Bolivia

  • Bolivia's Morales: 'This little Indian won't be leaving office'

    On January 22, 2002, then Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) senator Evo Morales was expelled from parliament, accused of being a “narco-terrorist”. Exactly five years later, as the nation’s first indigenous president, Morales gave his first annual report to parliament. This time it was not Morales who exited prematurely.

  • Cochabamba challenges governor

    Cochabamba is a city with a history of struggle. In April 2000 the people stood up against the privatisation of their water supply, threw out the multinational Bechtel and retook control of the local water company. In October 2003 they joined the thousands of people on the street in El Alto, La Paz and other cities to defend the right of the people to nationalise the country’s gas reserves, effectively forcing, then president and champion of the neoliberal economic model Gonzales Sanchez de Lozada to flee the country.

  • Right wing in Bolivia moves to destabilise indigenous power

    A chain of events triggered by the passage of a new agrarian reform law, part of the “agrarian revolution” of indigenous President Evo Morales, has brought into sharp relief the drive by the right-wing opposition to overthrow Morales’s government, even if it means pushing Bolivia towards a civil war.

  • Going underground in Bolivia

    Before we descended into the mine, our mini-bus (or micro) dropped us at the local “miner’s market” so we could buy sticks of dynamite, bags of coca leaves and a few 2-litre bottles of soft drink. These were gifts for some of the miners we were about to visit underground who still work the Cerro Rico — the famous mountain of silver that towers over the city of Potosi, located 4100 metres above sea level in the Bolivian Andes.

  • Waiting for nationalisation

    On May 1, the day the Bolivian government announced the “nationalisation” of the country’s vast oil and gas reserves, I went out to witness the symbolic takeover of a former Bolivian refinery that was privatised in the late ’90s.

  • Behind the 'tin war' in Huanuni

    For two days in early October, the sides of the barren Posokoni Hill above the mining town of Huanuni, 150 kilometres southeast of Bolivia’s capital La Paz, were transformed into a war zone in the two most violent days since leftist Evo Morales was elected the country’s president last December.

  • When Cochabamba said 'Enough!'

    In April 2000, the people of Cochabamba captured the imagination of anti-corporate campaigners the world over. Only months after the US transnational Bechtel took control of the regions water supply — forcing citizens to pay for rainwater they collected — the people of Cochabamba, organised through the Coalition in Defence of Water and Life, rose up and booted out the corporation.

  • Solidarity urged for extradition campaign

    Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on September 19, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, said that previous Bolivian governments had “massacred people that struggled for their economic demands, for their natural resources” and that “perpetrators of genocide, corrupt criminals, escape in order to live in the United States”.