Bolivia: Rodrigo Paz is Against the Wall
Featured image: Demonstrators confronting repressive forces during a highway blockade. Source: Caudia Morales, Reuters.
After four weeks of protests, Rodrigo Paz has shown himself totally incapable of controlling the sweeping popular protests in Bolivia: This Tuesday, the country woke up to 57 blockades installed on strategic highways in 5 out of nine provinces. In the capital, La Paz, which have been facing an uninterrupted siege by the protesters, is especially affected.
A Nova Democracia (AND) reports that the State intends to break the blockades in Calamarca with with 3,000 police and military and 200 vehicles that intends to enter La Paz. The repressive forces were repelled, but in the process a young protester was shot and murdered. The State also unleashed repression in other areas of the country, for example in Puerto Acosta, Camacho province, where an indigenous leader was murdered.
Rodrigo Paz has failed in his attempts to suffocate the protests despite the unleashed brutality. Yesterday, in a desperate move, the Chamber of Deputies of Bolivia annulled the legal restrictions of intervention from the Armed Forces in internal conflicts, paving the way for the army to be deployed against the people.
Rodrigo Paz has tried to deceive the people with a ridiculous measure: cutting his salary in half, in an attempt to make it seem as though he stands with the people and shares their plight, while he orders the killing of protesters and gives the military free rein to suppress the struggle. His current salary is $3,500, eight times the average income of a Bolivian worker. The protesters have responded to this charade with even greater ferocity in the demonstrations and with unwavering resolve at the roadblocks.
The truth is that all of this is proving futile, as the roadblocks continue and clashes in La Paz and other cities persist.
In many parts of the country, there have been scenes of fierce resistance in which state forces have been humiliated and rejected by the people, as happened in Caracollo, where indigenous peasants and workers from the area confronted an operation by the so-called “White Flags Humanitarian Corridor”—a police-military convoy attempting to break the blockade—on Saturday.
The local residents showed creativity and resilience: they set fire to some grasslands to create plumes of smoke and thus counter the chemical agents deployed by the State’s repressive forces. They also managed to set fire to an armored military truck.
