Resistance to the Bolivian Coup: A Personal Account

The author was carrying out thesis research in a Bolivian mining community last summer when a military coup occurred.

On the morning of July 17, 1980, reports arrived in La Paz, Bolivia that a military uprising had taken place in Trinidad, a departmental capital east of La Paz. The military in Trinidad demanded that the Armed Forces take charge of the government. Bolivia's National Committee for the Defense of Democracy (CONADE) called an emergency meeting in La Paz and ordered a general strike and road blockades in protest. At noon, before that meeting had ended, ambulances arrived at the meeting place and heavily armed paramilitary personnel jumped out, broke in, and arrested everyone present. Several, most notably Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, the Socialist president candidate, were killed on the spot.

Two Bolivian University students who attended the meeting and subsequently escaped compiled a written description of the events. An excerpt describes Quiroga's assassination:

When we arrived to the ground floor, one of the fascists recognized Marcelo Quiroga and ordered that the others move on and that Quiroga be led to another room. Obviously, they had orders to kill him then and there, and wanted to do it without witnesses. Marcelo objected to being separated and grabbed the banister. It took two men to pull him away, but as they were doing so, another shot Quiroga at point black range in the chest with a submachine gun . . .

That afternoon the Armed Forces occupied the city of La Paz, closed the University and took numerous political prisoners; the count soon reached 2000. A few hours later the Constitutional president, Lydia Gueiler, abandoned the government and General Luis Garcia Meza, commander of the Army, assumed the Presidency.

In Viloco, a mining community of 4000 inhabitants, both miners and campesinos had been anxiously awaiting the fulfillment of the previous month's democratic elections in which Hernan Siles Zuazo, a center-left candidate, had won a clear plurality. Zuazo was to be inaugurated August 6. When news of the military coup reached Viloco, the response was swift and unanimous. The miners' union called a general strike and formed a 12-member steering committee to coordinate the resistance. The committee included representatives of miners, their wives and relavaderos, Marginal workers not formally hired by the mining company. Action was taken immediately to block the road to Viloco and groups were assigned to stand guard to give warning if the military approached.

Later that day Radio Viloco called a meeting for the next morning in Curawara, the central hamlet of the valley. The approximately 5000 campesinos of this region speak Aymara, an Indian language, as a first language. They save a portion of their agricultural produce for their own consumption and carry the rest to Viloco and to La Paz for sale in the urban markets.

At the meeting in Curawara, a resistance committee for the valley was formed and the first decision made was that no agricultural produce would leave for La Paz, in keeping with the strike and blockades called by CONADE. They also decided to suspend sports events and observance of religious holidays that would detract from the efforts at hand. Then the assembly addressed the question of security. The campesinos were assigned to guard the lower valley, the only alternative entrance to Viloco. Each community was responsible for providing 15 men for a 24 hour shift. Women stepped forward and asked what they could do to contribute. The assembly decided that women would not be involved directly in combat, but would help by making weapons, preparing and distributing food, and caring for the wounded. "Civil War" and "the enemy" were the terms used in reference to the imminent conflict.

Though arms and ammunition were scarce everywhere, miners managed to take dynamite from the mining company, and they distributed it carefully to each community. A campesino experienced in guerilla warfare demonstrated the production of grenades using a half stick of dynamite, tin cans, and scraps of metal and glass. Another man showed the group how to make Molotov cocktails, filling glass bottles with gasoline and old rags. These homemade weapons and an occasional rifle left over from the '52 revolution were all the people had to defend themselves. In return for the dynamite, the campesinos agreed to provide food to the miners as supplies ran low.

Radio Viloco was crucial to these organizing efforts in the countryside, and also was the only means of communication among mining centers. At 10:00 each evening. Radio Viloco and seven other miners' radios formed a network in order to exchange news and messages of solidarity. On July 18, the network reported that one nearby radio station had been occupied, that another had been strafed by the air force, and that a military offensive in the town of Huanuni had been repulsed by miners and peasants. The next morning a meeting in the countryside was interrupted by a special report. Someone turned up the radio: miners and campesinos crowded around as the network announced that Radio Huanuni had fallen and that the town was occupied. There was a hush in the group, a mixture of fear and anger.

By the fourth day of the coup, the military still had not entered Viloco. In part, this reflects the community's strategic location. Unlike the largest mines. Huanuni and Catavi, the winding mountainous road to Viloco is easily protected and the town's location in a ring of hills makes bombing and strafing from the air very difficult. In addition, Viloco is a smaller mine, and according to official statistics has been losing money for many years; Huanuni, on the other hand, was a primary target because it is one of the few profitable nationalized mines.

Despite these factors, everyone in Viloco knew that it was only a matter of time before they would be attacked. I left Viloco on the morning of July 20, upon notice that military were coming. No one in the town had slept the previous night. Men mobilized commandos to reinforce the entrance point, and a group of women surrounded the radio, holding only a Bolivian flag in their defense. The atmosphere was unbearably tense; all were aware that they could not last long in battle, and that once the town was occupied, the military repression would be brutal.

Nor would this be the first time that the Bolivian military has occupied the mines and forced people back to work. Miners have a history of violent confrontations with the military which intensified beginning in the 1940s when the miners' union was first formed. Major mines were nationalized in 1952, and pressure from miners working for the state-owned enterprise (COMIBOL) led to other left-leaning reforms by the new government. In the mid-1960s a foreign financed "rehabilitation" plan phased out miners' participation in COMIBOL's management, but it took a series of massacres by the military government of Barrientos to impose this change.

Right-wing forces cannot rid themselves of the political pressures from miners because mineral production has such importance in the Bolivian economy. Although miners represent only 3 per cent of Bolivia's workforce, mining provides the Bolivian government with 60 per cent of its official foreign exchange. Most recently, miners have used their clout to fight persistently for democratic elections; many in Viloco and other centers vowed to oppose this latest interruption to the final consequences. The resistance of such communities had been instrumental in staving off a 1979 attempted coup.

But this time determined resistance from miners, urban workers, and campesinos was no match for brute military force. Three weeks after the coup the military had forced workers back to their jobs, cleared road blockades and restored the flow of produce to the cities. Under direct supervision from the Argentinian military, the Bolivian repressive apparatus became more thorough and astute. In the cities, specially trained para-military forces made surprise raids during the night, systematically terrorizing anyone thought capable of providing leadership to the resistance. Repression in the mines was less selective because opposition there had been more widespread and militant. Since international journalists were expelled from the country in mid-August and national newspapers censored documentation of atrocities committed in these first weeks has rarely reached the international press. Excerpts from a letter by two miners' wives from Caracoles, a mining center near Viloco, to the archbishop of La Paz describe the coup's aftermath:

We greet you in these times of griel and sorrow. We want you to know what has taken place in this mining center so that through your mediation the barbarbous cruelty can be divulged . . . The Max Toledo Regiment attacked Caracoles with guns, mortars, tanks and war planes; our husbands defended themselves with stones, sticks and dynamite. By Monday afternoon most of the miners were dead, and the survivors either fled to the hills or houses in Villa Carmen. Army troops pursued them and killed some men in their homes, arrested and tortured others and bayonetted many. They also decapitated the wounded. In the middle of the plaza they put dynamite in the mouth of one miner and blew him to pieces . . . They whipped children with cables and made them eat gun powder. They made young people lie down on broken glass and forced us to walk over them; afterwards the soldiers marched over them. At dawn, on Tuesday, Agust 5, they loaded the dead and wounded into three army trucks headed for La Paz . . . About 900 people disappeared, the dead, wounded and prisoners.

The magnitude of political repression by the military has made organized opposition to Garcia Meza over the past year virtually impossible. Siles Zuazo has established a government-in-exile based in Lima, Peru which, combined with clandestine political work within the country, may eventually pose a forceful challenge to the military regime. In the meantime, political stability will depend on other factors. The regime has survived economically so far because of the repeated lenience of the international financial community. At the time of the coup, Bolivia's foreign debt was $1.9 billion, $170 million of which came due in December. Within 10 days a consortium of banks led by Chase Manhattan agreed to postpone the payments. Last Friday, the consortium agreed in principle to reschedule another $460 million, giving Garcia Meza additional breathing space.

This most recent reprieve is contingent on prior fulfillment of an IMF stabilization plan that Garcia Meza first tried to impose in January. IMF intervention in the Bolivian economy has a long history of detrimental effects on the popular sectors and the latest IMF conditions are no exception. In January, economic degrees resulted in severe inflation of necessary goods and wage freezes. Workers all over Bolivia went on strike in spontaneous protest. A new attempt to comply with IMF mandates will surely bring more political problems for Garcia Meza.

The survival of Garcia Meza's regime also depends on diplomatic recognition from key developed countries. Joining the international outery against Garcia Meza in July, former president Carter withdrew the U.S. ambassador and suspended all "non-humanitarian" economic aid. Reagan's election has diminished hopes that this expression of opposition will continue. In a recent Commentary article U. N. representative Jeane Kirkpatrick advocates support of Garcia Meza's regime and argues that the human rights violations are not significant. Shortly after the article was published, nine Leftist leaders were massacred by the government.

Furthermore, Reagan's policy toward El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American governments shows a complete willingness to support institutionalized, state-sponsored terrorism of the right wing. The resistance to recognize Bolivia stems not from human rights violations, but from concern about cocaine, produced in Bolivia and sold in the United States. Deep involvement of top-ranking officers in cocaine trade has been documented beyond doubt. Analysts of Bolivian polities suspect that control over this 800-million-dollar-a-year business was a central reason for the July coup.

Outraged by the drug connection, Sen. Dennis DeConcini (R-Ariz.) is attempting to mobilize U.S. opposition to the Bolivian regime. Future U.S. recognition of Bolivia depends largely on the outcome of this controversy: human rights is not an issue.

Continued U.S. non-recognition would be highly ironic. Just as the late Shah of Iran and Somoza of Nicaragua were U.S.-created dictators, so is the Bolivian military largely a product of U.S. foreign policy in the 50s and 60s. The 1952 revolution in Bolivia shook the U.S. government because major mines were nationalized, a peoples' militia were created, and workers obtained an important role in the new government. Over the next 18 years U.S. economic aid was contingent on the rebuilding of the military, and direct military aid during that period came to $56.6 million. Even more important, between 1950 and 1975 nearly 4000 Bolivian military personnel were trained in Panama and the United States. The ideological emphasis of this training was rabidly anticommunist, and the predominant message was that only the military could "save" the country from internal threats to political stability. Young officers were taught to see politically active workers and campesinos as insurgent enemies.

Since 1964, when the military came to power in Bolivia, there have been massive denials of human rights, extensive political repression, including frequent massacres of peasants and miners. U.S. economic military and economic aid continued undaunted during all of that time, and only recently has there been any serious objection to the interruptions in the democratic process.

With the upsurge of militarism and Cold War politics in the U.S., rapid change in the Bolivian situation is highly improbable. If the past is any indication, miners and campesinos will slowly reorganize and gradually force a political opening. This will give the Left an opportunity to reformulate its strategy in light of past experience. Opposition leaders agree that the new strategy must include a means to neutralize the military, either through political influence or countervailing military strength. Our responsibility as North Americans is to support the reassertion of the Bolivian Left as it occurs, and to oppose all diplomatic and economic ties between the U.S. and the military regime. Monitoring our own government's action is of special importance.

All over Latin America, the U.S. is taking the side of repressive, elite-controlled regimes. By working to prevent that support, we will help workers and campesinos within each country to assert themselves politically, to challenge the injustice of their own situations, and to determine their own destinies.

Charles R. Hale '81, a Social Studies concentrator who wrote his thesis on Boliva, is also a member of Education for Action's Bolivian Study Group.

The Cocaine Connection

Cocaine, one of the most popular and most expensive illicit drugs sold in the U.S., derives from the coca plant which grows mainly in Peru and Bolivia. For centuries, highland Indians have chewed leaves of the coca plant as a mild stimulant, to stave off hunger and drowsiness. Although this use continues, Bolivia now produces four times more coca leaf than can be consumed locally.

The rest, some 27,000 tons per year, is converted into cocaine paste, and exported to Colombia where additional processing takes place. The final product enters the U.S. market.

The cocaine trade in Bolivia has boomed since the military coup of July 1980. CBS' 60 Minutes recently provided ample documentation that top-ranking members of the military are closely associated with the elite group which controls the drug traffic. Minister of Interior Colonel Luis Arce Gomez, for example, is part owner of an air freight company which makes weekly flights to an unknown location in Colombia. In February, his plane was found to be carrying 300 kilos of cocaine, but Arce avoided conviction. Arce's yearly income from cocaine was estimated at half a million.

Hernan Siles Zuazo, who won the election in June of last year, had promised to clamp down on the cocaine traders. The statement may have lacked conviction, but the military leaders were not willing to risk their 800 million per year business to find out. The subsequent coup brought to power a cocaine mafia that includes even the president Luis Garcia Meza. Informants within Bolivia report that cocaine production now has become centralized, efficient and much more tightly controlled. The losers are Indian peasants, who no longer can afford to chew coca because its price has risen astronomically. With the Bolivian mafia so pervasive and well-connected, any thought of internal drug enforcement would be preposterous.

Outraged by the drug connection, U.S. congressmen have organized opposition to the Garcia Meza regime. Sen. Dennis De Concinni (R-Ariz.), one of the most vocal opponents, contends that cocaine elites actually prop up the government, referring to an alleged $70 million emergency grant given by those involved in the illicit trade to avert an impending economic crisis. De Concinni and others also demanded that the most blatant drug traders be removed from the government, a condition that Garcia Meza met last month by dismissing Colonels Arce Gomez and Coca. The Bolivian government propbably will continue to comply with U.S. demands in hopes of achieving formal recognition and the accompanying economic support. Notably absent from U.S. demands, however, is reference to the extensive political repression and human rights violations of the Garci "Meza" regime--which clearly are not ameliorated by cosmetic changes in the Bolivian cabinet.