The leader of the Coordinating Committee for the Defense of Water and Gas, Oscar Olivera, explains to us the solution that the Bolivian people must arrive at in their struggle to reclaim the hydrocarbons:

Audio: Oscar Olivera - (2,14 min)

“Any kind of solution will have to include hydrocarbon nationalization and the constitutional assembly. Those have been the demands since the year 2003, and it will soon by two years that the politicians refuse to take actions toward that decision that the Bolivian people have made. Second, their intransigence when the great majority of the Bolivian people demand economic and political changes, they don’t want to carry that out. The people have practically lost confidence in the government, the congress, the politicians, and that is very serious, because there is a kind of power vacuum, which could lead to a solution that includes the use of force. Meanwhile, we are going to continue the mobilizations, in fact the mobilizations have radicalized, and they will continue until these same forces can’t take it anymore.

“Individual prejudice is one thing, and collective prejudice another. I’d say that this is individual prejudice, that the people are prejudiced by the need to survive day to day. But if we don’t understand each other, and those people don’t get involved in the struggle for the collective good, which means fighting for the recovery of the hydrocarbons that will give us a future for the us and for our children, for the next 40 years, I think we are doomed. Without us, they will continue to live as slaves.

“That publicity machine – the government and the multinationals – has worked to try to confuse, criminalize, and derail all the true social mobilizations. I’d ask that this not be so. That the people understand that we can allow ourselves to be prejudiced for a day, a week, a month, but it would be worth it to leave behind that prejudice (against action) for the next 40 years. But when we have governments like this one, and the previous ones, totally sold out and surrendered to the interests of the multinationals, the U.S. Embassy, and the international lending institutions, doing anything differently really causes those politicians fear, makes their knees tremble. I think a country on the edge of changing its economic and political model needs a handful of politicians who, like in the case of Venezuela and other Latin American countries, can act with dignity, in the service of the people and not of the multinationals.”

Oscar suggested that hydrocarbon nationalization must happen when way or another; if not now, than in a Constituent Assembly. At the same time, he rejected any request from the foreign bourgeoisie based in Santa Cruz for intervention from the United Nations or the Organization of American States in the Bolivian conflict:

“This request is nothing more than an open invitation for military occupation of our country by foreign military forces, under the pretense of protecting democracy. But their only objective is that the multinationals continue operating in our country and keep maintaining those privileges to irrationally exploit our natural resources. [We look at] experiences such as the case of Haiti, where in the name of avoiding a confrontation between Haitians there has been a military intervention, and the same has occurred with the UN in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, and other countries. As Bolivians, we cannot allow that.”

He also expressed his rejection of the acts of violence against peasant farmers in the department of Santa Cruz on Tuesday, June 1, saying:

“We vehemently condemn the acts of physical aggression by the so-called Cruceñista Youth against indigenous campesinos, teachers, and health workers in the city of Santa Cruz. We also want to make it clear that this is the kind of autonomy that the Santa Cruz oligarchs proclaim, an autonomy of aggression, of exclusion, where they determine who marches and who doesn’t; those who march against their interests will be attacked and beaten as our brothers the indigenous campesinos, teachers, and nurses were. We cannot tolerate that. There in fact is the de facto autonomy that the reactionary sectors are now assuming in capital of the east.”