Bolivia - Fresh upsurge of violence against journalists during autonomy referendum

[Judi Lynn]

Bolivia - Fresh upsurge of violence against journalists during autonomy referendum

MONTREAL, June 2 /CNW Telbec/ - Reporters Without Borders today condemned
attacks on journalists during a referendum on autonomy in the northern
department of Beni yesterday.

At least two media were targeted for threats and harassment by groups
linked to the opposition to the government in La Paz, including the Juvenil
Crucenista Union (UJC), a radical militia that stemmed from the independence
movement in Santa Cruz department.

"Armed groups hostile to the government in La Paz are increasingly acting
like predators on freedom of information," the worldwide press freedom
organisation said. "The recent autonomy referendums - in Santa Cruz on 4 May
and yesterday in the departments of Pando and Beni - are adding to a climate
of political tension in which the press is one of the first to be targeted".

Clashes between supporters and opponents of autonomy during the
consultation process in Beni led to a variety of obstructions of the work of
the press. In the department's capital, Trinidad, members of the UJC
systematically harassed special correspondents for state-run Canal 7
television.

One of its journalists, René Martinez, said that the cables on its
transmission vehicle were twice cut with machetes. "They managed to interrupt
our programme twice this Sunday. Then as we were visiting schools for the vote
count, the same youths insulted and threatened us", he said. "Our cameraman,
Edgar Quenallata, had to leave and I was forced to flee on a motorbike", he
told Reporters Without Borders.

Meanwhile, in Riberalta, a group of pro-autonomy thugs chased after
another team from Canal 7, forcing them to take refuge in the home of a local
resident.

Community, indigenous and peasant media, regularly targeted for racist
violence by militia hostile to President Evo Morales, were not spared during
the referendum violence in Beni. Gumersindo Yumani, of Coordinadora
Audiovisual Indigena television was threatened in Nuevos Horizontes by
militants of the Juvenil Riberaltena Union, a similar organisation to the UJC,
who snatched his camera and handed it back with images deleted.

More:
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/June2008/02/c7209.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Dirty deeds in Bolivia

Dirty deeds in Bolivia
Hugh O'Shaughnessy

Published 02 June 2008

Agitation, violence and illegal ballots on autonomy. Hugh O'Shaughnessy on disgraceful tactics aimed at intimidating and undermining a democratically elected president

~~~~~
Bolivia’s right-wing extremists who have been doing their best to rip their own country apart for the past two years rather than accept the rule of their constitutionally elected President Evo Morales finally have showed themselves in their true colours.

These are various violent shades of an apartheid green mixed with several unappealing tones of Ku Klux Klan off-white. For the extremists, the democratically chosen Morales labours under the crushing disadvantage of being a member of the indigenous majority. To have a head of state like that who seeks greater fairness for the indigenes, they say, will never do.

On 24 May in the run-up to this Sunday’s unofficial vote on “autonomy” rigged up by the Bolivian Klansmen in the departments of Beni and Pando they went into action in the city of Sucre. There an aggressive horde of university students and unelected conservative city notables came together to prevent their president visiting the city. He was to come to inaugurate a new step forward in the agrarian reform programme which most voters in this agriculturally stunted country want.

In their unelected grandeur, financed by the ample royalties that the government of the department of Santa Cruz gets for its oil and natural gas and spreads round its political satellites, they stationed thugs in the stadium where President Morales was to speak and aborted his visit. Then they turned their attention on the government supporters who were awaiting him.

Mainly poor peasants, they had gathered to welcome the president and greet his moves towards agrarian reform in a country where there is land for all but where much of it is concentrated in the hands of the few. A number of indigenous people who were to have received the President were seized by the mob, forcibly undressed, marched to the central plaza and made to kneel and shout anti-government slogans and to burn their ponchos, the flag of the MAS party and the wiphala, the flag favoured by indigenous peoples up and down the Andes. They were kicked, hit and racially abused.

More:
http://www.newstatesman.com/south-america/2008/06/government-president-bolivia

[Judi Lynn]

2. Just uncovered a great article: Bolivia: Political Racism in Question

Bolivia: Political Racism in Question
by Idón Moisés Chivi Vargas
28 August 2007

Bolivia is living through a time of political transition where the verbal masks used prolifically by the television, radio, and press to cover up reality and, as Galeano would say, lie in what they say and lie even more in what they don't say.

We live in a country where reality is one thing and what the media says is another, the media racism is a close relative of political racism, and it constructs a country where paradoxes have the perversity of showing us the world upside down.

In this context, born democrats are those with white skin; born dictators are the ones that have dark skin and that's why:

Democracy is when the political minority govern; dictatorship is how the social majority govern.

Democracy is the savage market where the only ones that are saved are those than can and those that have the ability to; dictatorship is the search of a society of equals.

Democracy is beating Indians, mestizos, or progressive intellectuals with impunity; dictatorship is when the Indian, or the mestizo, or the progressive intellectual does not allow this to happen.

Democracy is the failure of deliberative mechanisms to find the solution to a historic crisis; dictatorship is the success of these mechanisms.

Democracy is the infamous sellout of the nation to transnationals; dictatorship is the recuperation of those resources for the nation.

Democracy is being an accomplice to transnationals; dictatorship is to not be one.

Democracy is being an accomplice to corrupt judges; dictatorship is justice for all.

Democracy is protecting the privileges of the powerful; dictatorship is not doing this.

Democracy is being the privileged owner of the state; dictatorship is when the state belongs to the entire nation

Democracy is telling lies; dictatorship is telling the truth

Democracy is the exacerbated racism of the white; dictatorship is the diversity of colors.

Democracy is the media justification of racial violence; dictatorship is preserving social peace.

This is because majestic democracy sustains itself on skin color, on the most simple, and at the same time most grotesque and perverse, racism.

This string of political facts is not fiction, rather the reality of a country that has decided to decolonize itself and put things in their rightful place. They are the reverse of what is occurring today.

Bolivia is facing the task of saving the Constituent Assembly, of saving democracy, the state of law, and the plurinational republic.

The oligarchic minorities persist in the protection of old privileges, of old forms of impunity and infamous domination.

More:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/vargas040907.html

[Judi Lynn]

3. Sorry, I posted in error. Wrong thread. n/t