RE: [aymara] fw: Indigenas exigen espacio en el Estado

["Alex Condori" <lista2@xxxxxxxxx>]

Alex Condori's Note: One year ago (2000) Bolivia
collapsed into a civil uprising led by indian
movements. The former dictator and now President
Hugo Banzer declared a state of siege. Violent
military and police intervention tried to keep
things at bay. The did not succeed. Please, note
the extreme position usually kept by the Mallku
(Felipe Quispe Huanca, leader of the CSUTCB and 
self-proclaimed aymara leader)


============
IPS World News

POLITICS-BOLIVIA: Banzer, the Siege and the Market


By Alejandro Campos

LA PAZ, Apr 21 (IPS) - The end of the government-declared state of siege
in Bolivia does not necessarily ensure a definitive social peace in a
country whose people have accumulated 15 years of frustration with the
market economy model, say political observers.

One military and four civilian deaths, 88 people wounded, 21 union leaders
arrested and various governmental defeats is the balance after 13 days of
siege, lifted Thursday by president Hugo Banzer, though it had originally
been set to last 90 days.

Though all forms of protest had been banned, streets and roads were
occupied by demonstrators throughout the 13-day siege.

The declaration of a state of siege was Banzer's lowest point in his two
years and eight months in the presidency, because not only was it
incapable of containing the protests, it deepened existing conflicts and
created a general feeling of contempt for the government.

The use of force only helped the sectors caught up in the conflict
entrench their demands, and contributed to widespread criticism of
Banzer's government, even from some of its political allies.

The government lifted the state of siege after the Catholic Church and
trade unions stepped up pressures and when it became apparent that a
foreign debt relief programme financed by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank was in jeopardy. The funding was conditioned on
government dialogue with civil society in defining how the resources would
be used.

In Bolivia's 15 years of democracy, the three governments preceding
Banzer's implemented a state of siege five times. In each of those cases,
the siege lasted the three months established by the Constitution, but
none of them resulted in human deaths.

The 13 days of violence seem to have left warnings, not lessons. Felipe
Quispe Huanca, leader of the Union Confederation of Peasant Workers of
Bolivia, which organised the largest blockade of national roads in the
last two decades, warned that recent events were "just a rehearsal."

"The peasants have made their stand," an indigenous leader known as
"Mallku" ('condor' in his native Aymara language) told the press, adding
that what occurred this month "are the first stones towards taking
political power."

"Here the Indian question is not an issue of land, it is about power," he
announced.

During the state of siege, the peasants won a battle with the government
over the controversial Water Act, a law that had forced them to pay for
using water from natural springs and wells.

Political analysts see the failed siege and the public's discontent as an
expression of disenchantment with a democracy that is limited to the
electoral sphere.

"Such as it stands, democracy is reaching its limits," warned Erick
Torrico, an expert at the Simon Bolivar Andean University, of the Andean
Community of Nations (CAN). "The content of recent demonstrations responds
to a situation that reveals the inadequacies of a merely (electoral)
democracy."

The voting ritual no longer satisfies and the siege is a reflection of the
dangerous and unproductive hardening of the system, according to Torrico.

The population's patience has reached its limits, agreed sociologist Maria
Teresa Segada, a specialist from the government-run Higher University of
San Andres.

When the neoliberal economic model was implemented in 1985, government
leaders asked the Bolivian people for patience and sacrifice, but now, 15
years later, patience has run out because the model did not meet their
expectations, Segada said.

Analyst Rafael Archondo predicted that what occurred during the two-week
siege, which was generally disobeyed by the public, is the beginning of
the end for government models dictated by the Supreme Decree 21060, which
in 1985 initiated the full implementation of the market economy in
Bolivia.

To resolve this conflictive situation, the nation's democracy must move
beyond being an elected dictatorship and become an authentic process of
co-leadership in the social and political spheres, "where there is more
society and less State," concluded Archondo.