Is Bolivia on the Brink of a Civil War?

Bolivia continues in turmoil. President Evo Morales, a darling of the left, has been leading leftist "revolution" in Bolivia similar to Chavez in Venezuela. In the past few weeks, conditions have drifted towards civil war. Political differences between the indigenous coca farmers and the natural gas rich landed class and their middle class workers have exploded into street fighting in Cochabamba. This was provoked by the local Governor, Manfred Reyes Villa, who made what proved to be a dangerous play to position himself as the key national opponent of the President.
NAM

When Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, socialist Evo Morales, a year ago, the country's poor and marginalized could now claim a president as their own. It was also clear, however, that Bolivia's transformation would not end with an election, and that it would continue to provoke serious political conflict.


On Thursday, that conflict turned into open battle on the streets of the nation's third-largest city, Cochabamba, leaving two men dead and more than 150 people wounded.


"Manfred provoked this," Teodoro Sanchez told me, a 36-year-old man from the rural Chapare region outside Cochabamba. "The majority of people are tired of being cheated. We are asking for his resignation and we will continue marching until he leaves."


He was speaking of Manfred Reyes Villa, the governor of Cochabamba, who is at the center of the battle in the streets. A former presidential candidate, Reyes Villa has emerged as one of the leading opposition figures to Morales.


In December, Reyes Villa joined with four other governors to call for "regional autonomy," a demand that Bolivia's states be given wide independence from Morales' national government. The autonomy demand is primarily backed by the eastern departments that sit on top of the country's vast oil and gas reserves and is designed mainly to give those states a bigger share over the revenues that come from that oil and gas. Last July "autonomia," as it is called here, was voted on in national elections. In the state of Cochabamba, 63% of the electorate rejected it.


Last week, several thousand union members and people from the countryside descended on Cochabamba's colonial central plaza and demanded the governor's resignation. When protesters began throwing rocks at the police guarding the state building, those police responded with a barrage of tear gas. After the gassing, some in the crowd (protest leaders claim they were infiltrators seeking to provoke conflict) set fire to the building's front doors and bottom floor offices.


For more than a week a crowd of a thousand -- many of them members of the coca growers union that Morales has long led -- have occupied the Central Plaza and stood vigil over the charred doors of the abandoned state building.


"We want Manfred to leave. Autonomy will divide the people," Sabina Claros said as she squatted next to me. The 45-year-old housewife who came to the city from a rural town hours away said she was prepared to stay two months in necessary. "We have no fear, we don't even fear death."


On Thursday, Cochabamba was a city divided. While Claros, the coca growers and their allies occupied the shut-down city center, backers of Reyes Villa blockaded and occupied the streets of the Cochabamba's more affluent northern neighborhoods.


[...]Two hours later peace on the streets of Cochabamba was hard to find. All day the two sides, each armed with sticks, bats and other makeshift weapons, was separated by a wide bridge over a river and a thin line of 25 nervous police.


At 4:15, a sudden surge of as many as a thousand young, male backers of Reyes Villa broke through the police lines and began beating several hundred coca farmers -- men and women -- sitting on the lawns that mark the entrance to the city center. Television footage showed young men beating wide-skirted indigenous women with two-by-fours. Eyewitnesses say that the state police gassed the coca growers just before the young men attacked.


The targeted coca farmers ran seven long blocks toward the city's center, where 2,000 to 3,000 of their allies remained in force. Behind them raced huge bands of Reyes-Villa supporters, who carried sticks and threw a hailstorm of rocks. When word of the beatings spread to the Central Plaza, stick- and rock-wielding bands from the other side ran to engage their adversaries.


For more than an hour the streets in the city center turned into a scene of open battle. Nicómedes Gutiérrez, a 42-year-old farmer, was killed by a bullet that pierced his heart. Cristian Urrestia, the 20-year-old cousin of a Reyes-Villa aide, died after being attacked with a machete. More than 150 others were wounded.

The conflict has served to further polarize the country. The middle class that had been largely supportive of Morales may be now lost to him. Villa on the other hand appears at this point to have greatly benefited by the street fighting that by all accounts was started by his supporters. Here is a series of excerpts from the Blog from Bolivia over the past week that offers some inside information from Cochabamba.

At the news conference of the governors yesterday Manfred announced that Bolivian Cardinal Julio Terrazas has agreed to mediate a dialogue between the governors and Morales (or whomever he sends).


[...]There is no straight answer, which leads me to believe that Evo did not engineer this but also did not prevent it from happening when he could have. I believe that Morales will pay a huge political cost for all this. He began 2006 with a vast reservoir of political capital and a strong base of middle class support to add to his natural base among the poor and rural. After this week, in Cochabamba at least, what was left of that middle class base is gone and it isn’t coming back.


[...]Vice President Garcia Linera blamed Manfred for provoking the violence and also called for peace. More interesting was a long declaration on the radio this morning by the Vice Minister of Government who said the solution to the crisis needed to be a compromise that "respected democracy." That compromise, he said, meant that the cocaleros and others in the plaza needed to respect the democratic legitimacy of Reyes-Villa as governor and Reyes-Villa needed to respect, in turn, the democratic will of the people of Cochabamba who voted strongly against the regional autonomy Reyes-Villa is now backing. The prospects of either side backing down seem pretty slim at this point.


[...]The issues of political power at hand in Bolivia at this moment are important. I am not disputing that. But both Manfred and Evo bear responsibility for letting the conflicts involved become bloody battles in the streets that took a huge human toll. Neither seems to be taking the role of peacemaker right now either.