Lagniappe
Andrés
Soliz Rada: Bolivia:
indigenous people and mestizos
Setting
indigenous people against mestizos in a country like Bolivia
is to betray one's country. It is as absurd as trying
to separate red blood corpuscules from white ones while trying
to keep the body alive. Our independent life was born from
the fusion of the indigenous rebellion of Tupaj Katari in 1781
that weakened the Spanish imperial power and of the untamed
cries for freedom of High Peru from 1809 onwards. Its most
decisive expression was La Paz's Junta Tuitiva presided over
by the mestizo Pedro Domingo Murillo and composed also of the
indigenous Katari Inkacollo de Yungas, Gregorio Roxas de Omasuyos
and José Sanco de Sorata. The inheritors of the colonial
period were the beneficiaries of those heroic deeds that gave
birth to Bolivian statehood. (see www.patriagrande.org.bo)
The
separation of indigenous and mestizo always ended in tragedy.
The feudal mining oligarchy, in order to prevent indigenous
people from taking up military service, left the country defenceless
during both the Pacific War of 1879 and the Acre war of 1901-1904.
Unity given free rein, on the other hand, allowed the survival
of Bolivia during the fratricidal Chaco conflict of 1932-1935,
provoked by Standard Oil and Shell. In 1899, the mestizos abandoned
the aymara leader Pablo Zárate Willca and helped the
tin barons and big landowners into power for more than 50 years.
Quechua leaders, by supporting the pro-US General René Barrientes
Ortuño between 1964 and 1969 made possible the massacres
of mineworkers and greater imperialist control of mining and
oil.
The pre-Colombian cultures set Bolivia apart in the world. That
is why we should defend them. The indian-mestizo symbiosis should
lead us to adopt in a sensitive way scientific and technological
advances from other parts of the world that may strengten our
nationhood. Unfortunately, as Mauricio Ochoa Urioste has noted,
francophile ideologues forced through the approval of a Constitution
that, while it attacks opprobrious social exclusion, also tries
to create 36 ethnic frontiers to satisfy foreign NGOs and multinational
corporations that support separatism for eastern Bolivia.
The Movement towards Socialism's (MAS) constitutional text,
whose consequences will be dire if they are not deeply revised,
has already provoked bloody fights between members of indigenous
communities and members of mining cooperatives, as indigenous
and mestizo as their adversaries. Such confrontations inevitably
favour foreign interests and their local proxies. The paradoxical
thing is that no one has been able to point to the line separating
an indigenous person from a mestizo person. While on the other
hand articulation of this is the only way to stop Bolivia from
disappearing.
When, to use Evo Morales opportune image, the ponchos and the
suits face off, then the basis of social cohabitation has broken.The
arrogance of the promoters of extreme indigenous ideology, so
friendly with George Soros and the NGOs, tipped the country into
exporting capital, welfarism and ingovernability accompanied
by, as Alex Contreras, ex-Presidential spokesman, recounts, corruption,
internal division, violence, media censorship and disinformation.
The break-up of that cohabitation has handed the Santa Cruz
oligarchy the excuse it needed to push for its long-desired separatism
and to manipulate in its favour the people of the department's
legitimate wish for autonomy with national unity. It has led
to the government, that said it was the bulwark of national unity,
to preen itself with its calls for help to the foreign ministries
of Brazil, Argentina and Colombia and also to representatives
of international organizations. For its part, the right wing
opposition calls for help to the US, while Senator Oscar Ortiz
of PODEMOS (the country's most conservative party) sought help
from the President of Peru, Alan Garcia. Both sides try to ignore
that the New World Order has decided to disappear national States
in countries at the periphery. Bolivia runs the risk of being
the first victim in our continent of that perverse objective.
Andrés Soliz Rada is a former Bolivia's Hydrocarbons
Minister under the present government of Evo Morales. Petroleumworld
does not necessarily share these views.
Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published by scoop.co.nz,
on 04/16/2007. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest
of our readers.
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News 04/18/08
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