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The neighborhood councils of El Alto declare war on the coup in Bolivia

The powerful organization of El Alto, a city located five kilometers from La Paz, calls for "forming self-defense committees, blockades, permanent and forceful mobilization." This organization was key in the fall of neoliberal president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003.

The coup has hit its first major obstacle: the Federation of Neighborhood Boards (Fejuve) of El Alto. This powerful social organization had already stood out in the social struggles that preceded the arrival of Evo Morales to the Government, and was decisive in the fall of neoliberal president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003, as well as in the expulsion of Aguas del Illimani, a subsidiary of the multinational Suez, after the privatization of water in 2005. This city located five kilometers from the capital was also the epicenter of the protests that in 2010 forced Evo Morales himself to withdraw the famous “Gasolinazo” [proposed cuts to fuel subsidies that were defeated by popular protest].

Hours after Morales presented his resignation on November 10, the Fejuve-El Alto leadership called at a press conference to “form self-defense committees, blockades, permanent and forceful mobilization, in different sectors of the Government headquarters”. In the same way, Fejuve-El Alto appealed to the police to defend the Bolivian population and launched a threat: “Otherwise, the civil union police are instructed to build up our population.”

The president of the neighborhood federation of El Alto, Basilio Vilazante, gave a period of 48 hours to those he considers responsible for the coup to leave the department of La Paz “for inciting division, convulsion and violence among Bolivians.” The first of those cited by this social organization is Luis Fernando Camacho, a lawyer from Santa Cruz, capital of the Bolivian oligarchy, who began his militancy in the ultra-rightist and supremacist Juvenile Cruceñista Union, identified by the party of Evo Morales as the main instigator of the blow. The president of Fejuve-El Alto also cited Waldo Albarracín, rector of the La Paz University of San Andrés, who became a strong opponent of Morales, and Marco Punari, president of the Potosí Civic Committee.

El Alto is a city of almost one million inhabitants, mostly nourished by Aymara migrants from the Altiplano, located a few kilometers from La Paz, more than 4,000 meters high. In El Alto is the airport of the capital, many of the main fuel tanks and one of the obligatory steps to enter La Paz. The strategic value of El Alto and the power of the neighborhood boards, which are organized on a street by street basis, has made all the Governments that passed through the Burned Palace, since colonial times, look up with a mixture of respect and fear.

Hours after the announcement of the neighborhood federation, already on the night of November 10, hundreds of people cut the road that connects the capital with the airport and where the buses that go down to La Paz pass, and blocked the passage to the height of the toll.

Some scenarios and neighbors who were already protagonists of the famous Gas War of October 2003, when the clashes between the people of El Salvador and the army over the control of access to the capital became a real war, as epic as unequal . The imagination was on the part of the neighborhood boards, which were organized to resist for weeks, dug ditches in the cement and even derailed train cars to prevent the passage of military convoys trying to reach the fuel tanks. But the weapons were from the army and their bullets caused 77 deaths and 400 wounded. The then president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, educated in the United States and still having an English accent, had to resign.

However, much has changed since then. And the Fejuve, as well as the rest of the Bolivian social movements - after years off the streets, in which their leaders were included in different governments of the Socialism Movement (MAS) -, are no longer what they were. According to the critic Raquel Gutiérrez, these movements were largely “corporatized” and have lost initiative, in a drift of internal divisions and disconnection between the leadership and the bases.

In addition, as denounced again and again by the research center on natural resources of Cochabamba Cedib , the extractivist and developmentalist policy of the Government of Evo Morales, as well as the criminalization suffered by social organizations that did not align with the MAS, led to the Morales Government to lose many supports, even within the indigenous movement. Some of these movements were part of the protests against the alleged fraud in the last elections.

As the Bolivian analyst and former director of the international NGO Focus On The Global South - an entity not suspected of playing the game right - points out, the composition of the opposing sides is not homogeneous : “It is necessary to make it clear that both on the side of the government as of the opposition forces there are indigenous and workers. The government obviously has more support in rural areas, but in the opposition sector there are also coca leaf producers from the Yungas area [near La Paz], peasant leaders, mining workers, health and education workers and especially young students of both middle class and popular extraction ”.

It remains to be seen if the current crisis, which can be exploited by the oligarchic sectors of the richest departments of Bolivia to destroy the conquests of the so-called ‘process of change’, allows a new articulation of the previously all-powerful Bolivian social organizations.

Social movements in Bolivia begin to mobilise against the coup

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