Waves of Protests by the Poor Keep a Divided Bolivia on Edge

Parts of this impoverished, teeming community on the outskirts of La Paz are a kind of liberated territory, patrolled by men in helmets emblazoned with “Workers Police.” Their leader is Felipe Quispe, an Aymara Indian leader who has announced that he and his followers might soon carve an “Aymara Republic” out of the western half of Bolivia.

Down the road, in La Paz, the country’s biggest labor confederation has gone on strike, demanding the president’s resignation. “We can’t negotiate with this government,” says Jaime Solares, a union leader. “If the president doesn’t quit, there will be blood on the streets.”

A series of protests has left 64 people dead in Bolivia this year, and many fear that the scattered violence may be the prologue to a more violent and widespread conflict. The words “civil war” are increasingly on people’s lips here, with talk of bands of youths arming themselves and training in guerrilla tactics in the Altiplano highlands.

The strife is being fed by this country’s rampant poverty, the growing restiveness of its Indian majority and also by a plan to export natural gas through Chile. The gas plan has stirred Bolivian nationalism -- Chile invaded and annexed Bolivia’s corridor to the Pacific Ocean in the 19th century.

Food shortages and almost daily demonstrations rock La Paz, the administrative capital, which is occasionally cut off from the rest of the country due to blockades set up by protesting peasants. In recent weeks, the prices of vegetables and other foodstuffs in the city have risen by 50% to 100%.

In the face of so much disorder, President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada has remained defiant.

“Sure, there are problems, but the protests are being created by a radicalized group of society that thinks it can govern from the streets,” the president told foreign journalists last week. “There are radical elements who don’t want me to finish my term. But I will not resign.”

Sanchez de Lozada, a Chicago-educated former film producer who speaks Spanish with a noticeable American accent, took office last year. Under Bolivia’s arcane electoral system, he was elected president by Congress after getting just 23% of the vote.

A recent poll put his approval rating at 9%.

Goni, as the president is known here, assembled a loose coalition of centrists and moderate leftists to win the vote in Congress. The election left Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism as the largest opposition party in Congress.

Morales’ base of support is among the Quechua Indians and the coca farmers of east-central Bolivia. A strong critic of globalization and neoliberal economics, he has called for the nationalization of Bolivia’s gas reserves.

The natural gas fields have been developed by an international consortium, Pacific LNG, which is backing the Chilean pipeline plan. The gas could be shipped, in liquefied form, to electricity plants in California.

“Our demand is the same as that of the majority of Bolivians,” Morales said last week. “We don’t want to see our wealth usurped by multinationals again.”

Morales announced Friday that his supporters would join the growing blockade of the nation’s highways, a move that could worsen the shortages in the capital.

Quispe, the Aymara leader whose base is here in El Alto and other towns near La Paz, has promised to step up his own group’s protests too. He said his movement is “preparing people, little by little” for a revolutionary war should the government fail to accede to his demands for expanded social services and employment.

“The whites and the mestizos are going to have to respect us in this country,” he said.

A week ago, an estimated 60,000 people marched in La Paz carrying red flags, one of a series of demonstrations organized by the Bolivian Workers Central labor federation demanding the government’s ouster.

The class and ethnic divisions of Bolivian society were on display, as the demonstrators -- many in traditional Aymara clothes -- taunted passersby in suits and ties with cries of “filthy rich!” and “Chileans!” A few protesters threw rocks and engaged in fistfights with business owners who had declined to close their stores in solidarity with the labor federation’s strike.

“The government shouldn’t sell the gas like that, at a giveaway price,” said one of the protesters, Eleuterio Paudimani. “We’re doing this for the future of our children. That’s why the people are very mobilized.”

The government says it has uncovered evidence of armed guerrillas training in the Altiplano and Chapare regions. Bolivian television broadcast images last week of teenagers training in the use of rifles and submachine guns.

The footage was jolting in a country that hasn’t seen a serious guerrilla movement in decades.

In 1967, Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia and his followers crushed. Attempts to revive a resistance movement in the years that followed were also failures.

On Sept. 20, five peasants and two soldiers were killed in the town of Warisata about 80 miles north of La Paz when protesters tried to block an army caravan escorting tourists who had been trapped in the Lake Titicaca region by a weeklong Aymara roadblock.

The army said the soldiers were ambushed. The protesting peasants said the soldiers opened fire on them first.

Javier Gomez Aguilar, an economist with the La Paz-based Center for the Study of Labor and Agrarian Development, fears that the violence will only intensify. The poverty rate in Bolivia stands at 70%, and the government has launched an austerity program that precludes investment in health, education and other needs.

“Bolivia historically has not been fertile ground for the development of guerrilla groups, but the lack of a government plan to address these inequalities is helping to generate these very serious confrontations,” he said.

“The government’s ability to stay in power is based increasingly on the armed forces.”

D’Alessandro reported from El Alto and Tobar from Buenos Aires.