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October
30, 2003
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
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
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Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
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Israel's
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Dardagan,
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CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
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October
30, 2003
Popular Insurrection
and National Revolution
Bolivia
in Historical and Regional Context
By FORREST HYLTON
Slave driver
the table has turned
Catch a fire
you're gonna get burned.
Bob Marley, Slave Driver
On the Day of National Dignity-which commemorates
the greatest achievement of socialist martyr Marcelo Quiroga
Santa Cruz: the nationalization of Gulf Oil in 1969-former Bolivian
President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, his family and inner
circle (Minister of Defense Carlos Sánchez Berzaín,
Minister of Government Yerko Kukoc, and Minister of the Interior
Jose Luis Harb) fled to Miami, though not before looting $85
million from the Bolivian Central Bank.
The "gringo," as Sánchez
de Lozada was called, had gone home. What, until recently, had
been a clever bit of graffiti, had become reality, and the Bolivian
majority-not multinationals and their tiny minority of compradors-had
decided to determine the fate of the second-largest liquid natural
gas reserves in Latin America via a system of popular democratic
assemblies in neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, fields and
farms. Since the Spanish "discovery" of Cerro Rico
in Potosí in 1545, laboring Bolivians have suffered from
the looting and export of their natural resources, as well as
the exploitation of their bodies and minds, for the benefit of
others. Their memory is long, their patience has run out, and
their resilience is remarkable.
The party that had designed and implemented
neoliberalism in Bolivia, the National Revolutionary Movement
(MNR), and which had ruled Bolivia on and off for 50 years, had
finally been broken by overwhelming, non-violent popular opposition,
though at great human cost. In less than a month, troops under
the command of the MNR killed more than 84 civilians, as well
as15 conscripts who refused to fire on unarmed protestors. The
MNR disappeared some 40 people, injured more than 500, and detained
an untold number in a desperate effort to maintain power and
preserve the neoliberal status quo.
As darkness descended on the Plaza San
Francisco, the symbolic heart of the nation's capital, on October
17th, truckloads of miners and Quechua-Aymara peasants from Oruro
and Potosí arrived to march and celebrate their triumph.
They chanted, "Yes we could!"-a parody of "Sí
se puede!", Sánchez de Lozada's campaign slogan-and,
"Goni! You bastard! The people have defeated you!"
They drank, chewed coca, set off dynamite, chanted, marched,
and sung and danced until the early morning. In the Plaza San
Francisco on the afternoon of the 17th, Alteños (people
from El Alto, a city which is over 80% Aymara, and located on
the upper rim of La Paz where the rural highlands begin); neighborhood
groups from the steep hillsides of La Paz, along with miners,
teachers, students, market women, butchers, bakers, truckers
and taxi drivers, staged the largest rally in Bolivian history:
estimates run as high as 500,000. The Wiphala-considered the
flag of the oppressed, indigenous Bolivian nations-flew side
by side with the Bolivian flag, as insurgents re-appropriated
national symbols from the dominant race/class, effectively laying
claim to the nation that has never been willing to make a place
for them as political equals and autonomous stewards of an economy
based on collective labor, cultivation of the land, and rational
use of natural resources.
On October 18, when the truckloads of
miners and Aymara-Quechua community peasants ascended from La
Paz and passed El Alto on their way home, thousands of Alteños
lined the streets to cheer them on, provide them with food, water,
coca, and alcohol for the punishing trip, and express gratitude
for the solidarity they had received. As architects of the eleven-day
general strike that brought the capital to a standstill-especially
once a general solidarity strike was called in La Paz to honor
the twenty-six Alteños massacred on October 12, the 511th
anniversary of the genocide initiated by Columbus-Alteños,
organized in trade unions, neighborhood and student groups-knew
that they, most of them a proletarianized peasantry, along with
brother and sister Aymara community peasants in the Lake Titicaca
region, could not have overthrown the government without practical
support from rest of the country's social movements. These
are listed in descending order of impact: 1) coca growers from
the eastern Chapare lowlands, 2) Quechua-Aymara community peasants
from the southern highlands and valleys of Potosí and
Sucre, 3) the miners from Huanuni, Oruro, 4) the multi-ethnic,
cross-class civic movements that shut down Cochabamba, Sucre,
Potosí and Oruro on the 14th and 15th, 5) prominent middle-class
intellectuals, human rights activists, professionals, students
and citizens who launched a hunger strike on the afternoon of
October 15th.
Many analysts see recent events as part
of a clear pattern established in Ecuador with the overthrow
of Abdalá Bucaram in 1999, and repeated in Argentina and
Peru in the new millennium, whereby loose coalitions of popular
movements, mobilized against the neoliberal model and the political
parties and/or politicians associated with it, overthrow governments
without being able to impose an alternative economic model and
a new set of political arrangements. While superficially plausible,
such comparisons overlook the depth and sources of the insurrectionary
tradition in Bolivia, elide the question of the distinctive characteristics
of the armed forces in each country, and miss the potential significance
of the "October Revolution" for the Bolivia's future.
A tradition of Aymara-Quechua community peasant insurgency that
stretches back to the late eighteenth century was transformed
through successive struggles over collective land rights and
self-government in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;
this tradition shaped the trade union political culture that
dominated opposition political culture after the 1930s. As historian
Adolfo Gilly has pointed out recently in La Jornada, Indian
peasant insurgency forms the bedrock of a tradition of popular
insurrection without parallel in the hemisphere.
Bolivians are now living through the
most radical moment of republican history since the National
Revolution of 1952, in which Trotskyist-led tin miners' militias
triggered an urban insurrection that defeated the Bolivian army-which
decomposed and rapidly defected-as peasant militias in the western
highlands and the valleys of Cochabamba staged land takeovers
and smashed landlord rule in the countryside, handing power to
the MNR. President Victor Paz Estenssoro-like many MNR leaders,
a middle-class intellectual from Cochabamba-ratified the land
takeovers, which would provide the MNR with deep reservoirs of
support in the countryside for decades, and nationalized the
country's major tin mines, like Siglo XX and Cataviri. Opposed
to imperialism and an oligarchy composed of merchant-miner-landlords,
the MNR seized control of the insurrectionary movement for its
own benefit, but also imposed significant structural reforms.
They aimed to modernize the economy with infrastructural development
and peasant markets that would subsidize the mining industry
while creating an internal market and "civilizing"
the Aymara-Quechua peasant communities through compulsory schooling
and military service. With a discourse of national identity
based on the idea of "mestizaje," or race mixture as
a form of whitening, they helped bury the memory of the traditions
upon which popular insurrection and national revolution are ultimately
founded.
Trapped between mounting US imperial
pressure and a tin miners' trade union movement led by Trotskyist
and Stalinist parties-which formed the center of gravity of the
Bolivian Workers' Central (COB) that aglutinated of civil society-the
MNR splintered into warring factions above, and, through clientelist
control of peasant trade unions, below as well. Thus the MNR
grew progressively weaker vis-à-vis both the US government
and the COB, and with the backing of the US government, René
Barrientos became the first military leader to unleash a counterrevolution.
(This, by the way, was the historical situation into which Che
Guevara stepped so intrepidly.) Since he spoke fluent Quechua
and employed classic forms of populist demagoguery to great effect,
Barrientos solidified a clientelist following in the countryside
loyal only to him, particularly in Cochabamba, mobilizing peasant
militias to crush highland miners' strikes in what was known
as the "military-peasant" pact. Though under General
Juan Jose Torres and the Popular Assembly (AP, 1969-71), proletarian-led
mining radicalism enjoyed a brief upsurge, the military-peasant
pact lasted through the neo-fascist dictatorship of Hugo Banzer
Suárez (1971-78), which sent many radicals to jail or
into exile, and the question of self-determination for Aymara
and Quechua peasant communities had only begun to be raised at
the time of the AP.
A radical Aymara-led peasant trade union
federation (CSUTCB), which emerged out of clandestinity to blockade
the roads in solidarity with miners in 1979, rejuvenated the
COB, which, together with Left political parties, overthrew two
violent (if short-lived) dictatorships, electing a center-left
coalition, the UDP, in 1982 that was to go beyond "the incomplete
revolution" toward some version of state-led welfare capitalism
(known in those days as "el socialismo"), but with
a new demand percolating in the national revolutionary pot: self-determination
for Aymara-Quechua peasant communities.
Instead, with the MNR and the MIR (Revolutionary
Leftist Movement) engaging in parliamentary warfare against Left
opposition parties, and the miners' movement increasing in militancy
and radicalism, the UDP proved unable to govern, and popular
hopes of national sovereignty, rekindled throughout the 1970s
by Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz among others, were buried. With
inflation running at 24,000% annually, in 1985, Victor Paz Estenssoro
took his last turn in office and dismantled dependent state capitalism,
calling on a young, American-educated technocrat-Gonzalo Sánchez
de Lozada-to redesign the relationship between the State, society
and the economy, which resulted in a neoliberal blueprint: DS
21060.
On the advice of Harvard economics professor
Jeffrey Sachs, the tin mines were privatized by decree in one
swift motion, the miners' movement crushed with state terror,
and 20,000 miners "relocalized" (a euphemism for firing
and displacement). Now lacking strong allies in the proletarian
movement, and rent by internal divisions and sectarianism, the
CSUTCB fell into decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Meanwhile, the coca growers' movement of peasant colonizers in
the eastern lowlands of the Chapare-led chiefly by ex-miners-turned
into the most militant and confrontational of Bolivia's "new"
social movements, just as George H.W. Bush began to ratchet up
the intensity of the "drug war" in the Andes. Current
US Ambassador David Greenlee, then a CIA agent working as an
attaché, designed the counterinsurgent strategy by creating
joint task-force teams to force coca eradication in 1988, one
year after Sánchez de Lozada visited then-Secretary of
Defense Casper Wineberger and then-Secretary of State George
Schultz to explain why a one-dimensional, neoliberal counterinsurgent
strategy would never work in Bolivia without substantial development
aid with which to build schools, housing, health care services
and clinics; roads, sewage and water treatment facilities.
Because of the thoroughness of his privatization
programs, during Sánchez de Lozada's first term as president
(1993-97), the IMF and the World Bank held Bolivia up as a model
for "LDCs" around the world. Sánchez de Lozada
was in the progressive technocratic vanguard, with a package
of reforms designed to decentralize the state and encourage a
liberal form of municipal democracy, and until 2000, the neoliberal
political parties-MNR, MIR, CONDEPA, UCS, NFR-enjoyed a monopoly
on legitimate political representation, even as they descended
into unheard-of depths of corruption. However, with the fight
against privatization in the Cochabamba "water wars"
in April 2000, the popular movements scored their first victory
in almost two decades through an insurrection that was cross-class,
multi-ethnic, and directly democratic. This was reinforced in
May by an Aymara resurgence in the highlands, under the direction
of Felipe Quispe and a more combative, Aymara nationalist CSUTCB.
As the neoliberal façade began to crack under President
Hugo Banzer Suarez, the former dictator who ruled as president
from 1998-2001, state terror increased and the political parties
began to see their legitimacy erode.
This is the context in which the coca
growers, Aymara highland peasants, proletarianized peasants from
El Alto and La Paz, along with disaffected middle class professionals
and intellectuals, voted for two new opposition parties, Movement
Toward Socialism (MAS) and the Indian Revolutionary Movement
(MIP), which between them picked up forty-two seats in Parliament-a
historic first. Evo Morales, leader of the coca growers' trade
union federations and their political vehicle, MAS, lost the
presidential elections by less than 1.5%.
In October 2003, led by the proletarianized
Aymara peasantry of El Alto, Aymara peasant communities of the
western highlands, and reinforced by the Quechua-Aymara peasant
communities of the southern highlands and valleys as well as
the Quechua-speaking mestizo coca growers' and colonizers of
the eastern lowlands; plus the urban middle classes of La Paz,
Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Tarija and Oruro; took to the streets
and the airwaves, and long and distinguished traditions of insurrection
have enjoyed a renaissance.
There can be no doubt which sector was
the driving force, though. What began as the most important
highland Aymara uprising in Bolivia since the Federal War of
1899 became, in a matter of days, become a nationwide, non-violent
insurrection-a national revolution in march, but with no political
force comparable in organizational coherence and sophistication
to the MNR. Unlike the national revolution of 1952, which brought
Sánchez de Lozada's MNR to power on the back of insurgent
miners' and peasants' militias, were it to materialize, the new
revolution would hold out the possibility that the colonial contradiction
that has structured the Bolivian republic since its inception-the
economic exploitation, political domination and racist oppression
of the Indian peasant and proletarianized majority-will finally
be addressed in terms of sovereignty and political representation.
So will the question of state terror and impunity.
It is important to emphasize that Felipe
Quispe notwithstanding, the new nationalism in anything but an
atavistic, separatist and racially exclusive backlash against
neoliberal imperialism. If, at the macro-level of the state and
public policy, the new revolution recognizes the demands for
popular sovereignty and self-government, and the forms of trade
union and Indian community organization from which those demands
arise, it will be a world-historical first that with repercussions
throughout Latin America, Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
In spite of the colonialist terror that has descended on the
new millennium in the Middle East and Central Asia, the poorest,
most indigenous and most geographically isolated country of the
South American continent might provide a beacon of light to the
rest of the world.
The new revolutionary process, whose
outcome is of course uncertain rather than guaranteed, would
demand an end to multinational and US imperial domination, reject
the FTAA, insist on the right to grow and commercialize the coca
leaf as well as control and regulate the use of natural resources
for the benefit of the majorities that produce Bolivia's wealth.
It would also includes the demand for political autonomy, representation
and self-government for highland and lowland ethnic groups whose
forms of social reproduction and political struggle are non-liberal
and even non-capitalist.
One thing is certain: the era of the
MNR-led coalitions is over, and with it, the neoliberal political-economic
system implemented in 1985-86. The relation of the State to
the economy and society will change, but it is much too early
to say how much, or when. Though neither Evo Morales nor Felipe
Quispe led the struggles of the "October Days," the
rank-and-file, especially in El Alto, have shown what they can
accomplish on their own initiative. This means that there will
be two Constituent Assemblies and a form of dual power: one will
take place in Parliament among delegated political representatives,
and another in the streets, neighborhoods, trade unions, Indian
peasant communities; among miners, coca growers, students and,
perhaps, even middle-class intellectuals and personalities.
There is a country, if not yet a world, to win.
Forrest Hylton
is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia. He can
be reached at forresthylton@hotmail.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 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
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