The Racket by Kennard Matt

Author:Kennard, Matt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2016-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

THE MASSACRE THAT WASN’T

In May 2008 political turmoil rocked Bolivia and threatened civil war. Santa Cruz held an autonomy referendum, which the government claimed was a move to secession by the eastern province. Rubén Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz, had said in the run-up that the vote – which was not legally sanctioned by the National Electoral Court or recognized by the OAS – would “give birth to a new republic”. (This is the same governor whom terror suspect Mario Tadic told authorities had met with the terror cell’s leader three times and vaguely discussed “organizing something”.) As things hurtled out of control with mass protests and violence, President Morales refrained from annulling the plebiscites which took place in other departments and called a recall referendum on his own mandate. He won resoundingly, with two-thirds of the national vote. At this point, desperate and bewildered, the opposition went on strike, and sent out the UJC (the far-right youth group) to attack government buildings and local indigenous people. The defeat at the polls led the opposition to unilaterally declare “autonomy” in four of the country’s eastern provinces. One of the platforms of the autonomy movement was the rejection of central government control over profits from the country’s natural gas reserves concentrated in the region. In the Bolivian context, therefore, the term was used as a euphemism for increased control over taxation, police and public works. If autonomy was granted in the form Santa Cruz wanted, Morales’ extensive reforms would be impossible – which was obviously the aim of the request.

The strategy of the autonomy movement was to take complete control of the media luna, provoke a national crisis to destabilize the government, and convince the army to remain neutral or move against Morales. The mayor of Santa Cruz, Percy Fernández, had already called on the military to overthrow Morales’ “useless government” just before the August referendum. In this heady tumult, in September 2008, 13 indigenous peasants in the Pando department of Bolivia were massacred in violence erupting across the region between pro-government and opposition forces. The atrocity remains relatively uncontroversial – unless you are the HRF, Achá, or the Bolivian opposition. A report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) placed the blame for the killing of the peasants at the hands of people working for the local prefecture, which was led at the time by the opposition politician Leopoldo Fernández. Fernández is still in jail in La Paz, after being arrested, in the aftermath, on charges that he was involved in ordering the attack. The US embassy, in the WikiLeaks cables, noted that he was being held “under dubious legal pretext”.

The UN report unequivocally called it a “massacre of peasants” and a “grave violation of human rights”, concluding that the massacre was committed by personnel from the local road service office, members of the Pando civic committee and others linked to the prefecture. The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) also sent a

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