BOLIVIA Guns against the hungry ON AUGUST 28, at 6.30 in the morning, T33's left the military airport of El Alto near La Paz. They flew to Calamarca and San Antonio, which lie a few dozen kilometers from the capital. The "elite" troops, just good enough to kill defenceless workers and farmers, surrounded the procession of miners and their families. The latter had just passed their sixth night in cold and bad weather -and now the soldiers were preventing the clergy from bringing them food and medicines.
Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) of Paz Estenssoro managed to win the presidential elections. On August 29, an austerity plan was adopted, freezing wages, removing price controls, and blocking investments in the state sector, with the perspective of eliminating it. Food and gasoline subsidies were removed. The currency was devalued, and restrictions on layoffs in the public sector were lifted.
The press has written a lot about the 15,000 per cent inflation in 1985 and the success of the freeenterprise economic policy in this area. It is true that inflation was cut to 50 per cent in the first half of 1986, and that many items reappeared in shop windows. But most Bolivians could not afford them. The deflationist medicine had killed the patient.
Competition from imports is killing the weak domestic industry. Poverty has never reached such a level. Underemployment and unemployment afflict two-thirds of the population. For those who have jobs, the minimum wage is 15 dollars a month. A teacher gets 20 dollars, a doctor 25, but an officer gets at least 150. Infant mortality has reached a rate of 16.8 per cent.
Since June 1986, the Bolivian labor movement (the COB) has retaken the initiative. It organized a people's referendum against the new tax law that rewards the rich and punishes the poor, and against pay. ment of the national debt. The action was a success. Hundreds of thousands participated in the vote, which the minister of defence declared illegal. On June 30, 30,000 peasants came to La Paz out of the highlands to support the COB's popular referendum. On August 1, the employees of the Bolivian airline and of the University of San Andres went on strike. At the end of June, 21,000 COMIBOL miners also began a strike. With their backs to the wall, they said "no" to the government's plans and proposed a plan for saving jobs.
Since May 1986, the US has been building up its military presence in Bolivia. Joint military maneuvers have been carried out, in which the Yankees have spread insects that are supposed to destroy the cocaine plantations. The despatching of 170 military men at the end of June to fight the drug mafia went far beyond the declared goal. Washington wants to get the region used to a US military presence.
Now that the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile is tottering and Washington is no longer entirely sure of Peru, the Pentagon is establishing itself in Bolivia. The state of emergency in the Andean country fits into that perspective.
CHARLES ANDRE UDRY CHARLES-ANDRE UDRY
The miners, with their wives and children, came from the two mining centers of Potosi and Oruro, and had covered more than 180 kilometers. On the "road of sacrifices," they wanted to go to the government palace in La Paz to stage a hunger strike to press demands for withdrawal of closure plans announced by the state tin-mining board (COMIBOL).
Since August 1985, more than 7,000 miners had already lost their jobs, and now another 8,000 were to follow, out of a total of 23,370 in March 1986. [Latin America Regional Report, July 31, 1986]. For months hundreds of families had been driven out of the highlands to the tropical areas, where they sought to become farmers or start panning for hypothetical gold. Did they leave the highlands for an Eldorado? Not exactly!
"My grandfather was a miner. My father was a miner. What else should I do but go down the pit too? They pushed me down into the tropical zone, and I am dying from pains. There is too much light here, brother," a miner grumbled.
In particular, in the new settlement area, there is no infrastructure. Children are dying from diseases. The dietary habits here are completely different.
But on August 29, the "elite" soldiers came and poked their submachine guns in the backs of women and children, forcing the people into trucks and carting them back to the mining villages, which had become ghost towns.
Paz Estensorro had declared a state of emergency, under the pretext that an insurrection was being prepared. An Associated Press correspondent correctly noted, "This is the second time in a year that the government has declared a state of emergency to suppress a workers' mobilization." [International Herald Tribune, August 29, 1986.] Brutal austerity program
The first time he did this, in September 1985, it was to impose a brutal austerity program on the people. The second time, he did it to silence "a starving mass, a marching mob, most of them with bleeding feet," as the weekly magazine of the London financial establishment cynically remarked. [The Economist, September 6, 1986.]
The repressive forces, which in all absorb half of the budget, while only four percent is spent on health, arrested about 25 union leaders, along with left and Christian activists. As in the days of the military dictatorship of Garcia Meza (1980-1981), they were banished to jungle villages in the province of Beni, the same area that the laid-off miners were supposed to seek their fortunes.
In March 1985, when a giant general strike paralyzed the country, the workers were unable to seize the opportunity and pose the question of power. Then the pendulum swung brutally in the other direction.
Against the background of the defeat of the workers' movement and the confusion of the socialist and revolutionary forces, the Movimiento