The massacre in El Porvenir was the worst in Bolivia since right-wing President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada presided over the slaughter of more than 70 unarmed protestors in October 2003. This time, however, the violence was not orchestrated by the central government, but by regional officials: departmental prefects in league with civic committees. Administratively organized similar to France, Bolivia is divided into nine departments, each run by a prefect, while civic committees are made up of a handful of unelected, local, commercial-landed elites who preside over one of the most unequal distributions of land and wealth in the world. These public- and private-sector authorities, in turn, are allied with cypto-fascist paramilitary youth gangs armed with baseball bats, clubs, chains, guns, and in the case of the massacre at El Porvenir, official vehicles. These groups have made Bolivia’s eastern lowlands ungovernable for the Morales administration.
It may be helpful for U.S. readers to consider Bolivia’s eastern lowlands as analogous to Dixie. In the 1950s and 60s, working with governors and mayors of states and localities, white supremacist paramilitary groups terrorized African Americans. The campaign of terror was intended to preserve a status quo that benefited a tiny class of wealthy white landowners, against which the federal government—under Eisenhower and Kennedy—hesitated to act.
Imagine, though, that African Americans had comprised an overwhelming majority of the U.S. population, that Kennedy was Black, and that he had come to power on the back of serial insurrections led by African Americans. Imagine that, in response, white supremacists not only massacred Blacks, but also blockaded roads, blew up oil pipelines, and burned and looted federal government offices and installations.
The limits of the analogy with the Jim Crow south are significant, but another analogy—from a century earlier, the 1850s and 60s—transcends them. The southern secessionist movement sought to preserve the republic of slavery and extend it through the west to the Pacific. The movement mobilized a mass following and mounted an armed challenge to the federal government. Such analogies help convey the virulence of what one commentator has labeled a “revolt of the rich,” as well as the scope of the challenge posed by a wealthy white minority to a government backed by a majority of workers and campesinos of Indian descent, a government without historical precedent.
link"For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it." - Patrick Henry
The level of injustice and wrong you endure is directly determined by how much you quietly submit to. Even to the point of extinction.
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