CounterVortex

ECUADOR: END TO “LONG NIGHT OF NEOLIBERALISM”

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Promising to end “the long night of neoliberalism,” economist Rafael Correa started a four-year term as president of Ecuador in a ceremony in Quito on Jan. 15. Only about 25 of the 100 legislative deputies in the opposition-dominated Congress attended, but there was a large international delegation including nine presidents from the Americas, most of them leftists or social democrats: Evo Morales (Bolivia), Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Rafael Uribe (Colombia), Rene Preval (Haiti), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), Nicanor Duarte (Paraguay), Alan Garcia (Peru) and Hugo Chavez (Venezuela). Correa was the third Latin American leftist to take office in less than a week; Chavez and Ortega both had inaugurations on Jan. 10.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also attended. Iran is an important member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and his presence was thought be connected with plans for Ecuador to rejoin OPEC.

Hours after the ceremony, Correa announced his second decree, calling on the Supreme Electoral Council to hold a referendum on March 18 on Correa’s proposal for a Constituent Assembly to replace the 1997 Constitution, which promoted neoliberal economic policies. (Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina,” Jan. 15; El Diario-La Prensa, Jan. 16 from AP and EFE)

Correa is Ecuador’s eighth president in 10 years, and none of his seven predecessors served a full term. Correa has little support in Congress, where the rightwing parties strongly oppose the plan for a Constituent Assembly. But an opinion poll conducted by the private firm Cedatos/Gallup Jan. 16-18 in urban areas showed Correa with a 73% approval rating, the highest for any president since the end of military rule in 1979. Congress has an approval rating of 13%, with an unfavorable rating of 68%. (ED-LP, Jan. 21 from EFE) The Congress itself is divided. On Jan. 11 the Patriotic Society Party (PSP) of ex-president Lucio Gutierrez broke with the right-wing parties and announced support for the Constituent Assembly plan. The Cuban wire service Prensa Latina says this could make the center-left and leftist parties the majority, with a 54-vote bloc. (PL, Jan. 12)

Correa also faces pressure from his left. Before his inauguration he condemned Colombia’s decision to resume spraying with the herbicide glyphosate near the country’s border with Ecuador. But after meeting with President Uribe in Managua the week before his inauguration, Correa accepted a compromise in which Colombia would warn Ecuador before spraying so that Ecuadoran technicians could “see that the glyphosate doesn’t pass into Ecuadoran territory.” Environmental, indigenous and campesino organizations denounced the agreement as “Rafael Correa’s first slip.” (Alai-amlatina, Jan. 15)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 21

Following Ecuador’s Nov. 26 presidential runoff election, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal declared Correa the winner with 57.14%, compared to 42.86% for banana tycoo Alvaro Noboa. (La Jornada, Mexico, Nov. ) His vice president is Lenin Moreno Garces, a businessperson and motivational speaker from the Amazon province of Napo who was physically disabled in a shooting nine years ago and gets around in a wheelchair. (Altercom, Ecuador, Nov. 27; El Universo, Guayaquil, Aug. 6)

Correa proposal for a Constituent Assembly to rewrite Ecuador’s Constitution is a key demand of the country’s indigenous and popular movements. He also says he hopes the assembly will make it possible to renegotiate contracts with multinational oil companies. Correa also announced that he will arrange for the state bank to repatriate some $2 billion deposited in the US. (LJ, Nov. 29) While the legislature remains extremely unpopular in Ecuador–Correa referred to it in his campaign as the “sewer of party-ocracy”–Correa denied that he aims to shut it down, though he said he expects it to play a limited role while the Constituent Assembly convenes. (El Universal, Caracas, Nov. 30)

Correa’s party, the Proud and Sovereign Homeland (PAIS) Alliance, did not run any candidates for Congress in the Oct. 15 general elections. The 100-member single-chamber Congress will have 28 deputies from Noboa’s National Action Institutional Renewal Party (PRIAN) and 24 from the Patriotic Society Party (PSP) of populist ex-president Lucio Gutierrez. Another 12 deputies are from the right-wing Social Christian Party (PSC), 12 are from the Democratic Left (ID) party, eight are from the indigenous Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement-New Country alliance and the rest are from various smaller parties. (El Nuevo Herald, Nov. 24 from EFE; Congressional results from Ecuadorelige.com, Nov. 16)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 3

DEFENSE MINISTER KILLED IN CRASH

Ecuadoran defense minister Guadalupe Larriva was killed when two military helicopters collided on the night of Jan. 24 as the air force carried out a series of nighttime military exercises. Also killed in the crash were one of Larriva’s three children, 17-year-old Claudia Avila Larriva, and five air force officers. According to Hector Camacho, head of the Armed Forces Joint Command, the crash took place near the Puerto Viejo road in Manabi province. Larriva was the head of the small Socialist Party until leftist president Rafael Correa named her to be the first woman to head Ecuador’s military. Correa took office on Jan. 15.

Larriva and the others were riding in two Gazelles, helicopters produced by the French company Eurocopter; they are armed with artillery and use special equipment for night flights. The helicopters had “excellent maintenance,” Camacho said, and the crew was “duly trained.”

The site of the crash is near the Manta military base, which since 1999 has been the main center for US anti-drug activities on South America’s Pacific coast. Correa announced after his election in November that he would not renew the 10-year contract with the US for use of the base when it expires in 2009. On Jan. 22 Larriva repeated the promise. “The Manta base issue is very clear,” she told the daily El Universo. “The agreement ends in 2009, and there is no intention to renew it.” Asked if she expected reprisals from the US, Larriva said: “I expect that won’t happen.”

“It’s not normal for two helicopters to fly together, especially at night, for which reason it is necessary to have a deep and exhaustive investigation,” said Interior Minister Gustavo Larrea, who referred to the accident as “unheard-of.” Gustavo Ayala, the current head of the Socialist Party, also expressed doubts about the causes of the collision. Correa said he believed the crash was “an unfortunate accident,” but he is naming a neutral commission to investigate “so that there is not the least doubt.” After discussions with Chilean president Michelle Bachelet and France’s ambassador to Ecuador, Didier Lopinot, Correa announced that the commission would include specialists from Eurocopter and the Chilean air force. Larriva’s son, Rodrigo Avila Larriva, and retired army captain Guillermo Bernal will also be on the commission. (La Jornada, Jan. 26 from AFP, DPA, Reuters; El Diario-La Prensa, NY, Jan. 23, 26 from AP)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 27

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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also:

WW4 REPORT #124, August 2006
/node/2254

ECUADOR’S CHAVEZ? Rafael Correa and the Popular Movements
by Yeidy Rosa
WW4 REPORT #128, December 2006
/node/2863

From our weblog:

Ahmadinejad tours Latin America
WW4 REPORT, Jan, 22, 2006
/node/3079

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Feb. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

ARGENTINA: “DIRTY WAR” DEATH SQUADS BACK?

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Argentine bricklayer Luis Gerez, a survivor of torture who testified against a former police official, disappeared the evening of Dec. 27 in his town of Belen de Escobar, 60 kilometers north of the city of Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires province. He left the house of a friend to buy some meat at the butcher shop for a barbecue and never returned. His vehicle was found with his documents, money and keys still in it.

Gerez is a member of the Evita Movement and of the Commission for Memory of the Campo de Mayo. Last May, Gerez provided key testimony that led the Chamber of Deputies to prevent deputy-elect Luis Abelardo Patti—a former rightwing police agent and former mayor of Escobar—from taking his seat in the national legislature. In his testimony to the Chamber of Deputies, Gerez recounted being tortured in the Escobar police station in 1972, when he was a 17-year-old member of the Peronist Youth. Although he was kept hooded during the ordeal, he recognized Patti’s voice.

Patti still faces criminal charges for human rights violations—including the 1980 murder of two leaders of the Montoneros [urban guerilla] organization, among other cases—and Gerez will almost certainly be called to testify against him in court. (AP, Dec. 29; La Jornada, Mexico, Dec. 29; Resumen Latinoamericano, Dec. 28 from ANSA, Agencia Walsh; Clarin, Buenos Aires, Dec. 30) Last Nov. 8, Gerez reported that he and his family had received recent serious threats. Gerez said his tires were repeatedly slashed, and several times people pointed guns at him from other vehicles while he was driving. (Indymedia Argentina, Dec. 28; LJ, Dec. 29) Patti publicly condemned Gerez’s disappearance. On Dec. 29 Patti told a radio station that he felt no resentment against Gerez, and that whoever is behind his disappearance is “against democracy.” (AP, Dec. 29)

On Dec. 29, hundreds of people took part in two marches in Buenos Aires province, including one in Escobar, demanding the safe return of Gerez and of Jorge Julio Lopez, a torture survivor and witness who disappeared last Sept. 18 and remains missing. Lopez’s testimony was key in sentencing former Police Chief Miguel Etchecolatz to life in prison for the disappearance of six people. (AP, Dec. 29; Clarin, Dec. 30)

The Buenos Aires provincial government offered $130,000 for information on Gerez’s whereabouts, and President Nestor Kirchner postponed a trip to the southern province of Santa Cruz to coordinate efforts to locate Gerez. Human rights groups say the disappearances of Gerez and Lopez are an effort to intimidate witnesses so they don’t testify in trials scheduled for the coming months against human rights violators. The trials were reactivated after the Supreme Court annulled, in 2005, two amnesty laws that had protected rights violators from prosecution.

Late in the evening on Dec. 29, President Nestor Kirchner spoke about the disappearances in a televised address, calling them a blackmail attempt by former military and police agents seeking amnesty for abuses committed during the military dictatorship (1976-1983). “Everything seems to indicate that both cases involve… paramilitary or para-police elements who want to intimidate, to achieve their goal of maintaining impunity,” Kirchner said.

“Let it be known to everyone that this president will not allow any type of amnesty to be carried out. All of Argentine society is victimized by the mafioso actions of those who want to guarantee their impunity,” warned Kirchner. “We won’t give in to this extortion, we won’t allow the trials to be stopped,” Kirchner insisted. “On the contrary, we demand that the courts act swiftly in these trials, so we can at once obtain a just sentence that puts the murderers where they belong: in common jails.”

After 9 PM on Dec. 29, less than an hour after Kirchner’s speech, Gerez was found alive, stripped to the waist, after having been thrown from a moving vehicle onto the street in the city of Garin, less than 10 kilometers from Escobar. Gerez was taken to the hospital for treatment; he was described as being in reasonable health but emotionally traumatized. (AP, Dec. 29; Miami Herald, Dec. 30 from AP, EFE; Clarin, Dec. 30) According to Alberto Fernandez de Rosa, a friend who spoke to Gerez after his reappearance, Gerez said he was kidnapped by three men who kept him blindfolded with his hands and feet bound and burned him with cigarettes. (AP, Dec. 29) Gerez’s wife, Mirta Praino, confirmed on Dec. 30 that Gerez had cigarette burns on his chest, but had not been beaten. (Clarin, Dec. 30)

A day before Gerez was abducted, disappeared activist Hector Dario Bustos reappeared alive after being tortured for 13 days by four individuals who Bustos said “seemed to be police agents.” Bustos, a member of the Solidarity Network of Children of the Disappeared from the town of Venado Tuerto in Santa Fe province, was found on Dec. 26, nearly naked, on a road near San Gregorio. He had burns over his whole body, including his genitals, and a swastika burned into his chest. Bustos said that while they were burning him, his torturers yelled: “Shitty little lefty, we’re going to change your heart.” They also left him with a scar on his face, a warning that every time he looks in the mirror he should remember that the disappeared don’t talk. Bustos attributed his abduction to “political motives.” “They put a hood over my head and talked on a cell phone, they said ‘mission accomplished, we got him,'” said Bustos. Criminal court judge Hugo Perazzi in Venado Tuerto characterized the case as “torture”; the Santa Fe provincial government has ordered special protective custody for Bustos. (Resumen Latinoamericano, Dec. 28 from ANSA; Indymedia Argentina, Dec. 28)

Spain to Return Rights Violators

On Dec. 28, Argentine judge Sergio Torres formally asked the Spanish courts to extradite Ricardo Miguel Cavallo, accused of committing genocide, terrorism and torture while he was a lieutenant commander at Argentina’s Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), used as a torture center for political prisoners under the country’s 1976-1983 dictatorship. On Dec. 20, the Criminal Chamber of Spain’s National Court ruled that Cavallo’s case should be transferred to Argentina, where the “Final Point” and “Due Obedience” amnesty laws that prevented his prosecution were overturned in 2005. The Mexican government must also approve the extradition, since Cavallo was arrested in Mexico in August 2000 and extradited to Spain by Mexican authorities in June 2003. Cavallo has been jailed in Spain since his arrival there. (La Jornada, Dec. 29; El Nuevo Herald, Dec. 27 from EFE)

On Dec. 28, Spanish authorities arrested another Argentine rights violator, Rodolfo Eduardo Almiron Sena, in Torrent, a suburb of the city of Valencia. Almiron, a former leader of the ultra-rightwing Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA), is charged in Argentina with the murders of at least four people in a criminal case first filed in 1975. Argentine judge Norberto Oyarbide requested Almiron’s arrest and extradition after the Madrid daily El Mundo published an expose on Dec. 17 detailing the fugitive’s undisturbed life in Torrent.

The AAA was founded in 1973 by Jose Lopez Rega, minister of social welfare in the government of President Juan Domingo Peron. Lopez stayed in that post after Peron’s widow, Maria Estela Martinez de Peron, became president, while Almiron served as a bodyguard for Martinez. Under pressure from the military, Lopez and Almiron were forced out of the Martinez government in 1975. The two moved to Spain, where they were protected by fascist supporters of ex-dictator Francisco Franco; Almiron served as a bodyguard for Manuel Fraga Iribarne, founder of the right-wing Popular Alliance, which later became the Popular Party. The Popular Party continued to support Almiron, and was paying for his apartment in Torrent. Lopez died in 1989.

Almiron is wanted in Argentina for the murders of Rodolfo Ortega Pena and former police chief Julio Troxler, and for the double murder of teacher Silvio Frondizi and his friend Luis Mendiburu. The AAA is considered responsible for between 1,500 and 2,000 murders and numerous other human rights violations between 1973 and early 1976. Following Argentina’s 1976 military coup, a number of AAA members went on to form paramilitary groups responsible for abductions, torture and disappearances under the dictatorship. Lopez and the AAA had the support of Robert Hill, former US ambassador to Argentina, who helped Lopez establish links with death squads in Central America, especially in Guatemala—links which continued under the Argentine dictatorship. (El Nuevo Herald, Dec. 29 from EFE; La Jornada, Dec. 28, 29; El Mundo, Dec. 17)

Martinez de Peron, better known as Isabelita, who served as president of Argentina from July 1974 to March 1976 and is also said to be living in Spain, may be called to testify in the case against Almiron. Evidence presented in court in the 1970s mentions Martinez de Peron presiding over a cabinet meeting on Aug. 8, 1974, at the Olivos presidential palace, at which participants (including Lopez and Almiron) viewed slides showing individuals who were later assassinated for alleged subversive activities. At the same meeting, a decision was made to eliminate Troxler, a Peronist who was deputy police chief of Buenos Aires province under the brief progressive government of President Hector Jose Campora Demaestre, from May 25 to July 13, 1973.

According to Judge Oyarbide’s resolution, the AAA acted in obedience to “political circumstances with a context that was also ideological, and all organized from the state’s own apparatus.” This state support granted AAA members a “guarantee of impunity,” said Oyarbide, in carrying out “a widespread practice of crimes.” (La Jornada, Dec. 28)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 31

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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

Our last report on Argentina:

WW4 REPORT #129, January 2007
/node/2980

Our last report on the “dirty war” legacy:

WW4 REPORT #126, October 2006
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See also:

Argentina: Amnesty Laws Overturned WW4 REPORT #111, July 2005
/node/735

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Feb. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

SOUTH AMERICA: SUMMIT PROCESS STALLS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas:

The Second Summit of the South American Community of Nations (CSN), held Dec. 8-9 in Cochabamba, Bolivia, concluded with a declaration that the meeting had laid the “cornerstone” for a regional union with “a space integrated politically, socially, culturally, economically, financially, environmentally and in infrastructure.” Eight of the 12 member nations were represented by their heads of state: Evo Morales (Bolivia), Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Bharrat Jadgeo (Guyana), Nicanor Duarte (Paraguay), Alan Garcia (Peru), Tabare Vazquez (Uruguay), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela). Two presidents-elect attended as observers: Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua).

Despite the declarations of solidarity and the fact that most of South America now has left or center-left governments, the meeting made little substantive progress towards its goal of establishing a South American union on the model of the European Union. Lula pushed unsuccessfully for a South American parliament. Morales called for a merger of the Mercosur trade bloc (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela) and the Andean Community of Nations (CAN, composed of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru), as was discussed in the first summit [in Cusco, December 2004]. Morales also urged Venezuela to rejoin CAN. “I think, with all respect, that CAN doesn’t work,” Chavez answered, “or Mercosur either. They aren’t suitable instruments for the era we’re living in; they’re instruments for the elites.”

Vazquez complained that the summits are “very pretty” and a good chance to take “beautiful family photos” of the presidents but don’t lead to major advances. Chavez said the problem was that the region needs “political viagra.” But he and Garcia took advantage of the occasion to stop the verbal battle between them that started last spring; now Garcia called Chavez a “friend and companero.” The next summit will be held in 2007 in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. (La Jornada, Dec. 10; EFE, Dec. 9; El Diario-La Prensa, NY, Dec. 10 from AP)

Grassroots and leftist groups held a parallel summit, the Second Social Forum for the Integration of the Peoples, in Cochabamba from Dec. 6 through Dec. 9. About 4,000 delegates attended, and more than 40,000 people came to the closing ceremony in the Cochabamba Stadium, where an Ecuadoran indigenous leader, Blanca Chancoso, presented the Social Forum’s conclusions. The parallel summit announced its opposition to “the death agreements that the trade agreements are,” to military bases in the region and to the privatization of natural resources. The concluding statement also called for the CSN nations to “withdraw immediately” their soldiers “that are occupying Haiti” and to establish “other forms of cooperation while respecting the principle of the self-determination of the Haitian people.” Several South American countries are part of the United Nation Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), a military force deployed to Haiti in June 2004.

Morales helped organize the Social Forum. He attended the closing event along with Chavez and Ortega—the only other major political leaders to participate in both summits. (Alterpresse, Dec. 9, 10; EFF, Dec. 9)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 10

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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Jan. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

BOLIVIA: AGRARIAN REFORM LAW SIGNED

from Weekly News Update on the Americas:

On Nov. 28, a standoff in Bolivia’s Senate ended when the rightwing National Unity (UN) party’s only senator joined two senators from the rightwing Democratic and Social Power (Podemos) in returning to the session, allowing a quorum. The Senate had been shut down since Nov. 22, when the opposition bloc withdrew its 14 senators, depriving the 27-member body of a quorum. The opposition was stunned by the betrayal of the three senators from the opposition stronghold departments of Beni and Pando. Opposition senators tried to get the dissident senators to withdraw, but only succeeded in removing one of them—not enough to break the quorum.

In a marathon session on Nov. 28, the two remaining opposition senators joined the ruling leftist Movement to Socialism (MAS) bloc in passing an agrarian reform law, ratifying 44 renegotiated contracts with multinational oil companies, approving a $43 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), authorizing a military pact between Bolivia and Venezuela and giving the green light to the reformulated national budget.

President Evo Morales Ayma wasted no time in signing the long-awaited agrarian reform law. In a midnight ceremony at the Quemado government palace before a crowd of thousands of campesinos and indigenous people in La Paz on the night of Nov. 28-29, Morales promulgated the Law of Community Redirection of Agrarian Reform and declared the end of large landholdings in Bolivia. The campesinos and indigenous people had marched for three weeks from various parts of the country to the capital demand passage of the agrarian reform law. (La Jornada, Mexico, Nov. 30; Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina,” Nov. 29)

On Nov. 30, Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera handed over legal titles for 238,162 hectares of “Community Lands of Origin” to the Indigenous Federation of the Leco People in Apolo, La Paz Department. The land—the first distribution under the new agrarian law—goes to benefit 547 families, a total of 2,980 people. (LJ, Dec. 1)

A 24-hour strike on Dec. 1, called by the opposition for five departments, had limited success in three: Santa Cruz, Beni and Tarija. Residents of Pando and Cochabamba did not heed the strike call. (LJ, Dec. 2 from Reuters) On Dec. 2, Garcia Linera invited the opposition to meet with Morales and other officials in Sucre, where the Constituent Assembly is convening, to work towards resolving a conflict over the assembly’s voting procedures. (LJ, Dec. 3 from AFP)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 3

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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also:

WW4 REPORT #129, December 2006
/node/2858

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Jan. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

PERU: ELITE FACE THE HEAT

Voters Reject Traditional Parties in Elections Marred by Violence

by April Howard, Toward Freedom

A soldier running from angry protesters died instantly when he fell off of a cliff, town offices were burned down, and one mayor escaped to Lima, claiming that his constituency was planning to lynch him. In spite of the Organization of American States’ report of a normal election, Peruvian President Alan García called on the armed forces to quell violence across the country during and after regional elections held November 19, 2006.

Though García was re-elected as president representing one of the country’s oldest and most institutionalized political parties just six months before, these regional elections showed a widespread rejection of such parties, and favor for “independent” parties. The election results challenge García’s second presidency and demonstrate the deep social, economic and political divides that continue to run through present-day Peru.

The regional election results provide a contrast to the past presidential elections held on June 4, 2006, which had analysts wondering if Peru was going to join in on the current leftist shift in Latin America. Recent presidential elections across the continent have brought left-of-center presidents into office in Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia and most recently, Ecuador. The June 4 elections were a run-off between García, of the eighty-year-old and well-institutionalized Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP), and nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala who ran for the Union for Peru Party (UPP), and was also supported by his own Peruvian Nationalist Party. The choice of candidates already indicated the divide between rural Peruvians and those from Lima. While García’s base was concentrated in the northern coast and in the capital city of Lima, Humala’s support came from the 50% of Peruvians who live under the poverty line, mostly rural and indigenous poor in the south.

The fact that Alan García was willing to run for a second time was somewhat surprising. His first presidency from 1985-1990 is remembered as disastrous, marked by 7,000% inflation, food shortages and Marxist guerilla violence. His policies are now “used by ardent free-marketeers as a textbook example of how to ruin a country’s economy” (BBC News, June 5, 2006). Under his watch, the number of Peruvians living in poverty rose by five million, from 41.6% to 55% of the population, and Peru’s gross domestic product shrank by one-fifth. His 2001 run for presidency was unsuccessful, losing in a run-off to Alejandro Toledo, but his campaign message in 2006 insisted that he had learned from his mistakes. While the Peruvian economy recovered somewhat under Toledo, mostly due to high world prices for gold and copper exports, the underlying problems of poverty and unemployment remained critical.

While nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala led in the first round of the presidential elections, held on April 9, 2006, he lost ground when he faced García in the run-offs. In the first round, Humala came in first place, receiving 30.62% of the valid votes, while Alan García obtained 24.32%, beating conservative, pro-business and Lima elite favorite Lourdes Flores of the National Unity coalition. However, as run-off elections neared, Humala was hurt by a combination of family, international and trumped-up publicity. García’s campaign focused in on Humala’s radical father’s support for Shining Path leaders, and his mother’s assertion that homosexuals should be shot. When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez entered the scene with support for Humala and scathing insults for García, Humala lost more support. Lima-based economist Fritz du Bois told the BBC News García became the “default candidate of the business community, the markets and the middle classes. Humala’s message was so aggressive and hostile to the private sector and hostile in general to the middle class here that they turned to García.” For many, García was the lesser of two evils.

After the elections, many Peruvians comforted themselves with the idea that García simply couldn’t be as bad as he was last time, and that with him came the experience of other Aprista leaders. Some, like political columnist, Mirko Lauer, looked to the Aprista party as a source of strength. “You can’t forget we will have Peru’s largest party in command and that will help with stability,” he told the BBC.

The Aprista party once “espoused an anti-imperialist, Marxist oriented but uniquely Latin American-based solution to Peru’s and Latin America’s problems,” and influenced several political movements throughout Latin America, including Bolivia’s Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) and Costa Rica’s National Liberation Party (PLN). It is now seen as a party of the center-left (if left at all). Years of repression, secrecy, dominance and opportunistic ideological swings to the right by Aprista founder Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre resulted in sectarian hierarchies, and the exodus of young leaders, and brought the party closer to the center. (Country Studies/Area Handbook Series, Library of Congress, 1986-1998). On November 19, the Apristas received a sound slap in the face in regional elections marred by violence and protests.

The regional presidencies (similar to governors), which control their own budgets and are somewhat autonomous of the national government, were taken by movements in opposition to traditional political parties, such as members of the Union for Peru Party, lead by Humala. The independent movements won in 22 of the 25 regional governments, a crushing victory over the governing PAP, which only retained three of the 12 administrations won in the 2002 elections. In one case, the Apristas lost a municipality that had voted Aprista for the last 40 years.

According to the Organization of American States (OAS), voting took place normally through out the country. Not all citizens were content to vote against candidates, though, and some were more inclined to prevent elections altogether. In spite of the OAS’ assertion, in many locations citizens met results with protests in response to unpopular re-elections and so-called “golondrino” votes, in which citizens voted in two locations.

Due to violence and lack of security, including the destruction of up to 1,000 election records, elections were suspended in several areas of the country—though those votes did not constitute 1% of the national votes,. The ministry of the interior denounced the destruction of electoral materials in towns and cities such as Puno, Piura, Cajamarca, La Libertad, Amazonas, Loreto, Ucayali, Lima, Huancavelica and Ayacucho. There was also violence in the areas of Huarochirí (Lima), Piura, La Libertad, Tumbes and Junín. On November 22, post-electoral violence lead President García to order the National Police and the Interior Ministry to use force, including arms, against so-called “vandalism,” which led to two deaths and up to 270 detentions across the country, (La República, Nov. 21, 24, 2006).

In many cases, election materials were not the only casualties of civil unrest. In the locations named and elsewhere, crowds of up to 1,000 protesters blockaded highways, took siege to and burned down city halls, attacked election officials, and took hostages. In one case, a soldier fleeing protesters fell off a cliff and died instantly, while in Cerro Azul, a citizen died during a protest. Clashes between the supporters of different parties also lead to violence and, in one case, a shoot out. Police responded by shooting tear gas at protesters, even when children were present. Human Rights Watch has detailed the past use of excessive force to quell demonstrations in Peru, and catalogues eleven demonstrators who died as a result of excessive use of lethal force by the police and army between 2000 and 2005. The president of the National Board of Elections, Enrique Mendoza, stated that in places where violence disturbed elections there wouldn’t be new elections, but penal processes instead.

Most voter dissatisfaction had to do with the re-election of mayors. In the Puente Piedra district of Lima, a large group of residents protesting the re-election of the mayor broke windows and doors of the municipal building, and burned a municipal motorcycle in protest. On November 24, Cléver Meléndez, the re-elected mayor of the town of Paucartambo, in Pasco, traveled to Lima to request protection from angry residents who he claimed were planning to lynch him. Some of the worst violence took place in Umachiri, Melgar, where the population protested against the re-election of mayor Róger Cáceres, and took an election official hostage for a short time. In radio reports, citizens accused Cáceres of paying for votes with money and food, as well as corruption in office, including the selling of medications donated by international aid institutions. Protesters reported harsh repression by armed forces and police, who they claimed shot at the crowd on election night. In Arequipa, elections were nullified based on charges that the re-elected candidate paid voters 10 soles (approximately $3.15) each to vote for him.

The elections showed little promise for stability under the Apristas, named for the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), the party’s original name upon its founding in 1924. Javier Bedoya, spokesman for the conservative National Unity coalition led by Lourdes Flores, asserted that recent “electoral defeat of the government party…reinforces the impression that the APRA is nothing without García.” Still, instead of promising changes, some in the party refuse to see defeat. Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo stated: “The Peruvian Aprista Party is the only party that remains as a party of national dimension. Some other parties have virtually disappeared, others are becoming strictly watchdog organizations.” He asserted that the president still “has more than 60% approval.” It is most important “that people see clear leadership in the president,” he told reporters. Other Apristas, like the party’s leader in Parliament, Javier Velasquez Quesquén, admitted that party leadership has sometimes chosen the wrong candidates. (Living in Peru, Nov. 21).

Expert analyst for the organization Propuesta Cuidadana (Citizen Proposal) Eduardo Ballón said that the results expressed a “moment of the greatest weakness of the parties.” According to Ballón, the traditional parties don’t understand the meaning of the regional elections, aren’t dedicated to the construction of a serious constituency, and will face an even more adverse scenario in the 2011 elections. He explains the failure of the traditional parties as the result of three factors: “The incapacity of the national parties to have an active presence outside of Lima; the regions in the interior of the country’s rejection of the parties that call themselves national, but aren’t inclusive of those regions, which makes them be seen as Limans [from Lima]; and the fragmentation that can be observed in Peruvian society in general.” (La Republica, Nov 22).

These clashes combined with the anti-Aprista election results show Peruvian frustration with local corruption, and lack of access to justice. In the past few years, serious outbreaks of violence have occurred when irate townspeople vented their grievances against controversial local authorities, or when supporters of the authorities attacked critics. A 2004 report published by Human Rights Watch names seventy-seven municipalities affected by conflicts between townspeople and local governments. In April 2004, a mob lynched Cirilo Robles, the mayor of Ilave, Puno, and injured another official, both of whom citizens accused of corruption. “During the same month,” the report states, “men armed with planks, machetes, and other weapons attacked townspeople in Lagunas, on the Peruvian Amazon, injuring more than forty, some seriously. The townspeople had surrounded the town hall to prevent the mayor from evading an accounting audit. Local government corruption and the failure of the Peruvian justice system to investigate effectively allegations of corruption and abuse of power were contributory factors in such outbreaks of violence.”

Electoral violence is a sign that a population is not happy with elected leaders. In Peru, impoverished and indigenous populations are recognizing their exclusion from traditional electoral politics, and showing their dissatisfaction with their lack of representation. Alan García has another chance as president, but the events of the 2006 regional elections prove that Peruvians are wary—and may not be willing give him and the Apristas the chance that they were hoping for.

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April Howard is a contributing editor at Upside Down World, an online magazine uncovering activism and politics in Latin America. She lives in Bolivia and recently traveled to Peru during the regional elections.

This story first appeared in Toward Freedom, December, 2006
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/937/

RESOURCES:

“Peru still wary of Garcia’s past” BBC News, June 5, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5047950.stm

“Peru’s ruling APRA party mulls disappointing regional election results”
Living in Peru, Nov. 21, 2006
http://www.livinginperu.com/news/2761

“Essential Background: Overview of Human Rights issues in Peru”
Human Rights Watch, World Report 2005
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/01/13/peru9874.htm

From our weblog:

“Peru: Ollanta Humala charged in ‘dirty war’ atrocity”
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 23, 2006
/node/2369

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Jan. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

LAND AND POWER IN BOLIVIA

Campesinos Mobilize for Agrarian Reform

by Benjamin Dangl, Toward Freedom

Silvestre Saisari, a bearded, soft-spoken leader in the Bolivian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), sat in his office in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The building was surrounded by a high cement wall topped with barbed wire. It looked like a military bunker. This made sense given the treatment Saisairi and other like-minded social and labor organizers received from the city’s right-wing elite. In 2005, the young MST leader was attacked while giving a press conference on landowners’ use of armed thugs to suppress landless farmers. To prevent him from denouncing these acts to the media, people reportedly tied to landowners pulled his hair, strangled, punched, and beat him. Sitting in his well-protected headquarters, Saisari explained, “Land is a center of power. He who has land, has power… We are proposing than this land be redistributed, so their [elites] power will be affected.”

According to Saisari, the MST has been at the forefront of groups demanding changes to land distribution legislation. The agrarian law originally passed in 1996, the National Agrarian Reform Service (INRA) Law, establishes the right of the state to expropriate lands that “do not serve a just social-economic function” and redistribute those lands to landless farmers and indigenous communities. While the INRA Law already exists, many complain that gray areas in the legislation have led to an incomplete redistribution of land in some areas, and corrupt land hand-outs in others. Land activists like Saisari are now calling for Bolivian president Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party to carry out a second “agrarian revolution” through legislative reforms to the INRA Law. The proposed reforms focus on the effective distribution of unused land to landless farmers. On November 28, 2006, various landless farmer, campesino and worker organizations, including the MST, arrived in La Paz after marching from around the country to demand such changes. Later that same day, the Senate—minus boycotting opposition party members—passed the reform bill.

MAS has supported the reforms, and even encouraged the country-wide march to the senate chambers to support the legislation—perhaps to give MAS the excuse they needed to muscle the reforms through the opposition. Many historic marches to La Paz have taken place in Bolivia, and most have been met by military and police forces who welcomed them with tear gas and bullets. This march was different in that it was supported, and even encouraged by the government. Events such as this march demonstrate the character of the MAS, and its attempt to renegotiate its identiy from that of a radical, union-built opposition social movement to that of a powerful governmental administration. During the march, I asked one woman from the Beni, a department in the north, about the possibility of police repression. “We don’t have anything to worry about,” she said, grabbing another coca leaf for stamina. “We are with the government now.”

After marching from around the country, the exhausted indigenous and campesino land activists converged in La Paz on November 28. When I arrived at the rally, the main plaza was flooded with placards and flags representing the wide array of social organizations that had united behind one demand: land reform. Instead of bumper-to-bumper traffic, the streets buzzed with the sound of Bolivia’s many indigenous languages. As a man in a condor costume flapped his wings from the top of a nearby statue, speakers rallied the tired marchers to make the final push to the Plaza Murillo, in front of the presidential palace. A river of colorful banners and clothing filled the city’s main street as the political center of the country was occupied. Marchers yelled such phrases as “Free Bolivia—Yes!, Yankee Empire—No!” La Paz residents supported the march from the sidewalks. Businessmen and women greeted the activists with applause during their lunch breaks while grinning street vendors handed out free ice cream in solidarity.

The marchers exhibited a spirit of fun more than the anger and urgency which marked so many previous mobilizations around issues such as gas nationalization and an end to forced eradication of coca crops. At the Plaza Murillo, around 50 policeman dressed in riot gear guarded the presidential palace in two rows. They showed no intentions of attacking the crowd, and the crowd seemed to ignore them all together, knitting and preparing ceremonial coca offerings right in front of the police line.

However, there was a symbolic threat. Adolfo Chavez, the leader of an indigenous organization from Santa Cruz, stood next to the man in the condor costume, explaining, “We are staying here in the Plaza Murillo. We aren’t going anywhere until these changes are passed.” The multitude remained in the plaza long after the sunset, hunkering over bags of coca, guitars and the tired banners they hauled from their homes. Late that night, they were victorious. Morales, who supported their calls for reforms, presided over a Senate without opposition parties and passed the reforms while a celebratory clamor rocked La Paz.

To Have and Have Not: The Bolivian Landless Movement

A bloody history of land occupation and unequal distribution led up that night’s passage of the reforms. On April 20, 2000, hundreds of Bolivian landless families peacefully took over land in Pananti, an area in Tarija, and began a precarious new life. They pooled their labor to cultivate the land, which had been abandoned for eight years, and built their homes close together for protection from the thugs hired by local cattle ranchers who claimed the land was theirs. The residents devised shifts to keep watch on the community while others slept, worked in the fields, or gathered water from far-away sources. In early November, 2001, 60 armed men hired by local cattle ranchers attacked landless farmers in the Pananti settlement, burnt down their homes, and unleashed a barrage of gunfire which killed five men, one 13-year-old boy, and wounded 22 others. In response, landless farmers killed a leader of the attack. Police arrested five landowners linked to the violence and nine landless farmers. Juana Ortega, who had given birth just three days beforehand, was one of those arrested. Ortega occupied the land for her children, “I decided to do it for them, for the land they will need to survive.”

This violence reflects an ancient system of exploitation in which land is concentrated in the hands of a few rich landowners while poor farmers are left to tenant farming slavery or starvation. The wealth of Latin America’s large landowners has been built on the backs of the region’s poor, landless farmers. In the Spanish colonial era, plantations were largely powered by slaves, though land was sometimes lent to workers in exchange for money, crops, or labor. It was common for owners to rule every aspect of life on their plantations—from communication with the outside world, to internal commerce and justice. These colonial chains still grip the continent. With the application of neoliberal policies, old plantations were turned into modern industrial farms owned or contracted by US and European corporations. Campesinos fed up with working conditions or unable to compete with large farms increasingly migrated to the city. Currently, Latin America has some of the most unequal land distribution in the world.

In Bolivia, a country largely dependent on agriculture, conflicts over land have arisen on numerous occasions. One of the only ways campesinos survived was through their work in horrible conditions on large farms. In return for the use of their own small plot of land, campesinos served the owner’s family day and night, cleaning, cooking, and tending to livestock and crops. The 1952 Revolution offered a glimpse of hope to these small farmers. Large land holdings, mostly in the western provinces, were broken up and distributed to landless farmers, and various forms of exploitation on large farms were outlawed. Some indigenous communities were given land titles.

Since then it has been uphill battle for most of Bolivia’s landless. In the 1970s, General Hugo Banzer gave his allies and friends thousands of hectares of land, much of which is in the fertile department of Santa Cruz. In the 1990s, when neoliberal policies were applied in full force to Latin America, privatization and foreign investment was encouraged, and small farmers were ignored by governments. Their credits were slashed and land was sold off to foreign owners. “Modernization” of the agricultural industry favored exports and cheap labor, goals that were threatened by empowered campesinos.

Seventy percent of the productive land in Bolivia is owned by a wealthy five percent of the population. Cattle ranching, the expansion of the soy industry, and mineral exploration has put a strain on land use and distribution. Brazilian soy companies have taken over significant portions of land in northeastern Santa Cruz, displacing the Guarayo indigenous populations. In southern Santa Cruz, ranchers compete with the Guarani indigenous communities for land. Conflicts between small farmers and industrial producers are common elsewhere in this department.

Various areas of indigenous land were not officially recognized until lowland indigenous people from Santa Cruz and Beni began a march in 1990 to demand legal recognition. Their cause was motivated by the fact that the land they traditionally used was being threatened by increased logging, cattle ranching, and soy production. Their demands were eventually met by President Paz Zamora who created decrees legally recognizing indigenous land. However, indigenous populations have often had trouble making the government enforce and enact the decrees that are made to sooth social conflict. Furthermore, the titles given to indigenous communities were only allowed to have one owner, instigating internal disputes as well as facilitating the sale of indigenous land by the individual owners.

Protests and violent confrontations continued across the country over this valuable resource, forcing the government to take action in 1996 with the passage of the INRA Law. The law included a plan to grant collective titles to indigenous communities, resolve conflicts, and distribute state-owned, unused, or illegally obtained land to landless farmers. However, as an investigation by the Andean Information Network reports, successive governments failed to enact this legislature due to vague definitions of unproductive land and standards for determining the legality of land holdings. During the nine years following the passage of the law, land titles were certified on only 18% of the targeted areas. Corruption and lack of initiative to fully implement the law resulted in few victories for Bolivia’s landless.

Another aspect of the INRA Law that angered small farmers was a change in the article of the land law, established in the Agrarian Reform of 1953, which stated “The land belongs to those who work it”—meaning that the land had to be used productively or else the state can take the rights to it. Under INRA, landowners were allowed to keep their unused land as long as they paid a one-percent property tax on the entire value of the land. Yet it was up to the landowners themselves to establish that value, leaving loopholes for corruption.

In the face of such inequality, landless farmers have organized to take unused land regardless of official sanction. On June 14, 2000, a march of farmers demanding land arrived in the town of Entre Rios, in the department of Tarija where a representative of the Prefect asked to meet with leaders of the march. It was then that farmers decided to form the Bolivian MST. From this beginning, the MST has coordinated actions, marches, and land occupations, inspiring others across the country to do the same. The first land occupations usually involved some 40 families who took unused land and set up tents or homes with log walls and plastic tarps for roofs. Communities then began cultivating subsistence crops on land that had often been unused for decades.

The land in Timboy Tiguazu, a humid area 65 kilometers outside of Yacuiba, Tarija department, was totally abandoned and unused when 13 landless families occupied it in 2000. After the takeover, men prepared the land for cultivation and women looked for the best places for homes. Though the poor quality of roads made the zone nearly inaccessible, it had plenty of water sources and good land for farming. In the beginning, family members took turns working for large landowners outside their area and in cities and towns to buy supplies for the new community. They divided work duties and organized shifts to protect themselves from thugs hired by local landowners. By 2001, a total of 40 families lived there, many of them producing surplus vegetables to sell in local markets.

In the wake of such success, landless farmers occupied land elsewhere, primarily in Santa Cruz and the Chaco where there are vast expanses of unused land. Wilfor Coque of the MST participated in a land occupation in 2000 in Ichilo, northeast of Santa Cruz. According to Coque, land there had been sold illegally, leaving little for indigenous people and small farmers in the region. Coque said that the community will continue occupying unused land until the “state gives us back what is ours.” Many farmers take part in the occupations to work the land for survival, as, in the past, labor for large landowners barely has paid enough to survive. “There are still haciendas where 30 peons work from sunrise to sunset for a completely inadequate salary,” said Ermelinda Fernández, an MST member in the Chaco. Some laborers are paid only $1.41 per day, but, according to Fernández, “they have no alternative because they have no land of their own.”

Various land distribution advances have been made under the MAS administration. Outside the city of Santa Cruz, 16,000 hectares of land have been given to 626 families, along with credits with low interest. The area has been re-named Pueblos Unidos (United People), and despite the difficult access to the community and the lack of basic services, the land is giving some farmers the chance to feed themselves. However, the landowners in Santa Cruz have moved against such progress by hiring thugs and members of the right wing Unión Juvenil Crucenista to harass and destroy such landless settlements.

The land reforms passed on November 28, 2006 are expected to help thousands of poor Bolivian families as well as fuel the growing fire among the country’s elite, which will be deeply affected by the redistribution of this natural resource. The passage of the reforms also marks an interesting moment in the brief history of the Morales administration. When MAS lacked support from opposition parties to pass the controversial changes to the land legislation, they worked to mobilize social organizations from around the country to provide the backing and, in many ways, the grassroots mandate Morales will need to continue confronting the Bolivian right. However, it remains to be seen how effectively these land reforms will be enacted.

Saisari of the MST believes the MAS government provides a window of opportunity that should be utilized by the country’s social movements. His organization has access to the government, and offers advice and proposals to the administration in ways that never existed with previous governments. “We feel listened to,” he said, explaining that it was important to support government policies that benefited the MST, and offer criticism and advice when necessary. “Our democracy depends on us as social movements,” he asserted with a smile.

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Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia, forthcoming from AK Press in March, 2007.

The fully footnoted version of this story appeared in Toward Freedom, December, 2006
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/938/

See also:

“BOLIVIA: THE OPPOSITION STRIKES BACK”
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
WW4 REPORT #128, December 06
/node/2858

“THE NEW AGRARIAN REFORM IN BOLIVIA”
by Stefan Baskerville, Diplo
WW4 REPORT #125, September 2006
/node/2415

“BOLIVIA: THE AGRARIAN REFORM THAT WASN’T”
by Leila Lu, Upside Down World
WW4 REPORT #117, January 2006
/node/1442

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Jan. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution