Thursday 18 September 2008, San
José, Costa Rica
BOLIVIA:
Opposition Accepts
Morales’s Call for Talks
Analysis by Franz Chávez
LA PAZ (IPS) -
Opposition governors in
Bolivia accepted
President Evo Morales’s
call for talks aimed at
pulling the country out
of the current crisis,
in which at least 15
supporters of the
leftwing government have
been killed.
Speaking on behalf of
himself and the
governors of the
lowlands provinces of
Santa Cruz, Beni and
Chuquisaca, the governor
of Tarija, Mario Cossío,
announced late Tuesday
in the central city of
Santa Cruz that he and
Morales had agreed to a
framework for
negotiations.
The deal involves a
pledge by the governors
to order their
supporters to pull out
of government buildings
and gas installations
occupied and ransacked
last week by groups of
radical rightwing
demonstrators in the
eastern lowlands
provinces, which
concentrate most of the
country’s natural gas
reserves, fertile
farmland and gross
domestic product.
Some 35 roadblocks
mounted around the
country by anti-Morales
pro-autonomy protesters
will also be lifted,
Cossío said.
For its part, the
government agreed to the
opposition governors’
demand for the
restitution to the
provinces of a portion
of the natural gas tax
that the Morales
administration had
diverted to the payment
of a universal pension
of 26 dollars a month
for people over 60.
The government had
argued that the funds
diverted from the
provinces for the
universal pension are
insignificant compared
to the more than two
billion dollars that
will be transferred to
the provincial
governments this year,
more than double the 952
million dollars
transferred in 2005.
Among the issues that
are to be on the
negotiating table
Thursday in the city of
Cochabamba are the
autonomy demanded by the
so-called "eastern
crescent" provinces and
the new constitution
rewritten by a
constituent assembly in
which the governing
Movement to Socialism
(MAS) holds a majority
of seats.
Cossío also asked the
government to suspend
the January referendum
in which Bolivians are
to vote on the new
constitution, while the
talks between the
central government and
the opposition leaders
continue.
Another question to be
discussed is the
possibility of ceding
some government offices
and bodies to the
provinces.
The talks will be
brokered by the Catholic
Church and international
entities like a
commission approved
Monday by the Union of
South American Nations (UNASUR)
to facilitate dialogue
in Bolivia.
With respect to the
violent incidents that
occurred Thursday, Sept.
11 in the northern
province of Pando,
Cossío reported the
creation of a
parliamentary committee
to investigate the
killing of at least 15
indigenous Morales
supporters.
He also urged the
Morales administration
to guarantee the safety
of Pando governor
Leopoldo Fernández, who
was arrested Tuesday by
the military and flown
to La Paz to face
charges of instigating
the Sept. 11 violence,
and of other leaders of
the rightwing opposition
movement also arrested
in connection with the
case.
After receiving
resounding support from
the rest of the leaders
of South America meeting
in Monday’s emergency
UNASUR summit in Chile,
Morales took decisive
steps towards reaching
the agreement on talks
with the opposition and
ordering Fernández’s
arrest in response to
the loud calls for
justice.
But the political
advances made over the
last 72 hours by
Bolivia’s first
indigenous president,
and the support from his
fellow South American
presidents, stand in
contrast to the U.S.
government’s
announcement Tuesday
that Bolivia has "failed
to cooperate adequately"
in the fight against
drugs.
Bolivian Vice President
Álvaro García Linera
called Washington’s
decision a politically
motivated move, and
Morales complained that
it was "blackmail."
He also noted that the
United States is one of
the world’s biggest
markets for cocaine, and
that coca production
increased much more
sharply in its ally,
Colombia, than in
Bolivia.
Being added to the U.S.
drug blacklist, where
Bolivia joined Venezuela
and Burma, was seen by
the Morales
administration as a
possibility since it
expelled U.S. Ambassador
Philip Goldberg last
week after accusing him
of supporting
pro-autonomy groups and
conspiring against
Morales.
When the U.S. government
of George W. Bush
responded by kicking out
Bolivian Ambassador
Gustavo Guzmán,
diplomatic relations
between the two
countries were reduced
to the level of charges
d’affaires.
Powerful opposition
leader landowner Branko
Marinkovic, the head of
the pro-business Santa
Cruz Civic Committee,
was virtually a lone
voice calling for the
release of governor
Fernández as a condition
for talks.
The governor is accused
of "genocide" in the
Sept. 11 massacre of an
estimated 30 people --
although only 15 deaths
have been officially
confirmed so far -- and
the disappearance of
around 100 others,
during what has been
described by survivors
as an "ambush" of
Morales supporters in
the province of Pando.
Only two of the victims
worked for the Pando
provincial government.
The rest were members of
impoverished indigenous
Amazon jungle
communities in that
province, on the border
with Brazil. The victims
had been shot to death.
The attack, which
prompted the Morales
administration to
declare a 90-day state
of siege in Pando, has
apparently strengthened
the argument that the
pro-autonomy rightwing
movement has strong
racist overtones.
Fernández has failed to
explain the presence of
armed men at the site of
the violent incident,
and has merely called
for an impartial
committee to be set up
to demonstrate, as he
says, that the
indigenous supporters of
the MAS party were also
armed and that they were
responding to a
government plan to
foment violence.
The arrest of Fernández,
one of the opposition
movement’s most radical
and defiant leaders, by
the military represents
a shift in the Morales
administration’s
formerly passive stance.
In his political
calculations, Morales
failed to foresee an
outbreak of such
violence as the incident
in Pando. At the same
time the killings were
occurring near the town
of Porvenir in that
province on Sept. 11,
Morales was apologising
in La Paz for the overly
passive stance taken by
the security forces in
response to the violent
storming of government
institutions by
opposition groups. |
|
|
|
|
|
