During the first fortnight of September, the northern, eastern, and southern regions of Bolivia were in chaos. Even now, as the violence, confusion, and death that spreads from the "autonomous" regions seems to have died down—and a difficult negotiation has begun between the central government and the dissident provinces involving national and foreign intermediaries and observers including the OAS and representatives of various established churches—internal tension is not easing.

Understanding recent events is very difficult due to a tangle of disputes and long histories that come together in previously unheard-of ways. This essay seeks to schematically display the events that culminated in the massacre of El Porvenir in Pando and identify the actors in the conflict.

Days of Confrontation and Death

Sept. 5, as the first week after the "decrees package" that the Morales government designed as a political way to "move the process of change forward"3 drew to a close, the following things happened: the presidential representatives'4 offices were attacked in Santa Cruz, Tarija, Trinidad (capital of Beni), and Cobija (capital of Pando); in Santa Cruz, the office was sacked and equipment destroyed. In other more violent incidents, young people in Civic Committee-dependent paramilitary groups took over the governor offices and the airport and sacked an airplane that was carrying anti-riot gear to the police in Santa Cruz.5 Meanwhile, in the southern province of Tarija, university students took over the National Tax Office.

That was just the beginning. In the next few days, things got worse. On Sept. 9, other states suffering upheaval began to follow the example of the northern, remote, and sparsely-populated province of Pando, where Governor Leopoldo Fernandez had gone so far as to name a new National Land Reform Institute director. In Santa Cruz, members of the Cruceñista Youth Union (UJC) took over public offices, sacked them and set some of them on fire, and occupied the streets throughout the day in systematic confrontations with the police.

Apparently, aside from causing chaos, the goal was to take over the tax-collecting offices, the National Land Reform Institute, the Migration offices, and ENTEL, the recently "nationalized" telecommunications company.

The strength with which these violent groups managed to confront and neutralize the police and military force of the institutions they occupied stems primarily from their compact organization without too many members, their paramilitary aspect, and their limited use of some arms and explosives. Secondly, their strength derives from the large number of vehicles at their disposal, which allows them to quickly transport forces and persons. They did not hesitate, either, to crash some of these vehicles into the doors of public offices with the aim of opening them. Thirdly, all these events possess a strange, dark, and systematic inability of public security forces to restrain the violence, starting with the orders received to "avoid provocation" at any cost and to be extremely cautious.

The climax of the violence came on the morning of Sept. 11 at a spot on the road to Cobija, Pando, in the Bolivian Amazon. A large contingent of peasants, chestnut harvesters, student teachers, and minor merchants, men, women, children, and old people, was on its way before dawn to the provincial capital for a general meeting where they would decide how to go about stopping the lack of control caused by the governor and the "civic" groups. On their way, they were brutally detained in the middle of the bridge that leads to the community El Porvenir and shot at by government employees from the governor's office itself, and by groups of hired killers made up of some large ranchers and drug traffickers in the area. It was a massacre, a bloodbath; they fired until they emptied their cartridges and then they attacked anyone still moving with machetes. They chased and hunted down some terrified men and women who were escaping through the rainforest. The toll of this was 25 people killed, more than 70 wounded by gunshot and machete, and over 100 disappeared.

Survivors describe a massacre, and photos of corpses have hit the media, including mutilated bodies, shot children, and exploded bodies.6 The images remind one of African massacres: such is the criminal madness prominent in northern parts of Bolivia.

What is Going on?

The climate of civil disobedience, the takeover of public institutions, the violence directed toward federal government workers and, finally, the criminal massacre of peasants, all most present in the northern parts of the so-called "half moon" region—Pando, Beni, and Santa Cruz—takes on the appearance of a growing confrontation between the Morales governments and some allied grassroots organizations, on the one hand, and the political and "civic" authorities of the half moon area on the other.

However, the tumultuous events of the past few weeks should be read as a four-way conflict, the parties being: the Morales and MAS government; the regional elites as directed by the Civic Committees and backed by the governors' offices; the Armed Forces and the National Bolivian Police; and lastly, the grouping of organizations, collectives, federations, juntas, and all kinds of unions that together constitute the most dynamic force in Bolivian society.

At first glance the most visible aspect of this conflict is the confrontation between the central government and the provincial civic and political leaders, who for over a year have clashed on two main points: a) the approval or non-approval of the new constitution, and b) the fate of the extra resources obtained by the state through the sale of hydrocarbons at higher international prices under new contracts with the multinational businesses.

The first round of the conflict saw several skirmishes, like the move of the seat of the Constituent Assembly from Sucre to Oruro last November, and the current call from the half moon civic leaders and governors to submit the constitution to referendum, presumably in January of next year. The regional civic and political powers have opposed the new constitution by proposing their Provincial Autonomy Statutes. The main differences between these two projects are that the new constitution proposes a complicated state structure that recognizes provincial but also regional and indigenous autonomies, and also proposes that lieutenant governors be elected by direct vote whereas now they are appointed. Despite barely changing liberal forms of political representation, the constitution's proposal for territorial, levels-based governmental organization promotes a possible territorial control from the ground up, and constitutes a democratic opening at local levels.

The Santa Cruz autonomy statutes, on the other hand, which serve as a model for the other "autonomous" regions, include a vision of political organization as the establishment of provincial sovereignty in matters of natural resources, politics, taxes, and the use and usufruct of the land. The supporters of provincial autonomy do not support a real federalism plan. "Federalization" would be the gradual passing of rights and authorities from the central government to the provinces, which would then be sovereign and united under the federal pact.

What they do propose is for the entire range of state competencies to be passed from the La Paz government to the provincial governments and, specifically, for almost no functions to be left in the hands of the central government—not decisions on land tenure and property size, nor the prerogative to use and benefit from natural resources located in the provinces, nor the ability to charge taxes or manage foreign commerce. If the "autonomy statutes" of Santa Cruz have their way, none of this will be a function of the federal government and, rather, every autonomous province will operate according to its own political considerations. Moreover, they plan to simply copy the government structure, on a regional level, in exactly the same vertical structures that they criticize on the national level, believing that this concentration of decision-making capacity is the best model for the provincial level.

Fundamentally, the dispute over the political ways that Bolivia's territories and their resources are controlled, administrated, and governed is the most profound conflict being played out on the national political stage. The president, the central government, MAS, and the Constituent Assembly face the "autonomous" provinces' governors, the regional elites, the large landowners, agro-industry businesses, ranching, drug trafficking, the media, and those associated with the hydrocarbon industries.

The second level of regional-government conflict is the dispute around the direct hydrocarbons tax (IDH), that is, how much of state resources each political authority can spend, and how.

The next and most significant level of the conflict, which has been developing since Jan. 11, 2007 in Cochabamba, involves the multiple actions, demonstrations, speeches, and aggressions headed by the Civic Committee leaders, by local elites, and by the governors to intimidate and frighten the simple and hard-working people of their respective regions. The intention of these actions is to silence them, divide, paralyze, and confuse them. Various events of the last year and a half or more can be traced back to this, almost all in the same format: a "demand of the elites" is built up in public opinion and discourse.

In Cochabamba in Jan. 2007 the issue was to "defend" the now-revoked Governor Reyes Villa and throw the "hateful road-blocking coca-growers" out of "his" city. In Sucre between October 2007 and May 2008, the issue was "full capital status" and the ancestral rights of Sucre bluebloods to be the highest-ranking bureaucrats and civil servants in the country. In the east of the country, the central issue is "autonomy" as understood by the civic leader Branko Marinkovic, also one of the largest landowners of Santa Cruz.

The media, alongside some universities and recently created nonprofit organizations, have played a decisive role in imposing issues defined by the elites and justifying the mobilizations against rural and urban working classes. The nonprofits have "invented" and encouraged these mobilizations through forums, articles, and meetings; the media have functioned as an elite sounding board, repeating these "new and sensitive" issues ad nauseam. These "regional demands" become tools to create binary divisions in the various provinces.

In Sucre: "Those who support full capital status versus those 'MASistas' who don't and who are traitors to the region"; in the east "those who support Santa Cruz (or Beni or Pando) autonomy versus those 'MASistas' who are traitors to the region." This scheme of division and classification of people, alongside aggressive and visceral language, has been the trend in recent months. Its systematic reiteration has created an atmosphere of hate and aggression from elites and their hitmen toward workers, poor people, and community members. That confrontational atmosphere and a widespread climate of war have been reinforced time and time again, moreover, by the ferocity of bands of "cruceñista youth," "youth for democracy" in Cochabamba and in Sucre, etc., who violently intimidate the most vulnerable sectors of the population, adding to their known actions, these weeks, the ransack and burning of union and organization headquarters and destruction of markets and residences.

This mix of attitudes and actions are the clearest elements of Bolivia's civil war: the regional elites are in direct confrontation with the poor and hardworking people, as is now most obvious after the Porvenir massacre and the burning of the Filadelfia mayor's offices. The goal of all this has always been to spread a far-reaching offensive of dissuasion in order to paralyze any indication of dissent or resistance and also, as an effect of this, to show the weakness of the government so as to secure control of the area and protection of the population. This mainly occurs because, faced with the elites' systematic aggression against the humble people of the regions, the government's response has generally been timid, lukewarm, and late—"without drawing limits," as has been voiced in hundreds of grassroots organization meetings.

The war scene is completed with the systematic media offensive that for months has confused and obscured understanding of what is happening. For example, regarding the Sept. 9 confrontations, which were especially fierce in the city of Santa Cruz, the civic leaders' communications strategy was similar in all cases. When their paramilitary brigades were charging the police and attacking people with dark skin and indigenous features—qullas—the confrontations were shown on television and heralded as "acts of resistance for autonomy," a multitude of civic spokespersons made declarations, sent letters, and repeated their message that "Evo is a murderer," that "Evo is responsible for the spread of violence," that he is the one who "is attacking cruceños and Bolivians."

However, despite all this, organized communities have autonomously organized resistance to the offensive. Their growing activity has provided new strength to the Morales government in recent weeks after over 30 months. Various organizations, some close to MAS, some not so close; occasional or regular participants in the National Coordinator for Change (CONALCAM), became fed up with the aggression from the civic groups and their paramilitaries and with waiting for decisive action from the government. They have said "enough" to the excesses and violence of the former, and have begun to gradually reorganize, to argue, to speak up, and recuperate the variety of voices and tones that makes up the vital richness of recent Bolivian struggles. And they have begun to act.

After the roadblocks around Sucre, carried out by Quechua communities at the end of August, coca leaf producers established a western blockade of Santa Cruz, in coordination with the government, which interrupted Santa Cruz-Cochabamba communications in the Chapare region. Equally important are the recent weeks of resistance in the Plan 3000 urban development in Santa Cruz, where qulla-origin workers, young people, and community members have resisted and confronted the " cruceñista" paramilitary bands. In fact, in Pando, the people who were massacred and the ones who are still hiding in the forest, wounded or dying, were on their way to a meeting about how to resist the civic groups' violence and how to push the land reforms at the moment when they were attacked. Recently, emergency meetings have been held nearly all over Bolivia: in the Chiquitania north of the city of Santa Cruz and toward Beni; in the vast Guaraní regions in the south; in Cochabamba; in El Alto. The social organizations' press releases are similar in that they all declare themselves to be in states of preparation; they demand that the government use the means available to bring the Pando murderers to trial; and they all claim along the same lines that they will fight at their own decision and risk, that they will no longer tolerate the brutality and the insolence of the hitmen with links to the civic leaders.

All recent public press releases and actions are noteworthy for a new degree of political autonomy from governmental decisions, recovered by diverse and important social organizations in Bolivia. To clarify, it is not that these governments are opposed to the Morales government. They support this government and want it and approved it last Aug. 10 with a massive vote in the referendum; but they are coming to the conclusion that the government will not be capable of containing the offensive alone. Once again, thousands and thousands of men and women in Bolivia are realizing that the transformation of political and social relations is not a "top-down" question. They see the government as an ally, but they do not generally sit down and wait for the government to give them what they want. In the last 30 months they have learned that that is not possible. With caution and energy they are gradually starting to fight for their needs themselves.

These varied resistance actions have shifted the mobile stage of multiple conflicts in recent days. The delirious and systematic aggression of the civic groups has little by little been confronted by local populations, and there is the backdrop of the forward leap made by the government on Aug. 28 when it established its short-term political plan. The latter accelerated the aggression and madness of the elites as manifested in Porvenir's heaped corpses.

Meanwhile, the fourth side of this confrontation is made up of the security forces in Bolivia. The national police—a single entity, hierarchically organized, dependent on central orders, like the armed forces—was moved cautiously and until now had been in the scene as a chorus actor only.

Throughout the counter-offensive plan, the civic leaders have been especially careful to attack and offend the police and military as much as possible, perhaps trying to generate bad feelings and maybe hoping to unleash a military rebellion. If the most attacked have been the community members, the peasants, and the workers, men, and women, from rural areas, the second on the most-attacked list have been the national police and military police bodies, attacked with dynamite and humiliated in the stadium of Sucre on May 24. The police, moreover, had to tolerate, stunned, the catcalls of their commander general less than a month ago in the city of Santa Cruz.

In all these conflicts, government orders to the police and armed forces seem to have been to try and contain violence and be careful not to provoke anything. On many occasions over the past weeks, the Bolivian population has asked itself why the forces were not intervening or being more forceful with the civic groups' excesses. One interesting hypothesis which various groups advocate is the following: that there is a burdensome lack of command in the forces, that the police and army commanders do not have any guarantee that the troops will follow their lead if they decide to rebel against the MAS government and join the civic groups, while the government does not have any guarantee that the armed forces would reprimand the civic leaders or control the situation if given orders to do so.7

The latter may have changed in recent days, with the military intervention of Pando province and the capture of Governor Fernandez, accused of ordering the Porvenir massacre. The tension between political authority and military force seems to have diminished somewhat.

What Do Recent Events Mean and What Can We Expect for the Near Future?

Keeping in mind the basic traits of this four-party conflict, the following are some categorized hypotheses:

Recent events present some probable scenes that are uncertain but perhaps slightly more predictable than they were some weeks ago.

Firstly, it becomes more and more clear that what the most recalcitrant landowners and civic leaders, alongside the U.S. government, want is to consolidate a climate of intense civil confrontation in Bolivia. Among other things, the calls from the Civic Committees to the OAS and the UN8 for mediation in "Bolivia's internal conflict," as they call it; the way in which the main North American media present and explain the situation; and the internal propaganda and disinformation campaigns that the media run, show this to be the case.

After the referendum where Morales was ratified with two-thirds of the vote, it was clear that at a national level the Civic Committees' politics is a minority. The question around the true intentions of these committees was also cleared up: they do not intend to reach any agreement with the central government. What they do attempt, repeatedly and by any means, is to generate confusion and the most instability possible, to block any political initiative that aims to approve the new constitution and, ultimately, to play for time so that everything remains the same, so that any governmental initiatives will be as inefficient as possible and, finally, to sometime and somehow provoke the displacement of the legitimately elected and effectively re-elected government.

Paradoxically, September's tragedies have left an encouraging clarity on this point. In previous months and up until the Aug. 10 referendum, it seemed possible that the central government might reach some kind of agreement with the "autonomist" governor offices and Civic Committees. Morales, García Linera, and various cabinet members negotiated and looked for solutions through dialogue time and time again to no avail. Now, after the massacre at El Porvenir, the arrest of Fernández, and the trials crisis that has arisen, it seems that the government itself is more decided than before on the need to establish limits to the action of the governors and Civic Committees, and to oblige them to keep to legal paths when expressing their differences.

The situation seems clearer for the regular population also. Citizens must recover the capacity for decision making and mobilization both to detain the elite offensive, as the growing "siege" on Santa Cruz shows, and to encourage the government not to negotiate or backslide on what has been the sovereign will of the population for years, as expressed on streets and in ballot boxes—to enjoy a new legal framework for regulation of social and political relations.

In general, the situation is still delicate and the confusion, while less than it was, is still there. Completely opposite versions of the Pando peasants' massacre are being circulated. The civic leaders still insist on hiding and disguising their goals and their actions. However, the Bolivian people and the governments of neighboring countries are gradually refining their position of condemnation of the massacre: that the governors, the civic leaders, and their groups of hired killers are the ones who pulled the murdering triggers, and that they organized the chase after the injured.

As the situation stands today, the governments of Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, and, more than any other, Brazil, have rejected these bloody events and supported the Morales government. Their support, declarations, and presence curb the international rumors of invasion or occupation troops.

It is very probable that in the next few weeks Bolivia will come to a kind of truce, although we insist that the conflict is not over; it has only been transferred to institutional paths which will hopefully avoid any more deaths. Even so, the joint causes of upheaval in the country at the heart of South America will remain open to analysis.

In these circumstances, information—and the chance to understand it—is vital for everyone. Bolivia today is once again not only the place where the struggle of the working classes is condensed; it is sadly also the place where the whirlwind of contemporary confusion and violence for the destruction of countries—as propelled so by the U.S. government and its on-the-ground allies—is found with most armed confrontation. Hope is present in everything in Bolivia. It does not rest only in the Morales government's skill at continuing in power, pushing forward its progressive project; better said, it is present in the new ferment felt once again from below, from the villages, and from the communities.

End Notes

1. In a bold press release from the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, dated September 16, when the first corpses were arriving from Pando to La Paz in airplanes and the country was moved by the brutality that these people had suffered, the civic leaders stated the following in point 4 of their document: "Call upon the population not to fall in to the trap of being provoked by the violence MAS wants to propel. We also call upon the President Evo Morales to suspend this strategy of promoting violence, and we declare before our people, before the country, and before the world that we desire peace and that any violent act is the exclusive responsibility of MAS, of its leaders, and of the national government that controls these masista militants."
2. The following examples of a week of trial after trial illustrate the post-Fernández arrest withdrawal of the conflict to institutional levels: the Supreme Court—headed by magistrates who are still chosen under the former "party quota" system—asks that the detained, i.e. Leopoldo Fernández, remain its responsibility, and attempts to limit other jurisdiction for his detention and the treatment of his case; furthermore, it instigates a trial against the Ministry of Government for the events that occurred last November 24 and 25 in Sucre when the Constituent Assembly had to be moved to Oruro. The survivors of the Massacre and the relatives of the victims open a case against the attorney general, claiming omission of responsibilities in the case of the Massacre.
3. On the night of August 28, the government released a "supreme decrees package" with which it called the population to a new series of polls, planned initially for next December 7; on this date, it was proposed to hold three elections jointly—election of new governors in the provinces where the previous leaders had been recalled; election of sub-governors in the 112 provinces and of provincial advisers; and the submission to public vote of the new constitution; and also to settle everything pertinent to Article 398 about the legally permitted range of agrarian property. You will find a broader analysis of this governmental plan in Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, " Multi-Layered Conflict Poses Uncertain Future for Bolivian Reforms," http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5598, Americas Policy Program, October 16, 2008.
4. The presidential representatives occupy public roles, inaugurated in April 2007, which have a parallel function to the governors. In the political structure of the Bolivian state, until 2005 the provincial governors, also called the "first political authority," were appointed by the president of the Republic. Since 2005 these roles are submitted to the popular vote and in the five mentioned provinces the governor is currently opposed to the government of Evo Morales. In that context, the appointment of presidential representatives, who in theory "contribute" to the coordination between the now-elected governors and the central government, is viewed by the Civic Committees and the governor offices themselves as a duplication of public roles; the representatives are a kind of uncomfortable intermediary and their function is ambiguous, for example in the control of the police, and the taking of certain political and administrative decisions.
5. Erbol, Cobija, Pando, September 5, 2008. The Bolivian Information Agency finished the news item explaining that: "The offices of the National Land Reform Institute (INRA), the Forest Superintendent, the Bolivian Road Administration (ABC), and the Migration offices in the border city of Cobija are under the control of the civic leaders. The Customs Office also remains occupied, but by a small number of disabled people who seek to receive an annual benefit and life pension from the state."
6. There are two websites where information about what is happening in Bolivia can be found: the Bolivian Information Agency (ABI) to find out about official and governmental issues, and Ukhampacha Bolivia which constantly informs and links various and disperse reports about happenings in that corner of Bolivia.
7. The history of Bolivia is marked by recurrent and gory coups, disturbances, and military uprisings. Since 1982, when the so-called "democratic opening" began, the military have stayed in their barracks, pausing their role as direct political protagonists. However, the idea of the "coup" remains in the communal Bolivian imagination like a ghost that presents itself as a recurring threat from time to time; this is especially true in times of upheaval.
8. On September 12, the Santa Cruz Civic Committee sent a letter to the Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, asking for UN intervention. One of that letter's paragraphs states the following: "Since the beginning of his administration, President of Bolivia Evo Morales, also an important coca leaf producer and the president of the coca-growers' federation, has displayed an unfair and totally racist antagonism toward the Bolivian orient, as well as toward other sectors and regions of the Bolivian nation (such as Tarija, Chuquisaca, Beni, Pando). While Morales was elected by the majority, respect for those who think differently is a fundamental part of any democratic process. Since the beginning, his conduct has contravened the pacts that make up international legal systems, in particular all references to democratic guarantees and individual liberties. "

For More Information

Multi-Layered Conflict Poses Uncertain Future for Bolivian Reforms
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5598

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