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Today's
Stories
November 29 / 30, 2003
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
November 29 / 30, 2003
Skepticism v. Enthusiasm
Empire
and Revolution in Bolivia
By FORREST HYLTON
"It's a utopia that's going in who
knows what direction."
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, ex-President of Bolivia
It is difficult, not to mention pointless, to
resist being caught up in the tide of a revolutionary process
for the sake of maintaining analytical distance from immediate
events, particularly when the counterrevolutionary current moves
with such crushing force. In writing about revolution, one must
convey, above all, the mood of hope, exuberance, mourning, courage,
joy, and dignity that one has seen and felt in struggle. Skepticism
takes a back seat to enthusiasm, at least temporarily.
The danger, of course, is that enthusiasm,
by exaggerating what are in fact only tendencies, can cloud judgment,
and lead to unwarranted triumphalism. Once the effervescence
of victory dies down, the time comes to appease the skeptics.
Announcing, as I have recently, the definitive end of the neoliberal
order in Bolivia, along with its corollary-the demise of coalition
governments composed of political parties-is perhaps premature.
In any case, it puts the cart before the horse. There is a range
of possible outcomes to the new transitional phase, one of them
being the restoration of the old order a sangre y fuego
(through blood and fire), which would mark another historical
first in Bolivia, as significant as the "October Revolution."
Fortunately, Bolivians have never experienced the levels of
state terror known to Colombians, Peruvians, Chileans, Argentines,
Uruguayans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans.
Political maneuvering within the neoliberal parties tied to Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada's downfall is now furious, since their
very survival is at stake, and they are trying to repackage themselves
as the only forces capable of ensuring that the Constituent Assembly
does not get "out of control" and fall into the hands
of the laboring majority who represent themselves in non-liberal
forms of participatory democratic organizations: trade unions,
neighborhood associations, and Indian peasant communities. Once
again, the parties are trying to monopolize political representation
and channel it along liberal lines.
Manuel "Tuto" Quiroga, the
former IBM executive who took over from Ret. Gl. Hugo Banzer
in 2001 at the age of forty-one, and, by the time of the 2002
elections, had run his and Banzer's party (ADN) into the ground,
has been recalled from the US as Goni's surrogate- a political
son of the neoliberal right working overtime in Washington and
Miami (the European Parliament having refused to grant asylum
to criminals). Opposed to interim President Carlos Mesa's binding
referendum, supporter of and participant in the deal with Sempra
Energy and Pacific LNG to export Bolivian gas through Chile to
California, "Tuto" is the old order's man in Bolivia.
But he cuts a most unimpressive figure.
As president, his willingness to use state violence to crush
social protest surpassed Ret. Gnl. Banzer's, but Tuto is no Goni,
and certainly no Terminator. Having buried the ADN, he will
have to re-invent it in a new guise-hence there is no powerful
party machine behind him. Lacking an armed forces united around
the idea of repressive restoration and a real political vehicle,
the deposed neoliberal right can only fantasize of returning
behind a figure of the stature of Louis Bonaparte, the clownish
cousin of the fallen Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. On the spectrum
of possibilities, the triumph of the counterrevolution is among
the least likely.
The fact that at the end of October,
extreme reactionary Otto Reich, in the un-elected position of
Presidential Advisor for Western Hemispheric Affairs, said to
the Bolivian press, and in so many words, that the problem in
Bolivia is that one group of people has been exploiting another
for more than 500 years, indicates an unprecedented shift in
imperial rhetoric. Shockingly, Reich had nothing to say about
"narcosindicalism and terrorism" imported from Colombia
and Peru, thus distancing himself from, and discrediting, Sánchez
de Lozada. Peter De Shazo, the State Department's Subsecretary
of Western Hemispheric Affairs (who, we note in passing, wrote
a doctoral dissertation on the making of the Chilean working
class at UW-Madison), held a conference with leading indigenous
politicians to deal with a variety of Bolivia's most pressing
issues. De Shazo labeled the presentations "fascinating,"
stressing how much he had learned from them about the current
situation; he even asked about "the indigenous vision"
of democracy!
In the Washington Post, Harvard
Economics Professor Jeffrey Sachs, one of the architects of Bolivian
neoliberalism, and until recently a close ally of Goni, blamed
the US for eradicating the livelihood of 50,000 coca-growing
families without providing viable alternatives; for trying to
export Bolivian gas without consulting Bolivia's people; and
for imposing IMF recipes. Though Sachs' opportunism and amnesia
are remarkable at the very least, had Goni and US Ambassador
David Greenlee adopted such a flexible discourse and outlook,
the latter might not have had to evacuate the former and his
circle to Miami on October 17th. That would be like expecting
chickens to lay duck eggs, though.
While collective action from below has
forced a change in official imperial rhetoric, practice lags
behind theory: coca eradication, under US-authored Ley 1008 (the
legal glove to the joint task-force fist designed by then-agent
Greenlee in 1987-88), is to continue under Carlos Mesa, and new
US estimates of coca production put the sub-tropical Yungas region,
located northeast of La Paz, firmly within imperial sights: "excess"
coca production has grown by 26% since the March 2003 report.
To his credit, Mesa has called for Bolivian academics and technocrats
carry out an inquiry to confirm or disconfirm US satellite figures
before moving ahead with eradication in the Yungas (the failure
of which had much to do with Tuto's demise in 2001). The Yungas,
we remember, implemented one of the most long-lasting and thoroughgoing
road blockades in October, thereby stopping the flow of fruits,
vegetables, and nuts to citizens of the capital. Through the
anti-narcotics operations it demands of the Bolivian government,
the US embassy will try to punish the yungeños for their
growing radicalization and self-organization.
As for El Alto, ground zero of the October
Revolution, and Oruro-whose miners provided crucial reinforcements
to El Alto, and whose civic committee shut down its city-an unsigned
editorial in La Razón (11/6/03) suggests that future
anti-narcotics efforts will have to take into account new centers
of cocaine production and distribution in the altiplano, especially
El Alto, but also Oruro. The view of insurgents as intimately
tied to a burgeoning cocaine industry is being reinforced the
killing of a policeman by a homemade bomb in the Chapare, and
the discovery of a large encampment in the Yungas, which led
to the detention of thirty-three coca farmers, on November 14,
the day of the inauguration of the Iberoamerican Summit in Santa
Cruz-at which Carlos Mesa declared the need to "listen to
the other" and to focus on the issue of inequality. Mesa's
government, however, has reversed the course suggested by the
phrase "zero repression" (an ironic reference to Banzer's
"zero coca"), and Mesa's Minister of Government Alfonso
Ferrufino, a former revolutionary leftist known as "the
gun," stated his intention to continue to apply Law 1008
to the letter. One cannot but note the political timing of the
explosion and the discovery of the cocaine "laboratory."
Nor has the "war on terrorism"
ground to a halt, for on the very same Friday the 14, Goni launched
his theory-in the Washington Post, no less-that Bolivia
could become the "Afghanistan of the Andes, a failed state
that exports drugs and disorder" (remember, too, that in
the Brazilian press Goni had compared the Bolivia's urban revolts
of February 12-13 to the hijack bombings of September 11 in the
US). An anonymous, mysterious, well-financed "humanitarian
group" called Kantuta, meanwhile, has dedicated itself-at
a cost of at least $8,000-to sustaining the media-fueled link
between social movements, particularly coca growers tied to MAS,
and Colombian guerrillas of the ELN. The effort to criminalize
social protest did not end with Goni's resignation. Rather,
the race to de-legitimate MAS before the Constituent Assembly
and the municipal elections in 2004 continues as before, and
Colombian peasant leader Francisco "Pacho" Cortés;
former MAS mayor of Asunta (Yungas), Claudio Ramírez;
and trade union militant and human rights activist, Carmelo Peñaranda
(Chapare), remain detained without charges in the Conchocoro
Maximum Security Prison. According to one well-placed source,
the "April 10th" case is a card to be played against
MAS in case it wins the 2004 municipal elections hands-down.
Then there is the all-important question
of impunity, indemnity for victimized families, and punishment
for perpetrators of the October massacres. A veteran human rights
activist insisted over lunch recently that no military in Latin
America has ever failed to protect its own, which is true; but
while the DA has archived the criminal processes against the
perpetrators of the massacres of February, he has accused Goni,
along with fifteen of his ministers, of genocide. The military
remains protected, but civilian politicians in exile are apparently
fair game. For opposition leader Evo Morales, as visible now
as he was invisible in October, the breadth of the indictments
represents a setback, since the political parties, who might
have been willing to sacrifice four or five of their own for
the sake of survival, will now bog the process down in Congress.
Thus one of the critical struggles to
come will hinge around the question of the end to impunity in
the police and armed forces, institutions that, over the past
twenty years, have survived the transition from dictatorship
to neoliberal democracy nearly intact. On November 10 in El
Alto, where more than half of those massacred in October lived,
family members started a hunger strike to demand more rapid justice,
and on November 18, they initiated another in the Plaza Murillo,
in front of the Presidential Palace. The first meeting between
leaders of the Coordination for the Dead, Disappeared, and Injured
in the Defense of Gas, leaders of the regional trade union federations
(COR and CSUTCB-TK), and the new Ministers of the President,
Government, Health, and the vice-Minister of Justice, ended abruptly
due to the caprice of the Minister of the President, who, after
hearing the testimony of leaders and family members of victims,
called an end to the meeting. Hunger strikers were evacuated
from the Plaza Murillo and sent back to El Alto. So much for
dialogue and listening to "the other."
What are opposition forces doing to counteract
the above-mentioned developments in order to make their vision
of a new national revolution a reality? A parallel summit, organized
but not dominated by MAS, was held in Santa Cruz to define an
alternative agenda, in which the issues of gas, the FTAA, impunity,
the Constituent Assembly figure centrally. Though certain leading
figures of the NGO world tried to impose their vision of what
is to be done, the rank-and-file insisted on defining their needs
and demands. Many veterans of the "October Days" see
another round of violent conflict on the not-so-distant horizon,
and are preparing themselves through critical and self-critical
analyses of October. The idea is to insure that next time, people
will be sufficiently organized and clear about the tasks to be
carried out so as to take power and continue to exercise it;
the absence of coordinated, democratic national leadership has
become a key theme for discussion. Debates over the nature and
aims of the Constituent Assembly are taking place at all levels
and in all instances of popular organizations, and a broad array
of proposals are circulating. "Vigilant optimism"
would perhaps best describe the mood among las bases (the
rank-and-file), but people are conscious of having made world
history in October, and have no intention of disappearing from
the political stage.
In a previous column, following Argentine-Mexican
historian Adolfo Gilly, I referred to the new national revolution
in Bolivia, which promised to right colonial wrongs that the
national revolution of 1952 left in tact or reinforced. The
term "revolution" requires clarification: neither Gilly
nor I have in mind a violent break in social property relations
leading to a "revolutionary state" controlled by a
"revolutionary party"-the most common definition of
"revolution" in the twentieth century (Mexico, Russia,
China, Bolivia, Cuba, Vietnam). Ours would be closer in some
ways to the most widely accepted nineteenth-century definition
of "revolution": the overthrow of one political regime
and its replacement by another, more democratic regime, but with
a new twist: whereas in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries,
dissident political elites were able to appropriate and benefit
from the people's "revolutions" in whose name they
spoke, in Bolivia at present no group is similarly positioned
to command the state or the revolutionary process.
As for the term "national revolution,"
it is evident that the conditions for social revolution on a
global scale do not exist at present, which means that unless
one adheres to a theory of "socialism in one country,"
the idea of communist revolution in Bolivia or elsewhere is mere
fantasy. What, then, could national revolution mean in this,
the latest phase of capitalist globalization? Economically,
it would mean the end of multinational domination of key sectors
of Bolvia's economy: petroleum and natural gas. Politically,
it would spell the end of a long history of exclusion: there
have been more than a dozen constituent assemblies and constitutional
reforms since the republic was founded, but not one has incorporated
the non-liberal forms of representation through which the laboring
majority of Bolivians make themselves heard. In terms of justice,
it would mean respect for the "laws" that regulate
popular forms of organization, as well as an end to impunity
and the criminalization of direct democracy. Perhaps no one
has put it better than Marcos Bilbao, General Secretary of Local
University Federation (FUL) of the Public, and now autonomous,
University of El Alto: "We don't want to be cheap labor
for transnational corporations or peons for political parties.
Unfortunately, we continue living under the neoliberal capitalist
system, and that means violence is not going to stop. We supported
the constitutional succession, but we want to see the Constituent
Assembly and the recuperation of gas; otherwise there'd have
to be an armed uprising. But without arms, what can the people
do? We have but clubs and slingshots. What we have to do is
rescue the organization and structure of the Aymara and Quechua
people politically, economically, and juridically." In
the context of Bolivian history, such a change would be nothing
short of revolutionary.
Forrest Hylton
is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia. He can
be reached at forresthylton@hotmail.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
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