Christian Parenti (The Nation): Bolivia's Battle Of Wills

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation
Issue of July 4, 2005
Posted online Thursday June 16

Bolivia's Battle Of Wills
By Christian Parenti

At a roadblock on the Bolivian altiplano, a group of indigenous tin miners in brown fiberglass helmets, their jaws bulging with coca leaves, lounge around on an empty strip of road. Suddenly the thin, high-altitude air shakes with a quick explosion. Everyone laughs. The comrades are killing time by tossing lit dynamite into a field. Tomorrow they will march across these high empty plains, through the sprawling, impoverished, majority Indian city of El Alto and over the edge of a steep canyon down into the capital of La Paz, and there lay siege to the government.

The miners have held this road for the past twenty-four hours. Both main arteries linking La Paz to the outside world are shut down. The Bolivian economy is beginning to sputter and stall; before long the restaurants, hotels and offices of the capital will start to run out of food and fuel; uncollected garbage will pile up in the streets. Soon six major cities will be sealed off by more than eighty blockades.

"The Congress is dominated by the transnational corporations. We are fighting to recover our natural resources. It is our right," says a stern miner named Miguel Sureta.

The social movements--a host of mostly indigenous organizations representing Aymara and Quechua peasants, miners, teachers, urban community organizations, coca growers and the oldest national labor federation--are demanding nationalization of the country's massive natural gas reserves, now estimated to be the second-largest in the hemisphere, at 53 trillion cubic feet. Their other plank is a constituent assembly to reformulate Bolivia's political system and give greater power to the majority indigenous population.

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