Aymara Rebellion And Democratic Dictatorship

"We're going to count up how much you owe us in back taxes since 1532! You're just tenants! We're the rightful owners of this country!... Since you can't govern, give us back the power! ... Let us govern!"

Opposition Senator Germán "El Inca" Choquehuanca to Bolivian Vice-President Carlos Meza, October 9, 2003

La Paz Bolivia (Znet) October 13, 2003 -- With rumors of an impending State of Siege and/or coup attempt circulating through the body politic, on October 10, twenty-one years after the end of its last dictatorship, Bolivia's citizens were comparing dictatorship and democracy.

After the October 12 massacre in El Alto, an Aymara city of 800,000 on the upper edge of La Paz, which left at least twenty-five dead and one hundred injured, millions of Bolivians have concluded that dictatorship and democracy are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. The opposition demands a new democracy in the form of a Constituent Assembly, in which the majority will enjoy political/cultural equality and decide the fate of its natural resources--gas in particular.

Throughout the afternoon of October 10, at the wake of the 22 year-old Aymara bricklayer, Ramiro Vargas, held in the middle of Avenue 6 de Marzo in Ventilla, on the outskirts of El Alto, the mourners chanted, "Now for sure! Civ-il war! Now for sure! Civ-il war!" Police shot Vargas on October 9 for no reason other than that 500 miners had arrived from Huanuni to join the civic strike in El Alto, rejecting the FTAA and the export of Bolivian gas to the US via Chile.

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