Bolivia a Year After the October Insurrection
by Lina Britto and Lucia Suarez
Translated by Forrest Hylton
Leaning against a concrete tombstone, nine men dressed in denim overalls of various colors drink beer and soda, taking care to pour the first sip on the dry and dusty ground as an offering to the Pacha Mama — Mother Earth. A few meters away, on the high plain that extends between the two hills covered with crosses and tombs, coffins of equal size are spread out in a row. Together with them, almost a hundred men, women, and children, seated and standing, most dressed entirely in black, mourn the dead for a second time. “On a day like today, October 12, the armed forces fired on unarmed people,” a young man with brown skin and straight black hair says to the assembled through a microphone marred by static. “It is time, as relatives, to show that this is not over, that we are mourning our dead again,” concludes Nestor Salinas, the president of the Association of the Relatives of the Fallen Martyrs in the so-called “Gas War” in El Alto, sister city of La Paz. Then Salinas passes “the word” to a priest who, in mixed Spanish and Aymara, presides over the Eucharist that begins the exhumation ceremony for twenty-two of the sixty-seven people who died during “Black October.”
Dug Up from the Bowels
Exactly a year ago, a caravan of tanks, truckloads of soldiers, and trucks full of gas passed through the better part of El Alto, leaving in their dusty path thirty-one dead and twelve injured. Five days after the military incursion, in a country exploding with protest, hunger strikes, and indignation, what had seemed impossible happened: then-President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a leading member of the political-economic elite and the second-richest man in Bolivia, flew to Miami after presenting his resignation to Congress, due to the non-negotiable demand of the majority of the country’s inhabitants, who refused to stand for the government’s brutal repression of protests against the export of Bolivian gas to California via a Chilean port.
Now, a year later, the hundred or so people gather around the coffins of their dead to summon up energy and hope so that the impossible happens; so that Sánchez de Lozada is extradited to Bolivia to receive punishment for genocide — among other charges, including corruption — that will be presented now that Congress has approved the “trial of responsibilities.” As relatives and volunteers from the different organizations tried to convince the nine men in overalls to charge the widow of the last body exhumed eighty Bs. ($10), Nestor Salinas made the position of alteños abundantly clear: “Now we’ll see who’s for and who’s against the people,” he said, referring to the parliamentary vote that would take place the following day, October 13.