safety and protect them from physical harm” because pro-government groups were approaching to stop the march.
Vehement opposition to the road has been a dilemma for Morales, an Aymara Indian whose support for the highway has alienated many of the indigenous Bolivians whose support was crucial to his landslide re-election in 2009.
Morales, a coca growers union leader who is the first indigenous president of a country where more than two in three people are Indians, has been a passionate leader of the campaign to curb global warming.
But he has been less of an environmentalist at home, and insists the highway is essential to strengthening Bolivia’s economy.
Analysts have noted that Cochabamba, one of the regions that would be affected by the proposed highway, is home to the coca growers who still work with Morales and are in favor of the highway.
The crisis has hurt the president, whose popularity fell to 37 percent this month, its second-lowest level since he was first elected in 2006.
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