 Workers and peasants occupied La Paz and shut down the government. Photo: Ali Burafi/Afp/Getty Images |
For the second time in two years, mass protests and strikes by workers and Indigenous peasants brought down the government in the Andean country of Bolivia. After almost a month of daily protests and street battles, President Carlos Mesa stepped down from office on June 7.
Tens of thousands of people erected barricades and shut down the main highway that links the country’s main city La Paz with the rest of the country. The entire nation came to a stand-still.
At issue in the protests are the country’s vast oil and natural gas reserves, the second largest in Latin America after Venezuela’s. This source of wealth has been open to U.S. and foreign exploitation since 1996. Now the vast majority of Bolivia’s poor and working people want it back.
The result has been a social stalemate. The May and June protests brought down a government, but no united leadership emerged that could take the next steps toward setting up a workers’ and peasants’ government. Instead, Supreme Court head Eduardo Rodríguez agreed to act as a provisional leader until elections could be held by year’s end.
Wealth in a sea of poverty
Bolivia is a country of 8.5 million people, 64 percent of whom live in absolute poverty. Approximately 30 percent of the population survives on less than one dollar per day. Bolivia has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world—for every 1,000 births, 56 babies die. Maternal mortality is around 550 for every 100,000 babies born.
Yet, Bolivia is a country of great natural resources. It has an estimated 52.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, most of which are untouched. Foreign investors had poured over $2 billion into exploiting these reserves by 2004. (Washington Post, July 18, 2004)
As part of the neoliberal economic policies of privatization and cutbacks in social services that the International Monetary Fund imposed on governments across the continent during the 1980s and 1990s, the Bolivian government opened up many of its natural resources to private investment. These policies allowed foreign firms like Repsol, British Petroleum, Enron, Shell, Bechtel and many others to come into the country and rob the Bolivian people of their natural resources. Any natural resource that was seen as a potential money-making investment—even water—could be put on the auction block.
Bolivia’s working class—miners, factory workers and peasants—is overwhelmingly Indigenous. Some 60 percent have purely Indigenous heritage, many speaking only their native Quechua or Aymara languages. Another 30 percent are mestizo, with mixed heritage. The native ruling class is overwhelmingly white, of European descent.
The vast and growing polarization of the country between a tiny white ruling class owing its continued fortunes to its ties to U.S. and European banks and corporations and the vast majority of Indigenous workers and peasants set the stage for the May and June protests.
A growing wave of protests
Earlier, in 2000, mass protests forced the government to scrap plans to sell the city of Cochabamba’s water facilities to San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp.
Then, in 2003, former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada attempted to push through a plan to export natural gas to the United States through Chile.
Protests against the plan turned into a wave of opposition to the foreign exploitation of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon resources. More and more people demanded that Sánchez resign and the oil and gas resources be nationalized.
In October 2003, growing protests turned into street battles with Bolivia’s army. Over 80 people were killed in clashes with the government troops. Sánchez was forced to resign, fleeing to Miami.
At that time, the main popular forces leading the protests were the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), led by Evo Morales, the Bolivian Workers’ Federation (COB), and other workers’ federations. The MAS is a peasant-based political party with parliamentary representation.
The popular forces were strong enough to force the hated Sánchez regime from power. But without an orientation toward taking power on behalf of the people, political power shifted to the hands of Carlos Mesa, a millionaire without the corrupt and anti-people reputation that most of the ruling class politicians share.
Mesa promised a referendum on the fate of the country’s hydrocarbons. In July 2004, an overwhelming majority voted to “recover ownership of all wellhead gas.” But the ambiguous phrase meant different things to different people. Most who voted for it interpreted it as a call for nationalization.
But Mesa was not willing to antagonize the foreign corporations. His interpretation—raising the taxes on foreign ownership—provoked the current wave of struggle and his ultimate demise.
A wide spectrum of resistance
A number of organizations emerged in the May-June uprising. They include the MAS, the COB, the Federation of Neighborhood Councils of El Alto, the Regional Workers Federation El Alto, the Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB), the Confederation of Artesian Workers and Small Traders of Bolivia, and the Federation of Mine Workers of Bolivia.
The workers of El Alto played a key role in the mobilizations. El Alto is a town located in the highlands plain, only seven miles away from La Paz. Approximately one million people live there, and most of its population is Aymaras and miners who lost their jobs during the 1980s.
The unique geographical position of this town made demonstrations there especially effective. El Alto surrounds La Paz’s airport. The main highway that joins the rest of the country goes right through the center of the town.
The fact that the protests were in many ways anchored in El Alto accentuated the class character of the protests.
The Federation of Neighborhood Councils of El Alto is an alliance of more than 600 neighborhood organizations. These organizations are made up of smaller neighbors’ committees, or juntas. The most prominent leader of this federation is Abel Mamani. The juntas were originally formed during the mass uprising of October 2003 that drove Sánchez de Lozada out of power.
These organizations hold mass meetings to strategize and plan their actions. It is through these Neighborhood Committees that virtually all of the one million people who live here mobilized with fierce determination for the crucial weeks of protests. They marched into La Paz, occupied the city and led a political strike that shut down the whole country.
The second political force in El Alto is the Regional Workers Federation of El Alto, a trade union federation. The most noticeable leader is Roberto de La Cruz. They too were instrumental in building the mass demonstrations that have characterized this Bolivian uprising.
The COB has declared that it will not give up its demands after Mesa’s resignation. “There would not be peace in Bolivia as long as the hydrocarbons are not nationalized,” one of the union leaders announced. “We cannot give in on the struggle for nationalization. This is a life or death matter. We cannot retreat.” (KClabor.org, June 8)
Another force is the United Trade Union Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia. This is a peasant federation with great influence in the highland region next to El Alto. The federation represents the Aymaras and the Quechuas of that region. These two Indigenous peoples make up the majority of Bolivia’s population.
The Confederation of Artisan Workers and Small Traders of Bolivia is an organization of street vendors, peddlers and poor who make a living by selling trinkets or candies on the streets. They are part of the so-called “informal economy.” This group also includes unemployed workers.
The Federation of Mine Workers of Bolivia was once the most powerful political force in the country. The Federation has largely been undermined by the privatization of the mine industry, but still remains a relevant force. The police and soldiers fear the members of this organization the most. They have access to dynamite and other explosive devices.
The MAS has played an equivocal role in the protests. When the mass mobilizations began, Evo Morales initially refused to support the call for nationalization of the resources. Pressure from the people moved Morales to take a more radical posture. The MAS played a key role in arranging the truce between the political elite and the people.
Class struggles ahead
What is clear from the most recent round of protests is that Bolivia’s working class is gaining tremendous experience in class struggle, as well as a sense of its power. The people have toppled two presidents and have lost none of the determination to press forward with their demands.
 Bolivia’s poor hardly benefit from the country’s natural resources. Photo: Afp Photos/Aizar Raldes |
The unions and neighborhood committees have taken on a political character. The transformation of class organizations into vehicles for political struggle has been an essential component in successful revolutions around the world.
But the ruling class is also organizing. Bolivia’s bourgeoisie are largely concentrated in the resource-rich Santa Cruz province in eastern Bolivia. They look with racist scorn on the Indigenous working class. Rich families organized racist paramilitary groups like the “Santa Cruz Youth Union” with the aim of protecting the property of the elite.
The ruling class has also organized a secessionist movement in Santa Cruz in order to find other ways to exert control over Bolivia’s resources. They have called for the right to sell the region’s resources to whomever they choose—implicitly, to foreign hydrocarbon firms.
This situation makes the struggle in Bolivia much sharper. Whereas many recent protest and electoral movements in Latin America have had a general “popular” veneer encompassing all social classes, the struggle in Bolivia is shaping up as a class-against-class battle.
When Mesa resigned, he threatened that the country was on the “brink of civil war.” On June 9, days after the resignation, the military announced that it was “ready to intervene to preserve the country’s unity and sovereignty.” (AFX, June 9)
With the political regime of Bolivia’s ruling class hanging in the balance, many in the elite—and, undoubtedly, in the U.S. embassy—are looking to the military as a way to put down the growing mass movement. Interim President Rodríguez sent the military to take “physical control” of the country’s oil fields on June 28. While the move was presented as a way to enforce the results of the referendum, it undoubtedly is as much aimed at the wave of takeovers of oil fields in early June.
Under threat of new protests, Bolivia’s congress—still controlled by the old elite—called for new presidential elections on Dec. 2. It also approved a referendum that would open the way to greater provincial authority in July 2006, a move supported by the right wing secessionists.
Washington is worried about the growing protest movement. In a blatant attempt to pin the movement as the result of “outside agitators,” U.S. spokespeople are trying to blame the Venezuelan government for the protests. A July 5 Voice of America report noted that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega “expressed concern” about the “role of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in the Bolivian crisis.”
Various leaders of the movement are grappling with the way forward given the serious threats. For example, Felipe Quispe of the Confederation of Peasant Workers called on June 9 for “defining the [future of the] country with weapons.” (AFX, June 9)
In the past few years, Bolivia’s workers and peasants have met each challenge with continued protest and struggle. It remains to be seen, however, whether the leadership of the various mass movements will begin to look toward the critical issue of the struggle for workers’ power.
