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Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Bolivia's new President outpaces his predecessor's Repression

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


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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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