SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia: The spectre of violence, possibly even a civil war, is hanging heavy over Bolivia ahead of an autonomy vote on Sunday by its richest province that the government has declared illegal.
Santa Cruz, the eastern region controlling the landlocked Latin American nation’s biggest gas reserves, is to hold a referendum on whether to implement statutes to let it run its own finances and create its own security force.
The left-wing administration of Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales, has pledged to ignore the move, which looks likely to pass by an overwhelming margin, calling it separatist and unconstitutional.
The autonomy statutes “are not viable and therefore we won’t accept them”, Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said on a visit to Cuba this week.
Although Morales has backed away from an earlier threat to send in the army, sabre-rattling has escalated on both sides and many fear a spark is all it will take for street clashes to explode.
Santa Cruz’s Governor Ruben Costas closed campaigning for the referendum on Wednesday, saying that the vote was an opportunity for “a new republic, a second, non-centralised republic”.
The government is “alarmed by these intentions”, the deputy minister for co-ordinating social movement, Sacha Llorenti, said.
Three provinces neighbouring Santa Cruz are to follow suit next month with their own autonomy moves, and two others are considering doing the same.
If all go ahead, they would effectively split Bolivia between the wealthier lowlands populated by European descendants and the poor Andean mountains home to the indigenous Indians who make up 60% of the population.
The situation is impossible to predict.
Although the country has repeatedly stepped back from a potentially ruinous confrontations in the past, violence over political divisions is not unknown.
In January 2007, in the town of Cochabamba, for example, three people died and hundreds were injured in clashes linked to social strife. Street blockades and demonstrations occur frequently.
Santa Cruz’s referendum has exposed ethnic, political and ideological rifts.
Morales, an admirer of Cuba’s Fidel Castro and ally to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, has portrayed those backing the poll as a white “elite” acting in cahoots with the US to unsettle his country.
But many Bolivians in Santa Cruz and the other eastern “rebel” provinces say the unrest was triggered by Morales’s plans to overhaul Bolivia’s constitution to redistribute much of the wealth of the eastern provinces to the poorer Andean highlands and limit land holdings.
Brazil and Argentina, which have deals to access Bolivia’s recently nationalised gas sector, have attempted to negotiate a solution.
But that mediation has been in vain, as has efforts by the Organisation of American States (OAS) and Bolivia’s Catholic Church. – AFP |
