Former Nazis and the CIA helped South American dictators out with torturing leftists during the ‘Dirty Wars’ of the 70s.  The socialist tide that they prevented at that time is back again, what will they resort to this time in their struggle against liberation and socialism?

Hidden cells reveal Bolivia’s dark past

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7925694.stm

“There is no beginning without an end, but you will pay me back,” reads an engraving on the wall of a dark and humid room in the basement of a government building in Bolivia’s administrative capital, La Paz.

Next to it, stains of blood drawing four fingertips seem like grim blemishes, not at all adornments.

Bolivia is unearthing this dark part of its past.

The left-wing government of Evo Morales has recently discovered what his government calls “the horror chambers” – torture cells found by chance when contractors uncovered blocked off hallways in the basement of the Ministry of the Interior.

Those hallways led to cells where around 2,000 political prisoners were held and tortured during the 1971-1978 military rule under General Hugo Banzer.

More than 150 political prisoners “disappeared” and bones found in the basement could hold a clue to the fate of some of them.

Electric shocks

History says that, among other atrocities, electric shocks applied with a cattle prod in the genitals and teeth were common currency in those underground rooms.

The victims were left-wing militants. The perpetrators were right-wing military men under the rule of a ruthless military ruler.

“It was really a desperate situation,” says Bolivia’s deputy interior minister, Marcos Farfan, who after the rooms were uncovered, talked to the BBC about the horrors of the prison where he was placed in a flooded cell and electrocuted.

“One wanted to grab the ceiling and escape. There was nowhere to go because the electric shocks came from the floor and you could feel the electricity in your entire body… That way they were trying to extract from you the information they needed.”

Mr Farfan has been looking for these secret rooms since winning office three years ago.

He was detained and tortured in one of those rooms when he was a teenage militant in the National Liberation Army, a clandestine group created by the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the late 1960s.

“So we started the works and by simply touching the walls one could feel there were empty spaces behind them,” he said.

“That drove us to open up those spaces and that was when we discovered that the terror infrastructure that existed during the 70s still exists, a place where they put needles underneath my nails and applied electric shocks in my testicles and teeth.”

Torture centres

Now Bolivia’s government hopes the cells and hallways can provide clues to what happened in the clandestine torture centres.

There is strong evidence that torture and political murder were widespread in Bolivia in the 70s under the military government of Gen Banzer.

Earlier this week, President Morales visited the alleged torture chambers, where even the graffiti on the walls are clues to the fate of prisoners.

“There were a lot of accusations that torture chambers, underground cells, existed during the dictatorship. It’s unacceptable that this has happened, certainly during the dictatorship in the 1960s and 70s. We have to investigate and I ask that the excavations continue,” Mr Morales said.

Gen Banzer, a US-trained soldier, seized power in a bloody coup in 1971 and was Bolivia’s ruler until 1978.

His military rule ushered in violent repression of opponents. It is also known that the notorious Nazi-in-hiding Klaus Barbie – “The Butcher of Lyon” – was Gen Banzer’s adviser in torture methods.

Widely accepted figures say that during Gen Banzer’s tenure 19,000 people sought asylum in foreign countries, 15,000 were arrested, more than 8,000 brutally tortured and at least 155 disappeared without a trace.

Charges were brought in the early 80s but no-one went to trial. After the era of Latin American military leaderships ended in the late 80s, he reinvented himself as a democrat, winning the presidency in 1997.

His foes say the former hardline ruler never lost his authoritarian streak, continuing to abuse human rights and failing to help the Andean nation’s poor, Indian majority even as an elected leader.

His supporters, however, say Gen Banzer did more to strengthen Bolivian democracy than any of his predecessors.

Though many praised him for embracing democracy, his past still haunted him.

‘Plan Condor’

Evidence presented in 1999 linked his previous regime to the notorious “Plan Condor”, which allegedly involved joint operations among South American military dictatorships in the 70s aimed at kidnapping, torturing and assassinating leftists and dissidents in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay.

Delia Cortez, who now heads the Association of Families of the Disappeared, went into exile to Argentina in 1973 but her then-partner was “disappeared”.

Now, bones allegedly belonging to some of those who vanished have been found this week in the basement rooms.

“For us this is very painful but a milestone,” she told the BBC.

“We always knew some of our companions were killed there but we never had concrete proof, until now.

“Now we can begin a trial. Now we can properly search for justice. Now we can, hopefully, close this horrendous chapter.”

Violence looms as Bolivian landowners prepare to confront peasants

http://www.zibb.com/article/4004732/Violence+looms+as+Bolivian+landowners+prepare+to+confront+peasants

[Report by Jose Luis Castillejos: "Latifundists in Bolivia Tremble Over Land Ownership Issue" - Notimex Headline]

San Carlos, Bolivia, 19 Sep (Notimex) -Bolivian cattle ranchers and large landowners, hiding behind their demand for the return of the Direct Hydrocarbon Tax (IDH) and autonomy, are trembling in fear of the peasant threat to take over their land by force. Notimex has confirmed in Bolivia’s northern provinces that “white guards” have beefed up their protection of property by acquiring rifles, revolvers, and automatic pistols.

“We are not going to surrender anything to the Indians [indios]. They want to take over productive land. Let them go to the jungle and work new land. If they, the settlers, want to come and take over our property, they are going to have to go through us,” Juan Donaire said. Donaire, a sugar cane producer and cattle rancher, claimed that the socialist peasants [campesinos] who sympathize with Evo Morales want to attack private property, in which case, he said, “they will meet resistance.”

Land well cared for, tractors in motion, and trucks on the road carrying loads of cane and other agricultural products make up part of the panorama in this region situated on the banks of the Yapacani River. Fiery speeches are heard on both sides. The landowners have indicated that they will use violent methods to defend themselves, while some 100,000 peasants are slowly marching from all four corners of the country and converging on Santa Cruz.

The labour unions and social movements are also waiting from orders to march in the Departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, and Tarija. While groups of young people carrying clubs and chains head towards the police at Plaza 24 de Septiembre in Santa Cruz, the peasants supporting Morales display their shotguns, pistols, and machetes. “We have to be careful not to engage in provocation,” Branko Marinkovich, chairman of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, warned.

The violence is allegedly being financed, on one side, by the government, which has supplied the mobilized peasants with provisions and cars, and, on the other, the prefects and civic committees that unofficial sources say are paying 30 dollars a day to every member of the Santa Cruz Youth Union.

Bolivians negotiate with machetes and rifles. The ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) has battalions of peasants armed with spears, machetes, arrows, slings, and dynamite. The political opposition to Evo Morales’s government, led by heads of the civic committees, has riot squads equipped with assault rifles, pistols, and baseball bats.

Some 5,000 peasants from Yapacani are currently blocking the Santa Cruz-Cochabamba highway that also runs to Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Peru, and another 7,000 peasants are on alert in the region. Farm laborers have remained in the Sujal barrio, a collection of a scant 20 homes or so. Located near Yapacani, they are threatening to go all the way to Santa Cruz to force the prefecture to return the institutions they have taken over and cease holding indigenous people hostage.

Other locations where the peasants are assembling are: Cuatro Canadas, El Tomo, and San Julian. According to Notimex, the peasants are only waiting for orders from a leader whom they refuse to identify, but who is assumed to be Evo Morales, to begin marching. Thousands of peasants are on the Cochabamba and Potosi highways, also threatening to throw the prefects out. The peasants “kill” time by telling jokes, chewing coca leaves, or drinking brandy. Many have a glazed look in their eyes from going without sleep; others because of chewing balls of coca mixed with lime or bicarbonate of soda.

In an interview with Notimex, Oscar Camacho, Bolivian adviser to the Ministry of the Presidency, said that the landowners’ warnings are a “smokescreen” put up to force the Bolivian Government to cease turning over land to commune dwellers, thus putting an end to the latifundist system.

It is undeniable that there is a “paramilitary” type of behaviour, and that the landowners are prepared, a worrisome situation [because] unprecedented violence could be generated, violence like that seen in Pando a week ago, which resulted in 15 deaths. The peasants continue to be irritated by the takeover of such public institutions as the Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) and are now demanding the departure of Santa Cruz Prefect Ruben Costas before they will call off their siege.

Nevertheless, the opposition indicates that the peasants are being manipulated from within the government to instigate a confrontation and provoke the ouster and jailing of Costas, Morales’s staunchest opponent. Every possible pathway to dialogue must be opened so that the civic committees will sit down and negotiate.

The adviser to the Morales government said that the actions of the rightist groups have extremely racist slogans that undermine the structure of Bolivian society. He pointed out that the Santa Cruz Youth Union has been encouraged for the past two or three years and now serves as the quasi military operational arm of the civic committee. It is made up of some 2,000 armed youths, resulting in a dangerous climate.

The adviser observed that the paramilitary units of these hard-line factions of the ruling classes will continue to take over institutions and to beat and insult both Indians and mestizos who want to live in a country different from what they have endured since the founding of the republic.

Those practicing violence -in whom the Santa Cruz businessmen are investing thousands of dollars and are willing to spend more -are seeking to provoke a violent reaction from the partisans of change, better still if the government is the source of the violence.

Source: Notimex news agency, Mexico City, in Spanish 0115 gmt 20 Sep 08

BBC Mon LA1 LatPol tj

Copyright (C) 2008 BBC Monitoring. All rights reserved

News Provided by COMTEX

Talks at an impasse in Bolivian crisis

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/09/23/bolivia.talks/

*LA PAZ, Bolivia (CNN) *– The prospect of more violence in Bolivia remained
high Tuesday as negotiators continue to search for a solution to a crisis
that has threatened to divide the country.

The central government of leftist President Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first
leader from an Indian majority centered in the western highlands, has been
conducting talks with governors of largely white provinces in the east who
want autonomy.

Both sides are trying to settle differences in the distribution of oil and
gas revenue, autonomy for eastern states and Morales’ plans for a
constitution that would give more rights to indigenous Bolivians.

The talks began after clashes this month between supporters of the two sides
killed at least 30 people.

On Tuesday, Morales plans to attend a U.N. assembly in New York that will
draw heads of state from around the world. Before he left, he signed a
proposal dealing with sharing gas revenue and a proposed new constitution
and urged opposition governors to sign it, too. But Vice President Alvaro
Garcia Linera expressed skepticism.

“There are signs to suspect that in reality there is no will to sign an
agreement,” he said.

Meanwhile, peasants who support Morales marched toward the city of Santa
Cruz, an opposition stronghold, and said they were braced for a fight if the
negotiations fizzle.

Hugo Fernandez, a peasant leader who supports Morales, joined pro-government
demonstrators who were converging on Santa Cruz for a possible clash with
pro-autonomy residents. He dismissed the talks.

“There is no dialogue,” he said. “It’s a trick. We don’t believe anything
they tell us.”

Opposition figures such as Gov. Mario Cossio of the eastern Tarija state
have said that they hope to strike a deal with the government.

Cossio said they hope “to build a national agreement that
*Bolivia*<http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Bolivia>needs, that the
Bolivians want.” The goal is to “give peace back to our
country and give certainty to Bolivia,” he said.

Differences about Bolivia’s future have threatened to rend the country.

Peasant leader Julian Torrico said he and other Morales supporters will
storm the eastern city of Santa Cruz if the talks do not yield
progress. [image:
Video] *Watch as protesters threaten to take Bolivia’s wealthiest city
»*<http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/09/23/bolivia.talks/#cnnSTCVideo>

“We will go into Santa Cruz and respond with force because they have
[marginalized] us and massacred us, so we will massacre them and we will
take their land away from them,” he said.

“The fight here is between poor and rich. The government of Evo Morales took
power by a majority, and now these opposition governors don’t want to let
him govern.”

On the other side of the divide stand people such as Anyelo Cespedes,
president of the Santa Cruz Youth Union, which opposes
*Morales*<http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Evo_Morales>
.

“We don’t want a dictatorship or a communist regime,” he said. “We have our
way of life, and we don’t want that changed.”

The central government and eastern governors started negotiations last week
– talks that may offer one of the final chances to reverse Bolivia’s slide
toward violent instability, said analyst Gonzalo Chavez.

“This is probably one of the few opportunities that we’re going to have to
solve the problems of the country,” he said.

Four of nine provinces in Bolivia have declared autonomy from the central
government in referendums this year. Morales — an ally of President Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela and former President Fidel Castro of Cuba — said the
moves could cause Bolivia to disintegrate.

The eastern opposition leaders have long opposed a decision of the Morales
government to divert some revenue from oil and gas produced in the region to
pay for government programs for the elderly. They also have opposed his
plans to revise the constitution to give greater rights to the indigenous
majority.

The differences flared into violence this month, with opposition protesters
occupying government buildings and energy installations.

Morales has said the opposition leaders are trying to overthrow the
government. He expelled the U.S. ambassador, Philip Goldberg, on the grounds
that the envoy urged anti-government protesters to get violent — an
assertion the U.S. denied.

“This is a coup in the past few days by the leaders of some provinces, with
the takeover of some institutions, the sacking and robbery of some
government institutions and attempts to assault the national police and the
armed forces,” Morales has said.

Opposition leaders said they merely want their demands met.

Peasants have been massacred, diplomats sent home, protestors have clashed, one province is under Martial Law and one governor is about to get arrested.

The Bolivian people must prepare for the inevitable battle with the ruling class of their country. 

pics of peasants who were massacred:

 

 

pics of protestors at barricades, can you guess who stands with the masses and who represents the rich minority?

This is a good article on Boliva that I saw on the great blog Bolivia Rising (see my blogroll).  It seems that the right wing in Bolivia is preparing for battle, what is the left doing?

‘Stalemate’ as Counter-Revolution in Bolivia

http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2008/08/stalemate-as-counter-revolution-in.html

Despite winning more than 67 percent of the vote in a recall referendum on August 10, Bolivian president Evo Morales faces serious political challenges to his rule and to his efforts to lead a “democratic and cultural revolution.” Amid extreme antagonism between the national government and regional power brokers from the lowland departments, the referendum was a seen as a critical test of popular support for each opposing side. But the outcome strengthened both the government and the opposition prefects, preventing a decisive victory for either side and revealing a high level of political polarization.

The referendum asked Bolivians to vote yes or no on the continuance not only of their president, but also that of eight of the country’s nine prefects (similar to elected governors). Nationwide, 67.41 percent of voters voted yes for Morales, an increase of almost 14 percentage points over his already impressive electoral victory in 2005. In almost any circumstance this would have been a decisive and remarkable win for a president more than halfway through a four-year term, and the numbers demonstrated a trend of increasing support for the president, even in parts of the country where he and his party are weakest.

The distribution of support for Morales, however, varied significantly between the eastern and western departments: he lost the popular vote in three of the four eastern lowland departments, with his weakest showing predictably in Santa Cruz where he received just 40 percent. Somewhat surprisingly in Pando, one of the four lowland departments, he won over 52%. By contrast, in the five more populous western provinces, where the government has its strongest bases of support, the percentages in favor of Morales were astounding, ranging from the low of 53% in Chuquisaca to 70% in Cochabamba, and to between 83 and 84% in La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí. Thus, the overall national trend of increased support for the president also showed stark regional variation.

The prefects from the four eastern, lowland departments—Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija—who have been spearheading the opposition to Morales, were also ratified in their respective departments by impressive margins ranging from 56 to 66 percent. These figures represent increases of 8 to 19 points from the vote percentages they won when they were elected in 2005. Since much of their public profile and actions have been focused on confrontation with the central government it appears that the prefects’ tactics and their strategy of demanding greater political autonomy have paid off politically. Morales’ political party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), had hoped that one or two opposition prefects would be voted out of office, but that result failed to materialize.

The regional opposition has not acted as a “loyal opposition”—that is, one that plays by the rules of the game—rather, it has openly encouraged and supported acts of insubordination against Morales and his administration. Just days before the referendum, groups opposing the president illegally occupied a regional airport and prevented the Argentine and Venezuelan presidents, as well as Morales, from landing for a political summit and the inauguration of a joint investment project that would have benefitted the department as well as regional integration, declaring that Morales and those allied with him were not welcome in Tarija.

Morales’s presidency is viewed by many of his supporters as an opportunity to decolonize the country and redistribute wealth. Bolivia’s majority indigenous population has historically been marginalized from the spheres of power and relegated to extreme levels of poverty in one of the most unequal countries in the region. But plans for agrarian reform, attempts to change the country’s economic model, and, not least, leadership of the government by someone from the indigenous-based social movements are all viewed as threatening to many of Bolivia’s privileged.

Lacking an alternative national political project to that of the MAS, the prefects have used the wedge issue of regional autonomy and adeptly taken advantage of several political blunders committed by the MAS to assiduously fan the flames of regionalism. They have skillfully portrayed Morales and the MAS as the embodiment of the resented centralism that has historically characterized Bolivian politics and political administration.

Having lost access to political power at the national level, elites in the lowland provinces are demanding increases in departmental budgets (funding for regional governments come from the central government) and a model of regional autonomy that would increase their control of land use and natural resource extraction, as well as limit the reach of the national government. If successful, these proposals would dramatically weaken the Morales government’s ability to carry out its political agenda.

The incompatibility of the national and regional agendas and the pattern over these last couple of years of political intransigence, outright hostility, and even the use of violence and intimidation, bodes ill for a process of national dialogue and compromise. While Morales and four of the five opposition prefects (the exception was Rubén Costas, the hard-line prefect of Santa Cruz) all acknowledged the need for dialogue immediately after the referendum, events since then indicate that confrontation is likely to continue and even intensify.

In a brief address the night of the referendum Morales expressed his determination to deepen the reforms and transformations that his government has been attempting to carry out, but he also expressed a commitment to dialogue and compromise for the sake of national unity. Extending an olive branch to the opposition, he suggested that what was needed was to find a way to merge the new draft constitution passed by the MAS-dominated Constituent Assembly with the Autonomy Statutes drawn up by the opposition forces in the lowland departments; the opposition has been adamant in their rejection of the new draft constitution.

Following up on this promise, Morales summoned the prefects to La Paz to begin the negotiation process, but after meeting for less than two days on August 13 and 14 the talks broke down with each side accusing the other of being unwilling to compromise. In the wake of these failed negotiations, both the government and the opposition have staked out even more strident positions that put the prospect of dialogue and consensus even further out of reach.

On August 23, the MAS and its supporters decided in a national meeting that the president should move forward on ratifying the new constitution by convening another national referendum, which would also place the question of funding for the prefectural administrations to the citizens, thereby indicating that Morales’ previous suggestion of trying to merge the draft constitution and the autonomy statutes through process of national dialogue has now been discarded. In recent statements vice president Álvaro García Linera signaled the government’s view that it now has a strong mandate to move its political project forward: “There is but one single [political] project in Bolivia,” and “one way or the other, there must be a Political Constitution that guarantees and secures the advances [made by the government].”

Civic opposition groups in Santa Cruz, Tarija, and Chuquisaca responded by declaring themselves “on a war footing” (en pie de Guerra) against any attempt to approve the constitutional text and that no such referendum would take place in any of the five departments. Not only this, but in flagrant violation of the existing constitution, Rubén Costas, prefect of Santa Cruz, is moving forward with plans to organize a departmental electoral court and police force that would report to the prefectural government as opposed to the corresponding national institutions.

It was recently reported that in Santa Cruz a group of thugs associated with Costas and the “civic” opposition groups violently attacked the regional chief of police, who is hospitalized and has since resigned. Costas has since declared that no one will be reassigned to this post without his express permission. This recent incident indicates the willingness of the right to use violence and intimidation to advance their agenda and exposes the weakness of the state’s ability to enforce the law. Similar violent incidents in the past have gone unpunished.

At the present moment, the national government and regional opposition groups appear to be moving inexorably towards further confrontation as they each attempt to implement their political agendas on the ground even if that means sidestepping laws and the constitutional framework—and in the case of the right resorting to the politics of violence and intimidation. The MAS now has an even stronger popular mandate than before to move for the approval of the new constitution, which as García Linera indicated is essential to institutionalizing the changes that have already been made and advancing others.

However, even if they succeed in getting the constitution approved in a referendum, the opposition forces will still have the ability to sabotage government initiatives because of the weakness of the Bolivian state and its institutions. Morales’ political project cannot be successfully accomplished if the country is divided and the central government is weak. The referendum “victory” has not provided a solution to Bolivia’s political crisis, and the current stalemate between Evo and the regional opposition illustrates yet again how difficult social change and redistribution are to achieve. Even with a solid majority mandate and in a context of democracy, the road to revolutionary change is wrought with obstacles.

Jennifer N. Collins is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and has just returned from a month and a half of research in Bolivia.

Repuglished from NACLA