Another week in Bolivia

Just as ever more gruesome details of the massacre of peasants in Pando continue to emerge, the opposition media - that is to say, most of the Bolivian media - have chosen to ignore these disgraceful events and the survivors. Instead, they have been crying foul of the police’s arrest of the main accused, Leopoldo Fernández, whom we introduced in our previous posting. In addition, they have concentrated on the arrest of a police woman who is accused of having given the critical sign to shooters to start the massacre, and of two other people who have been charged with terrorist charges for blowing up a gas pipe used to export gas to Brazil last August.

These are the ‘canalladas’ (cynical lies) - as well-known journalist Amalia Pando has called them - that have been used by the opposition to refer to the events in Pando:

-The massacre was not such thing. It was a confrontation by two armed groups. The fact that only peasant men, women and children on their way to town have died has to do with the fact that the other side were bad a shooting.

-The video circulating on You Tube (see:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFvRGemlv3k) is fake. It has been doctored by government agents to put the opposition on a bad light. Would you agree??




Instead, accusations have been flying from the opposition that the government is persecuting them and their supporters (read Leopoldo Fernandez, or Mr Vaca, who has confessed his part on the gas pipe attack). Senate members of the opposition have even had the audacity to go on record to show their dissatisfaction with the UNASUR-led human rights commission investigating the events in Pando. So they have proceeded to send their own ‘investigative commission’, but only to Brazil, to visit their political supporters who fled after committing or instructing the killings.

To top it all, the opposition prefects, whose violent shenanigans that culminated in the massacre opened up a series of talks with government about those aspects of the proposed Constitution they find less palatable, have used this supposed ‘persecution’ to pull out of talks, further delaying the approval of a new draft Constitution and throwing the entire process into disarray.

Just another political week in Bolivia.

At the same time, Rafael Correa, a political outsider who two years ago surprised everyone by winning the Ecuadorean presidency, has managed to lead the process of writing a new constitution that was approved with a large majority in a national referendum that took place last Sunday 28th September. He calls it ‘a constitution that will bring 21st century socialism to Ecuador’. I bet MAS are looking north with envy right now.