It was eerie and somewhat uncomfortable returning to Cochabamba after my blissful holiday travels last Saturday. On the road, I’d gotten a feel for what was happening – photos of a singed central plaza on the front pages of newspapers, images of people being beaten played repeatedly to a horror movie soundtrack on the infamously sensational Bolivian news stations. On the last leg of my trip, we alternated between waiting in long lines of trucks and buses and swerving around the half-picked up blockades every 100 meters that had prevented hundreds of people from traveling to and from Cocha for several days.
The city was quiet when I arrived, nothing like those marches and vicious beatings I’d seen on television. As I sped down Heroinas towards home, I peered down the side streets of the central plaza for vestiges of what I’d heard and seen in such a detached way, but only caught a quick glimpse of the crowds still holding vigil in the central plaza.
The “sides”:
- Manfred Reyes Villa and co – Manfred is the somewhat slimy prefect for the department of Cochabamba, basically the Bolivian equivalent of a governor. He came to power in Cochabamba in the first departmental elections for prefects (they were appointed before) last year with a little under 50%. To over-simplify things, he represents the white middle and upper class and is a force of opposition to Evo’s socialist MAS government, with which he has had continuous tension. Perhaps the biggest issue has been his riding the autonomy bandwagon, demanding greater autonomy for Cochabamba along with the other rich, white departments of eastern Bolivia, namely Santa Cruz. (We call people from this so-called Miami of Bolivia cambas. Everyone else, the collas, tends to attach terms like neo-fascist, racist, crazy, etc. when talking about their camba compatriots.) To clarify, autonomy in this context does not mean secession, but rather that each department have greater control over its resources and spending. This is just as controversial to the central government and other departments, however, because it means that Santa Cruz, for example, wants to individually reap greater benefits from its recent oil wealth. Meanwhile, mining departments like Potosí had supported the entire country for centuries, and it’s just not fair.
Manfred called a referendum for Cochabamba’s autonomy in June-ish of 2006, which was defeated by a vote of 63%. The issue here is that he decided to re-raise the referendum in December 2006, causing uproar among his opposition.
- MAS, the cocaleros, social movements and co – This is the side that you most frequently see from outside of the country, the face of the government, but not necessarily the ultimate power in the country. Evo (elected as the first indigenous president and with a rare absolute majority in Bolivia) built his pre-presidency reputation as a leader of the cocaleros, the coca farmers of Cochabamba’s tropical Chapare region. His political party is MAS, “movimiento al socialismo”, which has a strong rural campesino and cocalero base. Slap on to this side various social movements and activists that aren’t necessarily pro-MAS/Evo, put are definitely anti-Manfred and anti-autonomy. Following Manfred’s call for a new referendum, campesinos bused into the city from all over the department, and these groups converged in Cochabamba’s plazas demanding Manfred’s resignation as prefect, throwing in various accusations of corruption for good measure.
To give as brief a summary as possible, on Monday, January 8th, there was a massive manifestation of these anti-Manfred groups in Cochabamba’s central plaza. The story goes that as the manifestation escalated, the police tear gassed the crowd; the protestors then retaliated by setting fire to cars and rolling burning tires in the prefecture, causing damage to the offices. On Tuesday and Wednesday things intensified with thousands marching against Manfred, blockading Cochabamba and virtually shutting down the city. This increased friction not only with Manfred supporters, but also with people from the city in general, embittered by the campesinos from outside of the city coming in and halting its regular functioning. Anti-protestors began amassing, both sides frustrated and armed. As the Andean Information Network put it in a pretty apt quote on Wednesday, “In Cochabamba, class, race and urban or rural residency now define more than political affiliation – they also determine the blunt instruments you take to protests. Social groups supporting MAS continue to carry sticks, two by fours and a few machetes in the main plaza. In contrast, MAS opponents marched today with baseball bats, lead pipes, billy clubs and even a hockey stick.”
It all exploded on Thursday in an absurdly symbolic and tragic scene. Campesinos and the social movements continued to hold the center of the city and hundreds rested in a plaza at the end of an important central avenue, behind a line of police officers. Beyond this plaza is a bridge which leads into the northern zone of the city, largely inhabited by the middle class and more well off families. Manfred supporters and anti-protestors gathered on this northern side of the bridge throughout the day, and it appears that at about 4:00 in the afternoon broke through the line of police officers, initiating a brutal beating along the central avenue between two bands of extremely angry and violent, primarily, men. Over 100 people were injured (a few of which are still in critical condition in the hospital) in the brutal confrontations that took place between those wielding sticks and throwing rocks, and those unfortunate enough to get in the way; a 42-year old cocalero was shot; and a 17-year old who was with his Manfred-supporting dad was attacked with a machete and hung with wire from a tree.
There are all sorts of theories floating around: the campesinos were paid/threatened by MAS leaders to come to Cochabamba to protest, cambas flew in from Santa Cruz to provoke the anti-protestors, which of the sides started the violence, that either Evo or Manfred orchestrated the whole show, etc. In the following days, things got even more confusing. More marches, continued demands for resignation, and weak attempts at moderation by the central government, until quite suddenly in the middle of this week, leaders of both bands met and protestors disappeared from the city. Currently, Evo asks that the opposition accept that Manfred was democratically elected as prefect. To compromise, he is pushing a measure that would facilitate a democratic referendum process to remove mayors, prefects, and yes, presidents from office (currently, nothing like this exists, explaining why Bolivia has such an impressive history of golpes de estado).
The results?
Never in my life have I been so confused in the face of news and politics and forming an opinion as I have in Bolivia. I work with activist interns, I live with a middle-class family, and I talk to Mauricio daily, who knows everyone and has close friends in both bands. Never has it been more evident how divided Bolivia is – while many people compared the scope of these protests and the violence to Cochabamba’s famous water war of 2000, it couldn’t be more different. While the pueblo united in a historical victory over the government and foreign interests in 2000, this time around it was cochabambinos beating other cochabambinos in the street in an ugly display of blatant racism and brutality. Yet this undeniable division is not all there is to it. It didn’t take many conversations with cochabambinos to grasp the perspective of the people in neither band who suffered regardless – the vendors and farmers who weren’t able to sell their products for a week because of blockades, the poor families who went to the market and couldn’t afford to buy a 5 peso bag of tomatoes suddenly marked up to 30 pesos due to the crisis, the friend of Mauricio’s who is in critical condition in the hospital because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on Thursday as he walked home.
I think the one common sentiment right now is profound disappointment with the leaders and nausea-inducing democracy rhetoric on both sides. With Manfred, who unconstitutionally raised the autonomy referendum for the second time in order to provoke conflict with the national government and put himself in the limelight as a key figure of the opposition. With MAS and Evo, both elected by an majority because of many people who, talking to now, I never would have suspected to have voted for him (namely, certain members of my host family) – but they did, and the single most common reason is that everyone wanted change. But it seems that MAS is falling right back into the power by force and coercion and shady business that they were supposed to turn around. And even if Evo didn’t play a role in organizing the campesinos’ protest in the city, he certainly could have wielded a bit of his influence to call it off.
What’s sickening is that this seems to have been a pointless show of power by two blocs who manipulated a ruthless confrontation at the expense of the people who they misguided with their “democracia” and “pueblo unido” speeches. Meanwhile, those who should have been compensating for their mistakes and moving their focus from power to peace were comfortably absent from the tension. Manfred was chilling in La Paz and later hid out in Santa Cruz, from where he easily could have escaped to Miami at any moment. Evo jumped from partying in Nicaragua to business in Ecuador and Brazil, with a brief stop in his country to address the issues.
In a sad moment on CNN, a reporter commented on the violence happening in Cochabamba. The following headline: “Meanwhile, Evo has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize…”
