Under undemocratic and seditious extortion, and after the Government of the Plurinational State has offered all instances of dialogue to deal in a participatory manner with the issues involved in the Population and Housing Census, the representatives of the extreme right and of the most authoritarian, racist and conservative oligarchy in the department of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho and Romulo Camacho, are now in the midst of an armed conflict, Luis Fernando Camacho and Rómulo Calvo together with insignificant but violent patotas, this Tuesday, November 1st, the spokesperson for the Presidency, Jorge Richter, expressed that the Executive is willing to create a new negotiating table, with an open date and without conditions, except those that emanate from a technical committee of plural composition.
A Census for 2023 or 2024? Does anyone believe at this point that Camacho and his gang ever spoke the truth when they stuck to their slogan of carrying out the national census in 2023, despite the scientific evidence that forced the census process to be rescheduled for 2024?
It is not only the social and popular movements throughout the country and particularly in Santa Cruz that are demanding that Camacho and Calvo put an end to a strike that is more fictitious than real, but which, in effect, is causing significant damage to the working classes of Santa Cruz in their economic dynamics. Bolivia is not a world power and its history is littered with oligarchic massacres, coups d’état, instability and poverty. For the first time, on the basis of a concrete project of democratic and cultural revolution, of Living Well, of the protagonism of the indigenous nations and their communitarian and cooperative ways of living, of millions who have finally emerged from poverty, Bolivia is capable of showing the world a future of inclusive development, economically redistributive and with social justice, with health, education and housing. But it is already known. Neither Washington nor the neo-fascist factions of an agro-soil and extractivist oligarchy can allow this.
Even the Archbishop of Santa Cruz at Sunday mass called on Camacho and Calvo to put an end to their anti-social behaviour and their personal and private ends, which are causing the pain of thousands of people.
The current government of Arce and Choquehuanca are only just returning to the economic conditions prior to the coup d’état and the dictatorship of Jeanine Áñez and the forces of reaction, many of whose figures are in jail or fugitives from justice. From November 2019 to October 2020, the period of the dictatorship, all social, economic and health indicators collapsed through corruption, terror, unleashed racism, elite business, the perverse abandonment of the population in the worst moments of the Covid-19 pandemic, the violent rupture with the process of pro-popular changes that mark the new Bolivia. Looting costs nothing. On the other hand, building a society with equity, dignity, based on the promotion and regulation of the state to favour local production and the internal market, towards a sister industrialisation of nature; on the nationalisation of its strategic common goods, with monetary stability, real growth and one of the lowest inflation rates in the world in the midst of a world in recession, requires the commitment of an entire people.
But the commoners are not sleeping. A meeting of social movements in Yapacaní, attended by organisations from the municipalities of Santa Rosa del Sara, San Julián, Buena Vista, San Carlos and El Torno, resolved to begin a march to the city of Santa Cruz with the aim of demonstrating against the strike and demanding Camacho’s resignation for the damage he has caused to the region’s poorest communities. Among the groups calling for Camacho’s departure are the Federation of Trade Union Workers, the Central Obrera Departamental, the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas del Oriente Boliviano (Cidob), the Federación Única de Trabajadores Campesinos, the Federación Departamental de Mujeres, the Campesinas Indígenas Originarias de Santa Cruz Bartolina Sisa, and the Federación de Interculturales del departamento de Santa Cruz, among others. It is possible that on Wednesday 3 November they will enter the city of Santa Cruz.
The breakdown of normal working conditions in Santa Cruz has caused speculation in the prices of products such as meat, artificially increasing its price. Bolivia is in full economic recovery and cannot expose itself to seditious noises that would interrupt its gradual recovery.
Also this Tuesday, November 1, modifications were made in all branches of the military.
President Luis Arce made significant changes in the high command of the Armed Forces, renewing its cadres with the explicit purpose of providing the country with a military armoury where “The place of the Armed Forces is in the heart of its people, who have expressed their will to live together in peace and democracy, and whose obligation is to defend the legally constituted Government through the ballot box, as the only legitimate way to achieve the leadership of the State”.
Camacho and Calvo are playing for the representation of interests that seek to liquidate Bolivia’s progressive process. That is why, at the time of going to press, they had not replied to the latest invitation to dialogue made by the central government.
The class struggle is concentrated in Santa Cruz.
