BOLIVIA: Congress Votes to Bring Ex-President to Trial for Protest Deaths

By Franz Chávez Reprint | | Print |

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Oct 14 2004 (IPS) - The Bolivian Congress voted Thursday for the Supreme Court to try former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, nearly a year after he was forced to step down by massive protests over exports of natural gas, in which 67 people were killed when the army was called out.

Pressure from the victims’ families and other protesters, who surrounded Congress Wednesday night as the legislators met, overcame the resistance of the parties that formed an alliance with Sánchez de Lozada (2002-2003), and which are still influential in parliament.

In the meantime, a march by 2,000 campesinos (peasant farmers) resumed its progress towards La Paz, to hold demonstrations here on Friday to commemorate the social unrest that culminated in the toppling of the Sánchez de Lozada administration on Oct. 17, 2003.

The debate on whether to strip Sánchez de Lozada, popularly known as Goni, of the immunity from prosecution he enjoyed as a former president even after leaving his post, lasted 12 hours, and the vote was held in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Former cabinet ministers are protected by the same immunity.

The Movement to Socialism (MAS), which is led by lawmaker Evo Morales and supports President Carlos Mesa, first made an unsuccessful bid to win the required two-thirds of the votes in parliament in favour of a trial for Sánchez de Lozada and former cabinet ministers Carlos Sánchez Berzaín and Yerko Kukoch, in line with recommendations by a mixed parliamentary commission that studied the question.

But the ex-president’s party, the Nationalist Revolutionary Party (MNR), attempted to postpone a parliamentary decision by blocking the MAS initiative with another motion. However, the delaying tactic backfired in the end.

The MNR suggested expanding the number of former officials to be tried to Sánchez de Lozada’s entire 15-member cabinet, which included members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) and the New Republican Force (NFR).

But the proposition did not scare legislators from those two parties into opposing the second motion, which passed by a vote of 126-13, with one blank vote.

MAS celebrated the possibility of seeing the former president – a mining tycoon who had already governed Bolivia, South America’s poorest nation, from 1993 to 1997 – in the dock.

At the same time, 100 km from La Paz, roughly 2,000 coca growers and other small farmers, who are represented by MAS, continued to march Thursday towards the capital to hold demonstrations in homage to those who were killed a year ago.

The epicentre of the month-long late-September and October 2003 social uprising by campesino and labour organisations was the sprawling slum city of El Alto next to La Paz.

The protests were triggered by the government’s plans to export natural gas to the United States and Mexico through a port in Chile, with which Bolivia has had an antagonistic relationship since Chile seized this country’s Pacific shoreline in a late-19th century war.

In mid-October 2003, roadblocks, which cut off petrol supplies to La Paz, spurred Sánchez de Lozada to call out the army against the protesters. A total of 67 people were killed and 300 were injured in the space of one week, according to the El Alto Association of Victims of the Gas War (as the month of unrest is known).

But the massive demonstrations in response to the repression completely paralysed El Alto and La Paz, and Sánchez de Lozada ended up resigning and fleeing the country on Oct. 17.

He was immediately replaced by Mesa, who had previously stepped down as vice-president in protest when the troops were called out.

Sánchez de Lozada is now living in the United States.

Memories of the tragic incidents of October 2003 were painfully stirred when the bodies of the victims began to be exhumed Monday in the simple cemetery in El Alto where they were buried, to determine the exact cause of their deaths.

The impoverished families demanded justice as they removed the earth from the graves of their loved ones, who included men, women and children. The bodies were covered by the Bolivian flag in a kind of open-air wake, awaiting the forensic exams.

After the vote in parliament, the head of the Permanent Human Rights Assembly of Bolivia (APDHB), Sacha Llorenty, told IPS that the decision by the legislature “is a step in the right direction.”

He said his group would work hard to demonstrate that the former president and his ministers should be held responsible for the deaths.

“We will not allow these incidents to go unpunished,” a representative of the October 2003 victims, Néstor Salinas, remarked to IPS.

The activist, whose brother David was killed in the crackdown, is now fighting on behalf of the families of those who were killed or injured.

Parliamentary Deputy Germán Choquehuanca of the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement (MIP) predicted that the outcome of the parliamentary vote would mark the political death of the MNR, the party that led Bolivia’s nationalist revolution in 1952 but shifted gears in 1985 in favour of a free market economy.

In the view of Jaime Solares, the executive secretary of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), the main labour federation, the trial would only lead to a conviction of the former president if certain Supreme Court justices were removed.

He was referring to magistrates who were appointed under the governments of Sánchez de Lozada and Hugo Banzer, a former dictator (1971-1978) who was later democratically elected and governed from 1997 until his death in 2001.

The only former Latin American dictator presently in prison is former Bolivian general Luis García Meza, who was tried in absentia in 1989 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was eventually captured in Brazil and extradited to Bolivia in 1994.

After the vote in Congress, one of Sánchez de Lozada’s ex-ministers, Hugo Carvajal of the MIR, put himself at the disposal of the Supreme Court.

“The measure hurts me, but I prefer for it to hurt me, and not democracy,” he said. He added that the “violent end” of the Sánchez de Lozada administration was not what he had expected in his political career, but that he had acted in a responsible manner, in keeping with party discipline.