Submitted on
The Plough, Museum St, London WC1
Submitted on
By David Broder
The movement against the far-right in Bolivia stepped up last month with a mass uprising in the nationÕs third city, Cochabamba, which dislodged the right-wing governor Manfred Reyes Villa and put forward the demand for genuinely democratic representatives. This was twinned with a solidarity strike organised by residents’ association FEJUVE in the city of El Alto, also seeking to get rid of a governor who wants to see the country split up.
Submitted on
Sixteen miners have been killed in fights over the control of Huanuni, the biggest tin mine in Bolivia.
The fight was over whether the mine would remain in state hands, or be given to a “co-operative” - essentially privatisation, as such co-ops have a strictly tiered managerial system, no effective workers’ involvement and very low wages for workers employed by the privately controlled board. Trade unions are prohibited.
Submitted on
BY ALAN PORTER
Evo Morales' MAS party has won 51% of seats in elections for a new Constituent Assembly, leaving him well short of the two thirds majority needed to pass legislation. This is problematic for his government, since the whole point of a Constituent Assembly is to rewrite the constitution.
Submitted on
On Saturday I went to Socialist Resistance's Latin America dayschool, which had sessions focusing in particular on Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba. While there was open discussion where members from other groups could say what they thought - all too rare for many left "schools" - I felt that key questions about the character of these governments were ignored, and it had little focus on independent, working class politics.
Submitted on
The Bolivian government has announced its plans to "draw up a living-plan to support poor people and select land to be redistributed." This is not enough to satisfy the landless peasants - they have begun to take their country's resources into their own hands rather than trust Morales' government to give them a few fragments which the landowners weren't using anyway. But in reaction the state today launched a violent backlash against the landless peasants' movement, seizing back "occupied" estates in the name of the ruling class.
Submitted on
From my blog - www.trotskyist.blogspot.com
Below is a - translated - letter sent to me by Angel Choque, one of the most important figures in the Movimiento Sin Tierra, a movement which fights to reclaim Bolivia's land so that it can be controlled by the indigenous campesinos who work it.
Submitted on
Reactionary landlords based in Bolivia's Santa Cruz province have pledged to set up "self-defence groups" - i.e. paramilitary forces - in the wake of Evo Morales' announcement that much of the country's land is to be redistributed to poor peasants. According to the BBC, "Bolivia's big landowners, he said, had to accept that the lands their ancestors stole during the Spanish conquest five centuries ago would now be returned to their original owners". The landowners' association will fight "by any means" to defend its "rights".
Submitted on
When, on the 11th, the Financial Times declared its worry over Evo Morales' alleged desire to expropriate gas without compensating multinationals, I was rather skeptical as to whether Morales' rhetoric at the Vienna summit had any substance to it. Indeed, reading major Bolivian daily La Prensa, we find some rather interesting nuggets of information about what else Morales said when he was in Europe. On Sunday the 14th, just 3 days after pretending that his government's position was not to compensate foreign gas companies, he had some rather different sentiments for the right-wing French President Jacques Chirac -
Submitted on
By David Broder
Bourgeois opinion was shocked on 1 May when new Bolivian president announced that he was going to nationalise the country’s gas resources. Troops were sent to occupy refineries and installations where the hydrocarbons are extracted as Evo Morales decreed, “The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources”.
