From the Mines to the Streets: A Bolivian Activist’s Life

Chapter 11. Life in El Alto

181 Chapter 11 Life in El Alto Three months after the 1985 Presidential Decree 21060,the key element in the New Economic Policy (NEP), was signed, I arrived back in Bolivia. The law embodied a neoliberal structural adjustment program just like those, having economic globalization as their goal, beginning to be applied all over the world.The previous government of Hernán Siles Zuazo (1982–1985) had been boxed into a corner and had no choice but to call elections. The new president was none other thanVíctor Paz Estenssoro,president following the revolution of 1952 until 1956, again between 1960 and 1964, and for a third time, very briefly, in 1964, when he was overthrown by General Barrientos. In 1985, he headed a weak coalition government with the National DemocraticAction (Acción Democrática Nacional,orADN), the party of ex-dictator Hugo Banzer, who drew on his support in the eastern lowlands to recast himself as a democratic politician.Paz Estenssoro’s NEP was one of the most extreme structural adjustment programs the world had experienced to that point. For me and thousands of other miners, his decision to shut down the state mines was devastating. The New Economic Policy, Decreto Supremo 21060: Adopting Neoliberalism The 1985 elections marked another crucial turning point in Bolivia. Víctor Paz Estenssoro, at the head of a coalition government, almost immediately signed Presidential Decree 21060, the NEP, which launched Bolivia’s neoliberal period by closing state mines, reducing social spending, floating the currency against the U.S. dollar, privatizing state-owned enterprises, opening the country to direct foreign investment, and ending protectionist and import substitution policies. This package formed the basis for the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) structural 182 adjustment programs around the world and is the policy package at the core of modern neoliberal development. The NEP gave international financial institutions and foreign governments renewed confidence, which was bolstered when it proved remarkably effective in reducing inflation in a matter of weeks, but at an enormous cost to Bolivia’s workers. Over twenty thousand miners lost their jobs in one year, with disastrous effects on their families, their communities, and their ability to mobilize politically. Workers and campesinos reacted immediately with a round of strikes and riots, but they failed to slow the NEP’s juggernaut, which was muscled through by the government’s declaration of a state of siege and backed by fiscal support from the IMF and the World Bank. While the new policies successfully stabilized the formal economy, miners, factory workers, and campesinos displaced or marginalized by the NEP were forced to eke out a living in the burgeoning informal, contraband, and coca economies, with their income supplemented by remittances from family members who worked abroad. The depth of this economic crisis essentially served to dissipate largescale resistance and to come close to achieving one of the NEP’s explicit goals: destroying the COB. I returned not to Siglo XX’s mines, but to the city of La Paz, with the Archdiocese’s orthopedic braces and prosthetics project. It was a terrible time: it felt as if the country was being torn apart, because the state mines, which had accounted for about 75 percent of all exports,were on the verge of fully closing.The miners embarked on a“March for Life,”from Siglo XX to La Paz, a trek of over 350 miles, in a vain effort to keep the mines open. The military intervened and blocked the march in Calamarca, about 50 miles south of La Paz.Marchers blamed the union leaders Filemón Escobar, Simón Reyes, and Oscar Salas for capitulating to the government. Shortly after the march was aborted,over twenty-three thousand COMIBOL mine workers lost their jobs. This alliance of the national oligarchy with multinational capital decimated the Bolivian labor movement, achieving the goal they had sought since the 1952 nationalization of the mines.Their success did not come easy;it required the imprisonment,exile,and murder of leaders and military collaboration in the slaughter of miners, sometimes even in their own homes. Settling in El Alto We arrived at our new house in the neighborhood known as Ciudad Satélite—literally Satellite City—one of the oldest settlements in El Alto. activist in el alto 183 As soon asValeria and I landed, we both were hit with altitude illness, as El Alto is at 13,300 feet...