What’s going on in bolivia?
Apostate Windbag has some answers, as well as analysis and links to further resources:
Timorous, middle class nervous Nellies talk of ‘restoring order’ and ‘preserving democracy’, but it is the very protests on the street who are by their actions are restoring an order, but one that is just and not exploitative, and are fighting for genuine, participatory, economic democracy, not the chimera of democracy we see in bourgeois parliaments the world over.
The short version of events is that the poor, working class and indigenous of Bolivia – the country’s majority – angered with their natural-resource-rich country having been plundered for hundreds of years refused to see their patrimony plundered one more time. Angry at the minimal royalties and taxes foreign companies would return to Bolivia in return for the theft of the country’s considerable natural gas reserves and inspired by the transformation that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has shown is possible if resource revenues are invested in social programmes and development, protestors have essentially shut the country down.