Indigenous Uprising: The Rebellion Grows in Bolivia

Bolivia’s capital of La Paz has entered its second week of mass protests by workers, indigenous peasants and students demanding the nationalization of the country’s energy industry.

Meanwhile, the government agency responsible for maintaining the country’s roadways reported Wednesday that 60 percent of the country’s highways have been blocked, including all major routes into the capital. Peasants and rural teachers have piled rocks, logs and other materials across the roads. Truckers have also gone on strike, and food and fuel supplies are rapidly dwindling in the city.

La Paz has witnessed some of the biggest protests in the country’s history as tens of thousands of peasants, teachers, miners and other workers have poured into the city and laid siege to government buildings. Various reporters estimated the largest of the demonstrations at 50,000. Throwing sticks of dynamite and rocks, the demonstrators have confronted riot police using tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon.

The sparks for these upheavals were the approval by Bolivia’s Congress of a new energy law last month and the drive by the country’s wealthier regions—backed by the oil companies and foreign capital—to achieve political autonomy.

The government of Bolivian President Carlos Mesa, who came to power after the October 2003 upheavals that toppled his Washington-backed predecessor, Gonzalo Sanchez Lozada (now in Miami exile), appears to be on the brink of collapse.

Mesa was Sanchez Lozada’s vice president, but distanced himself from him after government forces massacred scores of unarmed protesters, igniting insurrectionary conditions. Like his predecessor, he is a member of the right-wing Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) and a supporter of the policies of privatization, economic austerity and subordination to the transnationals that have left more than two-thirds of the population in poverty while creating unprecedented social polarization.

When the new energy law was passed in mid-May, Mesa, who opposed the measure from the right, sought to avoid responsibility and the political consequences by allowing the Congress to enact it without his signature.

The effect, however, has been far from what he intended. The additional taxes contained in the measure antagonized foreign companies that are reaping massive profits from the exploitation of Bolivia’s natural gas reserves. It also served to fuel the drive by the right-wing and wealthy elite based in the city of Santa Cruz to seek autonomy for the southern and eastern provinces, where the bulk of Bolivia’s oil and gas reserves are located.

At the same time, the law provoked the growing anger of the country’s impoverished majority, which sees control of the country’s natural resources as a means of ending decades of social misery.

Demands for Mesa’s resignation have come from the residents of El Alto, the impoverished working class city outside of La Paz, who have marched on Congress and the presidential palace. The same demand was made Wednesday by the head of the Eastern Agricultural Chamber, representing the country’s wealthiest landowners. Expressing ruling class impatience over Mesa’s failure to crush the revolt, he declared, “The president doesn’t have the pants to govern.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/boli-j03.shtml