Bolivia: political racism in question

Idón Moisés Chivi Vargas, August 28

Bolivia is living through a time of political transition where the verbal masks used prolifically by the television, radio, and press to cover up reality and, as [Uruguayan write Eduardo] Galeano would say, lie in what they say and lie even more in what they don’t say.

We live in a country where reality is one thing and what the media says is another, the media racism is a close relative of political racism, and it constructs a country where paradoxes have the perversity of showing us the world upside down.

In this context, born democrats are those with white skin; born dictators are the ones that have dark skin and that’s why:

Democracy is when the political minority govern; dictatorship is how the social majority govern.

Democracy is the savage market where the only ones that are saved are those than can and those that have the ability to; dictatorship is the search of a society of equals.

Democracy is beating Indians, mestizos or progressive intellectuals with impunity; dictatorship is when the Indian, or the mestizo, or the progressive intellectual does not allow this to happen.

Democracy is the failure of deliberative mechanisms to find the solution to a historic crisis; dictatorship is the success of these mechanisms.

Democracy is the infamous sell out of the nation to the transnationals; dictatorship is the recuperation of those resources for the nation.

Democracy is being an accomplice to the transnationals; dictatorship is to not be one.

Democracy is being an accomplice to the corrupt judges; dictatorship is justice for all.

Democracy is protecting the privileges of the powerful; dictatorship is not doing this.

Democracy is being the privileged owner of the state; dictatorship is when the state belongs to the entire nation

Democracy is telling lies; dictatorship is telling the truth

Democracy is the exacerbated racism of the white; dictatorship is the diversity of colours.

Democracy is the media justification of racial violence; dictatorship is preserving social peace.

This is because majestic democracy sustains itself on skin colour, on the most simple, and at the same time most grotesque and perverse, racism

This string of political facts is not fiction, rather the reality of a country that has decided to decolonise itself and put things in their rightful place. They are the reverse of what is occurring today.

Bolivia is facing the task of saving the Constituent Assembly, of saving democracy, the state of law and the plurinational republic.

The oligarchic minorities persist in the protection of old privileges, of old forms of impunity and infamous domination.

Bolivia is facing the challenge of giving to the world hope of renewing its paradigms of life.

The minorities have no other paradigms than those that scorn life and diversity.

The indigenous peoples of Bolivia are facing the task of being included in the Political Constitution of the State, just that.

The same privileged ones of always, are the same racists of always and their idea of democracy has the colour of their skin, violence as a culture of domination; that is the majestic paradox, it is the persistence of colonialism.

Everything that has happened up until yesterday in Bolivia, is part of a totally planned conspiratorial plot, we have denounced this in various previously published articles: “The Camba Nazion” (2004), “The proposal for autonomy and its racial nucleus” (2005), “Egalitarian and solidarity based autonomies vs. Camba Nazion” (2007), “Sucre, the full capital and the peak of rachitic racism” (2007) and “The full capital and the poverty of the arguments” (2007).

Parallel to this we have been closely monitoring the political evolution of the “Camba Nation” since 2002, and this is an ideological and political-military nucleus that marks out the line of action for the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee, the Chamber of Farmers of the East (CAO), the Confederation of Farmers of the East (CONFEAGRO), the National Association of Producers of Oils (ANAPO), the Cruceñista Youth Union, the Federation of Business Owners of Santa Cruz, the Fraternities and obviously, the citizens’ grouping, PODEMOS, whose historic roots can be found in ADN [National Democratic Action], with recycled elements from the MNR [National Revolutionary Movement], the MIR [Movement of the Revolutionary Left], the NFR [New Republican Force] and other less important fractions.

Currently the Camba Nation has control of the prefecture of the department, the Fiscal University and all of the private universities, which it can use to arm and design paramilitary tactics of persecution, clashes and physical offensives, and wage a social and media psychological war (see www.nacioncamba.net)

According to what PODEMOS senator Luis Vasquez Villamor pointed out on a state channel (20/8/2007), “the strategists of this grouping have worked out a political strategy of shifting the regional east vs. west conflict over the argument of autonomy, to a new west vs. west strategy through the debate over the capital”.

To confirm what was said, one week after the discussion on the capital began, groups of youth from the Camba Nation (Cruceñista Youth Union) travelled to Sucre with the aim of providing political military training to youth groups there (the same thing that they did in Cochabamba before the fatal January 11).

What is really infamous, and is already an insult to intelligence, is that today, the media fills it mouth with talk of democracy, having been the same ones who solidly protected the neoliberal model and the governments that support it.

What is indignant also, is that together with the rearticulation of the conservative right, we have seen the reappearance of their same babbling spokespeople, hypocritical media judges, tricky journalists and the accomplices to the murders of October 2003.

With this we can confirm the construction of a plot, which has as its political aim:

Destabilise the government

Destabilise the parliament

Ensure the failure of the constituent assembly

Protect its hard nuclei of power (judiciary, Constitutional Tribunal, judges council, National Electoral Court, civic committees and prefectures).

Weaken, fracture and destabilise the democratic road, which for the Camba Nation means, the return of the old schemes of party-based power, construct its own regional secessionist government, and with that the return of the old neoliberal Bolivia.

To avoid this dangerous predicament, Bolivian men and women, indigenous and non-indigenous, brilliant and honest intellectuals, business owners committed to their country, have the mission of carefully protecting the results we have had until now: Nationalisation, Decolonialisation, as the basis of the New Plurinational Bolivia.

Idón Moisés Chivi Vargas is part of the Presidential representation for the Constituent Assembly, REPAC

Translated from Bolpress