News of interest from Latin America by David Morris
Vol. 1, No. 1. Monday, September 3, 2007
Roadblock in Bolivia
The process of transforming Bolivia has met its greatest obstacle so far in an effort by opponents of the government to disrupt the writing of a new constitution. The Constituent Assembly, which began meeting in Sucre a year ago, suspended its work on August 23 in response to violent demonstrations and to intimidation of members of Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), the party of President Evo Morales, after a majority of Assembly members chose not to take up the question of moving the legislative and executive branches of government from La Paz to Sucre and after the MAS majority in Congress voted to replace four judges on the Constitutional Tribunal who, they held, had overstepped their authority by removing four justices of the Supreme Court recently appointed by Morales.After the civil war of a century ago, the legislative and executive branches of the Bolivian government were moved from the historical capital of Sucre to La Paz, the judicial branch remaining in Sucre. Sucre is now a stronghold of rightist opposition to the government. The Agencia Boliviana de Información quotes Morales as saying the real goal of agitation over moving the government back to Sucre is the destruction of the Constituent Assembly.
Facilitators of the Assembly have met to consider meeting elsewhere to avoid the violence in Sucre.
La Jornada of Mexico City reported on August 26 that Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera had declared that the United States was funding the rightist opposition in Bolivia. “It is curious,” he is quoted as saying, “that foreign aid money is being used to facilitate ideological, political, academic centers, with former conservative ministers…. That should lead us to wonder or to suspect: What kind of aid is this? They are strengthening and aiding conservative think tanks with money supposedly intended for the Bolivian people.” As the poorest country in South America, Bolivia is the most vulnerable in the emerging alliance of leftist and left-leaning governments.
On August 28, the third general strike in a month and demonstrations in rightist strongholds in the eastern part of the country were hailed as successful by organizers but dismissed by government officials who said the strike was not widely observed and that only the central areas of a few cities were affected. National organizers had vowed that the events would be peaceful but others had different plans. In Santa Cruz, a center of rightist organizing, a leader of the youth group Unión Juvenil Cruceñista announced plans to patrol the city to insure compliance with the call for a strike. He said his group would slash the tires of drivers not observing it. In Beni, another center of anti-government activity, strike committee president Jesús Hurtado, warned that “civic police” charged with enforcing compliance with the strike would take drastic measures against those not cooperating.
“There will be a blockade,” La Razón quotes him as saying, “and anyone not agreeing with the strike should just stay home, because we won’t be responsible for what happens to them.”
Jornada of La Paz reports that indigenous groups stood guard outside the Gran Mariscal Theater during the strike to protect the 255 members of the Constituent Assembly and the process of writing a new constitution. And according to La Razón, several thousand campesinos marched in Sucre that day in support of the government and of the Constituent Assembly. Florentino Barrientos of the Confederación de Campesinos de Bolivia argued that moving the government to Sucre should be accomplished through a referendum, not through violence or disruption of the Assembly’s work.
Prensa Latina reports there are plans for a march in Sucre by campesinos and indigenous Bolivians on September 10 in support of the Constituent Assembly, an event organizers predict will draw 100,000 participants.
Pasta de Conchos: remembering the miners
El Universal of Mexico City reports that a group of widows and other family members of 65 coal miners killed in an explosion 18 months ago have planned a series of events to commemorate the dead miners and to demand that the government and the owners of the mine resume the search for their remains and reinstate payments the survivors had been receiving.The bodies of only two of the 65 miners have been recovered. Industrial Minera México S.A. (IMMSA), owner of the Pasta de Conchos mine in San Juan de Sabinas, Coahuila, about 60 miles south of Eagle Pass, Texas, says conditions in the mine are too dangerous to continue the search.
The explosion on February 19, 2006, was reportedly the worst mine disaster in Mexico in 37 years. It sparked protests and militant strikes at coal, copper and zinc mines owned by IMMSA as well as at steel plants, all violently repressed by the government. It led to the Fox administration’s removing from office miner’s union head Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, who then moved to Canada. Demonstrations have been held at the company’s offices in Mexico City on the 19th of every month since the incident.
IMMSA, whose parent company, Grupo México, earned 5.2 billion U.S. dollars in profits last year, had been paying each family the equivalent pay of three shifts per day, seven days a week, representing the time the miners were absent from their families, plus other payments. The miners had been earning an average of 500 pesos a week, about 45 U.S. dollars. Each family was receiving from 11,000 to 15,000 pesos a month after their deaths, or about 989 to 1350 U.S. dollars, until payments were suspended last May 4.
The miners’ survivors will attend mass, hold religious processions and demonstrate to commemorate the miners.
Resistance, resistance, resistance
“Privatization, privatization, privatization,” Jean-Bertrand Aristide said to Naomi Klein when she asked him what had led the United States, France and Canada to sponsor the coup and kidnapping that forced the Haitian president into exile in Pretoria, South Africa, where she interviewed him for The Nation in 2005.Aristide’s resistance to privatization is one part of a continuing struggle that began soon after popular rage forced Jean-Claude Duvalier, “Baby Doc,” out of power in 1986. Currently in contention are the fates of the government-owned electrical power system, its seaport and airport facilities and, most importantly, Téléco, the Compagnie Nationale de Téléphone, which was practically shut down during a three-week strike in June by workers protesting the massive layoffs privatization would entail. They had demanded the resignation of director Michel Présumé, whom they accuse of refusing to negotiate with the union and of sabotaging telephone operations to stimulate public sentiment in favor of privatization.
A coalition of unions has announced a series of activities to mobilize the people to resist the surrender of government operations. Roger Annis reports on HaitiAnalysis.com that a transport union, the Association des Propriétaires et Chauffeurs d’Haïti, has called for unions and popular organizations to launch a two-day general strike on August 27 and 28.
The aim of privatization is not to improve the lives of the people of Haiti, Gassandy Brave of the telephone worker’s union told Agence Haïtienne de Presse, and no country where privatization has taken place has profited from it, including countries more advanced economically than Haiti.
If Aristide paid dearly for his resistance to privatization, current President René Préval, Aristide’s successor for a second time, is likely to face the outrage of the people who elected him but not that of the U.S. government. Préval has never resisted privatization. “The government of René Préval is aligning itself more and more with the interests of the foreign powers in Haiti, to the detriment of the Haitian people,” Fortuné Patrice of the transport union told Roger Annis.
During his first term as president, from 1995 to 2000, Préval oversaw the selling off of a government-owned company manufacturing cement and other building material and of its flour mill. Haitian economist Camille Chalmers was quoted in Haïti Progrès in 2002 as saying those privatizations, as predicted by critics, had resulted in higher prices for food and housing, with no improvement in distribution. Shortly after Préval’s inauguration, Haïti Progrès reported, members of the Aristide Foundation for Democracy, at a conference Aristide himself did not attend, passed a resolution declaring, “This neo-liberal plan was hatched in Washington and is not in the interests of the nation. It is the United States, the World Bank and the IMF which control this diabolic plan."
Aristide himself had been criticized by supporters after the Clinton administration reinstated him by military force following the first coup against him in 1990. As a condition for his return to the presidency, the U.S. had forced him to implement much of the IMF structural adjustment scheme but he balked at the demands to privatize state enterprises. René Préval was more cooperative. And he is more likely to remain in office.
Death in the fields
Not much has changed in Brazil’s sugar-cane fields since reports by government and human rights organizations documented the large number of deaths from sheer overwork among cane cutters. The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) reports 20 deaths in the year from 2005 to 2006. Experts quoted by MST say changing the way workers are paid would improve the situation. Workers are currently paid by the quantity of cane they cut, typically about 12 tons a day, but the low rates force them to work longer hours to earn a living. Francisco José Alves of the Universidade Federal de São Carlos urges a change to fixed salaries for cane cutters.But such a change is not likely to do much for the workers. Even if the current twelve- and fourteen-hour days were shortened, the work would still be about the most gruelling and deadly in the world. Imagine swinging a machete 72,000 times a day in the broiling sun, breathing dust and the ash from the charred cane, which is burned just before it’s harvested, imagine muscle cramps and bleeding cuts from the sharp machetes. Imagine an inadequate diet and practically nonexistent medical care.
Then imagine not being allowed to leave the fields to look for better work. Agência Brasil reported two months ago that government agencies had freed 1100 cane cutters in Ulianopolis from the debt slavery in which they had been living. Workers are paid not in cash but in script, which is accepted at company-owned stores in exchange for food and necessities but which is never enough to pay off the debts workers are forced to incur to stay alive. The raid was the largest so far in a continuing series of such raids.
Conditions in the cane fields of Brazil are similar to those wherever cane has been grown through the centuries. Haitian migrant workers in virtual slavery cut cane in the Dominican Republic, this country’s largest foreign source of sugar. The plight of Cuban cane cutters was an important factor in the revolution of 1959.
What makes sugar cane particularly relevant today is its use to make ethanol. With the enthusiastic leadership of President Luiz Inázio Lula da Silva, Brazilian businessmen are trying to position the country as the world leader in ethanol production by increasing its annual production from 17 billion liters to 110 billion liters, which would require that some 80 million hectares be planted with sugar cane. The sweat and the blood would come from the workers, the land from the Amazon.
Babies
Agence Haïtienne de Presse reports that for the time being about 100 infants will be left in the clandestine nursery in Port-au-Prince where they were discovered because the government doesn’t have the means to care for them. Of the 47 babies authorities had already rescued, ten are in a hospital being treated for malnutrition. The infants were being held by international traffickers who were offering them, at a price, for adoption overseas.The International Organization for Migrants of Geneva says the babies still in the nursery are in urgent neeed of medical care that the Haitian government has no means of providing.
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