BOLIVIA: Death Toll Climbs in Miners’ Clash

By Franz Chávez Reprint | | Print |

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Oct 6 2006 (IPS) - Two fatal shootings Friday brought to 13 the number of victims in a clash between state-employed miners and members of independent mining cooperatives at Bolivia’s biggest tin mine, located 4,000 metres above sea level in the Andean province of Oruro.

The government of leftist President Evo Morales sent 700 police officers to the area in southwestern Bolivia, where new clashes broke out Friday despite a truce reached late Thursday by the rival groups of miners.

According to local reports, some 60 people have also been injured in the conflict, many of whom are seriously wounded.

The conflict in the arid highlands region, 70 km from the city of Oruro and 320 km south of La Paz, has pitched different groups of mainly indigenous miners, who all share the same extreme poverty, against each other.

The dynamite which the miners have been using to fight each other mutilated the bodies of the 11 miners who were killed Thursday.

One of the world’s largest tin mines, capable of producing up to 400 tons a month at the current international price of seven dollars a pound, has generated the deepest division in decades between workers in an industry that in the past was in the vanguard of Bolivia’s trade union movement.

The violent confrontation broke out at the mine near Huanuni, a town of 35,000 on the slopes of Posokoni Mountain. The mine is owned by the badly weakened state-run Corporación Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL).

Around 1,000 COMIBOL employees came out in defence of the company when some 4,000 independent workers, who are grouped in cooperatives, stormed the mine, demanding increased access to its tin deposits.

The COMIBOL workers want to rationally administer the deposits, while the “cooperativistas” are demanding unlimited access to the tin, which they say they were promised by Morales in the election campaign that brought him to power in January.

“The cooperatives have gained political power through agreements reached with the governing (Movement to Socialism – MAS) party, and will prevent the strengthening of the state-run COMIBOL,” Osvaldo Guachilla, a researcher with the Bolivian Observatory of Extractive Industries at the Centre for Labour and Agriculture Development (CEDLA), told IPS.

Some 27,000 workers and their families were evicted from the mining camps in 1986 when COMIBOL closed its biggest operations after undergoing restructuring as part of a broader privatisation programme, at the same time that the price of tin plunged to below two dollars a pound.

Many of the miners moved away in search of new employment, while the few that stayed behind in the barren impoverished mining regions picked up their chisel and hammer and worked as small-scale miners in dangerous conditions, with no social protection or benefits.

But the steady rise in prices in recent years has drawn back many miners who gradually organised in cooperatives.

However, some of the artisanal miners staked claims, and rent deposits to their fellow miners for 500 to 1,500 dollars, emerging as new entrepreneurs in the industry.

Today, one of the leaders of the “cooperativistas”, Walter Villarroel, heads up the Ministry of Mines.

Editorials in several local newspapers have called for Villarroel to hand in his resignation, arguing that due to his background he has acted in a biased manner in this conflict, which dates back to early this year, when fears of violent clashes between the two groups of miners first arose.

“What should have been a blessing for the country today has become a curse,” Vice President Álvaro García Linera said in a national address Thursday evening, referring to the country’s natural riches.

Thursday’s truce, which gave the two sides time to bury their dead, was achieved thanks to the mediation efforts of Ombudsman Waldo Albarracín and the president of the Permanent Human Rights Assembly of Bolivia, Guillermo Vilela, in talks between representatives of the government and the different groups of miners.

With demand for tin rising in Asia and prices steadily climbing, the political backdrop to the conflict involves the growing power of the cooperatives – which supported Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, in his rise to power – and their demand to control the mine on Posokoni Mountain.

But the government has failed to provide a plan to modernise and reactivate the industry, sociologist Joaquín Saravia, a professor at the public University Mayor de San Andrés, remarked to IPS.

A favourable international scenario of high prices has ended in a tragedy due to the lack of effective management of the industry and policy decisions and political actions that are taken merely in response to events as they occur, he said.

TV screens in Bolivia have been full of dramatic scenes as the victims were taken to the city of Oruro, where the capacity of the local hospitals has been overwhelmed by the dozens of injured, and doctors report that they were forced to amputate limbs mangled by the dynamite explosions.

A week ago, two coca producers were killed in a clash with the police during the eradication of coca crops in the Carrasco National Park in the central province of Cochabamba. The authorities reported that around 200 people attacked the police in what was described as an ambush by drug trafficking gangs.

In 2000, the government at the time handed the administration of the Empresa Minera Huanuni mining company to the British firm Allied Deals. But the foreign company failed to make the promised investments and later went bankrupt over metals fraud.

The Bolivian firm was then taken over by Grant Thornton International, a global accounting, tax and business advisory organisation.

A law passed in June allowed the Bolivian state to recover control over the company, but the dispute between cooperativistas and the firm’s employees continued.

The leaders of the cooperatives have stated that they would like to take over the company, which has installations for the extraction and processing of tin worth 45 million dollars, and said they would pay one million dollars to Grant Thornton in exchange for 85 percent of the shares.