New Bolivian president meets with protest leaders

[struggle4progress]

Sun Jun 12, 2005 8:15 PM BST
By Fiona Ortiz

EL ALTO, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivia's most radical protest leaders threatened the country's new president on Sunday with more massive marches like the ones that toppled his predecessor if he did not immediately pledge to nationalize the country's rich natural gas resources.

President Eduardo Rodriguez, an interim president sworn in on Thursday night, met with neighborhood, union, mining and farm leaders in a church auditorium in El Alto, a sprawling poor city outside La Paz and focus of the country's most intense civil disturbances.

Speaking in Spanish and the Aymara Indian language, the leaders said their truce was only temporary after three weeks of roadblocks and factory occupations that forced out Carlos Mesa, the country's second president to resign in two years.

"If you respond to our demands, if you take your support from the people, you will serve out your term. If you don't, the people of El Alto and Bolivia will cut short your mandate," said Edgar Patana, leader of a union federation in El Alto. <snip>

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-06-12T191508Z_01_MOR269255_RTRUKOC_0_BOLIVIA.xml


Bolivian Protesters to Resume Demonstrations Monday
Jun 12, 2005

Protesters in Bolivia say their demonstrations and highway blockades will resume Monday if authorities in La Paz do not answer their demands favorably.

Demonstrators who have crippled much of the country for the past three weeks lifted many roadblocks Friday, after the appointment of interim President Eduardo Rodriguez. But organizers say a meeting with Mr. Rodriguez planned for Saturday to discuss their demands never materialized, so the demonstrations are set to resume.

The protesters eased highway blockades to allow much-needed fuel and other supplies to reach the capital and other cities.

Rural farmers, miners and labor groups in the impoverished country are demanding the nationalization of natural gas and oil resources to spread wealth more evenly among Bolivia's rich and poor regions. <snip>

http://www.politinfo.com/articles/article_2005_06_12_2007.html

[knowbody0]

1. the "people" have deprogramed themselves

and are not going to take it any more.

[K-W]

3. terrorism has a short effect, as soon as you remove the instrument

it goes away. The moment the pentagon looked away people started fighting again.

[bemildred]

2. The poor little rich country (By William Powers The New York Times)

SAMAIPATA, Bolivia For three weeks, Bolivia has been paralyzed by blockades and protests, an uprising that forced the president, Carlos Mesa, to resign last week. The protesters, primarily indigenous Indians, want to nationalize Bolivia's vast natural gas reserves, South America's second largest; BP has quintupled its estimate of Bolivia's proven reserves to 29 trillion cubic feet, worth a whopping $250 billion. The Indians are in a showdown with the International Monetary Fund and companies like British Gas, Repsol of Spain and Brazil's Petrobras that have already invested billions of dollars in exploration and extraction.

Many are calling developments of the past several years in Bolivia a war against globalization, but in fact this is more of a struggle over who has power here. An American Indian majority is standing up to the light-skinned, European elite and its corruption-fueled relations with the world.

When the Spanish Empire closed shop here in 1825, the Europeans who stayed on didn't seem to notice - and still don't. Even within Latin America, Bolivia is known for its corruption. It's also divided along a razor-sharp racial edge. Highland and Amazon peoples compose almost two-thirds of the population. And while Indians are no longer forcibly sprayed with DDT for bugs and are today allowed into town squares, Bolivian apartheid - a "pigmentocracy of power" - continues.

I've been here for three years as an aid official, and exclusion is part of life. Indians are barred from swimming pools at some clubs, for example; they are still "peones" on eastern haciendas little touched by land reform. Meanwhile, Bolivia's energy-rich eastern states are agitating for "autonomy" in a thinly disguised effort to deprive the poor Indian west of oil and gas revenues.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/12/opinion/edpowers.php