Feature Page: Social tensions heating up in Bolivia

by Gerry Foley

The social climate in Bolivia began heating up again sharply in March. And the temperature has continued to rise, heading toward a general strike call for May 2 by the Confederacion Obrera Boliviana, the Bolivian Workers Confederation. The new upturn followed several months of a truce accorded to the new government of Carlos Mesa, the vice president under Sanchez de Lozada, who was forced to flee the country in mid-October in the face of mass demonstrations.

The upsurge at that time came to the brink of an insurrection. It receded in the wake of the movement’s failure to put forward a political alternative based on the mobilizations. However, the militant fighters who came to the fore during the October explosion could have few doubts that Mesa intended to continue the neoliberal policies of his fugitive predecessor.

The announcement of Mesa’s proposed tax package in early February gave the signal for the remobilization of the mass movement. It contained no serious taxes on the rich or the foreign corporations, while the deregulation of prices was leading to a higher cost of gas and higher mass transport fares.

A series of marches and partial strikes led to the resignation of the petroleum minister and the postponement of the referendum on how the country’s hydrocarbon resources are to be exploited.

Two marches were organized by the COB, one on March 17 and the other on March 25. They brought out respectively 5000 and 10,000 demonstrators.

The April 15 issue of MAS, the journal of the Argentine Trotskyist organization of the same name, noted that a striking thing about the two demonstrations was that the great majority of the participants were workers and by their action they showed that the Bolivian working class was "not dead and buried."

The obituary of the Bolivian working class has been loudly proclaimed by some analysts as a result of the mass firings that followed the privatization of the country’s main industries.

Another important issue in the protests is the Mesa government’s decision to sell natural gas to Argentina at a very low price, 60 percent lower than the price for which it sells it to Brazil. The COB has denounced this plan as another sell-out of Bolivia’s most valuable natural resource, similar to the one that prompted the mass movement against Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

A statement by the COB published April 12 on the radical Bolivian website Econoticias said that Mesa "is following the same policy as Sanchez de Lozada. Like Sanchez de Lozada, he wants to sell the gas without benefiting the Bolivian people. He wants to go on making the same deals that benefit only the multinationals." The COB is demanding renationalization of Bolivia’s natural resources.

Econoticias reported April 25 that the government has defused its conflict with three important sectors—the miners, the landless peasants, and the students—for the moment, with some concessions. But there is no indication that the social volcano in the country has stopped heating up.

This article first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.