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June 14, 2005
Bolivia: Heard From
Something hopeful has been happenning in Bolivia. What is remarkable is not what is happenning, but how. Here's an excerpt from Empire Notes that captures the essence:
To understand these events fully requires terms that we were told history had forgotten – much as the indigenous were told history had forgotten them.Here's one: dual power. This is a situation in which popular movements, while not having overthrown a state, have removed the state's monopoly on control. Not only can the popular movements exercise direct political power (rather than merely attempting to influence elected representatives), the state is conversely highly constrained in the exertion of power.
This situation has existed in Bolivia for some weeks and continues, at least at the moment.
Miners, farm-workers, and coca-growers organized; the indigenous majority of Bolivia, Quechua, Aymara, Chiquitano, and Guarani, mobilized. Making clever use of Bolivia's geography, they paralyzed the country. The neighborhood association of El Alto mobilized to lay siege to La Paz much as the followers of Tupac Katari did over 200 years ago. Gas and oil fields around the country had been seized; and a variously estimated 70 to 120 roadblocks at strategic points had brought road traffic to a standstill. With that leverage, the government had to take these movements very seriously.
...
This incipient revolution has been no tea party. It has involved miners marching with sticks of dynamite and angry verbal battles between political organizations committed to the struggle and people tired of cooking with firewood and dramatically rising food prices. And yet, to the remarkable credit of all Bolivians, only one person has been killed during this evolving drama, killed, of course, by the state security forces.
After 500 years of massacre, genocide, rape, slavery, torture, and exploitation, that the indigenous of Bolivia should begin their reconquista so peacefully staggers the imagination – and, one hopes, stretches it as well.
Here are Bolivian indigenous leaders from El Alto, attending a meeting with new President Eduardo Rodriguez:
And I think this is the most important gain, right there, in that picture: the people who are ordinarily barely heard, rarely consulted, and almost never considered, meeting with the caretaker president, after having forced the previous one to get out of the way of their country.
However the struggle of the Bolivia ends, the one important result will be that, in the future, it will be harder for the ruling elite and the neo-liberal elites and the IMF bureaucracy --or should I say the theocracy, with their infallible "free market" doctrine that always ends up freeing the resources of a country to be usurped by the few-- to ignore the people of Bolivia. I suspect we are witnessing the beginnings of a new cycle of mass movements: popular, democratic, and consciously taking aim at the neo-liberal policies that have crippled so many for more than two decades.
Posted by zeynep at June 14, 2005 10:36 AM