Up to 8 Dead as Bolivian Troops Quell Protests

Reuters ^ | Sun October 12, 2003 07:57 PM ET | By Rene Villegas

[EsclavoDeCristo]

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Up to eight protesters were reported killed on Sunday after Bolivia's government sent thousands of troops backed by tanks to quell increasingly violent protests against President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

Witnesses told local radio eight protesters were killed during pitched battles with troops clearing roadblocks choking food and gasoline supplies to the capital in and around the poor industrial suburb of El Alto, outside La Paz.

The government, which has played down death tolls in recent protests, said four civilians and one soldier were killed and that around 30 others were injured.

Sunday's clashes raise the toll to 19 dead and dozens injured during a month-long wave of protests against Sanchez de Lozada's free market policies and failure to tackle crushing poverty in South America's poorest nation.

Fuel and basic foods were running short in the capital as thousands of poor Bolivian farmers and workers calling for Sanchez de Lozada to quit stopped convoys of trucks entering the Andean city with roadblocks.

"A military operation is under way to regain control of El Alto," presidential spokesman Mauricio Antezana told a news conference, adding the government could decree a curfew there at any time to stop what it perceived as a coup attempt by its opponents -- a charge it has made on several occasions in the past.

Witnesses said troops stood guard on the main road in El Alto, the center of recent protests against the government.

FLIGHTS SUSPENDED

Bolivia's flagship airline suspended flights out of La Paz due to security fears, but the international airport was still operating under the guard of troops.

Sunday's violence is the worst since February, when a government austerity drive backed by the International Monetary Fund sparked massive riots in which 32 people died.

Two people were killed on Saturday and dozens more were injured as protesters fought pitched battles with police and security forces outside the capital, local media reported.

Protests by the country's poor Indian majority against Sanchez de Lozada have spiraled in the last month amid an economic downturn in this nation of 8 million people, one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

Indian leader and lawmaker Evo Morales, who nearly won the presidency in 2002, rejected the government's claims of a coup bid.

"They are the subversive ones who are trying to act like coup leaders," he told reporters.

An unpopular project to export natural gas to the United States through Chile -- which has had tense diplomatic relations with Bolivia because of a border dispute -- has also become a lightning rod for protests.

Sanchez de Lozada, a U.S. ally in the anti-drug war who is widely unpopular for failing to alleviate poverty, has played down the protests and defied calls to step down.

Next week, transport workers and coca farmers -- angry at a U.S.-backed drive to eradicate illegal crops of coca, the raw material used to make cocaine -- are expected to join the protests.

[EsclavoDeCristo]

It's crazy. I'm studying in central Bolivia right now and none of this violence or protesting is going on here! The only way I know about this stuff is the internet, news papers, and through my professors. I don't know first hand, but the impression that I get from some of my Bolivian professors is that some of these marxist/socialist leaders,such as Evo Morales, are manipulating the poor indigenous people into revolt. It's easy to work off of the hope of a group of people who have nothing and are treated as second class citizens by everyone else! If any of you know more about this, I'd appreciate you're feedback! Bolivia needs your prayers right now! God Bless.

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[EsclavoDeCristo]

I don't know. One interesting thing I heard from a professor here is that coca is legally exported to the U.S. for the Coca-Cola Company. I don't know if it's true or not, but if it is true I wonder how the drug enforcement people know which coca is for cocaine and which is for legal export.

[blam]

Riots Leave City Under Military Rule

[LayoutGuru2]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/6232078.htm

[Destro]

Coca has notbeen used for coca-cola for a century. Bolivian university indeed.

[yonif]

Other reports say 20 to 40 dead.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

ping

[marron]

I refer you to another thread on the same subject.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/997631/posts

Quoting from that thread (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/997631/posts?page=4#4):

"The Bolivian coca farmers are becoming the shock troops for the NGOs, as are the tribes in Ecuador.

It is a bizarre fact that the left and the European NGO's have adopted the coca industry as a pet project. And the left's policy toward Bolivia's hydrocarbons industry exactly parallels the situation in Ecuador. This doesn't surprise me.

In Ecuador the oil industry has been stymied for twenty years, as the only pipeline over the Andes to the coast was full. Every effort for decades to build another was stopped on one pretext or another. Then in the late nineties President Mahuad pushed through a contract to allow private companies to build it, along with some other moves to open up the economy. The tribes and some military officers backed by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela rose up and overthrew him. But the constitutional order re-asserted itself, and all of Mahuad's policies have continued, although without him.

One of the officers who led the coup has now been elected president, but has also determined to continue Mahuad's policies. This has earned him a place on the FARC hit list, for reasons that would be obscure if you thought that the left of one country was separate from the left of a neighboring country.

Meanwhile, Mahuad's new pipeline project continues, but has been subjected to every kind of obstruction by the tribes, the NGO's, environmental groups, student groups, but everywhere the hand of the Euro left is apparent. Ecuador is dying for want of cash and jobs, and the one industry that is capable of providing both remains stagnant for want of a pipeline to the sea.

Bolivia's gas industry has put them on the map, for the first time in their long obscure history, and the left, the Euro NGOs, the enviros, hate it.

And its not a matter of saving them from the big multinationals; the only oil companies operating in Ecuador are no-name companies, Oxy is the only company left there with a recognizable name, the others are Canadians and Spanish.

The situation is similar in Bolivia. The big energy companies could probably be induced to invest there, but even a large gas field in a landlocked country behind the Andes, protected by a phalanx of Euro lawyers and Euro-led tribal activists is not a very inviting place to invest.

Sad. But it must be clear to anyone paying attention that poverty doesn't just happen. Poverty has a well-heeled lobby, and even the poor, misled as they are, aggressively demand their right to remain poor."

[marron]

The tribes are advised by Euro NGOs, who are uniformly leftist in orientation, and anti-development, and anti-US. The pro-coca position is part of a kind of racial dogma that elevates cultural "authenticity" at the expense of morality. No one would take it seriously normally, but it is presented in marxist terms as a serious alternative to industrial development.

It is weird to see marxists adopt racial nationalism, tribalist nationalism, but it is not unusual. They adopt whatever works, and among indigenous tribes and even Latin Americans of a more Latin cultural identity it reverberates because it offers excuses for poverty, and a barrier against Catholicism. You will occasionally find catholic clerics and lay people involved in these movements but the tribalist ideology is anti-catholic although it takes on an occasionally catholic veneer.

Hostility to development is expressed in marxist terms and in environmentalist terms. In Bolivia, where they are proposing coca as an alternative to hydrocarbons in apparent seriousness, they are trotting out the tribalist argument again, that hydrocarbons are somehow not authentic and coca is.

You wouldn't expect for educated people to say these things with a straight face, but they do. The rural people who listen to them aren't educated enough necessarily to recognize all of the contradictions in their argument, although even rural people are capable of moral judgement and equally capable of moral error. They are capable of logical reasoning and of using bogus logic to excuse things they know are morally wrong. But the European tribal advisors are openly cynical in backing these arguments. This is a profoundly evil movement.

[wardaddy]

Bolivia is cranking up again.

[wardaddy]

Some popular indigneous spokesperson in Bolivia eschews obtaining a pipeline to export Bolivia's huge gas reserves and instead claims coca is the natural and historically proper export...what an idiot.

Besides, since Roberto Suarez fell back in the mid 80s, nearly all Bolivia's coca "wealth" simply goes to Colombian druglords.

(not to excuse them)

[wardaddy]

There is a movie out right now called Dancer Upstairs directed by John Malkovich about this theme. It's loosely based on Guzman and the Senderos rise in Peru and told from a cop's perspective caught between the terrs and the military. Very objective in my view and well done and acted.

Beautifully filmed in the altiplano of Ecuador and in Guayaquil with interiors in Lisboa and Madrid.

I like it. Malkovich is a pretty plain spoken libertarian of sorts and it shows (in a good way)....it's not a Costa-Gavras hatchet job.....though he does oddly use some historical footage owned by him.

What Bolivian city are you in Escalvo?...Santa Cruz? or are you up high? Do they still have the world's highest ski slope outside La Paz where your's truly got a horrible case of sorroche?

Keep your head down and your political opinions to yourself. I'd erase any conservative crap off your computer as you post in case something cataclysmic happens and the lefties hold your town....some of those Andean lefties are downright Maoist and nasty as hell. Avoid cafes and other gathering spots. Keep an eye out on how to get on a charter flight into Mata Grosso Brasil if things spiral....keep all the cash you can on hand., the lefties will grab the banks pronto. Are you Boliviano or Gringo?

Cuidado eh!

Boy...you are bringing back old memories for this 46 year old.

[wardaddy]

The only coca legally imported here is for anesthesia and for certain applications in eye surgery. I think Sandoz or Lilly maunfacture it. The demand is quite small comparatively.

Coca has not been used in Coca Cola since before WWI, I think.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

I don't know first hand, but the impression that I get from some of my Bolivian professors is that some of these marxist/socialist leaders,such as Evo Morales, are manipulating the poor indigenous people into revolt.

This is it. Hugo Chavez must have his hand in this. The Latin American Bloc: The Ignored Danger to Freedom

[Travis McGee]

You gotta love FR, just for the eyewitness reports!

Another great Andean conflict flick is "Proof of Life".

[Travis McGee]

Communists never quit. They may hide, or change their stripes to green or black, but they never quit.

Marxism-Leninism is their religion. Lenin and Mao and Castro are their prophets.

[Truth666]

http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntn13521.htm Bolivia lines itself up to rescue energy-starved California (2001) ! ---- Street battles fuel fears of civil war in Bolivia - Oct. 11 http://theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/10/1065676156973.html

Debris litters the streets of Ventilla, 30 kilometres outside the capital La Paz, as Bolivian soldiers face protesters on a blocked highway.