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BLOOD IN THE BOLIVIAN ALTIPLANO |
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by Juventudes Libertarias, Bolivia
Email: jjll_bolivia (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified!) |
01 Jul 2001
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In complicity with the union bureaucrats, the government has initiated a military operation of genocide, has accused the peasants of drunkenness, Because they say that one cannot conceive how there could exist people in their right mind who defy bullets with sticks and rocks. To their murderous troops, they have added military aircraft and have announced that that will shoot to kill if the roadblocks are not lifted. |
BLOOD IN THE ALTIPLANO (27-06-01). Severo Mamani was 48 years old and had 9 children, an Aymara peasant that lived in one of the most miserable places on the planet, the Bolivian altiplano. His poverty was such that his few crops scarcely served for self-sustenance. But weary of racism, of being exploited by a system that treated him like an animal, he went out on June 21 to blockade the highway, together with other peasants, demanding dignity, bread, education for his children, health for his family, definitively demanding the end of capitalism, which in this country has been aggravated since 1985, when decree 21060 initiated neoliberalism. It is precisely this decree that his protest aimed to abolish. But it all ended for him when, on June 27, he fell dead from a gunshot. The bullet entered his arm, went through his chest and exited through the other side It left him lying in the middle of the straw, dusty, with his eyes open. He left nine orphaned children, the oldest of them 30 and the youngest 3. \"Who has the duty of providing for our children?\" cried his wife Evarista Flores between sobs(?) of pain his wife Evarista Flores.
Severo Mamani was found more than half a kilometer from the highway that connects Laja with La Paz when a fragment of the army moved against the group of peasants that blocked the way. It was difficult to escape from the military aggression. The witnesses say that they tried in vain to take cover from the bullets by lying on the ground. There was no confrontation, the army just arrived and began to fire.
The community to which Severo Mamani and the other neighbors belonged was not disposed to turn the other cheek. We are armed and starting tomorrow we are going to meet bullet with bullet, fire with fire, because we are not going to be killed like swine, one peasant declared while helping to carry the body of his comrade.
The violence also reached the other side of the altiplano. In the crossroads of Pucarani three people were wounded by gunshots. Isabel Quispe received a blow in the abdomen, Rolando Lucana was hit by a bullet in the hand and Freddy Quispe López, comunario of Corpata, was wounded in the right thigh This last individual was found digging potatos from his parcel when he was shot from a very great distance.
In their repressive toil, the armed forces occupy in a completely arbitrary manner various educational centers on the altiplano. Thus forty soldiers can be found in the Calama de Palcoco school, and another 80 have taken the San Salvador de Patamanta school.
The abuses are repeated from village to village, leveling houses and ransacking them. In their toil to find the leaders, the soldiers have detained those elderly that were unable to escape. Among those captured are some over 80 years old, such as Julián Poma, whose son denounced the excesses of the troops.
These scenes are now quotidian in impoverished Bolivia, governed by a fascist administration led by General Banzer and which, with the coming of the American government, has assassinated more than fifty people in social protests.
The Bolivian working class is gathering conscience of their strengths, and on more than one occasion has put the government in check. During the last month a huge peasant mobilization expelled the military troops from the Yungas, a region where they grow coca and which the army has aimed to militarize.
But thousands of organized peasants have forced the army to recede and edged the government into signing a promise to respect the coca growers, which by and large produce a crop intended for traditional consumption.
Right now an iron resistance of the health workers and teachers has avoided the privatization of those services, coming triumphantly out of a strike nearly a month in duration, which ended June 27th.
But the mobilizations are not limited to those sectors: it is a great popular movement that has transformed the streets and the countryside into trenches of resistance to the Banzer government, which has undoubtedly planted corpses of workers in cities and highways, while the bourgeois imperialism rains praise on the fascist gorilla Banzer, whose administration has been classified, by international bodies, as the most corrupt in the Americas and the seventh most corrupt in the world.
The international press and the governments of the world are silent before the atrocious reality that lives in Bolivia, because they know that what is gestating here is an authentic organized anticapitalist proletarian movement, which can become a dangerous example for the world’s powerful.
In complicity with the union bureaucrats, the government has initiated a military operation of genocide, has accused the peasants of drunkenness, Because they say that one cannot conceive how there could exist people in their right mind who defy bullets with sticks and rocks. To their murderous troops, they have added military aircraft and have announced that that will shoot to kill if the roadblocks are not lifted. Furthermore they will initiate a ferocious butchery of the peasant leaders.
Anarchists call for a class defense of Felipe Quispe \"El Mallku\", today with a warrant for his arrest. We aren\'t agree with his caudillist [personal aggrandizement as leader] adventurism and his authoritarianism, but we are conscious that when the bourgeois State injures one worker, it is an injury to all.
We call for international actions against the Banzer government, to propagandize the struggle of the Bolivian workers, to break the wall of silence that the international media has raised, to denounce the unchallenged crimes against humanity of the Bolivian state.
LONG LIVE WORKER-PEASANT UNITY! FOR THE END OF CAPITALISM, INTERNATIONAL CLASS ACTION! TOWARDS LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM…LONG LIVE THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION!
Juventudes Libertarias, Bolivia.
Anarcho-communist group
Email: jjll_bolivia (at) hotmail.com
Spanish Web site: www.come.to/jlb
Editor’s Note: This website crashed my browser several times when I tried to access it; it has some pop-up adverb that might be the problem, but perhaps not. The link below goes back to the original posting on global IMC: |
See also:
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=50220&group=webcast
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