INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-LATIN AMERICA:

NEW ADDITIONS TO OUR LINKS:

As regular readers of this blog know the Links section is in a continual process of updating, expansion and editing. As part of this Molly is happy to announce the addition of two new Latin American links that have been added to both the 'Platformist and Especifista' and the 'Enlaces En Espanol' categories. This deserves special mention because it signifies a further expansion of the concept of coherent anarchist organization into countries where the idea has been "thin on the ground" in the past few decades. The links are the Unión Socialista Libertaria from Peru and the Organización Anarquista Por la Revolución Social in Bolivia. Check these links out for a new perspective from the Americas.

INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-BOLIVIA:

WOMEN AND LIBERATION IN BOLIVIA:

Continuing on with our feminism theme in the run-up to International Women's Day here's yet another opinion, this time from the Mujeres Creando (Women Creating) anarcha-feminist group in Bolivia. What it is is an indictment of the "anti-imperialist" government of Evo Morales and its ignoring of the situation of women. Molly herself has few opinions on Bolivia, not knowing enough to comment on the situation. Still...this is another view that should be heard.

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Evo Morales and the Phallic Decolonization of the Bolivian State:
por María GalindoTraducción: April Howard

The Law of Convocation to the Constitutional Assembly: Society didn't propose a change of government.
In Bolivia there are hundreds of thousands of Evos, in each public high school, on each neighborhood soccer team, in each little workers union, from the taxi drivers to the ice cream vendors. There are intuitive Evos, with beautifully dark complexions, casual and unorthodox in terms of cultural identity. They are Evos as modern as they are indigenous but, above all audacious in their use of words and careless and macho in sex and love. They use ponchos, suits or sports jackets and they choose their clothes with the liberty that patriarchal societies prohibit women, and above all those that are called Indigenous and who, for that reason, have to carry their cultural identity on their hips and backs, undrawing their curves in the use of masculine mandates.

This Evo whose face is an immediate and magical social mirror did not receive just a presidential mandate in the past elections, he received a historic mandate that, moreover, consisted of the nationalization of the hydrocarbons and the sentencing of Sanchez de Losada, in the convocation of a constitutional assembly that would permit the redesign of the Bolivian political system. An assembly that was past of an agenda installed by the social movements and not the political parties, an assembly that marked Bolivian society's need not for a change of government, but instead for a historic meeting at which to redesign the bases that had created crisis together with the neoliberal model.

Due to that clear responsibility and his Indigenous condition, the hope existed that Evo would convoke an assembly that was open to all possible forms of participation.

However, though the Law of Convocation created by the government of Evo Morales, with the direct responsibility of Alvaro García Linera, promulgates a law that:

- Restitutes the legitimacy of the political parties defeated by the revolt in October of 2003, including those that committed genocide against the people of El Alto.
- Closes all possibility of direct representation of social movements, which has obligated many movements to seek out alliances with MAS in order to be able to propose candidacies or opt to stay out of the assembly and therefore the socio-political discussion that this has unleashed in Bolivian society.
- Ratifies the technocratic neoliberal criteria of representation of women as a biological quota within political parties, with the addition of the Otherness which inhibits all form of alliance between women by needing to alternate each woman with a man.
- Leaves out the important sector of Neoliberal exiles who are a migrant population in countries like Argentina, Brazil, U.S. and Spain. This population has grown steeply in past years and now constitutes a quarter of the economic support of our society.

- Closes the character of the constitutional assembly to session during a year in a framework that addresses powers already constituted, with which the assembly converts itself into a mere constitutional reform.

With this exclusion and weakening of social movements, Evo Morales and his indigenist-leftist government has the security of obtaining an absolute majority within the assembly. This permits him to co-opt social sectors like clients of the party, to carry out a plebiscite in place of assembly elections and to rewrite the text of the constitution from a place of executive power. So the project plans to annihilate spaces of dissidence and political autonomy in respect to the party of the government.

With this assembly then, we witness the silencing of the social movements in our society. We also witness a re-accommodation of the social movements from the role of being the forces of the veto and the Bolivian social mobilization, to being the cheap clients of a liberal state. They are left to be rats tricked by state power. It isn't the silencing of the bullet, and it isn't the silencing of censure, but rather a cynical exclusion. A silencing as could only come from Œone of ours¹ (in quotes): an ex prisoner who took up arms, like Alvaro García Linera and an indigenous union member, like Evo. In this way, the assembly converts itself in the scenario for the substitution of liberal representative democracy that we defeated in the streets, hundreds of thousands ,without leaders or parties, in unheard of mobilizations, to substitute this for a mono-partied democracy that offers us MAS as an alternative without alternative. In this way, the magic Evo, the Evo who wakes up identities, can convert himself into an identitive antidote that inaugurates a regime closed around its leaders.

I don¹t want to campaign for a candidate, I want to vomit: The electoral campaign.

It is not casual chance that the most conservative sectors have taken enthusiastically to the electoral campaign as a chance to make ridiculous reparations that will allow them to prolong their agonizing mediocrity by displaying gargantuan portraits of themselves which are unmistakable invitations to vomiting.

Other sectors that are taking advantage of the occasion are the great proliferation of Churches and Evangelical sects. They have presented their own candidates, thanks to thousands and thousands of their faithful, to defend their interests in the assembly and, like all churches, to go on eating the pieces of social life.

The military, which today enjoys important attributes in the present constitution, and which is not disposed to lose even the obligatory military service with which it installs in our youth its model of chauvinist virility, have also proposed their own candidates, borrowed and rented in all of their varieties. They range from pro-government to the extreme right, all coinciding in defense of their corporate interests.

Even the Catholic Church, using its intuitive instincts for the accumulation of power, has suffered an unexpected love-affair with MAS in order to put the brakes on the process toward a Secular State. Their campaign is characterized by efforts to delay, restrain, and confuse the processes of political recreation that a society as dynamic as Bolivia had proposed.

We, the Mujeres Creando [Women Creating], are street agitators, autonomous, self-summoned to all of life. We are women who have questioned representative democracy and the vision of equality proposed by the gender technocracy. We have proposed a candidacy, and so with our queerness, are entering a terrain that is a farce of representation. Our almost tiny candidacy has entered through a crack in the law, in the institution and the system, like rainwater that filters itself by simultaneously seeking and creating leaks. A crack in the roof of the houses, of the Palace and the institutions from where we let our dissidence leak.

To say that women are a political subject that for centuries was denied the right to speak, with which they emptied us of our own contents whether with arguments of complementariness, of submission, of exclusion or inclusion. In the end, all women come to the same end, women are ahistorical, apolitical and invisible. And all social pacts are pacts are made between categories of men according to the culture they pertain to, their skin color, the social class they pertain to or the ideology they subscribe to. And this social pact signifies a convivial pact regarding the interests of categories of men about hegemonic projects in which some are above others.

Today in Bolivia, Indigenism and Leftism repeat themselves and find themselves next to neoliberalism in the same phallic, patriarchal posture, a posture that ratifies the confusion between social projects and power projects, the control of society, the submission of the other, as the only interest around which history and politics should revolve.

I'm not native, I'm original: The colonial character versus the patriarchal character of the Bolivian State

As feminists we want to be neither underneath nor on top of anyone. That is why we will not find our own place in this process. As quasi undesirable tenants of the candidacy that we postulate, we use this space to affirm that the decolonization of the State is not possible without its depatriarcalization.

We affirm that the social pact rests on a sexual contract that has expropriated from women the sovereignty over our own bodies. And that this is a phenomenon of all political systems, of all ideologies and all cultures. A renovation of this social pact that does not question the sexual contract that sustains it can only reiterate forms of colonial and patriarchal submission at the same time. And looking at supposedly original cultures is not the mechanism that will permit us to decolonize our society, nor make it fuller, more livable or freer.

The demand for the original culture as pure, as the culture that will build the nation, the project of power and then nationalism will only drive us to the patriarchal and colonial renovation of power, where power simply exercises power with a mere change of actors.

A sample of this today is the andinocentrism with which one expects to reinterpret Bolivian society. Our society is not a society of pure, original, indigenous people versus undesirable mestizo white-oids. It is much more complex than that; ours is a society of disobediences and cultural mutations in which the technological revolution is sugar to the soul of all kids who, thanks to piracy, conquer it in their quotidian chatting and navigating with the world. It is a society like all societies of the world where we as social actors also construct culture and thus we can talk about youth culture, about an urban culture, about this, that and the other culture, about a culture of queers and a culture of the street and the street vendors and who culturally transform the meaning of the street and public space, for example.

We are not obedient originals and for that reason and because we put in question cultural mandates, starting with clothing and ending with pleasures. Due to and thanks to this disobedience which makes us happy, we propose a decolonizing and depatriarchalizing societal project that has the rise of nationalisms as a principal question.

They want to substitute the project of the united Nation State for a project of autonomous plurinationalisms in order to open an eternal struggle for land, for resources, for power and control. We want to be neither on top nor underneath and so we challenge this project with our body and our skin, sensitive and open to sin.

The only fight you lose is the fight you abandon:

The strategy of concrete proposals.

We have also developed a handful of concrete proposals that matter to us because they are born of our daily life:

Our Father if you are in heaven liberate us from the power of the Church:

Today the Bolivian State has an official religion, which is Catholicism. Freedom of worship is guaranteed but the secular character of social matters is not. In this way the Church has confabulated with State Power in everything. We have religion class in all public schools, the Church exercises a mountain of non ecclesiastical activities, and worst, we have inherited the Judeo-Christian concept of family in our constitution and in all judicial law.

That is why to propose a secular State is to recuperate an hour of class time in schools from religion and to put it, for example, to the service of a secular sexual education, and to our right to know our bodies through school and the classroom. Beyond that, our proposal separates the concept of family from the patriarchal Judeo-Christian vision, reconceptualizing the family, honoring all the complex forms that this has in our society. This opens the doors the recognition of all forms of free union that occur beyond the state, these pretty and unusual forms that make freedom possible in love and in the construction of affectionate and supportive coexistence. Of course this includes couples made of men and women, community unions, houses of mothers and daughters, sons, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, until complexity widens it without impositions, without models and, above all, without imposing suffering nor shortages, nor absences who have the right to grow and live in sympathy and liberty.

Che and Evo are the same Irresponsible Fathers:

Society has expropriated maternity from women, it values and protects reproduction at the same time it imposes maternity as a reason for living for women. However, it subordinates maternity to the existence of a father who gives it legitimacy. While the women give life, the fathers have the power to grant social space, and so convert the act of giving life into a secondary act. That is what invents the concept of the single mother, to whom society grants the burden of condemnation in some cases, in others the burden of the fate of the abandoned mother. Mothers' recuperation of their maternity is a cultural theme, but it also addresses the legal act of the paternal last name, which in our society is the first [of the two last names], the one that counts and, at the same time, is a mechanism of recognition of the ignorance that every man has regarding his sons and daughters. That is why we propose maternal filiation, which is to say that boys and girls should carry the last name of their mothers first. This recuperates the place of the mothers, where women change from being objects of reproduction to subjects of maternity. It also recuperates the daughters' place in the family, a place that all statistics show us is not valued in comparison to their brothers'.

This act also will have consequences in all family jurisprudence, in so much as what is called patria-potestad, which is a concept of patriarchal authority over sons and daughters. Sovereignty in my country and in my body:

They have also expropriated from us, the women, the right to make decisions about our bodies, and this is presented in legal rulings in various situations, one of them is the penalization of abortion. The recuperation of women¹s sovereignty over their bodies is a wider concept than the mere depenalization of abortion. This is why we consider it fundamental to insert within the special constitutional regimes, one that concretely carries the title of women's constitutional regime. This has to do with a chapter that would permit all of those fundamental rights to be concentrated and, as the principal of all rights, a woman's right to make decisions regarding her body.

Every political party is a weapon loaded with blood, machismo and corruption:

We propose to break the monopoly that the political parties have in respect to political representation though the aperture of the exercise of direct representation of all forms of social representation that exist in Bolivian society. In respect to the representation of women, for us it is fundamental to challenge the quotas that were introduced during the neoliberal period and ratified by the Indigenist-Left. This quota converts the political representation of women into a biological quota, empty of content, in which any woman, due to her biological condition of being female, is representative of all women in a situation of non-ideological representation. This quota has been moreover reinforced in its non-ideologization though the concept of alternity, alternity that has as effect the negation of the political alliance between women. Both are mechanisms that deny women political autonomy, which is to say, the sense of organizing from themselves, outside of political parties and mixed organizations.

Long live the deserters, the so-called cowards and all youth who object to the use of weapons

These days military service is obligatory for men, and the gender technocracy has motivated the creation of voluntary military service for women, giving power to one of the densest nuclei of patriarchal culture in our society. Military service in Bolivia has constituted itself as the school of macho virility and the mechanism for the acquisition of manliness. That is why the young men who come back from military service acquire authority in their communities and are celebrated for it.

Conscientious objection is the door that allows the value of the use of weapons and the very existence of an army in society to be questioned. It is a fundamental right for all young men to be able to object to this sense of virility and the possibility of substituting this service for social service allows us to repropose to young men the logic of service to society and the place and sense of masculinity.

Give the Constitutional Assembly back to society, opening deliberative spaces from the Assembly itself

The Assembly is crossed by a series of themes that are axes for Bolivian society. It is a historic irresponsibility to leave it in hands of the political parties that, moreover, have filled the majority of the lists with characters that in many cases do not even correspond to social sectors. There are all kinds of candidates fulfilling even marital quotas, like that of the Mayor of the city of La Paz's wife.

In other cases, the candidates are making proposals that have nothing to do with the constitutional scenario because, if they are elected, they will simply respond to postures that will be cut up into other spaces. ON the other hand, the complexity of the themes converts itself into a species of mosaic that is impossible to assemble from a single perspective. This is why we consider that the scenario of the assembly raises, above all, a methodological challenge that can gather together the knowledge and visions of the actors and protagonists of each theme.

This is why it is urgent that, once the elections take place, departmental, regional and thematic pre-constitutional assemblies are opened by social actors. We have posed to ourselves the proposition of convoking a pre-constitutional assembly of women as a complex political subject.

BECAUSE WOMEN ARE NOT A BIOLOGICAL QUOTA,

NOR A RIB OF ADAM'S,

EVE TO THE CONSITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY.

We, the Mujeres Creando, have a self-managed house that is located at:

2060, calle 20 de octubre

Between Apiazu and J.J. Perez, Tel. 2413764, La Paz, Bolivia.

Our house is named Virgen de los deseos [Virgen of Desires]

There you will find:

A market, a dining room, lodging, an audiovisual hall, classrooms for workshops,

Solidarity, feminist culture in all its forms

And a universe of Indians, bitches and lesbians,

Restless assemblies and sisterhoods.

Our website is:

www.mujerescreando.com

www.mujerescreando.org

Our email is:mujerescreando@alamo.entelnet.bo

INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT:

STATEMENT OF THE OCL ON THE SITUATION IN BOLIVIA:

The Organización Comunista Libertaria de Chile is a Chilean anarchist communist group. In addition to activities in their own country they are concerned with the broader context of Latin America. This is their statement on the present situation in Bolivia where, as reported earlier on this blog, there is violent right wing resistance against the left wing reforms of the Morales government.

The Brazilian Federacão Anarquista Gáucha has produced a much longer and more detailed analysis of the situation in Bolivia from an anarchist viewpoint. You can read this statement over at the Porkupine Blog.

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Statement on the current political situation in Bolivia:
by the Chilean Organización Comunista Libertaria

Given the current political situation facing the Bolivian popular movement, our Party wishes to make the following statement, and to provide all its internationalist solidarity to serve their just cause:

Latin America is at a crossroads. Like what is happening in Venezuela, imperialism - in collusion with the Bolivian bourgeoisie - is trying to destabilize the process of political and economic reforms led by President Evo Morales Ayma, a process that is disrupting the political scene in a continent which until not so long ago was "pacified" by the use of military coups.

This process is undoubtedly a contradictory one and at the moment it is increasingly clear to the masses that there are no half measures that do not mean sacrificing the interests of all the people and the workers to the oligarchy that is seeking to regain its lost ground with assassinations and coup attempts. Concern about the consequences that may arise from the current political crisis in Bolivia has attracted the presidents of the member states of the Union of South American Nations, who on the one hand, have to condemn destabilizing events, but who on the other have called on the Bolivian government to seek an understanding with the Bolivian Half Moon oligarchy. The magnitude of the fascist rebellion, the apparent intervention of U.S. imperialism, as well as the overwhelming popular support for the government simply go to confirm the absurdity of such an understanding.

At this time, with the Movimiento al Socialismo and President Morales having won themselves some time, there is no alternative but for them to assert themselves strongly among the mobilized masses and that section of the military that is loyal to the government, in order to widen the scope of the "October Agenda", which is an expression of the revolutionary process that the people have been building for many years on a growing wave of accumulated forces. On the other hand, the vacillating policy of seeking an understanding with fascism has clear implications, eloquently demonstrated by the Chilean experience of "Unidad Popular". This experience not only highlights the limits of the bourgeois democratic framework, it also demonstrates that there is no possibility of dialogue with the putschists: it simply enable the bourgeoisie and imperialism to align their forces to make the decisive blow, which would lead the Bolivian popular movement into butchery of untold proportions. That is why it is so urgent to take forceful measures against the paramilitary groups operating in the "Half Moon" and against any coup-inclined, middle- and high-ranking officers in Bolivian Armed Forces.

But beyond the possibilities offered by reformism, it has become essential for there to be unity among those sectors of society of a more revolutionary bent so that a common path that goes beyond the narrow framework of bourgeois legality can be mapped out. Indeed, there is an urgent need for the wise Bolivian popular movement to expand the revolutionary process without hesitation, to win over soldiers, the working class, anti-putschist and socialist NCOs and officers to the side of the people, to develop the embryos of popular power and immediately take on the tasks of defending working-class interests, to come up with a revolutionary program that will bring socialism, once and for all, to the heart of Latin America.

Moreover, we would like President Chavez - with the same force with which he condemned the murder of 30 Bolivian peasants at the hands of Bolivian "Cambas" (lowlanders) in the province of Pando - to condemn and prosecute those responsible for the treacherous murder earlier this month of four combatants of the Bolivarian Forces of Liberation (FBL) on the border with Colombia at the hands of "pitiyanqui" troops from the Bolivarian State's security forces; four revolutionaries who joined 300 farmers, two comrades of the Coordinadora Simón Bolívar, a Tupamaro councilor and a member of the Colectivo Alexis Vive from the January 23 Parish in Caracas, killed by paramilitary gangs operating with impunity under the noses of the government and in full complicity with the imperialists, the "escualidos" and sectors of the Bolibourgeoisie(the name given to that section of business that is actually prospering under the pseudo-socialism of Chavez in Venezuela-Molly).

Lastly, the imperative need to push ahead with the revolutionary tasks is not only a guarantee for the happiness of our people, but the only way to defend the lives of and win freedom for millions of human beings.

Arriba los y las que luchan!

Venceremos!
Organización Comunista Libertaria de Chile

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS:

BOLIVIA IN CRISIS:

One month after his 67% approval rating in a recall referendum the left wing government of Bolivia, headed by Eva Morales, is facing another crisis. Right wing secessionist s based in the richer eastern provinces of the country have taken to the streets, hoping to win by riot what they couldn't win by ballot. A report of what is happening in Bolivia can be found at THIS BBC LINK.The government of Bolivia has accused that of the USA os instigating the riots and expelled the American ambassador. Washington has replied in kind. Venezuela's Chavez government has replied in solidarity by expelling the US ambassador from their country and recalling their diplomatic staff from the USA.

The School of the Americas Watch organization has launched a phone-in campaign to the US government demanding that they stop their interference in the internal affairs of South American countries. Here is their request.

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Urgent: Support Democracy in Bolivia and Latin America‏:
We are writing with grave concern about an emerging conflict in South America´s poorest nation, Bolivia and we need you to take immediate action. Bolivia is facing a critical moment in which the survival of a new era of hope is gravely threatened. After suffering decades of military dictatorships followed by years of economic dictatorship, Bolivia heralded in a new moment of dignity with the election of its first indigenous president, Evo Morales. However, just one month after a recall referendum gave Morales 67% of the vote, Bolivia's secessionist movement has unleashed unprecedented violence throughout the country. After three days of riots, 8 people have died, several government institutions have been destroyed and Bolivia´s gas pipeline has suffered millions of dollars in damage. OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza has called for the violent actions of opposition groups to end.

Citing involvement with the opposition movement, Bolivia´s president Morales declared US Ambassador to Bolivia, Phillip Goldberg, persona non grata and asked him to leave the country. Among Ambassador Goldberg´s closest friends are Croatian businessmen in the city of Santa Cruz who lead the city´s powerful separatist movement. Washington responded by asking Bolivia´s ambassador to return to his country.

South America´s presidents have united their voices in declaring support for Bolivia´s democracy and Evo Morales. Yesterday Venezuela in solidarity with Bolivia asked the US Ambassador to leave the country and recalled their ambassador from the United States. Venezuela is also citing US involvement in recent destabilization attempts in Venezuela. Unfortunately, as we know too well form our campaign to close the SOA/WHINSEC, the US has a long history of US intervention in the region.

Morales has called for restraint by the military, a markedly different response from that of Bolivia´s military dictatorships. SOA Watch founder, Fr. Roy Bourgeois was one of the many recipients of the torture and random detention which was commonplace under the dictatorship of General Hugo Banzer, an SOA graduate. Thousands of Bolivians were tortured and hundreds disappeared under the following Garcia Meza dictatorship leading military command were SOA graduates. Last year President Morales announced his decision that Bolivian troops would no longer train at the SOA/WHINSEC. Venezuela was the first to make this announcement in 2004, and since then a total of 5 countries have followed step.

We urge you to take immediate action. Please call the White House with the message, please stop interfering in Bolivia and other Latin American Democracies. Please call the capital switch board and ask for your Senators and House Members and ask them to immediately investigate if the White House is trying to destabilize the democracies of Bolivia and Venezuela.

White House to reach the President (202) 456-1414

Capitol Switchboard to reach your Senate or House Member (202) 224-3121

In Hope,

April, Mike, Pablo, Pam, Hendrik, Roy, Lisa and Eric

SOA Watch

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR-BOLIVIA:

BOLIVIAN MINERS STRIKE AGAINST MEAGRE PENSION OFFER:

Whatever shade of politics a government may have, left, right or anywhere in between, there is one certainty...it will eventually come into conflict with the workers of its country in its defense of "business as usual" and "profitability". This is also true of the many populist regimes in South America, now the new darlings of the international left. Here's a story from the LibCom website about the recent conflict between the leftist Bolivian state and its miners.

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Bolivian miners strike against Morales pension reform:
The Bolivian government has lost over $1.5 million due to a strike at the country's largest tin mine, Huanuni, where workers are demanding a deeper pension reform.

Roberto Montano said the state-owned mine has been losing about $500,000 a day since workers went on strike, halting production, on Thursday afternoon. The official said the mine always closed on Sundays.

"They (the workers) are staging an indefinite general strike [...] they're waiting for negotiations between the Bolivian Workers Central and the government," Montano said.

Workers at Huanuni are backing Bolivia's largest labor federation, the Bolivian Workers Central or COB, in its campaign for bigger pensions and a lowering of the retirement age to 55. The leftist government of President Evo Morales has presented a pension reform proposal to Congress, but the COB says the bill is not generous enough and has called it "pro-business."

The COB has staged several protests, blocking roads and storming government buildings in recent days to demand a more far-reaching measure.

The mine in the Oruro region, some 160 miles (260 km) south of the country's administrative capital La Paz, produced 821 tonnes of tin in June.Huanuni employs some 4,700 workers and has been a flashpoint for labor strife.

Workers there went on a 12-day pay strike in April, and production came to a halt for several weeks in late 2006 after violent clashes between rival groups of miners killed 18 people and injured dozens. After the conflict, the government banned independent miners from working at Huanuni and granted state-run mining company Comibol total control over the mine.

PEOPLE:

IN SEARCH OF THE LAST ANARCHIST:

Here's one right out of a B. Traven novel. The following interview/story from the BBC tells the story of a meeting with the last survivor of the Durruti Column, resident for many long years in the Bolivian jungle. Antonia Garcia Baron settled there after spending time in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War. He wanted to find as isolated a place as possible "where you have civilization you have priests". Here's the story.

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Meeting Spain's last anarchist
By Alfonso Daniels

San Buenaventura, Bolivia
Hours after flying on a rickety 19-seater propeller plane and landing on a dirt strip, you get to the village of San Buenaventura in the heart of the Bolivian Amazon.

Antonio Garcia Baron spent time in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Here, in a simple one-storey brick house next to a row of wooden shacks, is the home of Antonio Garcia Baron.

He is the only survivor still alive of the anarchist Durruti column which held Francoist forces at bay in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the founder of an anarchist community in the heart of the jungle.

Mr Baron, 87, was wearing a hat and heavy dark glasses. He later explained that they were to protect his eyes, which were damaged when he drank a cup of coffee containing poison nine years ago.

It was, he said, the last of more than 100 attempts on his life, which began in Paris, where he moved in 1945 after five years in the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp, and continued in Bolivia, his home since the early 1950s.
Stateless
He was keen to share his views on 20th Century Spanish history with a wider audience.

"The Spanish press has covered up that the (Catholic) Church masterminded the death of two million Republicans during the civil war, not one million as they maintain," Mr Baron said before launching into one of his many anecdotes.

"I told Himmler (the head of the Nazi SS) when he visited the Mauthausen quarry on 27 April, 1941, what a great couple the (Nazis) made with the Church.

"He replied that it was true, but that after the war I would see all the cardinals with the Pope marching there, pointing at the chimney of the crematorium."

On the walls of Mr Baron's house is a picture of him taken in the camp. Next to it is a blue triangle with the number 3422 and letter S inside, marking the prisoners considered stateless.

"Spain took away my nationality when I entered Mauthausen, they wanted the Nazis to exterminate us in silence. The Spanish government has offered to return my nationality but why should I request something that was stolen from me and 150,000 others?" he said angrily.

Mr Baron wanted to be as far from modern life as possible
Mr Baron arrived in Bolivia on the advice of his friend, the French anarchist writer Gaston Leval.

"I asked him for a sparsely populated place, without services like water and electricity, where people lived like 100 years ago - because where you have civilisation you'll find priests."

Some 400 people, mostly Guarani Indians, lived there at the time, but in fact also a German priest.

"He was a tough nut to crack. He learnt of my arrival and told everyone that I was a criminal. They fled and made the sign of the cross whenever they saw me, but two months later I started speaking and they realised I was a good person, so it backfired on him."

Convinced that the priest still spied on him, a few years later he decided to leave and create a mini-anarchist state in the middle of the jungle, 60km (37 miles) and three hours by boat from San Buenaventura along the Quiquibey River.

With him was his Bolivian wife Irma, now 71.

They raised chicken, ducks and pigs and grew corn and rice which they took twice a year to the village in exchange for other products, always rejecting money.
Dunkirk
Life was tough and a few years ago Mr Baron lost his right hand while hunting a jaguar.

For the first five years, until they began having children, they were alone. Later a group of some 30 nomadic Indians arrived and decided to stay, hunting and fishing for a living, also never using money.

"We enjoyed freedom in all of its senses, no-one asked us for anything or told us not to do this or that," he recounted as his wife smiled, sitting in a chair at the back of the room.

Recently they moved back to the village for health reasons and to be closer to their children. They live with a daughter, 47, while their other three children, Violeta, 52, Iris, 31, and 27-year-old Marco Antonio work in Spain.

Paintings of scenes from the camp are a visual reminder of his past. They also share the few simple rooms arranged around an internal patio with three Cuban doctors who are part of a contingent sent to help provide medical care in Bolivia.

The hours passed and it was time to take the small plane back to La Paz before the torrential rain isolated the area again.

Only then, as time was running out, did Mr Baron begin speaking in detail about Mauthausen and the war - as if wishing to fulfil a promise to fallen comrades.

How the Nazis threw prisoners from a cliff, how some of them clung to the mesh wire to avoid their inevitable death, how the Jews were targeted for harsh treatment and did not survive long.

His memory also took him to Dunkirk where he had arrived in 1940, before he was caught and imprisoned in Mauthausen.

"I arrived in the morning but the British fleet was some 6km from the coast. I asked a young English soldier if it would return.

"I saw that he was eating with a spoon in one hand and firing an anti-aircraft gun with the other," he laughed.

"'Eat if you wish', I told him. 'Do you know how to use it?' he asked since I didn't have military uniform and was very young.

"'Don't worry,' I said. I grabbed the gun and shot down two planes. He was dumbstruck.

"I'll never forget the determination of the British fighting stranded on the beach."

ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-BOLIVIA:

LIBERTARIAN ENOUNTER/FESTIVAL IN COCHABAMBA BOLIVIA:

Molly has translated this notice from a recent Spanish item appearing on the A-Infos website. Anarchism is undergoing a revival in the smaller countries in South America, as it is worldwide. In Bolivia this process has gone on enough so that the local anarchists feel confident in holding public events such as this encounter/festival (In Spanish speaking countries the term "encuentro" is usually used rather than the "festival" that we use in English speaking ones).

Bolivia is a small poor country, and its anarchist movement is hardly as visible on the world stage as that of many others. But it exists none the less, and it is growing. It has a honourable history, and the Institute for Anarchist Studies has featured an article on this country in the Fall 2005 edition ('Anarchism in Bolivia Through the Writings of Silvia Rivera Cuisicanqui'), and they have recently offered a grant to Melissa Forbis and Cale Layton for a translation of 'Anarchist Trade Unions in Bolivia 1920-1950'. As in most of South America the union movement was essentially built by anarchists.

In recent years(2007 actually) the Bolivian anarchist movement has been most prominent in the "anarchosphere" because of an interview on the part of a radio station in Philadelphia, taken from the World War 4 Report site (or vice versa, I'm not too sure). The title 'Indigenous Anarchism in Bolivia' is quite apt. The majority of people in Bolivia are of indigenous descent, and the style of anarchism in that country reflects this. Molly highly recommends this interview/article.

There have been other previous reports on anarchism in Bolivia. The Anarckismo site published an interview titled 'Latin American Voices: Leny Olivera' last year as well. In 2002 the A-Infos site reprinted an interview with a Bolivian anarchafeminist from Black Flag magazine-'Interview with Julieta Paredes of Mujeres Creanda'. For those able to read Spanish the Indymedia Bolivia site is invaluable to understand what is happening in that country.

But news has still been little and far between. Molly is therefore happy to present this notice in the English language. The Bolivian graffiti above, by the way, reads "the government pisses on us, and the press say's it's raining". For a further selection of graffiti from Bolivia and Peru see the Angry White Kid blog.

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[Bolivia] libertarian encounter in Cochabamba

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From July 18 to 20 , in the city of Cochabamba, anarchist and libertarian groups and individuals of Bolivia, will meet in a Libertarian Encounter, to exchange experiences, publications, discuss the crisis in the country, racism and the risk of a violent confrontation in the country and also coordinate joint actions to come.

The venue will be the Manufacturers Complex (sorta like an industrial park-Molly) (Av-Melchor Perez Holguin, esq. Park Ex-Combatants) There will be an anarchist bookfair on Saturday, July 19.

Further information: crespoflores@yahoo.com

OCTOBER 9:

HISTORY:

TODAY IN HISTORY:

Forty years ago today, in 1967, to the great convenience of his so-called friends as well as his enemies, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was killed by Bolivian armed forces supplied and trained by the American CIA and US Special Forces. Born in 1928 in Rosario, Argentina of a middle class family of Irish and Basque descent and aristocratic pretensions. Despite a lifelong affliction with asthma he excelled in sports as a child. In 1948 he entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. He travelled about Latin America on a motorcycle expedition during at least a year of these "studies" but still managed to graduate in 1953. He promptly took off for more travels across the length of Latin America and ended up in Guatemala in December of that year. At the time this country was headed by the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a leftist reformist who was attempting land reforms with the object of ending the US dominated latifundia system. While in Guatemala he was introduced to the Peruvian economist Hilda Gadea Acosta who was working there. He began a love affair with her, a very convenient arrangement because she had many connections in the Arbenz government. He also established contact with the Cuban exiles gathered around Fidel Castro and helped them in their main fund raising activity, the peddling of religious artifacts related to the Black Christ of Espuipulas. Unable to obtain a post as a medical intern unless he joined the Communist Party his finances were precarious. Despite his vast sympathy for communism he balked at the idea of party discipline. He supported himself mainly by pawning his lover's jewelry. Guevara was present in Guatemala during the CIA sponsored coup that overthrew Arbenz in 1954, took refuse in the Argentinian Embassy , and later left the country for Mexico under a safe conduct pass.

While in Mexico Guevara became reacquainted with his Cuban friends, and when their leader Fidel Castro arrived, after being amnestied from prison in July, 1955, Guevara fell under his spell. He joined the "July 26th Movement" that planned to overthrow then Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Having not yet endured enough punishment Hilda Gadea also went to Mexico from Guatemala and resumed her love affair with Guevara. They were married on August 18th, 1955. She gave birth to a daughter, Hilda Beatriz, on February 15th, 1956.

On November 25th, 1956 the Granma set out from Tuxpan, Mexico carrying a band of Castro's followers who hoped to overthrow Batista. Their landing was a disaster, and only 15 to 20 of the group survived to retreat to the Sierra Maestra mountains in eastern Cuba. Once there Guevara rose in the ranks, acquiring a reputation for courage, military knowledge and ruthlessness. As the Batista dictatorship crumbled because of opposition from much of Cuban society (even Batista's generals had begun to negotiate a separate peace with Castro) Guevara led a march westward towards Havana, encountering little significant opposition.

Batista fled to the Dominican Republic on January 1st, 1959. For his military services the new Cuban government proclaimed Guevara a "Cuban by birth" on Feb., 7th, and he initiated divorce proceeding against Hilda Gadea shortly thereafter. On June 2nd he married the Cuban born Aleida March with whom he had been living since late 1958. He began a short career as a government bureaucrat during which he acquired a reputation for both brutality and incompetence. His first job was a five month stint as the commander of the La Cabana Fortress prison. During these months somewhere between 156 and 550 people were executed at that prison under his orders.

For the next few years Guevara was rotated through a number of bureaucratic posts as he failed to achieve his level of incompetence. From the National Institute of Agrarian Reform to President of the National Bank of Cuba and later as a stint as Minister of Industry Guevara flitted, or was moved by popular demand, from one to the other. He at least "authorized" the Stalinization of the Cuban economy in these positions even if his dedication to the "work" was minimal, occupied as he was with chess tournaments, book writing and plotting various almost comic opera attempts to repeat the Cuban success in other Latin American countries. To say the least he didn't disapprove of the authoritarian nature of the socialism being built in Cuba then, even though any "planning" or, especially, administrative role that he may have had has been exaggerated by both his friends and enemies. As his books will testify he had little interest in the practicalities of "building socialism", and great interest in abstract dreams of ideological glory.

In December 1964 Guevara was sent to New York as head of the Cuban delegation to the UN. From this point he indeed found his level of incompetence. He spent the next few months meeting with various US political figures and doing a world tour, the "highlight" of which was his visit to North Korea where he stated that the regime there was a model towards which Cuba should aspire. In Algiers, however, he shot himself in the foot by criticizing the Soviet Bloc for being insufficiently militant, seeming to lead towards the Chinese version of Stalinism. He returned to Cuba on March 14th, 1965 and dropped out of sight two weeks later.

Back in Cuba Guevara's incompetence had been thoroughly demonstrated previously. He was thus unacceptable for any government post in which he could do further damage. Similarly he had annoyed Castro's Soviet backers sufficiently that another high profile international posting was also out of the question. Through the rest of 1965 Guevara's whereabouts were unknown to the world, even though he fate had been settled in an all-night meeting the very day that he arrived back in Cuba. By April 24th Guevara and the first of what were later to be about 100 members of a Cuban expeditionary force had arrived in the Congo to fight on behalf of the pro-Marxist Simba movement. The expedition was a fiasco. The communications of the Cubans were constantly monitored by the US National Security Agency which transmitted the information to the Congolese army. By late December 1965 Guevara had left the Congo, blaming the failure on his Congolese allies rather than the utterly fantastic nature of the plan itself.

Guevara nursed his grudges for the next six months living underground in Dar-es-Salaam and Prague. Members of the Mozambique independence movement FRELIMO met with him in Dar-es-Salaam and rejected his offer of "aid" to their own war. By early 1967 Guevara had been parked in Bolivia in the remote Nancahuazu region where the local Communist Party had purchased a parcel of land for "training' of the about 50 recruits that Guevara hoped would start a new revolution in the Andes region. The local communists, however, were split about the wisdom of this sort of operation, especially given Guevara's history of pro-Chinese sympathies. Rumours persist that his death was due to betrayal to the authorities on the part of the communists and even the Cuban government who shipped him two radio transmitters that were non-functional. An East German intelligence operative working in La Paz, the Bolivian capital, under the pseudonym of "Tania" (Haydee Tamara Bunke Bider) reportedly led the Bolivian authorities to Guevara's trail.

The "betrayal" theory of Guevara's death is highly disputed, and the truth may never be known. At the time where communist "loyalties" were split between Moscow, Peking and Havana it was entirely possible for an individual to be a "quintuple agent" serving 5 different masters. In any case the failure of Guevara and his small band of followers in Bolivia hardly needed betrayal to come about. As mentioned before the local communists were, at best, ambivalent about the scheme and promised help that never arrived. His opponents were well trained and equipped, unlike Batista's forces in Cuba.The incompetence of the planners, Guevara amongst them, is highlighted by the fact that the expeditionary force learned Quechua rather than the local native language Tupi-Guarani. Furthermore Guevara's own personal habit of peremptory command lost him whatever local support he might have gained amongst Bolivian locals who, in any case, were not clamouring for armed revolution at that time.

The result was inevitable. On October 8th Guevara's small force was surrounded, and he was captured . In the afternoon of the next day, October 9th, he was executed. The body was looted, and some of his personal possessions are still on ghoulish display at CIA headquarters in the USA. His hands were cut off for fingerprint identification. The body was disposed of later by unknown means.

In the unthinking climate of the time Guevara became a cult hero to an odd assortment of new leftists, utterly unconcerned with either the brutality of his methods or the desirability of his goal of a Stalinist state. As an ultimate irony his image is nowadays spread across the world as a tradeable commodity emblazoned on anything from teeshirts to key chains. Guevara's capitalist enemies have had the last word. Meanwhile back in the jungles of Bolivia a religious cult has sprung up around the legend of one "St. Che" who, like any good Catholic saint, heals the sick but never had any criticism of the Church to which he belonged no matter how much his theology may have been unorthodox. See The Killing Machine: Che Guevara from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand and Just a Pretty Face ? for discussion of the "cult of Che", and how it is mass marketed today. This sort absurdity has inspired its own parody. In Mexico there is a popular teeshirt of Guevara with a clown nose, entitled "Chepillin" is reference to a popular children's clown on Mexican TV, "Cepillin". Back in Cuba Guevara is a sort of secular saint, one of the sort of holiness that good churchmen are always glad to see the end of so they can glorify it. Children are required to begin each school day with a chant saying they "will be like Che". The government has built a mausoleum in Santa Clara (minus the body of course) that attracts about 200,000 people per year, almost 2/3rds of whom are foreign tourists.

The "cult of Che" has attracted many over the years, especially declasse intellectuals, would-be commissars in Leninist sects and romantic student "revolutionaries" who "revolve" right out of this upon graduation. Even some anarchists bizarrely enough cling to elements of "Guevara Kitch", though to an anarchist of good sense a Che teeshirt should be about as popular as a Hitler teeshirt at a Bnai Brith function. For a good discussion of the whole Guevara mythology from a sensible anarchist perspective see http://libcom.org/history/guevara-ernesto-che-1928-1967 . Some of the attachment is because some of those who call themselves "anarchists" mistake the idea of "militance" for that of "anarchism" and are merely attracted to the violent aura surrounding men such as Guevara. Most of this attraction is, of course, mere 200 proof, triple distilled juvenile bravado mixed with the juice from the ignorance berry to produce that fine concoction known as the 'Fashion-A Cocktail'.

For a rational view of the life of Guevara and his cult see Larry Gambone's 'St. Che' available from Red Lion Press and also from AK Press. This pamphlet sells for $2, and is worth every penny. The "myth of Che" is, of course, only part of the larger leftist myth of the Cuban revolution as the sole creation of the Marxists gathered around Castro and of the supposed "progressive" nature of the regime that this "revolution" (can we say "revolution followed by coup d'etat") gave birth to. For an anarchist view of the revolutionary process in Cuba and the unknown (to the average leftist) role that anarchists played in it see the following texts available in Molly's Links section under 'Texts'.

Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement by Frank Fernandez

Cuba: The Anarchists and Liberty also by Frank Fernandez

Both these texts, the first a book and the second a pamphlet, are available from See Sharp Press in print form. See that site for ordering details.