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.  


http://www.workers.org/