Things have been on a full run here in Bolivia since we got back from Spring Break. At work I found my project in Yungas in the process of being evacuated from Caranavi. Our new president, Evito, hasn’t been cooperative (or even civil) with the US, so the Embassy finally decided to close down the development projects in Caranavi. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the militant MAS leaders declared that they weren’t going to allow any private entities or any Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) to work in Caranavi – they are only going to allow the MAS-backed syndicates to function in their district and have already driven out several privately owned agricultural-based businesses - just another step the MAS is taking to consolidate all political and economic power in their own pockets. In fact, it's very obvious that the MAS doesn't care if the people have electricity or roads or schools or clinics - they only care that whatever the people have, they get it from the MAS and no one else. This process started a couple of months ago when the MAS shut down six US-financed health clinics in El Alto. Apparently this even goes for housing - my son and his classmates went up to El Alto to build houses for Habitat for Humanity earlier this week, as part of their public service hours required by the American School, and found that the work they'd done previously had been demolished by the MAS hooligans. Evito's next step is to evict all foreign witnesses to his race to the Stone Age - he's already threatened to deny visas to any American citizen wanting to come to Bolivia and to yank the visas from all US citizens currently working in Bolivia.
Anyway, when the US informed us of their decision to close us down in Caranavi we told them that the angry mobs in Yungas would take over our installations by force and that they would lose about $2M in materials that we have stockpiled down there. (The photo above shows my project sign that was already destroyed by the angry mobs.) So they postponed their announcement until the end of the week, to give us and the other projects time to quietly slip out of Dodge before the blackhats noticed. Of course, slipping out unnoticed is a real trick for us because I had a whole warehouse in Caranavi, complete with tons of wire and hardware and about 5000 poles. So we hired a fleet of trucks and cranes and sent our whole crew down to see if we could inconspicuously dismantle our warehouse (literally – the building itself) and truck out a couple hundred truckloads of materials. The other NGO’s working in Caranavi, on much less tangible projects, were all out of Dodge by mid-week, leaving us alone to scramble for safety.
In other local news this month, the big news (besides the bankruptcy of the local air carriers - LAB and Varig - and all of the plane crashes - LAB, Amazonas, TAM) the government dismantled the PTJ, Bolivia’s equivalent of the US’s FBI, when it was determined that some PTJ officers were guilty of accosting tourists, taking them prisoner in order to get their ATM and credit cards, liquidating their assets, and then killing them. The government has, of course, formed a new police institution with a new name and everything, but I suspect that the usual cast of characters is still skulking around and can’t imagine that anything has really changed. Also, this month saw the first strikes and blockades against the government (as opposed to those BY the government last month) by the workers’ union (who want higher wages), the transportation workers (who don’t want to pay taxes), and the eastern lowlands (Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni – who, I think, don’t want their industries and agriculture nationalized.) So, Evito’s honeymoon is well and truly over – it’s starting to look like he’s not going to get to do whatever he wants, at least not without a semblance of a fight.
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