Isabel Hilton (Guardian Unltd): Justice on the streets of Bolivia

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday October 21

Justice on the streets
The ousting of Bolivia's president is a warning that the demands of Latin America's poor cannot be ignored
By Isabel Hilton

Bolivia's president of 15 months, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, was protesting to the last when he finally resigned on Friday after months of street protests. His resignation, he remarked sourly, was a blow for democracy in Bolivia and Latin America.
The president's democratic credentials were not impeccable: he was elected, certainly, but with only 22% of the vote. By last week, he retained the loyalty of less than half of even the small minority who had actually voted for him. He presided over government forces that shot 50 demonstrators dead in the days leading up to his resignation.
Democracy, it is true, has had a pretty patchy run in Bolivia. In the 50s, one president abolished the army, only to be overthrown (with US encouragement) shortly thereafter. Twenty years of military dictatorship finally reached its apogee in the early 80s - after one spectacular episode when there were five presidents in a single day - with the coca-peddling General Luis Garcia Meza. At this point the US belatedly concluded that military dictatorships were not necessarily reliable allies.
Perhaps the fact that Bolivians have not been blessed with much in the way of sound government goes some way to explaining why, when they are exercised about an issue, they tend to take to the streets rather than write to their MP. Experience has taught them that governments give them little that the people have not wrested by force, and that when foreigners take an interest in Bolivia's natural resources, fortunes are made by the few and the mass of Bolivians stay hungry. It was like that under the Spanish, when tens of thousands of Quechua and Aymara died working the great silver mountain at Potosi to fund the Spanish empire. It was like that under the military dictatorships and now, they have discovered, it is like that under elected governments too.

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