(Hugo Moldiz is a MAS leader and the head of the General Staff of the Peoples, which unites most of Bolivia’s social movements.)
The fascist onslaught, foreseeable in the coming week, by the ultra right and their paramilitary groups, armed with automatic rifles, FALs and AKs, will be a real test of the level of consciousness and organisation of the people, the loyalty of the High Command of the Armed Forces, some of whom have tight links with the Pentagon, and the strength of the revolution.
The tears and anger erupted across the country. Pando was the scene of the largest massacre that Bolivia has witnessed in the last 50 years and the state of siege, declared by President Evo Morales last Friday, is the opportunity, perhaps the only one, if the soldiers do not switch sides, to save the unity of the homeland and the revolution, and above all to avoid an even larger massacre being registered in the following days.
Bolivia is going against the clock. The civic committees, the political organisation form of the dominant classes that lack a party, and the paramilitary groups organised over the last 2 years, are finalising details for the “final confrontation” as the prefect of Tarija, Mario Cossio, warned about only minutes before beginning a meeting with the government last Friday afternoon in representation of the opposition bloc.
All available information, obviously silenced by the mass media, leads us to think that between Monday and Wednesday, although it cannot be ruled out that it may happen before, these paramilitary groups, armed as we have seen with FALs and even AK machine guns, will launch themselves against the zones with presence of MAS militants and social movements.
The leaders and social movements know that the deadline approaches with the passing of each day. There is no lack of wanting and decisiveness either. What is clear is that these men and women do not have weapons to confront the paramilitaries, as a peasant from Pando said impotently on Sunday morning, after miraculously escaping from the raid that the paramilitaries carried out, leaving up to now 35 dead.
The relative calm on Sunday is like those that precedes the days of big storms. President Evo Morales, who personally heads the preparations for resistance against what he has defined as a “civil-prefectural coup”, is profoundly conscious of what is coming and in front of millions of peasants in Cochabamba on Saturday reiterated that it is preferable to die for the homeland before betraying the struggle of the people. The words of the indigenous, revolutionary leader and head of state were not a demagogic attempt to reap applause, but rather an call to the conscience and heart in the moments of a final battle that approaches and on which will depend the future of the Bolivian revolution and in part the course of the Latin American revolution.
Goldberg has been expelled, but imperialism’s plans continue. In the week just gone by, several of his operators have dedicated themselves to knocking on the doors of the Military High Command to ask them to pay back past debts. The maximum Commander of the Armed Forces, Luis Trigo, who asked authorisation to work as co-pilot of Jorge Tuto Quiroga in the electoral campaign last December, maintains direct relations with the bourgeois of the department of Santa Cruz and has business interests in the United States. It is not even worth talking about [Commander of the Military Freddy] Macay, he was always the Pentagon’s man in the Armed Forces, his brother works in an office in charge of security issues in the US embassy in La Paz, as does his cousin.
The Eight Division of the Army in Santa Cruz, led by General Bracamonte, is strategic for the conspiratorial and coup plotting plans of imperialism and the right. The information available up to now is not encouraging for the government. At the beginning of the week, a private meeting between this military leader and the seditious Ruben Costas and Branco Marinkovic, where Gary Prado (the soldier who captured Che) also participated, finished with the commitment of the general to not act against the population or, what is basically the same: do nothing against the paramilitary groups that act with impunity in this department, the epicentre of the counter revolution.
The only thing that has stopped this kind off “sit down strike of the Bolivian Armed Forces” denounced by the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez from growing over to openly coup plotting measures against the government is the patriotic position of the other high level soldiers and the support that President Morales has amongst sub officials, classes and troops.
Time is running out. The hope that international pressure can help put an end to the violence against the people is minimal. Unasur, the UN and the OAS can pronouncement themselves in favour of dialogue, but it is highly unlikely that the ultra right will deactivate their plans, just as they didn’t in the organisation of their referendums on the autonomy statutes that the National Electoral Court declared illegal. Today the panorama is worse and the deaths and injuries send out signals that they are not contemplating taking a backward step.
It is not a lack of finance that is pushing the ultra right to maintain the state of convulsion, given that that a fund of no less than $12 million would have been built up with the support of the United States and ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who today is seeking refuge in the country to the north, but rather the certainty the longer this drags out, the bigger will be the national and international reaction that is activated against them.
And that is the key. The only thing that remains is the confidence that there is no weapon more powerful than the consciousness and the organisation of the people, and that this 67% of support for the government convert itself into an active majority and not a passive one as it has been up until now.
[Translated from La Epoca]
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