Bolivia: indigenous people and mestizos
Setting indigenous people against mestizos in a country like Bolivia is to betray one's country. It is as absurd as
trying to separate red blood corpuscules from white ones while trying to keep the body alive. Our independent life was
born from the fusion of the indigenous rebellion of Tupaj Katari in 1781 that weakened the Spanish imperial power and of
the untamed cries for freedom of High Peru from 1809 onwards. Its most decisive expression was La Paz's Junta Tuitiva
presided over by the mestizo Pedro Domingo Murillo and composed also of the indigenous Katari Inkacollo de Yungas,
Gregorio Roxas de Omasuyos and José Sanco de Sorata. The inheritors of the colonial period were the beneficiaries of
those heroic deeds that gave birth to Bolivian statehood. (see www.patriagrande.org.bo)
The separation of indigenous and mestizo always ended in tragedy. The feudal mining oligarchy, in order to prevent
indigenous people from taking up military service, left the country defenceless during both the Pacific War of 1879 and
the Acre war of 1901-1904. Unity given free rein, on the other hand, allowed the survival of Bolivia during the
fratricidal Chaco conflict of 1932-1935, provoked by Standard Oil and Shell. In 1899, the mestizos abandoned the aymara
leader Pablo Zárate Willca and helped the tin barons and big landowners into power for more than 50 years. Quechua
leaders, by supporting the pro-US General René Barrientes Ortuño between 1964 and 1969 made possible the massacres of
mineworkers and greater imperialist control of mining and oil.
The pre-Colombian cultures set Bolivia apart in the world. That is why we should defend them. The indian-mestizo
symbiosis should lead us to adopt in a sensitive way scientific and technological advances from other parts of the world
that may strengten our nationhood. Unfortunately, as Mauricio Ochoa Urioste has noted, francophile ideologues forced
through the approval of a Constitution that, while it attacks opprobrious social exclusion, also tries to create 36
ethnic frontiers to satisfy foreign NGOs and multinational corporations that support separatism for eastern Bolivia.
The Movement towards Socialism's (MAS) constitutional text, whose consequences will be dire if they are not deeply
revised, has already provoked bloody fights between members of indigenous communities and members of mining
cooperatives, as indigenous and mestizo as their adversaries. Such confrontations inevitably favour foreign interests
and their local proxies. The paradoxical thing is that no one has been able to point to the line separating an
indigenous person from a mestizo person. While on the other hand articulation of this is the only way to stop Bolivia
from disappearing.
When, to use Evo Morales opportune image, the ponchos and the suits face off, then the basis of social cohabitation has
broken.The arrogance of the promoters of extreme indigenous ideology, so friendly with George Soros and the NGOs, tipped
the country into exporting capital, welfarism and ingovernability accompanied by, as Alex Contreras, ex-Presidential
spokesman, recounts, corruption, internal division, violence, media censorship and disinformation.
The break-up of that cohabitation has handed the Santa Cruz oligarchy the excuse it needed to push for its long-desired
separatism and to manipulate in its favour the people of the department's legitimate wish for autonomy with national
unity. It has led to the government, that said it was the bulwark of national unity, to preen itself with its calls for
help to the foreign ministries of Brazil, Argentina and Colombia and also to representatives of international
organizations. For its part, the right wing opposition calls for help to the US, while Senator Oscar Ortiz of PODEMOS
(the country's most conservative party) sought help from the President of Peru, Alan Garcia. Both sides try to ignore
that the New World Order has decided to disappear national States in countries at the periphery. Bolivia runs the risk
of being the first victim in our continent of that perverse objective.
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Translation copyleft tortilla con sal.