Gómez: The Reappearance of the Nazis in Bolivia
November 2, 2005
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Luis Gómez reports today on the resurfacing of the ugliest of tendencies among Bolivia's ruling class: a homegrown
neo-Nazi movement. In the nation where Klaus Barbie worked for years as a high- ranking secret police official after
World War II, and where for even longer a white elite has maintained its privilege at the expense of an indigenous
majority, the sudden appearance of the Radical National Socialist Union of Bolivia, writes Gómez, is significant:
"Just like the so-called Movement of the Camba Nation - which usurps the moniker 'camba' from the peasants and
indigenous of popular extraction in Santa Cruz but is made up of rich, white people -the URNSB is one of the
organizations that protects the desires of whites in Bolivia. Both groups, with different degrees of viciousness, talk
of the future and what it holds for their 'people,' whether it be supremacy or the complete control of the department of
Santa Cruz. And they can't be too far from each other, despite the efforts of the Camba oligarchy not to appear racist:
in the House of Culture in Santa Cruz, right on the city's main avenue (24 de Septiembre), there is a revealing photo: a
carnival group, in which the participants, in order to 'dance and make merry,' have dressed up as Ku Klux Klan members.
(Has Sergio Antelo, intellectual leader of the Camba Nation, seen this? Could they be relatives of his?) So, the white
'aristocracy' of Santa Cruz is not beyond such demonstrations.
"However, in this correspondent's opinion, the two rightwing groups most resemble each other in their loudness and
deviancy. Not being a majority, or even legal in their actions, they have nothing left but to create pressure with
extortion and threats of force. While some, the most cowardly, hide behind their constitutional rights, others appeal to
revisionist versions of Bolivian history to make us believe that they are the truth and the life. Or as this editorial
from the Camba Nation states: 'we can guarantee that we are in charge here, and that we will keep being Bolivians as
long as we want, and only if we want...' Ah, right, as if they were the owners of a land that they have misappropriated
for years, received as a gift, or simply stolen from the Guaraní and Guarayo people, from the Amazonian groups and the
poor peasant farmers... they have been the partners of drug traffickers, growing off of dirty money..."
Read more on this and other developments as Bolivia's latest political crisis continues, in The Narco News Bulletin:
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin