March 19, 2002 Dear friends interested in Bolivia, This weekend President Bush will hold a summit in Peru with Presidents from the Andean countries. Below is an article I am filing today with Pacific News Service aimed to bring attention at the gap between the smooth external image of Bolivia's new President and the violent domestic reality. The article will by syndicated throughout the US and Canada. Feel free to share it with anyone that might be interested, though wait a until the weekend if you do, to give Pacific New Service time to do their syndication and please be prepared to lend me a hand if there are any repercussions. Best wishes, Jim ------------------------------------------------- ON HIS WAY TO MEET PRESIDENT BUSH, BOLIVIA'S NEW PRESIDENT OUTPACES HIS PREDECESSOR'S REPRESSION by Jim Shultz This weekend President Bush travels to South America for a summit with presidents from the Andean region. Among them will be President Jorge Quiroga Ramírez of Bolivia, a man whose Texas credentials come close to Mr. Bush's. Educated at Texan A&M, Quiroga spent seven years in the Lone Star state as an executive at IBM. His wife Ginger, a blonde Texas native, gives Bolivia the odd distinction of having a "gringa" as first lady. Quiroga, the former vice president, took over the presidency last August when his predecessor, Hugo Banzer Suarez, resigned after being diagnosed with cancer. Quiroga, 41, has been hailed as the model of the new generation of Latin American leaders. Smooth, fluent in English, and schooled in business rather than soldiering, the Financial Times called Quiroga, "a pro-reform technocrat with the backing of Washington." On paper, the boyish Mr. Quiroga could not be a sharper contrast from his predecessor. Mr. Banzer, 75, first ran Bolivia in the 1970s as its military dictator, a twin to his Chilean contemporary, Augusto Pinochet. In December, an Argentine judge issued an arrest warrant for Banzer for his role in Plan Condor, a continent-wide campaign by the era's military regimes to hunt down and assassinate their political critics. However, after just eight months in office, in the eyes of many here, Quiroga is starting to look, "even more like Banzer than Banzer." According to the Permanent Assembly on Human Rights, in just eight months Quiroga's government has killed 13 people in political conflicts. Banzer's government, during three years in office, was responsible for 19 government killings. "He is using an even harder hand than Banzer," says Father Luis Sánchez, a Roman Catholic priest who serves as President of the Human Rights Assembly's Cochabamba office. "Quiroga's government resembles the darkest hours of the dictatorship [under Banzer in the 1970s], even more than Banzer's did." The country that Quiroga took over in August is the poorest in South America and has been stuck in economic crisis for so long that thousands of families, both urban and rural, are fighting just for survival. Quiroga also inherited, and strongly supports, two major government initiatives that many here blame for that crisis. The first is the package of "free market" economic policies adopted by the government under heavy pressure from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. These include rollbacks in labor rights and the privatization of state-owned companies such as the national airline, train system and water utilities. The other is the end-game in the U.S. "War on Drugs" here, the forced eradication of the last of Bolivia's illegal coca leaf crop. Social conflict, often violent, over these policies was a signature feature of Banzer's presidency. Hopes were high, even among government critics, that the arrival of the new, modern President would be a chance for a fresh start, an opening to address long-standing conflicts through dialogue rather than bloody confrontation. Instead, Quiroga's government has taken on its opponents with even more ferocity than the ex-dictator and has taken aim far more directly at the leaders of social movements here. In November, in the country's conflict-ridden coca growing region, soldiers methodically sought out leaders of the coca growers union for capture. One, Casimiro Huanca, was brutally killed, unarmed, in police custody, a case that human rights leaders and the press have labeled "an assassination". Also last November, the government arrested and jailed Oscar Olivera, winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for his leadership in the movement against water privatization. Quiroga's government charged Olivera with sedition, for making comments critical of the President. In January the government engineered the expulsion from Congress of Evo Morales, the coca union leader who won his seat in the same 1997 elections that made Quiroga vice president. "He's a different face than Banzer," says human rights attorney Rose Marie de Achá of Quiroga, "but he has provoked even more conflict and killed even more people." Quiroga was in office just five weeks when the U.S. was attacked on September 11. The new President lost no time painting the "terrorist" label on a wide swath of movements not to the government's liking. Later that month, government officials seized a group of visitors from Africa, Asia and Europe at the La Paz airport, on their way to attend an international conference on globalization. One of Mr. Quiroga's subordinates branded the conference, "a meeting of terrorists." Quiroga also auditioned his anti-terrorist message in Washington last year during his first visit with Mr. Bush, telling reporters, "We cannot permit terrorists to disguise themselves as social movements." The most violent conflicts on Mr. Quiroga's watch have been over the coca issue. More than 90% of the country's illegal coca leaf crop has already been eradicated say U.S. and Bolivian officials. The remaining coca farmers, mostly peasant families, claim that what remains is not destined for cocaine production but for the ancient and widespread local practice of chewing coca leaves. They also say that growing coca is the only way they can keep their families from starving. Bolivian and U.S. officials say that the remaining crop is still aimed at the coca trade and that all of it must go. The U.S. government, which finances the drug war, has placed heavy pressure on Bolivia to deliver the goal of "zero coca", in part because it wants to use the country as an example that forced eradication is a winnable strategy (something it seeks to do in Colombia and Peru as well). As part of the "zero coca" campaign, Quiroga shut down a local coca leaf farmers market, setting off a month of violent protests which left two coca farmers and four police and soldiers dead. For weeks, despite the pleadings of the Catholic Church and others, Quiroga refused to open up talks with coca union leaders. Soldiers openly beat not only protesters but journalists covering the conflict. Many of those arrested were tortured. The widespread suspicion here was that Quiroga was under heavy pressure from the U.S. Embassy not to meet with coca farmers or their allies. During an earlier round of protests, a Quiroga representative used his cell phone, in the middle of a meeting with coca leaders, to call US. ambassador Manuel Rocha and ask permission to agree to a specific concession. The president of the Bolivian Conference of Clergy, Father Carmelo Moreno, declared, "The government needs to listen to its people, not simply obey the voice of its master, the United States." In February, faced with a bloody standoff and no end in site, Quiroga finally allowed the government to join talks convened by the Church and ultimately agreed to allow the coca leaf markets to reopen. That move sparked sharp criticism from the U.S. State Department in its March 1 report on the "War on Drugs." In a letter back to the State Department, an irritated Quiroga pointed out the price the country has paid for its anti-drug efforts and noted, "Bolivia is owed a debt." A year ago at the Summit of the America's in Quebec, President Bush proclaimed, "We have a vision before us - a fully democratic hemisphere." Mr. Quiroga, the other president from Texas, fits Mr. Bush's new democratic vision hand-in-glove. How much of the young president's adventures in repression are his natural instincts and how much they are the product of U.S. pressures is unknown. In either case, as he heads off to meet with Mr. Bush, the numbers of dead on his watch continue to mount and his promises of leading the country into a different political era have faded into that familiar and painful Latin American pattern of democracy by tear gas and bullet. # # # Jim Shultz, executive director of The Democracy Center (www.democracyctr.org), is author of the The Democracy Owners' Manual (Rutgers University Press). ************************************************************************* Note: The Democracy Center's new comprehensive policy/advocacy guide, "The Democracy Owners' Manual" is now available from Rutgers University Press. Preview it at: http://165.230.98.36/acatalog/__The_Democracy_Owners__Manual_73.html Jim Shultz Executive Director The Democracy Center Bolivia: Casilla 5283 Cochabamba, Bolivia US: P.O. Box 22157, San Francisco, CA 94122 E-Mail: JShultz@democracyctr.org Web: http://www.democracyctr.org Tel: (415)564-4767 Fax: (978)383-1269
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