Agreement ends week-long conflict in
Bolivia
By FRANCIS McDONAGH
Special to the National Catholic Reporter La Paz,
Bolivia
With mediation by the Catholic church, an agreement was signed
April 14 ending a week of conflict throughout Bolivia that followed a
government declaration of a state of emergency April 8.
Confrontations, largely between rural farmers and the government,
left five dead and eight injured; 22 people were detained.
Under the agreement the government is withdrawing troops to
barracks, and in return the main peasant organization, the CSUTCB, agreed to
call off roadblocks. The government has also promised to review long-standing
grievances of rural communities, notably its water privatization bill and the
complicated land titling procedure under agrarian reform law, and to improve
rural infrastructure and increase technical and financial support to small
farmers.
The guarantors of the agreement were Msgr. Jesús
Juárez, secretary of the Bolivian bishops conference;
government-appointed Peoples Defender Ana María Romero de Campero;
and the president of the Bolivian Permanent Human Rights Assembly, Waldo
Albarracín. There is pressure for the government now to lift the state
of emergency, due to run until July 8.
The government of Gen. Hugo Banzer, military dictator of Bolivia
1971-1978, but president by election since 1997, decreed the state of emergency
after widespread protests, including roadblocks, by rural communities against
proposals for water privatization and reduction of worker rights. Protests
escalated throughout the country and were met with violence by the army.
In Cochabamba on the day the state of emergency was decreed, a
17-year old demonstrator, Víctor Hugo Daza Argandoña, was shot
dead in a confrontation between the army and community groups protesting the
takeover of the local water supply by Bechtel Corporation, a British-led
international consortium. A man in civilian clothes filmed firing at
demonstrators from among army ranks was later identified as army captain
Robinson Iriarte.
The other flashpoint was the highland region around the Bolivian
capital, La Paz. Also on April 8, in Achacachi, two men were killed by army
fire at a roadblock, allegedly after the commander of the Ayacucho Battalion,
Lt. Col. Armando Carrasco Nava, ordered his troops to shoot to kill after being
struck by a stone thrown by the protesters. Enraged demonstrators captured
Carrasco and his deputy. Carrasco managed to escape, but the demonstrators
stabbed the other officer. Later demonstrators dragged the wounded officer from
a hospital and killed him. A 15-year old boy was killed by a shot in the throat
in Achacachi the following day.
The governments actions during the demonstrations were
widely criticized as an authoritarian and insensitive response to longstanding
social problems. Juárez of the bishops conference described the
rural unrest as the result of extreme poverty and demands that had gone long
unheard. The movement is not political. It is the result of dire poverty.
The demands of the rural population must be listened to if we want lasting
peace, he said.
National Catholic Reporter, April 28,
2000
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