Bolivian fascist seperatists attack in Santa Cruz

at this IMC Bolivia article you can see an embedded video of last night's attacks by seperatists on police  http://bolivia.indymedia.org/node/14460 The article muses ironically that the Bolivian police are not exactly the local champions of human rights but that it is important to realise that at this moment when the legitimacy of Evo Morales has been revindicated with a 67% "Yes" vote in the referendum, the attacks on the Santa Cruz police are exciting emotional responses.

With one eye to the past (perhaps that is where our inner eye ought ever be) Bolivian IMC has updated its front pages with no less than 6 features, the latest of which remembers the dictatorship of 1971.  http://bolivia.indymedia.org/node/14506

That dictatorship will see its abuses and its history & its finality marked in different ways as every such regime is marked; through collective identity & selective memory - this week. The rule of Banzer began as with a coup d'etat and ended as recently as 2001 as an "elected president".
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Banzer It is difficult to think he ever lost his core support either way he ruled.

Other areas touched include the problem of the "no" vote. For indeed referenda, their results as well as questions, always pose sticky problems for anarchists and anarchosyndicalists who at least know exactly where they stand at ordinary election voting. But IMC Bolivia is throwing its weight behind this series of discussions on the referendum and the legitmacy of the new state.
 http://bolivia.indymedia.org/node/14445 Although I would have thought it more correct to discuss the legitimacy of the emerging state, being one who believes that the democracy which we ultimately seek is either emergent or retrocesive at all times in all places. Needless to say the areas of legitimacy which are proving thorniest now are not the rights of the Andean state to administer subsoil hydrocarbon resources but the very intangible right of the state to exist with its current borders.

The continent who formally escaped colonial imperialism first but so sadly be reconquered again in different guises had its principle linguistic and cultural border (that between portuguese Brazil and Spanish South America) drawn by a pope before the precise figures of longtitude and lattitude were known. OR in other words - the South American continent is second only to the North in the average size of its constituent sovreign states. Seperatism has for ever been the nightmare of European empires whose prevading philosophy has posed the rights of nations to self-determination as "questions". Thus we had the Balkan question, the Irish question, the Finnish question and so on. For its plethora of post imperial states, Africa experienced little succesful seperatism as the memory of Biafra and the ongoing simliarities of Eritrea show. But South America has seen none.

The borders have changed just a tiny bit in the little over 200 years since the first Spanish viceroys split from Mdarid. & those changes are still felt in national conscienceness to a remarkable degree. The same Bolivia which now sees this ideological fight use ethnic differences to argue seperate statehoods whose logical consequence would be a continent of hundreds of states the size of Wales - ought know about these nation-state shiboleeths.

Why else does a landlocked state still have an admiral, whose importance is so great that during the crises before Evo Morales's ascension to power, it was the admiral who temporarily held supreme power in trust? An admiral whose coastline was lost 5 generations ago but who still has a national flagship (the Bolivar) happily steaming up and down the Rio de la Plata skirting Argentine international waters in that neutral zone of historic resonance. - quite - on the other side of the continent many thousands of miles from the nearest Bolivian (or Santa Cruz) village.

By this trivia aside I hope to show that South American nationalism is quite different from any nationalism a European or even an African or Asian might readily understand. It was not the European who organised much of the continent and the exploitation of its resources in largescale geographic systems. It was the pre-Colombine indiginous empires. It is my opinion as obviously it is that of the Bolivian left and the Bolivarian left - that Bolivia has a historic legitimacy as a supra-ethnic reality. something that no proposed "free Santa Cruz" even if it were politically of our hue and to our sympathy will ever have.

But looking at both IMC Bolivia and TeleSur TV it is painfully obvious that the finer points of nation state theory and anarcho-syndicalist response to state legitimacy are not really being discussed.
We never seem to get that far, to my mind it never really gets further than arguing the last dictatorship and avoiding the next "caudillo" becoming one. For one other thing you must know about South America is that it produces "caudillos".
 http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/secciones/nota/31610-NN/paro-politico-convocado-por-la-oposicion-boliviana-comenzo-con-violencia-en-santa-cruz/

Pretty much the government of Evo Morales has qualified the 24 hour strike in Santa Cruz today as a failure. But it is important to remember that all governments, regardless of philosophy, minimise the influence of strike action. & then the usual calls for dialogue were made. Leftwing media from Bolivia IMC to Telesur concur that the fascist students of "Unión Juvenil Cruceñista" brought their bars and pipes, chains and bats to bear on truck drivers ensuring the strike did at least cause economic "difficulty".
 http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/secciones/nota/31628-NN/tras-calificar-como-fracaso-el-paro-opositor-gobierno-de-bolivia-reitera-llamado-al-dialogo/
20 people were wounded.
 http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/secciones/nota/31624-NN/paro-civil-convocado-por-prefectos-opositores-en-bolivia--deja-20-heridos/

in the last hour Evo Morales has spoken for the third time this year of the right's intention of provoking a coup d'etat but this time he has been specific in naming the group suspected -
"Union Juvenil Cruceñista". I see much and little in this :-
Bolivians are remembering the coup d'etat of 1971 as was explained in the last comment. It also makes sense - police get tired of being attacked by the right wing and often throw their lot in with them as everyone knows and so reminding people who don't like cops that a coup d'etat is the aim of a bunch of unhappy youths with not much in the way of arms makes good PR. Especially less than a week after the little known Alvaro Garcia Linera (see article and previous profile linked to) told us he had it all worked out.

Just in case you ever get to run a small country - It is always wise to pay extra special attention to the needs and aspiration of the military keeping them sweet whilst plod is getting petrol bombed & never forget the adage "shake it and see what sound it makes" - useful tips done - let's move on!
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Now the focus of indiginous issues in South America ought be moved slightly. & I believe it is very important that on an English language Indymedia node the wider issue of unthinking and presumptious absorption of ethnic indiginous affairs on the continent into leftist, Chavez/Bolivarianism or even Zapatista analysis be explored. A mistake has been made which was easy to make in the cause of simplicity and idealism. If that mistake is not clearly explained now the next twist of the Latin American dialectic will have worse consequences for the masses than the generation of dictatorships had. Ironically because the next twist will be so well honed by the generation of intellectuals who were the primary victims of the dictatorships.

Thus we need to examine Peru.

The Peruvian state has declared a state of emergency akin to military rule over a huge swathe of its territory in response to a plethora of indiginous protests over the future of the Amazon. (video  http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/secciones/nota/31623-NN/envio-de-tropas-militares-aumenta-tension-en-amazonia-peruana/ ) If you are familiar with South American material & miitarisation of the jungle issues, I'd quickly refresh "the air we breathe" knowing you'll see the planet's lungs on not narcowars :  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/05/399527.html

IF you're not completely ready to sit on a mastermind leather chair and face off Magnus Magnusson on Latin America, I will write more about how these different states and their ethnic minority concerns meld into three distinct geopolitical areas & thus require 3 different geopolitical defence strategies against our common global class enemies.

It is in Peru that we really see well illustrated the problems of contemporary "Bolivarian" or leftist emancipatory revolutionary struggles in the extent to which they can succesfully knit cross-ethnic consciousness and identity - which to simple marxist or anarchist analysis seems class identity but as I've tried many times to explain - in Bolivia an indiginous who mines is not the same working class as an indiginous who farms coca - let alone the same type of indiginous. Peru's problems are deeper are more stark - the etnocacerista movement with its protonazi symbolism, ethnic war analysis before class war stance and all as of yet still under the umbrella of the opposition to pro-west, pro-US, pro-capitalist Latin America's legacy.

basta!

I digress too far & yet too shallow. There will not be a coup d'etat in Bolivia this month but there will be an article from me on Peru. :-)