|
Bolivia: The military plan and wait
Evo Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism still have plenty
of opponents in and out of Bolivia: the separatist white elite
in the rich oil and gas regions, army factions, multinationals,
and the government of the United States.
By Maurice Lemoine
02/05/06 "Le
Monde diplomatique" -- -- ADMIRAL Marco Antonio Justiniano, the commander-in-chief of the Bolivian armed forces
insisted last August that “as a citizen, Evo Morales has the
right and the freedom to talk to anyone he likes” (1). He was
responding to calls for an investigation into links between
Morales, the leader of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), and
the governments of Venezuela and Cuba. With Morales expected to
win the presidential election in December, the conservatives
were extremely active.
Justiniano, questioned about the potential dangers of populism,
suggested they depended upon the definition of the term. “If you
mean a mass movement seeking to secure better living conditions
then there is nothing to fear. But if you mean a movement driven
by caprices, it is a danger to the stability of the state.” What
he understood by populism remained unclear.
There is a well-established tradition of military interference
in politics in Bolivia, which has experienced about 180 coups
since it became independent in 1825. Two recent examples leap to
mind. In 1964 General Rene Barrientos ended the reformist
experiment conducted by the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement.
In 1971 General Hugo Banzer seized power with the support of the
United States, and of the dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil,
inaugurating a long series of authoritarian, repressive regimes
that only ended with the fall of the narco-general Luis García
Meza in 1981 and the restoration of civilian rule in 1982. A
sort of democracy ensued, during which the proponents of
neoliberalism plundered the country. For 20 years the poor and
underprivileged - the indigenous majority - paid the price.
After decades of support for military involvement, the US began
to promote peace and democracy as indispensable to the
development of the market. Although it preferred to control the
country through political parties rather than through the army,
the US made an exception of the fight against narco-trafficking
and the eradication of coca cultivation, supervised on the
ground by US soldiers. Bolivia’s generals found themselves
deprived of influence or room to manoeuvre, but they continued
to exploit privileged relationships with the parties in power
and some presidents used special funds to buy their loyalty.
In October 2003 the people rose against the policies of
President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Protesters built barricades
of rubble and burning tyres to seal off the vast working-class
township of El Alto, overlooking La Paz. Nestor Guillén, leader
of the Federation of Neighbourhood Committees, described what
happened when a squad of soldiers managed to enter Villa El
Ingenio: “The troops opened fire. There were bullets flying
everywhere. Seventeen people were killed - innocent bystanders
who were just looking on.”
But despite 67 deaths and 400 people wounded, the crackdown
failed. With the “business” to which he had devoted years of
care and effort in ruins, Sánchez de Lozada fled to the US. His
successor, his vice-president, Carlos Mesa, did no better. He
resigned in June 2005, after three weeks of social unrest when
80,000 people took to the streets (2).
Backing into the spotlight
These events dragged the army back into the centre of the
debate, although it seemed reluctant at first. Mesa, anxious to
avoid bloodshed, had forbidden the suppression of the
demonstrations. At the height of the crisis the only call for a
military patriot had come from the Bolivian Federation of Labour
(COB) and shades of opinion well to the left of Evo Morales. “We
need a Colonel Chávez,” asserted Jaime Solares, the COB leader.
In May two obscure lieutenant-colonels, Julio Herrera and Julio
César Galindo, had issued a personal statement calling for the
resignation of Mesa and putting themselves forward as leaders of
a new government. On 3 June several dozen COB representatives
made a renewed appeal for military intervention.
The high command deny that that they were contemplating a coup
at this stage. But one of Morales’s close associates insists
that such a plan existed: “They didn’t approach the right;
instead they sought Evo’s blessing. They wanted to stage a coup,
but with the support of the social movement.” There would have
been a military-civilian pact involving nationalisation of
hydrocarbons, calling a constituent assembly, and measures to
answer the demands of ordinary Bolivians. Despite their links
with the COB, the officers involved were clearly aware that this
support was not enough (even Solares did not enjoy the support
of the grassroots of his organisation) and that they would have
to bring in groups like the MAS with real power to mobilise
support. The associate added: “The proposal was rejected.
Whatever doubts there may be about the democratic process, the
people have paid for it with blood, death and exile. There is no
question of halting it. And anyway the military would just have
been a brake.”
Mesa’s resignation left Congress with a choice between the
president of the Senate, Hormando Vaca Diez, and the president
of the Chamber of Deputies, Mario Cossío. But there was fierce
opposition to these former allies of Sánchez de Lozada. It has
been reliably reported that a group of generals met to decide
which to support, and that during their deliberations a colonel
entered the room, clicked his heels and announced: “I think you
should know that many officers regard the MAS as the only fit
representative of our nation’s dignity.”
On 9 June Admiral Luis Aranda, then the commander-in-chief of
the armed forces, said: “Congress must give the clearest
possible expression of the will of the people.” This was enough
to secure the appointment of the head of the Supreme Court,
Eduardo Rodríguez. But the new president and the heads of the
two chambers immediately joined forces to dismiss Aranda, whom
they regarded as too sympathetic to popular feeling. This led to
the official emergence of Democratic and Patriotic Transparency
(Tradepa), a “citizens’ group” founded in Cochabamba a month
before by former members of the military and intended to be the
political wing of the armed forces, which are forbidden under
article 121 of the legal framework governing their operation
from engaging in such activities.
A ‘citizens’ group’
Although the initiative came from retired members of the
military, the serving top brass - including the commander of
land forces at the time, General Marcelo Antezana - were
involved in the creation of Tradepa. On 25 August its leaders
admitted that several serving officers had been among the
120,000 signatories of documents submitted to the national
electoral court in order to obtain legal status. Meanwhile some
officers complained of having been pressurised into signing and
claimed that the barracks of the second division, at Oruro, were
being used as Tradepa’s regional offices.
To counter the corruption of Bolivia’s political parties Tradepa
proposes “a revolutionary, independent and humanist nationalism”
and “the participation of the armed forces in national
development”. There is nothing new about this. The governments
of Colonel David Toro (1936-37) and that of his successor,
General Germán Busch (1937-39), used a programme of military
socialism to introduce, with varying success, a series of social
reforms (3). And in 1970, when a far-right junta seized power,
leftwing elements in the army under General Juan José Torres
established a nationalist and revolutionary government, with a
popular assembly designed to radicalise the regime, before being
overthrown by General Banzer.
But Tradepa is also reminiscent of the notorious Mariscal de
Zepita group, mainly composed of retired soldiers who supported
Banzer’s Nationalist Democratic Action during the elections of
1997 and who retained their links with the armed forces when
they subsequently occupied important positions in the public
services. The presence within Tradepa of such people as Colonel
Faustino Roco Toro is alarming. He led the intelligence services
under the dictator Garciá Meza and was suspected of involvement
in the assassination of the socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga in
Santa Cruz in 1980.
On 16 August the deputy defence minister, Victor Manual Gemio,
was sacked because of his links with Tradepa. Justiniano, the
new commander-in-chief, caused alarm by backing him and
announcing that the military would support Tradepa in the
constituent assembly.
As part of the judgment against Sánchez de Lozada, the Supreme
Court decided to lift official secrecy so that senior and
middle-ranking officers involved in the fatal crackdown of
October 2003 could be made answerable to the regular courts. The
armed forces went on a state of alert; on 19 August General
Antezana (one of those who, at the height of the crisis, had
conspired against President Mesa) made a statement justifying
the formation of Tradepa and attacking the Supreme Court’s
decision as an encroachment upon military jurisdiction. Next,
the former general Luis Gemio (brother of the sacked deputy
defence minister and leader of the Mariscal de Zepita group from
1997 to 2002) made a public threat to use other methods if the
military was not allowed to have its own political wing.
As suspicions about Tradepa grew, Morales commented: “It is an
alarming development. Tradepa has nothing to do with Chávez. It
is a fascist movement involving a section of the high command
who are in favour of a coup d’état against the social movement
in general and the MAS in particular.”
Rival factions
On 18 December Morales was elected president in the first round,
with 54% of the vote. He is in a difficult situation. The upper
classes, determined to hang on to all the privileges they derive
from the current system, will give him no respite. Neither will
the US, the multinationals or the autonomist, indeed separatist,
white elite in the rich oil and gas regions of Santa Cruz and
Tarija. If there is a showdown, what will the army do?
There are three factions. One, of which Tradepa is a part, is
reactionary and capable of attempting a coup. It supports the
repression of the social movement.
The second would like to have it both ways, reconciling
government and opposition. As the journalist Walter Chávez
points out: “There was a time when nobody really minded if you
massacred 300 peasants. Now, just 30 deaths are enough to cause
worldwide condemnation. That’s one of the effects of
globalisation.” The military are weighing up their options. Any
open confrontation with the social movement would result in
hundreds of deaths. With no guarantee of immunity, who would
carry the can? Even General Pinochet has had to answer for his
actions.
Finally, there is a progressive faction within the armed forces.
The permanent secretariat of the Supreme National Defence
Council has said it would be viable to nationalise and
industrialise the hydrocarbons sector. As Alvaro García Lopez,
now Morales’s vice-president, pointed out: “The right has gone
too far. There are many middle-ranking officers who, although
conservative by instinct and tradition, are very suspicious of
what they regard as the separatist tendencies of Santa Cruz and
Tarija. That gives them a degree of sympathy with the social
movement.” They must also have been influenced by the former
lieutenant colonel Hugo Chávez, who led a Bolivarian revolution
in Venezuela, and his campaign for social integration across
Latin America.
It is difficult to assess the relative strength of these
opposing factions, but the US is taking no chances. In October a
Bolivian anti-terrorist commando group, Chacha Puma, on
instructions from the US embassy and accompanied by US officers,
removed 29 Chinese-manufactured HN-5A surface-to-air missiles
from the barracks where they were stored. At first Antezana
claimed they had been removed because they had reached the end
of their operational life. Actually, they had completed only
nine years of a 20-year service life. He subsequently provoked a
storm by revealing that the US had ordered them to be destroyed
“in anticipation of Morales’s imminent victory”. On 18 January
this admission cost him his job and forced the resignation of
the defence minister, Gonzalo Méndez.
Last July 500 members of the US Special Forces arrived in the
neighbouring state of Paraguay to train the army “in the
struggle against terrorism and drug-trafficking”. Since August,
as well as supervising military manoeuvres, the US army has
rehabilitated the Mariscal Estigarribia airport in the Gran
Chaco region, just 250km from the border with Bolivia. The
3,800m runway is long enough to take heavy transport aircraft,
such as the B-52, the C-130 Hercules and the C-5 Galaxy. It is
ideally situated as a base for intervention in Bolivia, if the
separatist movement in Santa Cruz should decide that the country
had become ungovernable.
© 1997-2006 Le Monde diplomatique.
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
