MAY DAY-BOLIVIA: Ex-Miners Recover Pensions with Dynamite

By Franz Chávez Reprint | | Print |

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Apr 30 2004 (IPS) - Former Bolivian miners, excluded from the pension system that emerged during the Latin American wave of privatisations, have won a meagre monthly payment of 60 dollars – but the price was one worker who blew himself up with dynamite and the threat of three more to follow his example.

"What else can I do when my health is critical and I live in desperation?" exclaimed former miner Julio Saravia Oporto, 55, one of the three who on Saturday threatened to imitate Eustaquio Picachuri, who died Mar. 30 when he detonated a dynamite charge he had strapped to his body.

"It would be better to disappear," Saravia Oporto told IPS, sitting in his wheelchair and holding a letter written by the Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB) demanding the restitution of his disability pension.

The death of Picachuri in the entryway to the National Congress building in La Paz, 30 metres from the presidential palace, triggered the demands of 3,500 former mine workers who, despite having contributed to the pension system during their careers, lost their right to the retirement cheques with the 1997 reform that privatised the pension administration and imposed the principle of "individual capitalisation".

Also killed in the Mar. 30 blast were Col. Marbel Flores, chief of congressional security, and the police force’s explosives expert René Amurrio. Ten more officers were injured.

Picachuri, 47, unemployed and feeling very desperate, according to those who knew him, demanded the return of the contributions he had made to the old pension system during 15 years of working in the mines.

Bolivia had long relied on revenues generated by its mining industry, but the state-run mining enterprise, COMIBOL, shut its doors when international metal prices plunged in the 1980s.

After being laid off from his mining job, Picachuri could not retire because he was not yet 55, as required by the former pension system, which was a common fund of contributions by labourers and employers.

His case reflects that of some 8,700 workers – 3,500 of them former miners – who with the 1997 reform lost what they had paid into the system and their right to a pension.

The first administration of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (who served as president 1993-1997 and 2002-2003) set up a system based on individual capitalisation and introduced the participation of two private pension funds (Futuro de Bolivia and Previsión BBVA) that collect and manage the contributions.

Furthermore, the government hiked up the minimum retirement age from 55 to 65 for men, and from 50 to 60 for women.

Unlike the old system, which was based on a principle of solidarity in distributing pensions from a common fund, the new system is based on personal savings, and pays out pensions according to the contributions made during each worker’s active career.

The same sort of reforms have been implemented in several Latin American countries over the past 20 years, driven by the reduction of the state apparatus and the privatisations of public entities and services.

Saturday, Saravia Oporto, former mine worker Francisco Franco, 54, and the widow of another worker, Ana Bazagoitia, 58, said they would follow Picachuri’s example at the offices of the FSTMB. They had dynamite strapped to their bodies and were connected by a fuse.

Behind them was a giant portrait of the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary fighter Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who was killed by Bolivian troops in 1967.

For 20 hours, the three sat calmly with the detonators in their hands. The police set up a 100-metre perimeter around the union offices and kept a prudent distance on the central Prado avenue.

With the dynamite in hand "we felt the power and we remembered the strength of the miners who resisted the most ferocious dictatorships" that Bolivia has endured, said an emotional Oporto Saravia in the conversation with IPS.

A Communist Party activist in his youth, he worked as a labourer, an assistant to the blast experts and was a union leader at the tin and zinc mine at María Luisa, belonging to the state-run COMIBOL, Bolivian Mining Corporation, until 1982, when he was involved in a car accident while organising a worker mobilisation to protest the last dictatorship (1980-1982).

No longer able to walk, Saravia Oporto obtained a disability pension worth 101 dollars a month in 1991, but in 2001 that cheque – his only source of income – was halted without warning or explanation.

Since then, he has made the 500-km trip four times from his home in Salinas de García Mendoza, in the western region bordering Chile, to the capital to demand his pension. But those journeys have been in vain.

Dynamite was an important tool for Saravia Oporto when he worked breaking up the rock to search for ore, and it was also a weapon of resistance against the military governments.

And now it has become a dramatic instrument for defending his labour rights.

The protest came to an end with negotiations between unionists and the government, which agreed to provide a lifetime monthly pension of 60 dollars to all former workers who could not retire under the old pension system.

Picachuri’s death and the protest by Saravia Oporto and the others ended up benefiting the 8,698 workers who fell through the cracks between the two retirement systems – and who had become known as the "sandwich generation".

But Saravia Oporto will continue his fight for the restitution of his disability pension.

Serafín Salvatierra, leader of the former miners left without retirement cheques, says he believes the battle for obtaining this social recognition is only at the halfway point.

An indignant Salvatierra told IPS that other groups, like military officers or judges enjoy broad retirement privileges and big pension cheques.

Bolivian military officials are guaranteed a pension, and if they have not made the necessary contributions, the state provides compensation, Alberto Bonadona, an official from the national social security system, said in a recent television interview.

Unlike other sectors, the military maintained its own social security system, while the other pension and retirement funds were transferred to the government and privatised.

But this week, the Treasury Ministry announced that armed forces personnel would begin to make their contributions to the privately managed pension funds. The measure will also boost their retirement age from 55 to 65, said Bonadona.

La Prensa newspaper, in La Paz, published a list of the largest pensions paid to retired public employees, headed by former Supreme Court justice Edgar Rosales Lijerón, who received 3,506 dollars a month.

But after the Picachuri tragedy, the government ordered cuts to the biggest pension cheques, setting a maximum of 1,011 dollars.

According to official figures, 60 percent of the 8.7 million Bolivians live in poverty. The national minimum wage is the equivalent of 50 dollars a month.

"There is no justice," says Salvatierra, while Saravia Oporto continues waiting for some official to reinstate his 101-dollar disability payment.

On the eve of International Labour Day, May 1, the FSTMB resolved to begin a national strike on Monday for the annulment of the pension law, among other demands. Some of the trade unions of private companies have said they will not take part in the strike..