Commenting on the natural disaster that has left large swathes of Bolivia’s lowland east underwater after months of flooding, and much of the Andean region covered in ice, in late February Bolivian President Evo Morales called for a global debate on the effects of climate change and environmental destruction on poor nations.
Federico Fuentes
Walter Chavez, an adviser to Bolivian president Evo Morales, has found himself in the centre of a well-orchestrated corporate media campaign aimed at delegitimising the Morales government internationally by linking it to terrorist groups. This accusation comes only a week after attempts by the Spanish media to link Moraless party the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) with the Basque separatist group ETA.
On January 8, Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez swore in his new cabinet, including five new members, calling upon them to take an oath that they would “never rest arm or soul in the construction of the Venezuelan path towards socialism”. One the ministers sworn in was Hector Navarro, previously higher education minister and now Venezuela’s minister of science and technology.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on September 19, Bolivias 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.
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