Tuesday, August 4, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
BOLIVIA: Democracy Under Pressure
Franz Chávez
- University students in Bolivia took to the streets again Friday after the harsh police crackdown they suffered Thursday, while a mediating commission was set up to try to reach an understanding between the government and the groups involved in the demonstrations.
The aim of the talks is to make a detailed assessment of the demands set forth by the civil society organisations and draw up a national agenda of issues that require solutions from the government, one of the members of the commission, the president of the Permanent Human Rights Assembly of Bolivia, Sacha Llorenty, told IPS.
The mediating commission is made up of Llorenty, Ombudsman Waldo Albarracín, and the vice-president of Bolivia’s Catholic bishops conference, archbishop Edmundo Abastoflor, who began by talking to the organisations staging the protests.
The streets of La Paz, the seat of government, were once again swamped with public university students Friday, this time accompanied by professors and administrative staff.
Despite Interior Minister Alfonso Ferrufino’s statements that he would follow a policy of caution when it came to controlling the protests, the police stormed university grounds late Thursday to put down the student demonstrators, leaving at least five injured.
Thursday’s clashes were the culmination of a day of marches by tens of thousands of street vendors and taxi, bus and truck drivers in La Paz and the central cities of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz.
Ferrufino once again stated that he prefers prevention when it comes to keeping public order, and instructed the police to keep a prudent distance from the demonstrators. ”We will do everything we can to dissuade the protesters and thus prevent them from resorting to acts of violence,” said the minister.
Six months after massive protests toppled president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada last October, the streets of the main cities of this impoverished South American country of 8.2 million are once again the scene of growing demonstrations.
The trade unions of vendors and transport drivers came together in defence of the current tax regime, which exempts small businesses. The owners of public transport vehicles were also protesting the policy on petrol prices, which have risen along with the international cost of oil.
The students are demanding an 18-million-dollar increase in the university budget, compared to the government offer of just 1.7 million. But that demand appears to be the one with the least popular support in a country like Bolivia, where the minimum salary stands at 50 dollars a month, and the fiscal deficit amounted to 450 million dollars last year.
The mediating commission is brokering talks between the social and political organisations and the government of President Carlos Mesa – who replaced Sánchez de Lozada – in a bid to preserve the country’s fragile democracy, which has also been threatened by a planned coup d’état, according to continuing rumours.
Mesa, speaking with the U.S. Cable News Network (CNN) in Buenos Aires, where he signed an accord Wednesday to increase natural gas exports to Argentina in an effort to ease that country’s energy crisis, downplayed the rumours of a coup. He described them as ”just an expression of an impossible paranoia in a context of both internal and external rationality.
”A minimally informed reading of the Latin American reality and of the current circumstances in the continent gives a clear picture that although crisis situations can occur, and governments can even come to an end, the solution must always be democratic,” he said.
Mesa, vice-president until October, was sworn in as president on Oct. 17, 2003 after the right-wing Sánchez de Lozada resigned and fled the country in the wake of a month of protests. According to the constitution, Mesa is to complete his predecessor’s seven-year term, which ends on Aug. 6, 2007.
The social uprising that led to the collapse of the Sánchez de Lozada administration was triggered by protests against a plan for foreign oil companies to export Bolivia’s natural gas to the United States and Mexico through a port in Chile.
When Sánchez de Lozada called out the security forces to put down the protests last October, Mesa immediately resigned as vice-president (though his resignation was never officially accepted). At least 70 people were killed and hundreds injured in less than a week, according to human rights groups.
Bolivians are opposed to laying a pipeline for exporting natural gas through a port in northern Chile rather than one in southern Peru due to a more than century-long dispute that has simmered since the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), in which this landlocked nation lost its Pacific coastline to Chile.
Bolivia and Chile are the only two countries of South America that have no diplomatic ties, a situation that dates back to 1978.
On Thursday, the U.S. Embassy in La Paz was forced to deny that U.S. Treasury undersecretary for international affairs John Taylor had suggested that Mesa cut his term short and call early elections before year-end.
In its Thursday edition, a Peruvian daily, La República, printed a supposed dialogue between Mesa and Taylor, who were both in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.
Gary Fuller, press information officer for the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, told a local radio station that his country ”firmly supports the constitutional and democratic process” and the Mesa administration ”to the end of its tenure in August 2007.”
On Wednesday, Mesa had removed Admiral Jorge Badini as deputy minister of defence. Badini had accused the leftist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) of exercising excessive influence over the government’s decision-making process.
MAS, which is headed by lawmaker Evo Morales, the leader of Bolivia’s coca farmers, and has become one of the strongest political forces, accused Badini and Defence Minister Gonzalo Arredondo of trying to destabilise the government. But both men denied any link to the coup rumours.
In Llorenty’s view, the essential issues that need to be addressed by the government are a reform of the country’s law on natural gas, the call for a referendum on exporting gas, and Mesa’s pledge to call together a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.
But the human rights activist told IPS that the agenda will also be open to the complaints and grievances of other sectors, like organisations of indigenous people, who make up a majority of Bolivia’s population, and landless peasants.
Archbishop Abastoflor urged the demonstrators to carefully analyse their demands, while Albarracín warned of the dangers of actions that back the government up against the wall and endanger peace.
”We are setting out on a route of collective suicide,” said Albarracín, who said that social demands cannot be solved by social uprisings.
One of the leaders of the October protests, Roberto de la Cruz, the head of the regional workers’ union of El Alto, a poor industrial suburb of La Paz, called Mesa a ”traitor” because of his decision to sell gas to Argentina.
Speaking in a personal capacity, he urged Mesa to call early presidential elections. ”We are not trying to overthrow Mesa, but he doesn’t have our support either,” he told IPS.
El Alto was the scenario of the most violent clashes last October between the security forces and civil society groups opposed to exporting gas to the United States and Mexico under the terms of the current law on natural gas.
Bolivia has the largest natural gas reserves in South America, after Venezuela. But under the law in its current shape and form, the state is only paid 18 percent in royalties and taxes by the foreign oil companies operating in the country. Mesa proposes gradually increasing that proportion to 50 percent.
Minister Ferrufino has called on the social forces to generate a climate of ”dialogue and understanding.”
Llorenty, the president of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights, also warned of the risks faced by the democratic system, and urged the trade unions and students to set aside their pressure tactics.
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