minarchist wrote on Nov 12^th, 2019 at 1:53pm:


His only crime was, besides being indigenous, that he wanted his country's natural resources to be for the benefit of the Bolivian people, and not for the benefit of multinational corporations:

“We Refuse to be Burned”: 500 Years of Resistance, Colonization, and Coups in Bolivia
by Maya Ajchura Chipana
18 November, 2019


I am writing this because I don’t see many Bolivian voices represented in the media. Here is my story.

My father worked for Morales’ campaign. He and my aunt traveled from village to village, explaining to people in Quechua the importance of voting and of a socialist government. The people voted because they believed in change.

Morales was the first democratically elected Indigenous president of a nation that has the highest percentage of Indigenous people in all of South America. He gave people hope, and he made people believe Indigenous people can be leaders and teachers, and that we can be taken seriously, too. That’s why he is so precious to us.

Bolivia is a very rich country, especially in minerals. There are tin, silver, gold, bismuth, zinc, and iron reserves. Oil and gas are the main forms of resource exploitation. Before the nationalisation of the gas fields, there were three main industrialists: Simon Patiño, Mortiz Hochschild, and Carlos Aramayo. Simon Patiño had accumulated so much wealth they even nicknamed him the “Andean Rockefeller”.

I wondered, with all this resource wealth, how did Bolivia get to be so poor? How did it get to be the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, next to Haiti?

Like many Indigenous Bolivians, I come from a family of miners. My grandfather was a miner in the town of Pulacayo, which was the location of one of the biggest miner uprisings in the early 1940s.

In the 1978 book, Let Me Speak!, Bolivian feminist, Indigenous rights activist and wife of a miner, Domitila Chungara, recalls one of the great leaders of her time explaining to her and other miners’ union workers, the situation in Bolivia: “Compañeros, the ten thousand workers of Siglo XX produce 300 or 400 tons of tin per month.”

She recalls him taking out a sheet of paper that represented everything miners produce. Then tearing the sheet of paper into five equal parts, he says that out of these five equal parts, four go to foreign capitalists, while Bolivia keeps one part.

“Now this fifth part is also distributed according to the system in which we live, so the government takes almost half for transportation, customs, and export expenses, which is another way to make the capitalists earn a profit. Then the government again grabs some for its own benefit, for the armed forces, the salaries of the ministers and their trips abroad. And they invest money in foreign cities, so that when they fall from power then they can go to another country as millionaires. And the little bit that’s left over is for social security, for health, and for hospitals.”

This is the history of Bolivia, a country whose riches are stolen for the benefit of others. When Morales won the presidency in 2009, it changed the course of history for Bolivia and the lives of Bolivia’s poorest.

Out of 527 years of settler colonial occupation, Morales gave Bolivia 13 years and nine months of Indigenous leadership — until he was deposed by an unlawful coup led by the old oligarchy.

For the first time in 2009 Bolivia was officially secular, recognising indigenous spiritual beliefs. Now that Evo has been forced to step down, opposition leaders are bringing back their Catholic bibles and under the name of God, sending military forces to violently attack and oppress indigenous people.

The coup against Morales comes after the uprisings against Sebastian Piñera in Chile, the uprising against the IMF austerity package in Ecuador and uprisings against the right-wing, racist government in Brazil. So when the Bolivians raise their Wiphalas, the flag that represents the four Suyus — or the four corners of South America (Chinchawuyu, Antisuyu, Cuntisuyu, and Collasuyu) altogether composing Tawantinsuyu — they are definitely not alone.   

We should challenge what the Western media is telling us. It makes sense that the US would denounce Morales under the name of “democracy”, because they want Bolivia open for business. And just as the Spanish conquistadors enslaved Indigenous people to profit from gold, using religion as an excuse, the new Bolivian oligarchy will do the same with lithium and the country’s natural resources.

After Evo’s coup, I am most worried about the open racism. I see videos online of the police and those from the opposition parties burning the wiphala flag; and it hurts me because this is a hate crime, it is a racist act. When I talked to my father about what the burning of the flag means for us Indigenous people, he says, like if they burned something sacred, like a little piece of your heart. When there is a coup, they want to burn everything, even the Indigenous person they want to burn.”

We refuse to be burned.

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