AP - Bolivia has confiscated 280,000 more acres (115,000 hectares) of allegedly fallow or ill-gotten land as part of President Evo Morales' drive to redistribute land to the poor, the government announced Thursday.
The seizure includes 51,000 acres (21,000 hectares) from the ranching company of prominent opposition figure Osvaldo Monasterio, land reform agency chief Juan Carlos Rojas told reporters. Four other haciendas were targeted.
Rojas said the government determined the holdings in eastern Bolivia are underused or have fraudulent deeds -- reasons cited in the past for denying compensation to owners of seized land.
Monasterio is the owner of the Unitel television network, which is aligned with Morales' conservative opposition.
He did not immediately say whether he will appeal, and a person who answered the phone at Unitel on Thursday evening said no immediate comment was planned.
The government previously confiscated two other haciendas from Monasterio totaling about 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares).
In 2009, the government confiscated five haciendas covering 90,000 acres (36,000 hectares) in Bolivia's Chaco region, including ranch lands belonging to American cattleman Ronald Larsen. The government said ethnic Guarani workers there were found to be indentured servants, treated as virtual slaves.
Larsen vehemently denied mistreating the workers and their families, but a court recently upheld the seizure without compensation.
Morales is pushing an agrarian reform project that aims to redistribute land from wealthy owners to the poor indigenous majority.
Landowners targeted by the government allege the seizures are politically motivated.
Bolivia: Social tensions erupt
Federico Fuentes
Recent scenes of roadblocks, strikes and even the dynamiting of a vice-minister’s home in the Bolivian department (administrative district) of Potosi, reminiscent of the days of previous neoliberal governments, have left many asking themselves what is really going on in the “new” Bolivia of indigenous President Evo Morales.
Since July 29, the city of Potosi, which has 160,000 inhabitants, has ground to a halt. Locals are up in arms over what they perceive to be a lack of support for regional development on the part of the national government.
Potosi is Bolivia’s poorest department but the most important for the mining sector, which is on the verge of surpassing gas as the country’s principal export because of rising mineral prices.
Julio Quinonez, a miners’ cooperative leader told El Diario on August 4: “We don’t want to continue to be the dairy cow that the other regions live off as they always have. Potosi can move forward whether through independence, federalisation or autonomy as established in the constitution.”
Local media reported that 100,000 people attended a rally in the city of Potosi on August 3. A hunger strike was initiated that swelled to include more than 600 political and social leaders, including the governor, some local deputies aligned with Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and 20 sex-workers.
The trigger for the protests was an age-old dispute over departmental boundary demarcations with neighbouring Oruro following the discovery that a hill in the area contains minerals used to make cement.
Locals are demanding the government invest more in the region, frustrated that the government has not resolved the daily problems of a poverty-stricken region with an infant mortality rate of 101 in every 1000 babies born — despite sitting on 50% of the world’s lithium.
They are proposing the construction of a cement factory, the completion of a road between Potosi and the department of Tarija, the reopening of the Karachipampa metallurgical plant and an international airport for what is one of Bolivia’s premier tourist destinations.
Another demand is the preservation of the Cerro Rico. These legendary mountains overlooking the city of Potosi used to hold the world’s largest silver mine. Now it is in danger of collapsing as a result of centuries of rapacious looting dating back to colonial days, when Potosi was the same size as London and financed much of Europe’s development.
Locals have occupied an electricity plant and threatened to cut off supplies to the nearby Japanese-owned San Cristobal mine — the largest in Bolivia.
Supplies of food and other essentials are beginning to run extremely low.
Many roadblocks have been lifted, but negotiations between the government and local authorities stalled as they demanded that Morales himself, and not his “right-wing” ministers, come to the table.
Meanwhile, locals in Uyuni in the south of the department, home to the famous salt lakes and Bolivia’s lithium reserves, voted on August 12 to blockade roads against the protests being organised by the Potosi civic committee. They claim the civic committee wants a lithium processing plant to be built closer to the city so that it solely benefits the city of Potosi.
They are also demanding that the government install an interconnected electrical system in Uyuni and build a Uyuni-Huancarani highway.
These protests have been preceded by similar, though smaller protests, by workers over wages, clashes in Caravani between rival local peasant organisations over the site of a new citrus processing plant and a march by Amazonian indigenous peoples demanding consultation before any state activity to exploit natural resources.
These are warning signs of some of the challenges that the process for change underway in Bolivia faces.
To understand the protests it is necessary to look at the relationship that exists between social movements, the government and Morales.
The MAS, or Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (IPSP), as it was originally known, emerged both as a result of the process of decentralisation of Bolivia’s political system through the creation of municipal councils and local National Assembly deputies in the early 1990s, as well as the crisis that the political system underwent around the same time.
With the old ruling political parties in a state of terminal decay and the old left-wing groups having either disintegrated or incorporated itself into the traditional party system, it was Bolivia’s rising indigenous and peasant organisations that gave birth to their “political instrument” with the aim of entering the electoral arena and moving from resistance to power.
The core of this new political instrument was the peasant confederation, CSUTCB; the “Bartolinas,” a peasant women’s confederation confederation; the colonisers confederation, CSCB (now know as intercultural communities, CSCIB) and the coca growers of the Chapare, from whose ranks Morales emerged.
Through winning control of a number of local councils and seats in congress, the cocaleros became the core around which the various regional and sectoral organisations would coalesce in the late ’90s to make up the IPSP (more commonly known as MAS, its electorally registered name).
In 2000, an important cycle of revolutionary struggle exploded, beginning with the opposition to water privatisation in Cochabamba and uprisings in support of indigenous self-determination in the Aymara highlands.
The first wave of this cycle peaked with the overthrow of the-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in October 2003, when a diverse range of worker, peasant and indigenous organisations first united against the government’s attempts to cheaply export the country’s gas via Chile. The movement demanded the president’s resignation following the massacre of more than 60 people.
A second wave of resistance brought down his successor in June 2005, again with diverse organisations uniting around the issue of gas. This paved the way for Morales’ victory in December 2005 presidential election, with a historic 54.7% of the vote.
Fierce resistance from the traditional elites, who felt they were being pushed out of power, triggered the third, most powerful revolutionary wave in this cycle of struggle.
Bunkered down in the wealthier eastern states, the right-wing opposition set off a chain of events aimed at overthrowing Morales. However, the combined action of Morales’ government, the social movements and the armed forces crushed the coup attempt in September 2008, a blow the opposition has yet to fully recover from.
Ironically, while its electoral base grew to 64% in December 2009, the MAS itself was greatly weakened.
The MAS was born in the countryside, where the structures of the “political instrument” and the powerful peasant and indigenous organisations were one and the same. But it began to expand into the cities following its 2005 victory, where social organisations are much weaker and individual affiliation prevailed.
In many cases, due to the lack of trained professionals in the peasant and indigenous organisations, Morales was forced to rely on “invitees” from the already existing state bureaucracy to run the government.
Most of Morales’ first cabinet came from these sectors, causing concern among the founding organisations of the MAS, who felt they were not being treated as they should be, with quotas in the government.
While the relatively autonomous social organisations united to defend “their” government during times of intense confrontation, they have also tended to retreat to more local and sectoral demands.
Now in government, many of these groups began to view the MAS as a vehicle to access employment in the public service, just as the middle classes did with their parties when they were in power.
The absence of internal structures in the MAS that could allow a debate over its future led to it becoming increasingly irrelevant as anything more than a place to look for work.
Above all this stood Morales: at the same time as leading the process of change, he is head of state, head of the MAS and even continues to head the cocalero union in the Chapare.
With a debilitated MAS, Morales increasingly plays the role of mediator between ministers, social organisations, party leaders, militants, and “invitees”.
This created the rise in demands on the government by various sectors, who having supported “their” government through the intense battles of the last few years, now want it to resolve all the problems inherited from centuries of colonialism.
Here the government is encountering a number of challenges. There is a state bureaucracy which works more to undermine than advance the government’s projects and social organisations with political baggage inherited from the previous society. The government points out it is impossible to resolve century-old problems overnight.
According to an August 9 article by Pablo Stefanoni, Morales outlined the fight against narcotrafficking and contraband, low levels of public investment, personal ambitions and the industrialisation of natural resources as key problems.
“It is in the construction of the state that the success or failure of the reforms underway will play out”, Stefanoni said.
But to do this, it is vital to reconstruct a political instrument that can truly become a space for the exchange of debates and ideas about the future of the process, capable of generating proposals and uniting the necessary forces to implement a coherent project of change.
Otherwise, indecision, improvisation, inaction and incoherence will continue to plague Bolivia’s process of change.
Bolivia in talks to end protests hitting key mines
Aug 14 (Reuters) - The Bolivian government began talks early on Saturday seeking to end protests that have hurt output at two of the world's top silver mines.
The government and the demonstrators, who want an increase in public spending in the mineral-rich Potosi region, both said they were hopeful an agreement could be reached.
The more than two weeks of protests have hurt the mining industry in Bolivia, a major global producer of zinc, silver, tin and lead.
The start of formal negotiations comes after preliminary discussions stalled on Friday. The government has withdrawn earlier demands for demonstrators to lift the protest before sitting down for talks. Protest leaders also dropped demands to meet with President Evo Morales.
"The government wants an agreement as soon as possible to put an end to the protest," Presidency Minister Oscar Coca said.
He said the government was willing to negotiate protesters' demands, which include the building of a cement plant and a new airport.
Protest leader Celestino Condori said talks were "a sign of goodwill."
U.S.-based Coeur D'Alene's (CDE.N) San Bartolome mine, the world's largest pure silver mine, has been shut down for two weeks after workers joined the protests.
Japan-based Sumitomo's (8053.T) silver-zinc-lead San Cristobal mine was forced to stop processing ore after some demonstrators threatened to cut the power supply to the operation.
The combined output of the two mines accounts for about 83 percent of the nearly 1.1 million kilograms of fine silver Bolivia produced in 2009, according to mining ministry data.
Government officials have said the protests could have cost the poor country tens of millions of dollars so far. (Reporting by Carlos Quiroga; Writing by Alonso Soto; Editing by Eric Beech)
Bolivia: CIA Knew About Terrorist Plans Against Cuban and Venezuelan Brigades
Jean-Guy Allard
CIA agent Istvan Belovai, advisor of the Eduardo Rosza's paramilitary conspiracy to assassinate Evo Morales, in April, 2009, also knew about murderous plans against humanitarian brigades of Cuban and Venezuelan doctors and engineers developing communitarian works in the poorest communities the eastern part of Bolivia.
Proof of this are electronic messages between Rosza and Belovai, which are being carefully studied since they were discovered by the Bolivian Data and Analysis Research Center in Cochabamba, chaired by the well-known anthropologist and communicator Wilson García Mérida.
"Rosza proposed that Belovai to attack specific targets, which had been planned through these emails," said the researcher.
"They talked about the exploitation of the Pailón bridge —the largest in Bolivia, over a mile long, opened by Evo Morales in a sugar plantation area in Santa Cruz—, as well as those points carefully identified through Google maps. In the latter are brigades of Venezuelan military engineers of the binational groups, who are supporting with communitarian actions the poorest municipalities of Bolivia, along with Cuban doctors."
Former Hungarian intelligence officer, Istvan Belovai, who worked as a liaison officer between the Hungarian-Croatian Eduardo Rosza Flores, head of the paramilitary group responsible for assassination, and the US intelligence, died on December 6 in Denver , US, where he lived since he hurriedly left his homeland in 1990.
The circumstances of Belovai's death are still unknown.
In the mid eighties, the then Lieutenant Colonel Istvan Belovai (the "Scorpion-B" agent) of the Hungarian military intelligence services hit the headlines when he informed the CIA about the names of US officials informing the Hungarian intelligence. By the 90's, Belovai immigrated to the US and joined the main US spy agency.
Belovai's death took place just when the content of one of Rosza Flores' computer-laptops was being carefully revised. In a folder called Bel - Norte, Bolivian experts came across several emails Rosza Flores exchanges with agent Belovai.
TERRORIST VALLADARES INVOLVED
In these emails between the terrorist and the Hungarian spy, the name of the representative of the Human Rights Foundation in Bolivia Hugo Achá Melgar is mentioned. Achá is currently a fugitive in the US after having been denounced as one of the main financiers of the terrorist war plotted against Bolivia.
Achá Melgar was then in permanent contact with Cuban-American terrorist Armando Valladares, who ran the activities of this foundation used by the CIA as a facade from New York.
The relation between Hugo Achá Melgar and Valladares is direct, since this lawyer boasted about it in public —he was a co-conductor of a TV program with a high audience in Santa Cruz, where he used to refer to Valladares as his "dear personal friend." In fact, from the direct link between Acha Melgar and Valladares, the arrival of "international observers" (anti Castro agents) to Santa Cruz took place, during the January 2009 referendum, among these observers was Belovai," said Wilson Garcia Merida.
Valladares — the terrorist of Cuban origin was arrested in Havana City with Carlos Alberto Montaner on December 1960, while they were directing terrorist attacks in stores and movies of the Cuban capital, sponsored by the CIA— led his subversive organization from the very Empire State Building of New York, without the interference of the FBI. A while after the events of Santa Cruz, Valladares resigned the presidency of that organization, a facade already known due to his interfering campaigns against Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
Between October and November 2008, when the cited correspondence took place, Rosza Flores "had started to distance himself from his separatist godfathers of the Santa Cruz oligarchy, since they refused to give him the financing resources they demanded to buy weapons of mass destruction like missiles and tanks," and looked then for the direct contact with the CIA and its financial support via Belovai and Valladares.
The aim of the plot, thwarted in April 2009 in the Hotel las Americas in Santa Cruz, was to assassinate President Evo Morales, his vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera and the minister of Government, Juan Ramón Quintana.
THEY ALL TOOK REFUGE IN THE UNITED STATES
Among the leaders of the Supreme Council, who directed the conspiracy to assassinate Evo Morales, was an influential businessman from Santa Cruz, Branko Marinkovic, Croatian by origin.
Marinkovic escaped from Bolivia after being denounced by the district’s attorney and found refugee in the United States.
After the disarticulation of the command, the head of Arbitration and Conciliation of Santa Cruz, Alejandro Melgar Pereira, a participant in the plot, fled from Bolivia to the US.
They also proved that Rosza Flores was in contact with UnoAmerica, a Latin American fascist organization headed by Alejandro Peña Esclusa, who then appeared at the side of the Honduran coup attackers.
Peña Esclusa has multiple links with the Cuban American mafia in Miami and runs two anti Chavez groups affiliated to his organization.
He was detained on July 5 by officials of the Bolivarian Service of National Intelligence (SEBIN), after an operation undertaken in his residency in Caracas. One kilogram of C4 explosives and 100 detonators were then confiscated.
Republished from Granma
Bolivia protests bring mines to a halt
By David Mercado and Carlos Quiroga
POTOSI/LA PAZ, Aug 11 (Reuters) - Mining companies Coeur D'Alene (CDE.N) and Glencore said on Wednesday anti-government protests in Bolivia's southern Potosi region have brought their mining operations there to a standstill.
Demonstrations demanding the government carry out development projects in the country's mineral rich Potosi region also forced the San Cristobal mine -- one of Bolivia's largest -- to halt some of its productions, a company spokesman told Reuters.
Local residents have been protesting against the government for nearly two weeks, blocking roads linking Potosi with the rest of the country.
The San Cristobal mine is still extracting mineral ore although it has stopped processing it and is no longer transporting it to Chile, from where it is shipped abroad, spokesman Javier Prado said.
"We're very worried ... if we don't (restart the plant) we could face a complete shutdown of the mine in the short term," he told Reuters.
San Cristobal is one of the largest mines in landlocked Bolivia, producing some 1,300 tonnes of zinc-silver ore, and 300 tonnes of lead-silver ore per day. It is 100 percent owned by Japan's Sumitomo Corp (8053.T).
The protests have also left dozens of foreign tourists stranded. Some protest leaders have been on a hunger strike since Saturday, demanding leftist President Evo Morales visits the area to negotiate with them.
"The mining industry in Potosi is paralized," protest leader Celestino Condori told reporters.
The protests also brought to a halt the Cerro Rico silver mine, where thousands of independent miners work, and some key mines controlled by foreign investors, including San Bartolome, the world's largest pure silver mine run by Coeur D'Alene.
San Bartolome official Jose Manuel Farfan told Reuters the company has been unable to operate for 12 days, while an official from Glencore's Porco mine who asked not to be named said they were also at a standstill.
Protests by Indian groups against mining companies are fairly common in impoverished Bolivia, which is a big producer of zinc, silver, tin and lead.
The Andean country exported nearly 1.5 billion worth of minerals in 2009. (Writing by Eduardo Garcia)
Bolivian UN Ambassador interviewed on Democracy Now
Bolivian UN Ambassador: Despite Extreme Weather, US and Other Developed Countries Failing to Make Serious Pledges to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Even as the world faces a series of extreme weather events that scientists warn is related to global warming, international climate negotiations are moving at a glacial pace. The latest round of climate talks in Bonn, Germany, ended last week, and diplomats have just one more short meeting in China in the coming months to hash out their differences before the critical high-level climate conference in Cancún, Mexico, at the end of the year. We speak to Ambassador Pablo Solón. He is Bolivia’s permanent representative to the United Nations and was in Bonn last week.
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: Even as the world faces a series of extreme weather events that scientists warn is related to global warming, international climate negotiations are moving at a glacial pace. The latest round of climate talks in Bonn, Germany, ended last week, and diplomats have just one more short meeting in China in the coming months to hash out their differences before the critical high-level climate conference in Cancún, Mexico, at the end of the year.
At the meetings in Bonn, the negotiating text got a lot bigger, and a number of proposals from developing countries were added into the controversial agreement that came out of the divisive Copenhagen summit last year. Some fear the new text could slow down talks in Cancún, but others say the concerns of the majority of the world’s countries are finally represented in the text.
For more on what this means for a binding global agreement on climate change, I’m joined here in New York by Ambassador Pablo Solón, Bolivia’s permanent representative to the United Nations. He was just in Bonn last week.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
PABLO SOLÓN: Hello. Pleasure to be here with you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. As you listen to the litany of extreme weather all over the world, your thoughts as you return from Bonn?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, I would say that what you have shown is the reality, that it’s not changing as fast as we would want the process of negotiation. I have heard speeches in Bonn relating the situation in Pakistan, but the concrete pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are the same that one year ago. And with the current pledges of emission reductions from developed countries, we’re going to be in something like three to four degrees Celsius, an increase in three to four degrees Celsius. Now, what we are seeing, what you have shown, is related to an increase of zero-point—less than one degree Celsius. So, can you imagine a situation where this triples or multiplies by four? It’s unbelievable. And still, developed countries have put on the table targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that will increase the temperature dramatically during the coming years and during this century. So that is something that, until now, it hasn’t changed. I go negotiation—to all the negotiations during this year. We have all the—put all the evidence, and still the pledges of developed countries remain the same—very, very low, almost to business as usual.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the United States, in particular? Where are we on this?
PABLO SOLÓN: The United States has made a very, very small pledge. It is something that means to reduce three percent from the levels of 1990. To compare it, other countries, like the European Union, have said that 20 percent to 30 percent; the United States, three percent. So, almost nothing at all. Why? That is the question. Because corporate interests, economy, profits have more weight in the negotiation than, I would say, to preserve life and biodiversity and Mother Earth in climate talks. So that is the problem that we are facing.
In Cancún, the greatest challenge is, are we going to have a deal where developed countries are going to reduce in the next seven years at least half of their emissions? Yes or no? We say it very clearly. If this doesn’t happen, what we are seeing now is just the first episode of a tragedy. So, we need to put a lot of pressure around the whole world if we want really to have a greenhouse gas emission reduction that saves life.
AMY GOODMAN: Just remind people, how would you summarize what happened in Copenhagen, just to get a sense of where we are now?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, what happened in Copenhagen was that the process of negotiation was kidnapped by a group of countries. Usually we negotiate 192 countries. And suddenly, in Copenhagen, a group of countries said, “Now, this is the Copenhagen Accord. It’s 3:00 a.m. in the morning. You have one hour to sign it.” And, of course, we said, “No, not at all. We want to discuss it.” Why? Because in that Copenhagen Accord, said that the target was to limit the temperature to two degrees Celsius, so that is almost three times what we are seeing now. And there are a lot of countries that are saying we should limit the temperature to 1.5 or to one degree Celsius. That is the proposal of Bolivia. Why? Because some states are going to disappear. There is a state called Tuvalu. Its width is 607 meters. Its highest hill is four meters. If the temperature keeps raising, it will be under the water.
So, now we have, after the climate talk in Bonn, a new text. It’s bigger, as you have said. But it has the proposals of developing countries to limit the increase of the temperature, to develop a climate a court of justice, because somebody has to be responsible for this, to not only commodify, to not make profit through a new market, carbon market, mechanism, but also to recognize the rights of Mother Earth in the process of negotiations. So now we have a text that reflects, from our point of view, the proposals that were made in Cochabamba, in the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights. So, now the key thing is, from here until Cancún, what is going to prevail? It’s going to prevail the people’s voice, Mother Earth’s voice, or it’s going to prevail corporate voice.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at a piece by John Vidal in The Guardian. “New research reveals carbon emissions from rich nations could actually rise under loopholes in the proposed UN climate deal.” What are these gaping loopholes in the climate change treaty put forward in Copenhagen?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, it’s, for example, a country says, “I’m going to reduce 20 percent.” So you say, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” But in reality, there is some tricky parts in the different treaties that allow him, for example, to buy certificates of emission reduction in another developing country. So he, in reality, is not going to reduce; he’s just going to pay somebody else that is going to do his job, but there won’t be a real emission reduction. Second, there is a way of accounting. So, I say, “I’m reducing because now I have planted some more trees here, and I account them in this way.” So, there are too many things in the negotiation that really make things even worse.
So, today in Bonn, or last week in Bonn, it was very clear that they say the average is going to be a reduction, in the best scenario, of 18 percent, taking into account the levels of 1990. But because of these loopholes, in reality, there could be an increase to four or seven percent of the emissions of 1990. So what we are asking for is that when a country says, “I’m going to reduce,” say it very clearly, “How much are you going to reduce domestically, without any kind of loopholes, without any kind of carbon market, without any kind of offsets?” That is the only way to have a clear negotiation that is transparent for people.
AMY GOODMAN: Has the US attitude changed at all? I mean, after Copenhagen, you spoke out fiercely against it. President Morales did, as well. The United States penalized you by millions of dollars, saying if you wouldn’t sign on to the Copenhagen Accord, is that right?
PABLO SOLÓN: Yeah, they—
AMY GOODMAN: Did you sign on?
PABLO SOLÓN: No, of course not. I mean, they penalized us with an aid of $3 million, because they said we didn’t support the Copenhagen Accord. And we said, “You can keep your money.” But we are not fighting for a couple of coins. We’re fighting for life.
AMY GOODMAN: Why? How does this affect Bolivia?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, we have glaciers, for example, in Bolivia. Until now, we have lost one-third of our glaciers. If this situation continues in Bolivia, we’re going to lose the vast majority of our glaciers. All our mountains will be naked. And you know the consequences for that in relation to water for agriculture, for drinking water for the populations there. And this is a situation where we cannot hide ourselves. We think that there has to be a very responsible action.
And coming to the first part of your question, I would say that the situation in the United States has begun to move backwards. What I feel is that when this proposal of law was withdrawn from the Senate, then everybody began to say, “Oh”—
AMY GOODMAN: When the energy bill…
PABLO SOLÓN: Yeah. Then the United States is not even going to go move forward, move beyond what they have already said they were going to do, but instead, they can move backwards. That is the perception that I feel in—from other developed countries. So, if the United States is not going to do too much, then the others say, “Why should I do it?” And then comes a discussion of, “Well, if I do more, and the United States does so less, then I will be in a difficult situation to compete with the products of the United States, because I will have to invest more in clean energy.” And so, at the end, what happens is, we’re in a very difficult situation.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting. I remember when Bolivia held the climate change conference. The foreign minister of Ecuador said, in response to Ecuador also being penalized millions for not signing on to the Copenhagen Accord, the US cutting off money to Ecuador, they said they would give that money to the United States, an equivalent amount of money—I think it was like $2 million—if the US would sign on to the Kyoto treaty.
But I wanted to go back to a few weeks ago. We had Maude Barlow on, the former water representative at the United Nations, the day that the resolution was passed, that you, Ambassador Pablo Solón of Bolivia, had put forward around the issue of water and sanitation. This is an excerpt of what you had to say at the UN.
PABLO SOLÓN: [translated] At the global level, approximately one out of every eight people do not have drinking water. In just one day, more than 200 million hours of the time used by women is spent collecting and transporting water for their homes. The lack of sanitation is even worse, because it affects 2.6 billion people, which represents 40 percent of the global population. According to the report of the World Health Organization and of UNICEF of 2009, which is titled “Diarrhoea: Why Children Are [Still] Dying and What We Can Do,” every day 24,000 children die in developing countries due to causes that can be prevented, such as diarrhea, which is caused by contaminated water. This means that a child dies every three-and-a-half seconds. One, two, three. As they say in my village, the time is now.
AMY GOODMAN: Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón, he’s our guest today in studio. The first resolution on this issue, explain.
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, in the UN, we have recognized the right to food, the human right to education, the right to work, the right to social security. But for sixty years, we haven’t recognized the human right to water. So it’s the first time in history that the UN recognizes the human right to water and sanitation.
AMY GOODMAN: Who supported it, and who didn’t?
PABLO SOLÓN: We had forty-two countries that co-sponsored the resolution. That day, 122 countries voted in favor, and forty-two countries abstained.
AMY GOODMAN: Abstained?
PABLO SOLÓN: Abstained. So that means that 75 percent of the countries that were present voted in favor, and 25 percent abstained. Nobody voted against, but many made speeches expressing that they didn’t support the resolution, but that they were not going to vote against it.
AMY GOODMAN: And the US being one of the abstainers?
PABLO SOLÓN: Yes, the US was one of them.
AMY GOODMAN: Why? What would it bind them to? What are the forces that say no to a people’s right to water?
PABLO SOLÓN: I always have asked that question. For me, it’s something that I can’t understand, because you cannot put in first place privatization or corporate interests or transboundary issues related to water in front of the necessity of recognizing the human right to water. But I would say that behind these abstentions, there were this kind of concerns. But the vast majority was so strong that they couldn’t say, “No, we’re going to vote against.” They just had to abstain. And that was, at the end, very important, because if a resolution passed without any vote against, in reality, the resolution has been approved by consensus under the UN rules.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what is different from here on in, now that this resolution on the human right to water—and also add, why sanitation?
PABLO SOLÓN: And sanitation.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the significance of sanitation?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, now we are going to see the difference, when the summit on the MDGs, the Millennium Development Goals, come in September, because there is going to be a review, and we’re going to discuss what we are going to do in order to accomplish these goals until 2015. And we have a very critical situation in relation to water. One of eight citizens in the world doesn’t have clean water. But the situation is even worse when it comes to sanitation, because 40 percent of the worldwide population doesn’t have sanitation. And different presidents and governments are going to be here in New York, and the main discussion is now, we have recognized it, how much are we going to put on the table in relation to money, to efforts, to transfer of technology, in order really to make a change in this?
Why do we highlight very much the issue of water? Because climate change is going to affect, in a very severe way, the access to water. For Africa, it will mean a strong desertification. So it’s necessary to take all the measures now, or we’re going to see a situation even worse than what we are seeing now.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Ambassador Pablo Solón about the right to—the human right to water and sanitation. At the same time in Bolivia, there is a conflict going on. I wanted to ask you about that, Ambassador. A coalition of some 6,000 people in the southern Bolivian mining area of Potosí have blocked off the area for over ten days, cut all railings to Chile, and launched a hunger strike. On Friday, they shut down the city’s airfield, and some a hundred tourists were stranded in the area. The demonstrators are calling for more investment by the Bolivian government in the lithium-rich area.
DEMONSTRATOR: [translated] If they fail to heed what we have asked for in the documents by tomorrow, we are going to blow up the high-tension lines that supply electricity to the San Cristóbal mine so production is stopped in the mines in southeast Potosí like San Vicente and Chorolque.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to what he just said?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, yes, but the reason of the conflict that now is in Potosí is a conflict between borders between two of the states, two of the provinces, inside Bolivia. It is really something that the government is trying to solve, because there’s a conflict between the limits of one of the provinces and the other province.
In relation to the other issue that has to do with the interview, the issue of lithium, it’s the first time that we want to develop and to industrialize our lithium, but for our country, not to be exploited and exported as raw material to other places. And so, we just see almost no added value being developed inside Bolivia. So the main task that we have is how we develop an industry related to lithium inside our country, because the history of Bolivia and the history of Potosí, Potosí, where those protests are taking place, was a city that, 400 years ago, was bigger than London. But why you have it like that? Because even though it had a mountain that was full of silver, all of that silver went to Europe, and nothing remained in the country. Now we have the opportunity to change the situation for Bolivia.
AMY GOODMAN: Meaning you not only want to make the lithium, you want to make the electric cars, you want to make the lithium batteries—
PABLO SOLÓN: Yeah, the batteries.
AMY GOODMAN: You want to make the drug? What—it’s also the drug, lithium, right?
PABLO SOLÓN: Yes, all the products related that one can produce from lithium. That is our challenge. The history of Bolivia and of, I would say, many of the developing countries is that, for centuries, we have only been suppliers of raw materials.
AMY GOODMAN: This report that came out that—I mean, you have been called the Saudi Arabia of lithium.
PABLO SOLÓN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: But now this report has come out that says Afghanistan—you have more than half the world’s supply—that Afghanistan maybe may surpass Bolivia. Is this true?
PABLO SOLÓN: I don’t know, because those reports, we don’t have concrete evidence. But if another country has that, it’s very good. I mean, why should we always think, “I must be the only country that have this? I have to be the only country that can make profit out of something?” I mean, if you have a raw natural resource that is very important, think how you are going to use it responsibly, not think how you’re going to benefit for your own profit. That is what we think we should change, really, because that is the way things have been moved until now, and that is why we are in this traumatic situation. That is why we’re promoting a new kind of relation with our natural resources. They are not natural resources; we call them—they are our Mother Earth. We should try to look and seek balance with the whole system and not try to think, “Oh, I have lithium, oh, I have gold, or I have water. How am I going to exploit it? How am I going to make profit out of it?” The question is how I’m going to live in harmony with nature.
AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Solón, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón. You can go to our website at democracynow.org to see our week’s coverage from Cochabamba, when Bolivia led the People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth—Pachamama in the indigenous language.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, we look at developments in Latin America. Stay with us.
Republished from Democracy Now
Even as the world faces a series of extreme weather events that scientists warn is related to global warming, international climate negotiations are moving at a glacial pace. The latest round of climate talks in Bonn, Germany, ended last week, and diplomats have just one more short meeting in China in the coming months to hash out their differences before the critical high-level climate conference in Cancún, Mexico, at the end of the year. We speak to Ambassador Pablo Solón. He is Bolivia’s permanent representative to the United Nations and was in Bonn last week.
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: Even as the world faces a series of extreme weather events that scientists warn is related to global warming, international climate negotiations are moving at a glacial pace. The latest round of climate talks in Bonn, Germany, ended last week, and diplomats have just one more short meeting in China in the coming months to hash out their differences before the critical high-level climate conference in Cancún, Mexico, at the end of the year.
At the meetings in Bonn, the negotiating text got a lot bigger, and a number of proposals from developing countries were added into the controversial agreement that came out of the divisive Copenhagen summit last year. Some fear the new text could slow down talks in Cancún, but others say the concerns of the majority of the world’s countries are finally represented in the text.
For more on what this means for a binding global agreement on climate change, I’m joined here in New York by Ambassador Pablo Solón, Bolivia’s permanent representative to the United Nations. He was just in Bonn last week.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
PABLO SOLÓN: Hello. Pleasure to be here with you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. As you listen to the litany of extreme weather all over the world, your thoughts as you return from Bonn?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, I would say that what you have shown is the reality, that it’s not changing as fast as we would want the process of negotiation. I have heard speeches in Bonn relating the situation in Pakistan, but the concrete pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are the same that one year ago. And with the current pledges of emission reductions from developed countries, we’re going to be in something like three to four degrees Celsius, an increase in three to four degrees Celsius. Now, what we are seeing, what you have shown, is related to an increase of zero-point—less than one degree Celsius. So, can you imagine a situation where this triples or multiplies by four? It’s unbelievable. And still, developed countries have put on the table targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that will increase the temperature dramatically during the coming years and during this century. So that is something that, until now, it hasn’t changed. I go negotiation—to all the negotiations during this year. We have all the—put all the evidence, and still the pledges of developed countries remain the same—very, very low, almost to business as usual.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the United States, in particular? Where are we on this?
PABLO SOLÓN: The United States has made a very, very small pledge. It is something that means to reduce three percent from the levels of 1990. To compare it, other countries, like the European Union, have said that 20 percent to 30 percent; the United States, three percent. So, almost nothing at all. Why? That is the question. Because corporate interests, economy, profits have more weight in the negotiation than, I would say, to preserve life and biodiversity and Mother Earth in climate talks. So that is the problem that we are facing.
In Cancún, the greatest challenge is, are we going to have a deal where developed countries are going to reduce in the next seven years at least half of their emissions? Yes or no? We say it very clearly. If this doesn’t happen, what we are seeing now is just the first episode of a tragedy. So, we need to put a lot of pressure around the whole world if we want really to have a greenhouse gas emission reduction that saves life.
AMY GOODMAN: Just remind people, how would you summarize what happened in Copenhagen, just to get a sense of where we are now?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, what happened in Copenhagen was that the process of negotiation was kidnapped by a group of countries. Usually we negotiate 192 countries. And suddenly, in Copenhagen, a group of countries said, “Now, this is the Copenhagen Accord. It’s 3:00 a.m. in the morning. You have one hour to sign it.” And, of course, we said, “No, not at all. We want to discuss it.” Why? Because in that Copenhagen Accord, said that the target was to limit the temperature to two degrees Celsius, so that is almost three times what we are seeing now. And there are a lot of countries that are saying we should limit the temperature to 1.5 or to one degree Celsius. That is the proposal of Bolivia. Why? Because some states are going to disappear. There is a state called Tuvalu. Its width is 607 meters. Its highest hill is four meters. If the temperature keeps raising, it will be under the water.
So, now we have, after the climate talk in Bonn, a new text. It’s bigger, as you have said. But it has the proposals of developing countries to limit the increase of the temperature, to develop a climate a court of justice, because somebody has to be responsible for this, to not only commodify, to not make profit through a new market, carbon market, mechanism, but also to recognize the rights of Mother Earth in the process of negotiations. So now we have a text that reflects, from our point of view, the proposals that were made in Cochabamba, in the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights. So, now the key thing is, from here until Cancún, what is going to prevail? It’s going to prevail the people’s voice, Mother Earth’s voice, or it’s going to prevail corporate voice.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at a piece by John Vidal in The Guardian. “New research reveals carbon emissions from rich nations could actually rise under loopholes in the proposed UN climate deal.” What are these gaping loopholes in the climate change treaty put forward in Copenhagen?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, it’s, for example, a country says, “I’m going to reduce 20 percent.” So you say, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” But in reality, there is some tricky parts in the different treaties that allow him, for example, to buy certificates of emission reduction in another developing country. So he, in reality, is not going to reduce; he’s just going to pay somebody else that is going to do his job, but there won’t be a real emission reduction. Second, there is a way of accounting. So, I say, “I’m reducing because now I have planted some more trees here, and I account them in this way.” So, there are too many things in the negotiation that really make things even worse.
So, today in Bonn, or last week in Bonn, it was very clear that they say the average is going to be a reduction, in the best scenario, of 18 percent, taking into account the levels of 1990. But because of these loopholes, in reality, there could be an increase to four or seven percent of the emissions of 1990. So what we are asking for is that when a country says, “I’m going to reduce,” say it very clearly, “How much are you going to reduce domestically, without any kind of loopholes, without any kind of carbon market, without any kind of offsets?” That is the only way to have a clear negotiation that is transparent for people.
AMY GOODMAN: Has the US attitude changed at all? I mean, after Copenhagen, you spoke out fiercely against it. President Morales did, as well. The United States penalized you by millions of dollars, saying if you wouldn’t sign on to the Copenhagen Accord, is that right?
PABLO SOLÓN: Yeah, they—
AMY GOODMAN: Did you sign on?
PABLO SOLÓN: No, of course not. I mean, they penalized us with an aid of $3 million, because they said we didn’t support the Copenhagen Accord. And we said, “You can keep your money.” But we are not fighting for a couple of coins. We’re fighting for life.
AMY GOODMAN: Why? How does this affect Bolivia?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, we have glaciers, for example, in Bolivia. Until now, we have lost one-third of our glaciers. If this situation continues in Bolivia, we’re going to lose the vast majority of our glaciers. All our mountains will be naked. And you know the consequences for that in relation to water for agriculture, for drinking water for the populations there. And this is a situation where we cannot hide ourselves. We think that there has to be a very responsible action.
And coming to the first part of your question, I would say that the situation in the United States has begun to move backwards. What I feel is that when this proposal of law was withdrawn from the Senate, then everybody began to say, “Oh”—
AMY GOODMAN: When the energy bill…
PABLO SOLÓN: Yeah. Then the United States is not even going to go move forward, move beyond what they have already said they were going to do, but instead, they can move backwards. That is the perception that I feel in—from other developed countries. So, if the United States is not going to do too much, then the others say, “Why should I do it?” And then comes a discussion of, “Well, if I do more, and the United States does so less, then I will be in a difficult situation to compete with the products of the United States, because I will have to invest more in clean energy.” And so, at the end, what happens is, we’re in a very difficult situation.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting. I remember when Bolivia held the climate change conference. The foreign minister of Ecuador said, in response to Ecuador also being penalized millions for not signing on to the Copenhagen Accord, the US cutting off money to Ecuador, they said they would give that money to the United States, an equivalent amount of money—I think it was like $2 million—if the US would sign on to the Kyoto treaty.
But I wanted to go back to a few weeks ago. We had Maude Barlow on, the former water representative at the United Nations, the day that the resolution was passed, that you, Ambassador Pablo Solón of Bolivia, had put forward around the issue of water and sanitation. This is an excerpt of what you had to say at the UN.
PABLO SOLÓN: [translated] At the global level, approximately one out of every eight people do not have drinking water. In just one day, more than 200 million hours of the time used by women is spent collecting and transporting water for their homes. The lack of sanitation is even worse, because it affects 2.6 billion people, which represents 40 percent of the global population. According to the report of the World Health Organization and of UNICEF of 2009, which is titled “Diarrhoea: Why Children Are [Still] Dying and What We Can Do,” every day 24,000 children die in developing countries due to causes that can be prevented, such as diarrhea, which is caused by contaminated water. This means that a child dies every three-and-a-half seconds. One, two, three. As they say in my village, the time is now.
AMY GOODMAN: Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón, he’s our guest today in studio. The first resolution on this issue, explain.
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, in the UN, we have recognized the right to food, the human right to education, the right to work, the right to social security. But for sixty years, we haven’t recognized the human right to water. So it’s the first time in history that the UN recognizes the human right to water and sanitation.
AMY GOODMAN: Who supported it, and who didn’t?
PABLO SOLÓN: We had forty-two countries that co-sponsored the resolution. That day, 122 countries voted in favor, and forty-two countries abstained.
AMY GOODMAN: Abstained?
PABLO SOLÓN: Abstained. So that means that 75 percent of the countries that were present voted in favor, and 25 percent abstained. Nobody voted against, but many made speeches expressing that they didn’t support the resolution, but that they were not going to vote against it.
AMY GOODMAN: And the US being one of the abstainers?
PABLO SOLÓN: Yes, the US was one of them.
AMY GOODMAN: Why? What would it bind them to? What are the forces that say no to a people’s right to water?
PABLO SOLÓN: I always have asked that question. For me, it’s something that I can’t understand, because you cannot put in first place privatization or corporate interests or transboundary issues related to water in front of the necessity of recognizing the human right to water. But I would say that behind these abstentions, there were this kind of concerns. But the vast majority was so strong that they couldn’t say, “No, we’re going to vote against.” They just had to abstain. And that was, at the end, very important, because if a resolution passed without any vote against, in reality, the resolution has been approved by consensus under the UN rules.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what is different from here on in, now that this resolution on the human right to water—and also add, why sanitation?
PABLO SOLÓN: And sanitation.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the significance of sanitation?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, now we are going to see the difference, when the summit on the MDGs, the Millennium Development Goals, come in September, because there is going to be a review, and we’re going to discuss what we are going to do in order to accomplish these goals until 2015. And we have a very critical situation in relation to water. One of eight citizens in the world doesn’t have clean water. But the situation is even worse when it comes to sanitation, because 40 percent of the worldwide population doesn’t have sanitation. And different presidents and governments are going to be here in New York, and the main discussion is now, we have recognized it, how much are we going to put on the table in relation to money, to efforts, to transfer of technology, in order really to make a change in this?
Why do we highlight very much the issue of water? Because climate change is going to affect, in a very severe way, the access to water. For Africa, it will mean a strong desertification. So it’s necessary to take all the measures now, or we’re going to see a situation even worse than what we are seeing now.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Ambassador Pablo Solón about the right to—the human right to water and sanitation. At the same time in Bolivia, there is a conflict going on. I wanted to ask you about that, Ambassador. A coalition of some 6,000 people in the southern Bolivian mining area of Potosí have blocked off the area for over ten days, cut all railings to Chile, and launched a hunger strike. On Friday, they shut down the city’s airfield, and some a hundred tourists were stranded in the area. The demonstrators are calling for more investment by the Bolivian government in the lithium-rich area.
DEMONSTRATOR: [translated] If they fail to heed what we have asked for in the documents by tomorrow, we are going to blow up the high-tension lines that supply electricity to the San Cristóbal mine so production is stopped in the mines in southeast Potosí like San Vicente and Chorolque.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to what he just said?
PABLO SOLÓN: Well, yes, but the reason of the conflict that now is in Potosí is a conflict between borders between two of the states, two of the provinces, inside Bolivia. It is really something that the government is trying to solve, because there’s a conflict between the limits of one of the provinces and the other province.
In relation to the other issue that has to do with the interview, the issue of lithium, it’s the first time that we want to develop and to industrialize our lithium, but for our country, not to be exploited and exported as raw material to other places. And so, we just see almost no added value being developed inside Bolivia. So the main task that we have is how we develop an industry related to lithium inside our country, because the history of Bolivia and the history of Potosí, Potosí, where those protests are taking place, was a city that, 400 years ago, was bigger than London. But why you have it like that? Because even though it had a mountain that was full of silver, all of that silver went to Europe, and nothing remained in the country. Now we have the opportunity to change the situation for Bolivia.
AMY GOODMAN: Meaning you not only want to make the lithium, you want to make the electric cars, you want to make the lithium batteries—
PABLO SOLÓN: Yeah, the batteries.
AMY GOODMAN: You want to make the drug? What—it’s also the drug, lithium, right?
PABLO SOLÓN: Yes, all the products related that one can produce from lithium. That is our challenge. The history of Bolivia and of, I would say, many of the developing countries is that, for centuries, we have only been suppliers of raw materials.
AMY GOODMAN: This report that came out that—I mean, you have been called the Saudi Arabia of lithium.
PABLO SOLÓN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: But now this report has come out that says Afghanistan—you have more than half the world’s supply—that Afghanistan maybe may surpass Bolivia. Is this true?
PABLO SOLÓN: I don’t know, because those reports, we don’t have concrete evidence. But if another country has that, it’s very good. I mean, why should we always think, “I must be the only country that have this? I have to be the only country that can make profit out of something?” I mean, if you have a raw natural resource that is very important, think how you are going to use it responsibly, not think how you’re going to benefit for your own profit. That is what we think we should change, really, because that is the way things have been moved until now, and that is why we are in this traumatic situation. That is why we’re promoting a new kind of relation with our natural resources. They are not natural resources; we call them—they are our Mother Earth. We should try to look and seek balance with the whole system and not try to think, “Oh, I have lithium, oh, I have gold, or I have water. How am I going to exploit it? How am I going to make profit out of it?” The question is how I’m going to live in harmony with nature.
AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Solón, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón. You can go to our website at democracynow.org to see our week’s coverage from Cochabamba, when Bolivia led the People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth—Pachamama in the indigenous language.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, we look at developments in Latin America. Stay with us.
Republished from Democracy Now
Governor Joins Hunger Strike Amid Upheaval in Southwest Bolivia
LA PAZ – The governor of the southwestern Bolivian province of Potosi has joined dozens of people in a hunger strike aimed at pressuring President Evo Morales’s government into meeting a series of demands, the latest tactic in a week of upheaval in that region.
Gov. Felix Gonzalez, a member of the ruling Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party, began fasting Friday night at the offices of the Potosi Civic Committee, the president of that body, Celestino Condori, told the PAT television network.
Condori said the number of hunger strikers has now reached 30. Potosi city, the provincial capital, has been the scene of much of the upheaval, with a general strike and road-blocking protests having been held for the past 10 days and a mass march taking place on Friday to force the government’s hand.
“The people of Potosi are furious and enraged and we’re now in a mass hunger strike that is being led by our governor,” Condori said.
Potosi is demanding a solution to a boundary dispute with the neighboring province of Oruro, the construction of a modern airport, mining projects and the preservation of the conical form of Potosi city’s emblematic Cerro Rico mountain, which is in danger of collapse due to mining activity.
The national government has sought unsuccessfully to launch a dialogue with Potosi leaders and convince them to suspend the protests, while regional authorities are demanding that Morales travel to the city of Potosi to negotiate a solution to the conflict.
According to El Potosi daily, at least 25 foreign tourists were flown out of the city Friday by plane.
Another group of 15 Spanish, French, Brazilian, Argentine and German tourists were unable to depart due to lack of lighting at the airfield in the provincial capital, but were scheduled to leave on Saturday.
Among the stranded Spaniards were Antonio Alayeto and Rafael Bastida, who have been in Potosi – an important colonial city that supplied silver for the Spanish Empire – since last Saturday.
“Our time’s running out. We have jobs and if we don’t get back on time we could lose them,” Alayeto said while waiting for a chartered flight, the newspaper reported.
Republished from Latin American Herald Tribunal
Gov. Felix Gonzalez, a member of the ruling Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party, began fasting Friday night at the offices of the Potosi Civic Committee, the president of that body, Celestino Condori, told the PAT television network.
Condori said the number of hunger strikers has now reached 30. Potosi city, the provincial capital, has been the scene of much of the upheaval, with a general strike and road-blocking protests having been held for the past 10 days and a mass march taking place on Friday to force the government’s hand.
“The people of Potosi are furious and enraged and we’re now in a mass hunger strike that is being led by our governor,” Condori said.
Potosi is demanding a solution to a boundary dispute with the neighboring province of Oruro, the construction of a modern airport, mining projects and the preservation of the conical form of Potosi city’s emblematic Cerro Rico mountain, which is in danger of collapse due to mining activity.
The national government has sought unsuccessfully to launch a dialogue with Potosi leaders and convince them to suspend the protests, while regional authorities are demanding that Morales travel to the city of Potosi to negotiate a solution to the conflict.
According to El Potosi daily, at least 25 foreign tourists were flown out of the city Friday by plane.
Another group of 15 Spanish, French, Brazilian, Argentine and German tourists were unable to depart due to lack of lighting at the airfield in the provincial capital, but were scheduled to leave on Saturday.
Among the stranded Spaniards were Antonio Alayeto and Rafael Bastida, who have been in Potosi – an important colonial city that supplied silver for the Spanish Empire – since last Saturday.
“Our time’s running out. We have jobs and if we don’t get back on time we could lose them,” Alayeto said while waiting for a chartered flight, the newspaper reported.
Republished from Latin American Herald Tribunal
Bolivians on hunger strike cut rail line
Aug 8, AFP
Anti-government protesters tightened their siege of Potosi on Saturday, launching a hunger strike and cutting rail links to Chile, as tourists began negotiating their way out of the mining city, 10 days into the blockade.
"We're taking this to the bitter end," said a hunger striker in the tent city that sprung up overnight in Potosi's main square.
The hunger strike includes regional officials, union and farm leaders, as well as Potosi Governor Felix Gonzalez, a former ally of leftist President Evo Morales, whom many critics charge is ignoring the plight of Bolivia's poor who voted him to power six year ago.
"This strike... is the people's answer to the lies of the government," Potosi Town Council president Remberto Gareca told AFP.
People participating in the general strike, mostly local residents, miners and farmers, want increased regional investment, including construction of a new cement factory and a larger airport.
The southern city of 16,000 people for 10 days has been cut off from the rest of the country by roadblocks made of piled-up boulders on its main access routes.
On Friday, protesters took over the city's airfield closing it to all air traffic.
On Saturday, local miners blocked the railway line to Chile, as other protesters blocked highways also leading to Chile and Argentina.
"Our rules are tough here. We don't let any vehicle through," Janet Chipana, who joined the protest from Betanzos south of here, told AFP at a roadblock.
"There are 6,000 of us. We're organised even if unfortunately we have to put up with this weather," she added as the cold wind of the Bolivian Andes whipped through the valley.
A few kilometres north of the city, around 1000 people have been stranded in San Antonio since July 29, having to alight a long column of buses stopped at a roadblock leading to Potosi.
"We're cold, hungry and afraid," Rosario Machicado told AFP, as some protesters held what they said was dynamite, threatening to blow it up should anybody try to run the gauntlet.
More than 100 tourists from several countries have been trapped in Potosi since it has been paralysed by the general strike.
On Saturday, however, around 40 tourists were able to leave the city on small planes chartered by a Bolivian tourist agency after negotiations with strike leaders, a diplomatic source told AFP, adding that more would fly out later.
Landlocked Bolivia is estimated to hold about half of the world's total reserves of lithium, a key mineral used in rechargeable batteries as well as everything from mobile phones and laptops to electric cars.
Lithium: the gift of Pachamama
Raquel Gutierrez
In the south-western province of Nor Lipez in Bolivia lies the world's largest deposit of lithium. The vast and spectacular Uyuni salt flats sit 3,600 metres above sea level. They are shaped like an inverted cone, 400 metres deep, in which layers of salts have sedimented, interwoven between layers of mud and brine, in which the mineral salts have dissolved.
In the south-western province of Nor Lipez in Bolivia lies the world's largest deposit of lithium. The vast and spectacular Uyuni salt flats sit 3,600 metres above sea level. They are shaped like an inverted cone, 400 metres deep, in which layers of salts have sedimented, interwoven between layers of mud and brine, in which the mineral salts have dissolved.
In recent years, lithium's commercial value has risen astronomically. The development of laptops and mobile phones has depended on lithium batteries, and demand has grown to the point where it is now profitable to exploit the mineral even when it is found in a place as remote and inaccessible as this.
Uyuni is in the department of Potosí, the site of the legendary Cerro Rico (rich hill), which supplied the Spanish colonial regime with silver for 200 years. Mining continued there in the 20th century, particularly after the Bolivian revolution of 1952 which nationalised the mines, creating among the Bolivian people the collective belief that they were now the owners of huge potential wealth that would never again be exploited by "foreign interests".
So strong was this belief that the first attempt to exploit lithium commercially, in 1992 – 10 years before the wave of popular uprisings in defence of Bolivia's natural resources which would culminate in the election of Evo Morales – led to a period of protests across the region, and the then government of Jaime Paz Estenssoro was forced to break its contract with the Lithco corporation.
Today, the potential exploitation of Bolivian lithium exposes contradictions within Morales's government, and the possibility of social conflict, as multilayered as the salt lake itself.
On the one hand, Morales decreed in 2008 that the state would take full control of the exploitation of lithium. A new arm of the Bolivian Mining Corporation was set up with the aim of constructing a plant for the mineral's exploitation.
On the other hand, since 2009 the Bolivian government has begun negotiations with foreign companies with a view to signing contracts for its industrial production. Interested parties include the Japanese firms Mitsubishi and Sumitomo. And there are other possibilities, too: Morales has travelled widely looking for possible joint investment in lithium production with Chinese, Russian and Iranian firms.
Through such partnerships Morales hopes to further fund a number of social welfare projects through the so-called conditional transfer of resources – small amounts of money are given to families, so long as certain conditions are met (for instance, that children are sent to school). This is central to the government's social strategy.
However, the indigenous population of Bolivia's western areas, who are among the poorest people in the country and who have strong communal traditions, appear to disagree with the policy. The social movements that brought Morales to power have mobilised over recent months around demands for local development, and in defence of water rights. In the mind of many Bolivians, the most important thing is that local communities decide on the uses of resources in their own territory.
Bolivia today is undergoing a reconstruction of the state, in the course of which progressive nationalist policies find themselves in conflict with a highly politicised population with its own vision of how best to utilise "the gifts of Pachamama (Mother Earth)". Not only do the Uyuni salt flats sit above multiple layers of strategic minerals, they also raise questions of how to use them – to which there are multiple answers.
Republished from The Guardian
Bolivian ambassador to UN, Pablo Solon, press conference at Climate Negotiations Aug. 6
CLICK HERE to watch the press conference given by Ambassador Pablo Solón of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to the United Nations at the UNFCCC climate negotiations in Bonn on August 6, 2010.
Highlight: “From the perspective of the proposals of the World People’s Conference and Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, we want to express that the vast majority of those proposals have been included in the negotiating text.”
Full transcript:
We have come here to express our view in relation to this new round of negotiations here in Bonn. After five days, we feel that this is now beginning to be a party-driven process, and at the end of this week, we have a text that is a party-driven text. We have taken a step forward because now from a facilitating text, we have a negotiating text and all 192 parties recognize as its text. It has a lot of brackets… it has more pages, but now we can say that the vast majority of proposals of the countries are on the negotiating table. In China, we will begin a negotiation line by line, paragraph by paragraph.
From the perspective of the proposals of the World People’s Conference and Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, we want to express that the vast majority of those proposals have been included in the negotiating text.
For example, the reduction of 50% of greenhouse gas emissions for the second period of the Kyoto Protocol from 2013-2017, the limit on the increase in temperature to 1 degree Celsius and 300ppm. Now in the new text, we have a reference not only to temperature but to parts per million of Co2.
Another very important improvement is to guarantee an equitable distribution of the atmospheric space taking into account climate debt, and to take into account also an equitable distribution of the remaining budget in relation to the population of developed and developing countries.
There is a clear proposal now to respect human rights in the operative part of the text, not in the preambular part only, and clear paragraphs in relation to Indigenous People’s rights and climate migrants’ rights. There is also the proposal in the text to recognize and defend Mother Earth’s rights in order to promote to harmony with nature.
Also the proposal of the development of a climate court of justice has been included in different parts of the text.
In relation to the proposal to not promote market mechanisms that develop offsets from developing countries in favor of developed countries – that also has been included.
There is now a clear reference in what is called REDD, which we think should be called Forest Related Actions. There are two options – one option is supported by those that want to have market mechanisms, and the other is the one expressed by Bolivia and the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which is to move on without these kind of market mechanisms.
When it comes to financing, the proposal of Bolivia has also been included. We have said that it is necessary to use 6% of the GDP of developed countries to address climate change-related issues, and that has also been included.
When it comes to forests, the position of the World People’s Conference in regard that this should be done in an environmentally integrative way fully respectful of the rights of Indigenous Peoples is also there, and of course defending what we call real forests, and not trying to change forests into plantations.
So the main proposals of the World People’s Conference that took place from April 20 to 22nd in Bolivia are now in the text of negotiation. I am open to any questions you may have.
John Vidal (Guardian): We’ve heard the Americans, we’ve heard the European Union, we’ve heard others saying that the text is now so big that it’s going to be very difficult to negotiate it, and that there are unrealistic things put into the text, and I think they’re probably referring to some these things you mentioned. How would you respond to that, that what you’re doing is you’re proposing things that cannot be conceivably got through?
Ambassador Solon: From our point of view, the proposals that we have made are proposals to really save the planet and save humanity. When we say that there should be 6% of the budget for climate change issues, we are not speaking about a figure that is outside any imagination. Just four days ago in a conference, Pachauri, the president of the IPCC, said that if the world doesn’t expend 3% of the worldwide domestic product, we can suffer severe consequences in the near future. So these figures are based on real assessments and studies of different sectors and scientists. And when we ask for a climate court of justice, we are saying: if what is in place is something that can really mean the disappearance of 30, 40% of biodiversity and millions of people are going to be affected, then we need to have a compliance mechanism that is much stronger than what we have now. So those are our proposals, and we think that if we don’t discuss seriously real commitments, in the end, we’re not going to solve the problem of climate change.
John McGarrity (Point Carbon): I just need to confirm some details that some of the other negotiators were talking about in their press conferences. This issue of MRV. It appears that the row between China and the US that was papered over in the Copenhagen Accord could be opening up again. Just wondering what your views are on that and whether this issue will cause fireworks at the meeting in China and be a major problem in getting China and the US to agree on other issues.
Pablo Solon: The problem is that… the US thinks that the Copenhagen Accord is already the basis for agreement. And other countries that have associated with the Copenhagen Accord have a more open view… it’s mainly a declaration but the paragraphs that are there need further interpretation, and they interpret those paragraphs in a different way from what the US thinks is the interpretation. You have pointed out one of the issues. It’s not the only one, but it’s one.
John McGarrity (Point Carbon): Is it fair to say that when countries get down to negotiating paragraph by paragraph and negotiate in detail that the divergence become even more apparent? The idea of the devil-in-the-details, that countries when they are faced with proposals in black and white on a negotiating text, that they would balk at the proposals put forth by other blocks of countries?
Ambassador Solon: What we have expressed in different meetings here is that we now expect that, in China, we will negotiate paragraph by paragraph. There is a lot of text that can be very easily agreed on, it’s just a problem of wording. But there are parts of course where you have substantive brackets. If we have few substantive brackets at the end of China and we clear up the majority of the text, then we will be in a position to say: in Cancun we can come to an agreement. Because then we will focus on those specific substantive brackets that remain. I would say that now we are beginning to be on track. If during the six days of negotiation in China – and we have agreed that we are going to begin to negotiate on the first day – if we are able to do this, and to have two or three readings of the text… I work at the UN. We are going to have a text that is shorter, cleaner. It will still have brackets on some of the paragraphs, but then will come the time when countries will have to make a decision. Becuase from China to Cancun, there will be a text where governments have to say, I’m willing to accept this option, I’m willing to make a trade-off, I’m willing to do this, and in that sense we’re going to be able to have a comprehensive agreement in Cancun.
John McGarrity (Point Carbon): If I can just follow up once more, Do you think that this week we’ve seen an unravelling of the Copenhagen Accord to some degree, that countries that have associated with it are not backing up that association with
Ambassador Solon: I just want to say that I feel that this week we have moved forward because it has become a party-driven process. A negotiation is a negotiation of parties. And whatever you do, you can’t contain that, you can’t avoid having a negotiation between parties. I think that those who tried to find a way to come to an outcome without having a negotiation of parties were just dreaming. he only way to come up with an outcome in the UN is through a negotiation, and through negotiations like this. We should have begun this process in the previous meeting in Bonn, we would have had more time. But this is the reality. Now we have to move forward.
John Vidal (Guardian): Has there been, to your knowledge, enormous pressure on the Chair or on the UNFCCC people to take a different line? You say this is a party-driven process, which is clearly to your advantage, and that you feel that this is a good thing. Is there a sort of battle going on between the Chair and some of the different countries, and can you give us an idea of some of the backstage?
Ambassador Solon: Always in a negotiation there are those kind of problems. We were very disappointed, as I said in a press conference at the last meeting here in Bonn. But I would say that because there were a lot of countries that expressed… You remember that last meeting in Bonn. You’re going to see a very big difference between the 11th of July and now. There’s going to be a very big difference. You had more than, I don’t remember, 30 to 40 speeches expressing that they were really very disappointed with the texts that were presented by the Chair of the Ad-hoc working group and LCA. Now I can tell you that that situation won’t happen. Of course, nobody is absolutely satisfied. Nobody. But I would say that the spirit is that things have begun to move in a party-driven process.
John Vidal (Guardian): Are you saying that the balance is swinging back toward developing countries rather more than it had before?
Ambassador Solon: It’s moving toward developing countries and all parties. Because this is a negotiation between states. And we were negotiating before through a facilitator. And when states begin to negotiate directly, sometimes it’s a little bit more difficult, but it’s the only way to negotiate.
(Unidentified): I just wanted to ask you about market issues because there seems to be an increasing sense, and I heard the EU refer to it just now, new market mechanisms and so-forth being discussed. And I feel concerned about Mexico that some of this may come forward Do you feel like making some sort of comment on the force of markets increasing in the run-up to Mexico?
Ambassador Solon: Yes, but as I said at the beginning of my presentation, the proposals of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth have been included, and now there is the other option. That is the option that says we don’t want to promote more new market mechanisms, we don’t want to have forest-related actions that are so-called REDD through this kind of offset and market mechanism. So I would say that it was more unbalanced before. Now at least in the text you will see that there are two options. But that doesn’t deny what you are seeing, that there is a big pressure to promote and to try to have these market mechanisms no matter what in Cancun and this is beginning to be even more important than the issue of limiting the increase in temperature or raising the emission reduction commitments. And so, as we have said before, we cannot make business with the tragedy of humanity and our Mother Earth. Thank you.
Republished from PWCCC
Bolivia begins military training for civilians
Carlos Valdez, AP
La Paz, Bolivia — Bolivia's leftist government said Thursday it has begun military training for civilians at army barracks in what the opposition called a first step toward creating pro-government militias.
Weapons instruction and physical training began on Monday for hundreds at military bases in Bolivia's east, a stronghold of the pro-business opposition, and army officials said it would extend to all bases.
The program is reminiscent of one that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez launched in his country after a failed 2002 coup attempt that he blamed on the United States. Venezuela claims it has 120,000 participants.
Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales are close allies.
Questions about the Bolivian training arose after a television station broadcast images Thursday of young men armed with rifles taking target practice at a base in the eastern provincial capital of Santa Cruz. Also seen in the video were indigenous women in their 20s and 30s in billowing skirts and bowler hats doing calisthenics.
Vice President Alvaro Garcia, a former leftist guerrilla, said the purpose of the training is to enable civilians to assist in defending the homeland. He called participation "a citizen's duty."
Officials said there were no plans to arm civilians.
"These training activities that we have with the citizenry are for the defense of the country," Gen. Ramiro Siles, commander of the army's 8th Division, told reporters.
The division is based in Santa Cruz, the seat of opposition to what Morales calls the "re-foundation" of Bolivia — returning power its indigenous majority. That has included confiscating ranches from major landholders including an American from Montana.
The commander of the Cochabamba-based 7th Division, Gen. Hernan Ampuero, said the military training was intended for people of all social classes. But he acknowledged that many participants came from indigenous communities.
Opposition Sen. Herman Antelo demanded an explanation.
"We are asking ourselves if the goal is the create paramilitary forces in support of the government," he said.
The Morales government has repeatedly insisted that far-right extremists have conspired to try to topple it by forming armed militias, including with foreign mercenaries.
Questions still linger over the case of Eduardo Rozsa, a Bolivian-born Hungarian slain in April 2009 in Santa Cruz by an elite police unit. Authorities say Rozsa and two other men killed in the raid — an Irishman and an ethnic Hungarian from Romania — were involved in a conspiracy to create a separatist right-wing militia.
In May, a retired Bolivian general famed for capturing Ernesto "Che" Guevara was placed under house arrest in connection with the alleged plot. Prosecutors said Gen. Gary Prado exchanged "ultrasecret" encrypted e-mail with Rozsa.
Another man wanted for questioning in the case, Branko Marinkovic, is a soy magnate and opposition leader from whom the government has confiscated land. He has apparently fled the country.
Associated Press writer Frank Bajak contributed to this story from Bogota, Colombia.
Bolivia court upholds seizure of US man's ranch
Carlos Valdez, AP
La Paz, Bolivia — A Bolivian court has upheld a government decision to seize a ranch from a U.S. cattleman and his family on the grounds they treated workers as virtual slaves, an official announced Monday
The National Agrarian Tribunal rejected a challenge by Ronald Larsen, a 65-year-old from Montana who has owned the 58-square-mile (15,000-hectare) ranch nearly four decades, deputy land minister Juan Manuel Pinto said at a news conference.
Pinto said the Caraparicito ranch would revert to Guarani Indians, traditional inhabitants of Bolivia's southeastern region, known as the Chaco.
He said the ranch and an adjacent 15-square-mile (3,790-hectare) spread owned by an unrelated family, the Chavezes, would be cleared by authorities and divided among 2,000 Guarani families.
Pinto did not say when the court issued its decision, which is not subject to appeal.
The Larsens could not immediately be reached for comment. They have vehemently denied treating their ranch hands — all of them Guarani natives — as indentured servants.
Larsen moved to the region in 1969, began acquiring land and married a Bolivian. He told The Associated Press last year that he deeded Caraparicito in 2005 to his three sons, all Bolivian citizens.
After leftist President Evo Morales took office in 2006, Larsen became a key target of a government land reform campaign law that deemed servitude grounds for confiscation.
Human rights groups said last year that several thousand Guarani lived in conditions of "forced labor and servitude" in the region, earning as little as $40 a year.
Leaders of the Guarani, Bolivia's third-largest indigenous group after the Aymara and Quecha, claimed in 2008 that 12 families on Larsen's ranch lived in servitude.
Larsen denies that, insisting in interviews with the AP since the government first moved to seize his land in February 2009 that he has treated his workers well.
For four decades, he said, he has fed and clothed workers who would otherwise live in squalor, educated their children and provided them with free health care.
He claims he was singled out as a relatively wealthy white American in a racially divided nation by an Aymara Indian president who grew up dirt poor.
Morales, the Larsens claim, was more interested in getting access to natural gas and petroleum deposits that likely underlie Caraparicito — exploratory drilling began there last year — than in restoring indigenous lands.
Bolivia's government has also confiscated ranches totaling more than 60 square miles (15,500 hectares) from two powerful white opposition leaders in Bolivia's eastern lowlands, the stronghold of Morales' most bitter foes.
The government said the seized land had been fraudulently obtained and met another main criterion for confiscation — that it served no "social or economic purpose."
Associated Press Writer Frank Bajak in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.
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