In the worn out meeting room of worker-run Cerámica de Cuyo, Manuel Rojas runs a rough hand over his face. The mechanic recalls forming the cooperative after the company boss fired the workers in 2000: "We didn't have any choice. If we didn't take over the factory we would all be in the streets. The need to work pushed us to action."
From NACLA
Teenage actors parade barefoot onstage, jumping and pounding drums. Others walk in with notebooks and briefcases overflowing with papers. Each actor spouts fragmented political speeches. The play depicts revolts and counter-revolts throughout Bolivian history, ending with a dramatic exchange between a mother and the ghost of her dead son, tortured during a dictatorship. “Don’t cry, Mom!” the ghost says. “I died bravely even though they gouged my eyes out and tore me apart. Don’t cry!”
George W. Bush and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez crisscrossed Latin America on parallel tours recently, pushing opposing agendas. While Bush touted free trade, cooperative ventures and US aid programs, Chávez touched down in Bolivia, where his socialist ally, President Evo Morales, is dancing precariously with a divided population.
New social movements have emerged in
Evo Morales climbed into his presidential jeep, ducking a barrage of sticks, debris and insults thrown from members of right wing civic groups in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Cameramen and livid activists chased him until police filled the streets with tear gas. Bolivia's first indigenous president, a former coca grower and self-described anti-imperialist, was not welcome in Santa Cruz. This took place in September, 2006 when Morales arrived uninvited to a celebration of the city's founding. Upon leaving, he ran into a sector of Bolivian society that poses one of the biggest challenges to his administration: the leading opposition party, Poder Democrático Social (PODEMOS), the Comité Cívico Pro-Santa Cruz, and the Unión Juvenil Crucenista. Unión Juvenil with clubs
Silvestre Saisari, a bearded, soft-spoken leader in the Bolivian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), sat in his office in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The building was surrounded by a high cement wall topped with barbed wire. It looked like a military bunker. This made sense given the treatment Saisairi and other like-minded social and labor organizers received from the city's right wing elite. In 2005, the young MST leader was attacked while giving a press conference on landowners' use of armed thugs to suppress landless farmers. To prevent him from denouncing these acts to the media, people reportedly tied to landowners pulled his hair, strangled, punched, and beat him.(1) Sitting in his well-protected headquarters, Saisari explained, "Land is a center of power. He who has land, has power .we are proposing than this land be redistributed, so their [elites] power will be affected."(2)
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