Bolivia

From the Mines To the Streets draws on the life of Félix Muruchi from his birth in an indigenous family in 1946, just after the abolition of bonded labor, through the next sixty years of Bolivia’s turbulent history. As a teenager, Félix followed his father into the tin mines before serving a compulsory year in the military, during which he witnessed the 1964 coup d’état, and returned to the mines and became a union leader. The reward for his activism was imprisonment, torture, and exile. After he came home, he participated actively in the struggles against neoliberal governments, which led to the inauguration of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

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As the global climate change discourse heated up in Doha at the COP18, the lived reality of climate change was becoming more apparent in some of the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems.  In Bolivia, a country unfortunately well acquainted with the effects of global warming, the COP discourse is more relevant now than ever.

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Throughout the department of Cochabamba, women who have never taken a course in radio broadcasting are using the airwaves to inform, empower and raise awareness, and to work for change in their communities. Their impact in rural areas and poor neighborhoods surrounding towns and cities is indisputable, thanks to their programming in Quechua, Aymara or Guaraní, the three most widely spoken native languages in Bolivia.

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La Paz – Protests between rival mining groups have been growing in power and intensity over the past three weeks. As the conflict continues to swell, blockades have gone up across Bolivia, virtually crippling transport in and out of La Paz.

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After Domitila Chungara died in Cochabamba on March 13 of this year, three days of national mourning were decreed, honoring her heroic life of struggle on behalf of the working class and of women.  Married to a miner, she organized other women in mining communities to struggle for justice and for better conditions of life.  She was jailed, tortured, and driven into exile;  she is most famous for joining four other women in leading a hunger strike that began in 1977 and finally brought down the Banzer dictatorship in 1978.

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After Domitila Chungara died in Cochabamba on March 13 of this year, three days of national mourning were decreed, honoring her heroic life of struggle on behalf of the working class and of women.  Married to a miner, she organized other women in mining communities to struggle for justice and for better conditions of life.  She was jailed, tortured, and driven into exile;  she is most famous for joining four other women in leading a hunger strike that began in 1977 and finally brought down the Banzer dictatorship in 1978.

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“[W]e don’t believe in a democracy of parties, where just a few leaders make all the decisions.  We want a democracy of participation, a democracy where the people can make decisions about their own future.” – Oscar Olivera

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Mujeres Creando is a radical feminist organization that has been confronting the patriarchalism of Bolivian society since the 1980’s.  During a recent visit, one of the founders, Maria Galindo, spoke with us about women’s rights, access to work, education, reproductive freedom and politics during the presidency of Evo Morales in Bolivia. We met in the restaurant of their small hotel and cultural center in the capital La Paz, while the Mujeres Creando radio station, broadcasting from another room, played on the speaker in the background. […]

Bolivian Indigenous leaders are condemning violent state repression and accusations against indigenous marchers of “attempted homicide.” Between August and October of 2011, hundreds of indigenous men, women and children from the high and lowlands of Bolivia, marched for 65 days as a way of protesting against a proposed highway which, at a length of 300 kilometers (186.4 miles), planned to cross the center of the Isiboro Ségure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), to unite the provinces of Cochabamba and Beni. While the government is promoting the highway, indigenous communities say that their rights to approve or deny the mega-project on their lands are being ignored and violently denied.

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Jeffrey Sachs has nominated himself as the ‘progressive’ candidate in a non-election to head the World Bank, and judging from his campaign materials it’s a good thing they’re looking for an economist and not a historian.

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