Trial opens in US for Bolivian ex-president in 2003 killings

[Judi Lynn]

BY CURT ANDERSON
AP Legal Affairs Writer
March 06, 2018 02:46 PM

Updated 2 hours 12 minutes ago

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA.
A former president of Bolivia and his one-time defense minister went on trial Tuesday in connection with a lawsuit filed by family members who they say their relatives were indiscriminately shot by the military in a heavy-handed attempt to quell civil unrest in 2003.

The federal case against former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and his former defense minister, Jose Carlos Sanchez Berzain, has been pending since 2007. It was brought by families of eight people shot and killed under the Torture Victim Protection Act, which authorizes lawsuits in the U.S. for extrajudicial killings in foreign countries.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages from the two men, who have lived in the U.S. since fleeing Bolivia in 2003. Leftist Evo Morales, who was behind many of those protests, mainly by indigenous Aymara Bolivians like himself, became president later that year and remains so today.

In their opening statements to the jury, attorneys for both sides gave competing versions of events in the fall of 2003, when a series of sometimes-violent protests in Bolivia over use of the country's vast natural gas reserves came to a head. Protesters blockaded many towns and cities, including the capital La Paz, and confrontations between police and protesters frequently turned violent.

More:
http://www.islandpacket.com/news/nation-world/national/article203728424.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Gone, But Not Forgotten:Why Bolivians want the United States to extradite their exiled ex-president

ACT LOCALLY » MAY 2, 2007
Gone, But Not Forgotten
Why Bolivians want the United States to extradite their exiled ex-president

BY WES ENZINNA

When, on Oct. 15, 2003, Filomena León was shot in the back by military soldiers in the Bolivian town of Patacamaya, near El Alto, she had no reason to believe hers would be anything other than an anonymous death in the Andes.

“I was in front of the soldiers and the bullet entered me from behind, into my spine,” León, an indigenous miner and mother of six, told Verónica Auza and Claudia Espinoza, editors of Gas War Memorial Testimony. The shot left her paralyzed, and she told Auza and Espinoza on April 20, 2004, “[After being shot] I wanted to die. … I still feel the same.” She died 10 days later from a lethal infection.

. . .

In October 2003, protests erupted in the impoverished and largely Aymara Indian city of El Alto over a government plan to export natural gas to the United States via Chile under economic terms protesters said would not benefit most Bolivians. The demonstrators filled El Alto and organized strategic blockades to stop gas from reaching the nearby capital of La Paz and later being exported. They also demanded nationalization of the country’s gas reserves.

President Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada, widely recognized as the architect of Bolivia’s neoliberal “shock therapy,” had orchestrated the gas deal, and on Oct. 11 he ordered the military into El Alto to quell the protests and break the blockades. By the end of October, more than 60 demonstrators were dead and 400 wounded–the result of soldiers firing “large-caliber weapons, including heavy machine guns,” into the crowd, as the Catholic Church testified in a public statement. León, stopped by troops along with four others, was unarmed when she was shot. Among the others killed were small children and a pregnant woman. In the wake of the massacres, Sánchez de Lozada fled the country for the United States, where he remains today.

More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/3136/gone_but_not_forgotten

LBN:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142005974#post1