Storms over the
Andes
THE hurricanes smeeping the Andes evoke the ancestral tempests of a region characterized by poverty, authoritarianism, corruption of the dominant elites and : persistent popular resistance. Here, democracy amounts to voting now and again and economic liberalization destroys elementary rights like the right to work, health, education or a roof over one's head. Bolivia, one of the poorest coun trles on the continent, provides the clearest snapshot of a real social desolation.
26% of the economically actise population is currently unemployed and the montbly wage of a teacher is barely 40 dolfars, anger, constructed a new solidarity, bearer popular anger. Again the streets fill up, the
4.
FRIDAY
February awakes in full
Cochabamba
International bodies like the IMF and the World Bank have included Bolivia in mobilization. Thousands and the framework of a programune of "foreign debt rellef", HIPIC I, on condition that it pursues plans of counter-reforms and privatization; with HIPIC /1, Bolivia thousands of people, from the has received a new allocation of 760 million dollars, to be added to the preceding earliest hour, start to converge
1,300 million, to fleance projects in the "coctal area" and the "strucete against toward the meeting place fixed by poverty". On April 8th, the government of ex-dictator Hugo Banzer +- recon the Coordination for the Defence verted into a respectable democrat — declared a state of emergency. The reaction of Water and Life.
was immediate: roadblocks organized by the CSTCB (the trade union confederation of agricultural workers) to demand a change in the law of agrarian reform.
RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ AND a general strike called by the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana) trade union federation, general assemblies of the people in the popular aeighborhoods, students.
ALVARO GARCÍA LINERA* housewives, the unemployed, confrontations with the army. After one week, faced with the wave of popular protests and so as to avoid the inconvenience of
T is the day of the "taking of pressure from the "international community", the state of emergency was lifted.
Cochabamba
, a peaceful occupation
Provisional balance sheet: a few dozen dead, hundreds of union leaders, peasants, of the town where thousands of voices students imprisoned and an as yet unknown number of disappeared. The govern-
', "no to unite to say "no to the water law"
ment has presented as primary cause of the crisis the climate of "subversion of the the concession of water to the Aguas del established order? created by the mobilization of coca-colfivating peasants it
Tunari company",
"no to the brutal
Chapare, violently repressed. Yet the real polat of departure is in the formidable increase in the price of water".
struggle of the inbabitants of the town of Cochabamba, 500 kilometers south of
The town authorities are also on the
La Paz, who rose up on Pebruary 4 of this year against the announcement of an move with the aim of countering this con-
Increase in the rates for water, whose esploitation is in the hands of the Spanish vergence of an entire population tired of submitting to unjust decisions imposed
Faced with the soctal and political crisis, Banzer had to restructure his govern without the slightest consultation. For ment and put off some of the most unpopular measures. This popular revolt is some days, agitation has been at a peak:
rich with lessons in the area of social demands, metbods of struggle and, abose all, the political agreement between the municin what constitutes a real attempt to establish a radical popular democracy. The ipality and the central government has test that we publish here gives an excellent account of this revolutionary experibeen broken; police reinforcements are on ence and the development of a movement of reconstruction of the social organithe road from other departments and troop movements are underway.
Decisive day
Finally, February 4 came as a decisive day for the management of a resource vital for all, water. The first cordons of police who try to block the bridges leading to the town center are broken through around 10 a.m. The multitude who reach the main square don't let the forces of order stop them, despite the gas and the bullets, the blows and truncheons.
The resolute pressure of the crowd, fired by the justice of its demands, throws
12 International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 company Abengoa. rations. * Ernesto Herrera back the police who can no longer control that the immediate approaches to the administrative buildings symbolizing power. The entire rest of the town is now in the hands of the people. A great spirit of solidarity arises, fear conquered, hesitations swept away by the grotesque errors of the authorities.
The people of Cochabamba have recovered their dignity, unleashed their of hope, victory and elation.
On February 5th, Cochabamba awoke in total uncertainty, but still indignant at the fury and contempt shown on the previous day by the authorities and the police. The radio gave airspace to women who said "they have massacred our children, our peasants; it is intolerable".
These voices, quickly taken up by some television channels, increase the
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* Bolivia The rebirth of the multitude
crossroads are blocked and the crowd returns to occupy the central square. Solidarity is organized. The doors open to welcome the wounded; fires are lit at the crossroads; people talk, organize, share vinegar to counter the effects of the gas; entire families fill the street; parents want their children to learn how to defend a just demand; canteens are improvised to feed the demonstrators.
The entire population joins the mobilization. All concerned and organized. Nobody leads this multitude now that it is determined to face down repression, that it identifies itself with the objective of occupying the square and defending a primordial right, water. The capacity to decide and to act reappears after some years. The shaken legitimacy of the authorities has shattered in pieces, reduced to violence and lies.
At 11 p.m., the square is filled. The police have had to fall back, the detainees are released and feted by the multitude which surrounds them. "We have won, we have taken the square and we are here. We have said no to the increase in water and they have backed down. We have demanded that the legislation on water takes into account the respect of use and custom and the government has agreed" "We have made them respect us."
Four forces There are essentially four forces involved in the Coordination for Water and Life. The first and most important is formed by the local peasant organizations practicing the irrigated culture which has developed over the last six years in the valleys and suburban zones. The utilization of water in the Andean region has always been based on a system of communal authorities, of regulation of debts, collective controls and ceremonial practices, as complex as the regime on the land.
Lack of water in the valleys of the Cochabamba region, the regrouping of trade unions in investment projects for the sinking of wells, the purchase of pumps,
Bolivia * the digging of canalizations have all given the water committees an importance of the first order in social life.
Faced with the drying up of their lands, the cultivators have for some years engaged in radical struggles and set up the most powerful organization in the rural regions. With the adoption at the end of last year of law 2029, whose object is to treat water as a simple commodity and not a public good, they have been led to seek new allies and to build increasingly wide mobilizations.
The second force is the Federation of Workers of Cochabamba. The most conscious and active sector of what remains of the traditional workers' movement, under the leadership of Oscar Olivera, they have developed a long-term campaign to reknit the union and associative tissue of the proletariat, encourage the unionization of women and seasonal workers, defend the rights of the youngest who from the age of 14 or 16 work in unhealthy surroundings, with working days of 12 hours, and renew the culture of the working class.
### Authority
They have acquired a great political and moral authority. More than a force of mass mobilization, they count because of their legitimacy, their capacity to analyze reality and grasp the complexity of it, which gains them recognition at the level of the whole region and even at a national scale.
They have made the question of water a problem assumed collectively in a single organizational framework, that of the Coordination. Where the COB has always failed, they have succeeded in unifying under the workers' leadership the workers of town and country, transport workers and market traders, the pauperized middle class. It is a gain whose significance will undoubtedly appreciate in the coming years.
Classically, the COB organized workers on the basis of their workplaces. But the restructuring of social classes has created a vast and essentially nomadic salariat, of multifunctional workers who combine the sale of their labour power with the sale of products, independent work and petty trade, without any stability.
The Coordination offers them a space of multiple participation where the peasant is as welcome as the worker trades unionist, the inhabitant of a popular neighborInternational Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 13
"Coca or death!"
DURING & visit some months ago General Barry McCaffrey, the fear of the anti-drug stragele in the LSA, paid homage to the "sott drus policy" of the
Bolivian government: to beflere the offietal figures, which shoeld always be
* Bolivia hood, the organizer of an association of cultivators, the "young activist" or again the citizen who feels concerned.
This allows us to understand the extraordinary potential for urban mobilization from February to April, the capacity to taken with a pinch of salt, in too years the area of coca plantation has been involve thousands of youths with no reduced from 36,000 to 18,000 hectares. What is not said is that the problem future, working occasionally, with precari-
Rete morse day by dey. The result of this "success" Is that thoseande of peas ous contracts, in little family workshops or ants see their very existence threatened. In the region of Chapare, 300,000 peo again artisans, ice cream sellers, pupils and ple, in the majority below the "poverty threshold" cyaically defined by the students for whom study is no longer a
International bodies, live by cultivating coca. For whole familles, It B the sole source of focome. Under US pressure, the Bolivian goternment committed form of social ascent.
The third force comprises groups and felt to Implesenting progremmies of cradication and offered to pay 2.500 dol.
professionals who have got involved in the lars per hectare for the plantations destroyed which would be replaced prolegal area and masteted the technical quesgressively (in otber words never) by palm, citrus or banana cultivation. This & tions in the negotiations to renew the conlike a bad joke. When Banzer was elected in 1997, he announced a complete tract of the Aguas del Tunari company.
cradication in fire years. It was necessary to destroy 50,000 hectares of planta-
This has allowed the Coordination to dions, 35,000 to Chapare alone, without faking fato account the social and car involve some sectors of the middle classes ronmental consequences.
Faced with the hostility of the peasants, the goverument bee reacted only with of Cochabamba.
The fourth force, but not the least, conexpulsions and violence. "Coca or death" has become the symbol of the strug sists of the unions of coca cultivators and gle of the peasants, with Ivo Morales, now a deputy, at their head. The region traditional communities, the ayllus, from i now one of the main fields of battle against the goreroment and policy of the the Altiplano regions. Bearers of an ances-
United States which, under the pretext of strueeling agaloet the drugs trailic. i tral tradition and a very strong communal
Implementing a strategy of intervention (as in Colombia and Ecuador) in what cohesion, they joined the mobilization
Treasury Secretary Laurence Summers calls weak states k with all their qualities of discipline, the weight of memory and history.
"These are primitive Indians" said the minister Hoz de Vila when the leaders of the Coordination refused to decide to lift the blockade without first consulting their rank and file. The "Indianisation" of the enemy is an atavistic recourse to symbolically denigrate any opposition. It is not astonishing then that sharpshooters should open fire on a crowd that they see as a horde of savage beasts.
Rage and fear
This reflects above all a colonial feudalism, rage and fear faced with forms of citizen organization which break with the insipid normality of the state, with the fallacious forms of representation, high level political deals and general irresponsibility.
The Coordination has pushed back the state not only because it forced the troops to return to their barracks and negotiate for their supplies. The state has lost authority because the multitude has created forms of collective political participation in the assemblies which return to the citizens control over and direct responsibility for their affairs and decisions.
These are the forms of democratic practices of mass currents in the workers' mobilizations, the neighborhoods, the peasant trade union or the ancestral com-
14 International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 munities. What is new is their generalization, the creation of a democratic tissue on a regional scale, prefiguring a network of assemblies which could be set up all over the country.
The forms of organization of the Coordination have developed on four levels during the mobilizations of April. The first and most important is formed by the assemblies of water committees and cultivators, the neighborhood and community assemblies.
Here the people make the link between their specific problems and the general interest, discussing which actions to carry out and their translation at the local level. Thus was born the decision to form a collective popular force to surround the square and organize what became, in the heat of the barricades, "the war of the water".
The second form of organization has functioned for several months as a popular Parliament. It is the assembly of representatives of the Coordination. It is formed from rotating delegates representing the committees of water and local cultivators, farming trade unions, neighborhood committees, water associations, urban unions and federations, the "young" and the stu-
BIL dents. During the April mobilizations and before the declaration of the state of emergency, this parliament functioned daily and it was its plenary assembly which led the movement.
### Assemblies
The third level is that of the municipal assemblies. There were five held in a week with the participation of a crowd of tens of thousands of people (from 5,000 to 100,000). They witness to an unprecedented democratic thirst, a multitude tired of others thinking and deciding in its name.
In the heat of these events, these people wish to represent and rule themselves. They block the streets, bar the roads, go to the square with their children, armed with batons and slings, debate in assemblies and then carry out the decisions taken.
The final level of organization is the executive committee of the Coordination led by Olivera and Omar Fernández. Its uncontested authority comes from the fact that it is content to implement the decisions taken daily in the assembly. It is the most authentic embodiment of the extraordinary democratization of the public arena that this revolt has represented.
The consolidation of the social order
and the neoliberal ideology in Bolivian society have not been only the result of a set of decrees and propaganda operations. They result from a transformation of social and symbolic structures.
The discourse of commodity efficiency, governability and commodification of the vote, the internalization of social impotence experienced as an individual deficiency, the breaking of solidarities, all this has entered into the collective consciousnesses of the governing and governed to the extent that the old structures of social
BOLIV TA cohesion become degraded and give way to atomization, competition and loss of memory.
### Crisis
The crisis of traditional trades unionism, of cooperative forms of unionization
Cochabamba and of the COB which symbolized this political expression of society allowed neoliberalism to succeed. This has marked the end of the workers' movement incarnated by the miners, of the range of associative structures of universal significance of the latter decades.
profoundly atomized society emerged. But these destructive mechanisms did not have local networks in the neighborhoods or agglomerations. Appearing around very concrete problems, limited to the community or neighborhood and in a certain sense very fragile in terms of their dimensions, these elementary networks have given birth in record time to a new tissue on a regional scale, with a significance of national scale. The Coordination incarnates the formation of a new plebeian social identity which cuts through the traditional regionalist discourse of the gilded elites but also creates practices of self-determination in the political area.
The COB has suffered 15 years of defeat not so much because of repression as the absence of an alternative social horizon. The legitimate defence of rights conquered related to past agreements with the national state and the reference to socialism hardly went beyond an enlarged vision of state capitalism.
### Soulless
Basically, for some decades the people and the left have been nationalist and their dreams have foundered with the nationalist state to give place to a soulless society. Cochabamba and to some extent the
Fi La Fat Oruros ICIFIC CEAN Aymara Indians of the Altiplano have broken this torpor.
The Coordination's project of the creation of a self-managed society has broken the fallacious private/state duality which was at the heart of these political projects.
In the image of politics treated as a self-managed question, collective goods like water should be everybody's business: to be managed by those who need it and use it, self-managed by the citizens themselves. Thus was born a new idea of social sovereignty until then incarnated by the
Marx's dream
The rehabilitation of usage and custom as part of law, incarnated in the strength of the multitude in revolt, make that which is abusively called archaic a vector of the future, of modernity. One sees reborn the
### Santa
Cruz PAR
ARGENTINA
dream of the old Marx of transcending the rule of capital through the reconstruction, "in superior conditions", of the communal rural ancestral structures.
Two new social propositions are affirmed here in the long term: self-management and community. As the diverse currents of the workers' movement are fed in a common way from the social dissidence of the 1940s, a new sense of dissidence and social insubordination has surged with the impetuosity of a social rebellion at the dawn of the 21st century. The construction of an alternative horizon of action to the existing order now passes inexorably by these two dimensions of the masses in movement: political-economic self-management and the ayllu, the enlarged ancestral community. * * Raquel Gutiérrez and Alvaro García Linera are journalists in La Paz, Bolivia. International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 15
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150 km Bolivia * BRAZIL Achacachi