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“This is the
victory of the poor, the workers and the peasants”. This is how Roberto de La
Cruz, leader of the El Alto Regional Workers’ Union celebrated the resignation
of the hated “people-killer president” Sanchez de Lozada in the afternoon of
Friday October 17.
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The masses,
gathered in the streets of the capital and the main cities of the country,
paralysed by the indefinite general strike called by the Bolivian Workers’
Union COB since September 29, celebrated with joy and anger the fleeing of the
hated president. Once again a hated bourgeois president has had to escape by
helicopter to avoid the fury of the workers and peasants. Sanchez de Lozada has
joined an increasingly long list of Latin-American presidents who have fallen as
a result of the mass mobilization of the workers and peasants against the
capitalist policies of cuts and austerity.
Power could
have been taken
The resignation
of Sanchez de Lozada came at the last minute. It is not clear what would have
happened if he had delayed it even for a few more hours. In fact, since
Wednesday it was increasingly clear that all conditions were ripe for the taking
of power by the workers and peasants. Only the lack of boldness of the leaders
gave the ruling class a small margin to organize a replacement.
The general
strike was growing and spreading throughout the country, the first elements of
dual power had emerged, the masses were prepared to go right to the end,
divisions within the ranks of the army and the police were growing more acute,
the middle class was joining in the protests, and the workers had started to
organize self-defence committees.
On Thursday for
instance, the Federation of Neighbourhood Juntas (FEJUVE) of El Alto, the
organisation which represents democratic workers’ and peoples’ power in this
city of 1 million inhabitants, instructed its members to form “Armed
Self-Defence Brigades”. The resolution of the Political Committee of the
FEJUVE instructed the leaders of the 562 Neighbourhood Juntas to set up
self-defence brigades to face the constant harassment and murders they have been
suffering at the hands of the government forces. “The Brigades will be
composed of volunteers and they will make Molotov bombs and explosive bombs”
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When the San Francisco Square was
already awash with rumours about the resignation of the president, the miners
arrived, setting off sticks of dynamite. This is an eyewitness account:
“Almost at the same time that the miners were marching La Paz, the city of El
Alto was completely empty. Thousands of people had marched down onto the
capital, via the motorway. The city was empty, with bridges destroyed, train
carriages lying across the motorway forming barricades and with stones all along
the way.
“Down below,
in La Paz, the Square was packed. The mobilisation was at least as large as the
previous day and we arrived at the time when the rumour was announced that Goni
was about to resign. As if a bomb had gone off, the mass of the people surged
ahead towards Plaza Murillo, [where the presidential Palace was protected by
hundreds of policemen and soldiers]. The first police cordon melted away and the
policemen ended up shaking hands with the people. But behind them the tanks
would not move, and the people, unarmed, could not go through.
“(…) and then, the miners arrived, also crossing
through El Alto. These were faces coming from deep down in the mines, with
helmets, sticks of dynamite, organized in platoons, and bringing their coca
leaves and blankets. ‘Goni, bastard, the miners have arrived’, and the sound
of exploding dynamite could be heard even before you could see the miners. The
masses gave them an ovation, sang with them, embraced them, gave them something
to drink.
“It must have been four in the afternoon and it was
almost a triumphal march. ‘We did it!’, and ‘rifles and bullets will not
stop the people’. The sticks of dynamite were now not used for defence but to
celebrate the fact that the president was about to flee.”
No
confidence in Carlos Mesa and his government
However
the celebration cannot hide the fact that the movement is aware that the aims of
the struggle have not yet been achieved: the cancellation of the sale of gas and
oil, the agrarian reform, the respect of the rights of the Indians, an end to
the harassment of the coca-growing farmers, etc.
Thus, the COB has decided not to give any confidence to
the government of Carlos Mesa and has agreed to maintain the indefinite strike
until the new government makes a clear commitment “not to export gas, neither
via Chile nor via Peru, and to withdraw the gas and oil law.” A National
Enlarged meeting of the COB, gathering under the vigilance of the tens of
thousands of demonstrators outside, agreed to present a programme of basic
demands that the new president must implement. This is how bolpress.com reported
it:
The Workers’ Union decided not to support the new
government because they consider that the resignation of Gonzalo Sánchez de
Lozada is just a change of persons and not a change in the economic model. Also
it prefers to maintain its “class independence”, that is, not to “make
agreements with a government which does not represent the working class”
The COB programme of demands includes the following
points: “the investigation in Congress of all the contracts concerning
privatization and part privatization of oil, mines and state owned companies”,
“the cancellation of the Land Law and the distribution of Land to the
Peasants. Respect of the property of the Indians over the land”, “the recall
of all the laws against the rights of the workers”, “the immediate
withdrawal of the right to hire and fire”, “the recovery of the national
industry, rejecting free trade as established in the Free Trade of the Americas
Agreement”. Finally it also demands “trial for genocide of the Bolivian
population of those responsible”.
The statement of the National Enlarged Meeting of the
COB ends with a warning that: “whatever government there may be, it has to
apply the demands of the people. If that is not the case, the streets and roads
of our country will be our barricades again”. The Workers’ Union also called
for another mass meeting on Saturday 18 to decide what steps to take.
The new government therefore
has come into being extremely weakened. The new president had to ask permission
to the workers’ leaders for the MPs to be allowed to go to the Congress
session. This confirms once again what we have said before: power was in the
streets, in the hands of mobilized workers and peasants, and if the situation
did not go further this was because their own leaders did not take that last
step.
The government of Mesa has made
all sorts of promises. It cannot do otherwise if it wants to buy some time in
order to establish some sort of social basis. At the moment it only has the
precarious support of the army, the US embassy and a handful of capitalists and
landowners. Thus the new government has promised to put the sale of gas to a
popular referendum, as well as economic support for the city of El Alto (the
most radical center of the protests), and the calling of a Constituent Assembly
or early elections.
The workers’ and peasants’
organizations should give no support or room for manoeuvre to this new
government. Mesa at the end of the day was Sanchez de Lozada’s president only
a week ago, and is therefore also responsible for all his policies of
privatization and attacks on the workers and peasants. The same can be said of
all the previous government coalition parties which only abandoned the
“people-killer president” in order to save their own skin.
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The tactics of the ruling class will be to try to buy
time, delay the calling of a referendum and of a possible constituent assembly,
and at the same time intensify the appeals to the people to remain calm, for
national unity, to “rebuild the country all together”, with the aim of
demobilizing the masses and then, when the situation becomes more favourable, go
on the offensive again. Unfortunately in this task they can count on the
collaboration of some of the mass leaders like Evo Morales who think that the
country can be fundamentally changed through constitutional means.
However, Bolivia has already experienced 21 years of
democracy under capitalism, with all sorts of governments, and the results are
clear for everyone to see: 70% of the people live below the poverty line and 30%
are extremely poor, and the natural resources and the wealth of the country have
been sold off to the best bidder. This is the only future that capitalism can
offer the masses of workers and peasants in Bolivia, and these are precisely the
unbearable conditions they have risen up against.
No amount of changes in the political power structure
will solve the most pressing needs of the masses. Only the democratic control of
the economy in the hands of workers and peasants can offer a way out. The
renationalisation of gas, the expropriation without compensation of the mines
(starting with those which are owned by Lozada himself), a thorough agrarian
reform which puts an end to landlordism, these are the kind of measures which
can put in the hands of the many the necessary resources to start improving
their living conditions. The struggle must be a struggle for socialism, for a
genuine democracy of workers and peasants. Instinctively, in these glorious
revolutionary days, the factory workers, the miners, the coca-growing peasants,
the people of El Alto, the working people of Bolivia as a whole have moved in
that direction.
It is possible that because of the lack of a genuinely
revolutionary leadership armed with a clear programme for the taking of power by
the workers and peasants, the revolutionary movement may temporarily ebb faced
with the parliamentary manoeuvres of the ruling class. However, the masses are
undefeated, they feel strong, in these days they have became aware of their own
power, and it will be very difficult for the government to reestablish bourgeois
legality.
The COB statement made this point clearly: “140 lives
have been lost on the streets, giving their blood for the country, showing that
with our strength we are able to overthrow dictatorships, even if they use the
robes of democracy. Governments, even the most vicious and bloodthirsty ones,
can be overthrown by the targeted aims of the people. Now we know that with our
organization and our struggle we can and we must defeat neoliberalism.”
Once again, the main task is the building of a genuine
Marxist leadership which can guarantee victory.
October 18, 2003
See the original in Spanish.
You can find more photos on the events in La Paz on Friday 17 here: 1 - 2.
See also:
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