Joe R. Golowka JoeG at ieee.org Anarchist FAQ - http://www.anarchistfaq.org
"Necessity is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves." -William Pitt Jr. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Juventudes Libertarias" <jjll_bolivia at hotmail.com>
> BLOOD IN THE ALTIPLANO (27-06-01).
> Severo Mamani was 48 years old and had 9 children, an
> Aymara peasant that lived in one of the most miserable
> places on the planet, the Bolivian altiplano. His
> poverty was such that his few crops scarecely served
> for self-sustenance. But weary of racism, of being
> exploited by a system that treated him like an animal,
> he went out on June 21 to blockade the highway,
> together with other peasants, demanding dignity,
> bread, education for his children, health for his
> family, definitively demanding the end of capitalism,
> which in this country has been aggravated since 1985,
> when decree 21060 initiated neoliberalism. It is
> precisely this decree that his protest aimed to
> abolish. But it all ended for him when, on June 27,
> he fell dead from a gunshot. The bullet entered his
> arm, went through his chest and exited through the
> other side It left him lying in the middle of the
> straw, dusty, with his eyes open. He left nine
> orphaned children, the oldest of them 30 and the
> youngest 3. “Who has the duty of providing for our
> children?” cried his wife Evarista Flores between
> sobs(?) of pain his wife Evarista Flores.
>
> Severo Mamani was found more than half a kilometer
> from the highway that connections Laja with La Paz
> when a fragment of the army moved against the group of
> peasants that blocked the way. It was difficult to
> escape from the military aggression. The witnesses
> say that they tried in vain to take cover from the
> bullets by lying on the ground. There was no
> confrontation, the army just arrived and began to
> fire.
>
> The community to which Severo Mamani and the other
> neighbors belonged was not disposed to turn the other
> cheek. We are armed and starting tomorrow we are
> going to meet bullet with bullet, fire with fire,
> because we are not going to be killed like swine, one
> peasant declared while helping to carry the body of
> his comrade.
>
> The violence also reached the other side of the
> altiplano. In the crossroads of Pucarani three people
> were wounded by gunshots. Isabel Quispe received a
> blow in the abdomen, Rolando Lucana was hit by a
> bullet in the hand and Freddy Quispe López, comunario
> of Corpata, was wounded in the right thigh This last
> individual was found digging potatos from his parcel
> when he was shot from a very great distance.
>
> In their repressive toil, the armed forces occupy in a
> completely arbitrary manner various educational
> centers on the altiplano. Thus forty soldiers can be
> found in the Calama de Palcoco school, and another 80
> have taken the San Salvador de Patamanta school.
>
> The abuses are repeated from village to village,
> levelling houses and ransacking them. In their toil
> to find the leaders, the soldiers have detained those
> elderly that were unable to escape. Among those
> captured are some over 80 years old, such as Julián
> Poma, whose son denounced the excesses of the troops.
>
> These scenes are now quotidian in impoverished
> Bolivia, goverened by a fascist administration led by
> General Banzer and which, with the coming of the
> American government, has assasinated more than fifty
> people in social protests.
>
> The Bolivian working class is gathering conscience of
> their strengths, and on more than one occasion has put
> the government in check. During the last month a huge
> peasant mobilization expelled the military troops from
> the Yungas, a region where they grow coca and which
> the army has aimed to militarize.
>
> But thousands of organized peasants have forced the
> army to recede and edged the government into signing a
> promise to respect the coca growers, which by and
> large produce a crop intended for traditional
> consumption.
>
> Right now an iron(?) resistence of the health workers
> and teachers has avoided the privatization of those
> services, coming triumphantly out of a strike nearly a
> month in duration, which ended June 27th.
>
> But the mobilizations are not limited to those
> sectors: it is a great popular movement that has
> transformed the streets and the countryside into
> trenches of resistence to the Banzer government, which
> has undoubtedly planted corpses of workers in cities
> and highways, while the bourgeois imperalism rains
> praise on the fascist gorilla Banzer, whose
> administration has been classified, by international
> bodies, as the most corrupt in the Americas and the
> seventh most corrupt in the world.
>
> The international press and the governments of the
> world are silent before the atrocious reality that
> lives in Bolivia, because they know that what is
> gestating here is an authentic organized
> anticapitalist proletarian movement, which can become
> a dangerous example for the world’s powerful.
>
> In complicity with the union bueracracats, the
> government has initiated a military operation of
> genocide, has accused the peasants of drunkenness,
> Because they say that one cannot concieve how there
> could exist people in their right mind who defy
> bullets with sticks and rocks. To their murderous
> troops, they have added military aircraft and have
> announced that that will shoot to kill if the
> roadblocks are not lifted. Furthermore they will
> initiate a fercious butchery of the peasant leaders.
>
> Anarchists call for a class defense of Felipe Quispe
> “El Mallku”, today with a warrant for his arrest.
> We reject his caudillist [personal aggrandizement as
> leader] adventurism and his authoritarianism, but we
> are conscious that when the borgeuois State injures
> one worker, it is an injury to all.
>
>
> We call for international actions against the Banzer
> government, to propagandize the struggle of the
> Bolivian workers, to break the wall of silence that
> the international media has raised, to denounce the
> unchallenged crimes against humanity of the Bolivian
> state.
>
> LONG LIVE WORKER-PEASANT UNITY! FOR THE END OF
> CAPITALISM, INTERNATIONAL CLASS ACTION! TOWARDS
> LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM…LONG LIVE THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION!
>
>
>
> Juventudes Libertarias, Bolivia.
> Anarcho-communist group
> Email: jjll_bolivia at hotmail.com
> Spanish Web Site: www.come.to/jlb