Trial opens of alleged killers of journalist Carlos Quispe Quispe

[Judi Lynn]

Source: RSF

18 June 2008

Trial opens of alleged killers of journalist Carlos Quispe Quispe

The trial opened on 18 June of the alleged killers of Carlos Quispe Quispe, a journalist on Radio Municipal Pucarani, who died in the city of the same name in La Paz department, western Bolivia on 29 March after being beaten up by opponents of the mayor.

The six defendants, charged with “homicide” and “membership of a criminal gang”, were all in court for the opening. Four municipal councillors - Edwin Huampo Espinoza, Basilio Poma Poma, Rufina Zerna Flores and Nicolaza Cruz Quispe - and Julio Quisberth Quispe and Efraín Ticonipa, two leaders of the Pucarani municipal ‘vigilance committee’, a body that oversees council activities. The parents of the murder victim and Jorge Borda, legal advisor to the mayor, who is a civil party in the case, will all be giving evidence. According to statements made by Borda to Reporters Without Borders, the journalist was beaten up by members of the vigilance committee, incited by the accused municipal councillors.

Reporters Without Borders welcomes the opening of the trial as a first step in the fight against impunity and hopes that the court in Pucarani will determine the individual and collective responsibilities in the journalist’s murder.

~snip~
“Quispe is the first journalist to lose his life to the extreme political tension to which both state and privately-owned media - pro-government and pro-opposition - are now hostage,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The attack on Radio Municipal Pucarani that resulted in Quispe’s death was followed by attacks on two state-owned media in Sucre by radical groups hostile to the government.”

Read more: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=26491

---

Carlos Quispe Quispe, Radio Municipal,
March 29, 2008, Pucarani

Quispe, a journalist working for a government-run radio station in Pucarani, died March 29 after being severely beaten two days earlier by protesters demanding the ouster of the local mayor.

On the afternoon of March 27, at least 150 protesters rallied outside the government building in Pucarani, a small city about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the capital, La Paz, and called for the ouster of Mayor Alejandro Mamani. The mayor had been accused of corruption, according to local press reports and CPJ interviews. The protesters forced their way into the municipal building and broke down the door to the government-run Radio Municipal. Witnesses told radio station Onda Local that demonstrators destroyed station equipment and identified Quispe as “the mouth on the radio.”

Protestors wielding whips and metal rods beat Quispe in the head and chest, said an official from the mayor’s office who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity. Quispe, a journalism student at La Paz’s Universidad Mayor de San Andrés who had worked as an intern at Radio Municipal for three months, was taken to a clinic in Pucarani and later to a hospital in La Paz, according to reports in the Bolivian press. Quispe died on March 29 from unspecified complications, the Spanish news service EFE reported.

Radio Municipal, the only radio station in Pucarani, provided government information and community news, according to Bolivian journalists. Quispe delivered a daily noontime news report, Juan Javier Zeballos, executive director of the National Press Association, told CPJ. Quispe also hosted a nightly music program and often interviewed Mamani, who talked about government projects and fielded questions from listeners.

Wilson Arteaga, a reporter for Onda Local who traveled to Pucarani to investigate the incident, told CPJ that the Radio Municipal’s facilities were destroyed. The radio station has been off the air since. Local police do not have a land line and CPJ was unable to contact them.

http://www.cpj.org/deadly/killed08.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. The "political tension" is NOT holding rightwing, private media "hostage"!

It is ONLY the rightwing forces in Bolivia (and other places) that hold reporters hostage, oppose free speech and murder journalists!

“Quispe is the first journalist to lose his life to the extreme political tension to which both state and privately-owned media - pro-government and pro-opposition - are now hostage,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The attack on Radio Municipal Pucarani that resulted in Quispe’s death was followed by attacks on two state-owned media in Sucre by radical groups hostile to the government.” --RSF

It seems to me that "Reporters Without Borders" has gone out of its way to drag the leftwing, government supporters into this paragraph, with no justification--as if to imply that both sides are being violent, harming journalists and trying to suppress free speech. If they are going to do that, they need to provide some instance of the leftwing holding journalists "hostage." There is NO evidence of that, that I know of. None! The paragraph goes on to cite two MORE incidents of RIGHTWING attacks on "state-owned media" (i.e., media that belongs to everyone and that provides politically neutral news, like NPR used to do here, and some local community TV/radio stations still do). But it cites NO evidence whatsoever that leftists/pro-government supporters are doing this.

Further, the "extreme political tension" has been caused entirely by the white racists in the eastern provinces who--with Bush Junta help--are plotting to secede from the national government of Evo Morales (the first indigenous president of Bolivia--a largely indigenous country), taking the gas and oil resources with them. These rich white racists have every opportunity to express themselves, to run candidates for political office, and to vote--and they own most of the land and much of the country's wealth. They are not being oppressed! They have no reasons but greed and bigotry to behave the way they do. They are creating civil disorder. It is their thugs who beat journalists to death. There is no reason to blame the "extreme political tension" on the rightful, lawful, ELECTED government and its supporters, who, it seems to me, have shown amazing restraint in the face of Bushite-instigated plots to divide and destroy their country.

[AnnieBW]

2. Would that make him Extra Quispe?

Sorry, but the joke just popped into my warped brain...

[Judi Lynn]

3. The name of the young man who was beaten so savagely he died was pronounced "Kees-pay," not Kwispy."

Sometimes it's better to go ahead and show some respect for some innocent person who has suffered hideously and died alone, without friends around, at the hands of racist assholes who wanted to make a political score by destroying him and stealing his life.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Comments on the racist right-wing violence in Bolivia from one who has experienced it:

Bolivia's racial onslaught
César Navarro

Published 16 June 2008

~snip~
Dramatic manifestations of such social and racial violence, which are tolerated and encouraged by political nuclei of the opposition were seen in the city of Cochabamba in January 2007, in Sucre in September 2007 and May 2008; in Santa Cruz in August and December 2007 and May 2008 and in the regions of Beni and Pando in June 2008. Organised groups planned and carried out violence against indigenous people and peasants, and they publicly expressed their collective discourse through racist phrases such as: “fucking indian”.

Many of us, both men and women, are victims of this violence which is a result of the political mediocrity of the opposition and the racial arrogance of tiny sectors of society; they are part of the process of destabilising our President and the structural transformation that we are living through.

This article is not an attempt to theorise the violence that we are experiencing, but a testimony of what many of us suffer, its purpose is not for us to complain or to present ourselves as martyrs, but to let the world know how the right-wing, displaced from political power by popular mobilisation, defeated at the ballot box by a whole people, now uses overt racism as part of its discourse and action.

Racism is not admissible in the world in the 21st century, but it must be known that it is being promoted in Bolivia by sectors of the population which are economically powerful. These groups, today settled in the region of Santa Cruz, many of them offspring of immigrants from Europe, Asia and the Middle East have appropriated the indigenous identity of Santa Cruz, known as “camba” and this is being used to show racial supremacy over the “colla” and “chapaco” (indigenous people of the West and South of Bolivia).

This means that the historical challenge for Evo and the Bolivian process is not limited to the need to structurally modify the State, the economy and society but also to eliminate internal neo-colonialism once and for all.

The liberation of the people means the reaffirmation of their identity, not a negation of the other but a respect for differences.

César Navarro is an MP of the Bolivian Movement towards Socialism party. He was attacked, along with Senator Carmen Rosa Velásquez, at the airport of the Bolivian city of Sucre. The attack occurred while Navarro was travelling to his constituency in Potosí; he was manhandled by a waiting gang while Senator Velásquez was set upon, the group pushing her about, pulled her hair and hit her. Stones were then thrown at them as they escaped by taxi. Navarro has now decided to avoid passing through Sucre when travelling between his constituency and Bolivia's capital, La Paz.

http://www.newstatesman.com/south-america/2008/06/bolivia-violence-indigenous

~~~~~~~~
Colonial backlash: reflections on recent racist violence in Bolivia
Nick Buxton, May 28

Through the grainy print, I could just make out three men in suits and hats haughtily bristling their guns. At their feet were a line of indigenous men and women on their knees, heads bowed, the gaunt look of humiliation etched on their faces. Beneath the photo the caption: “Capture of savages in Santiago de Chiquitos,1883.”

I meant to challenge the gentle motherly museum owner in the small village in the eastern region of Bolivia about the inscription, but shamefully didn’t. My silence scratched at my conscience for a few days like an infected insect bite.

What I never expected though was to see a similar image live on TV a month later. Yet three nights ago, I sat sickened and disturbed as I watched a line of campesinos kneeling, their shirts stripped off, forced into mumbling chants against Evo and in favour of Sucre whilst a gang of students deliriously shouted racist insults.

Other images flickered repetitively on screen – indigenous men stumbling pushed aggressively by angry crowds, bewildered farmers showing huge bloody gashes on their heads, a camera zooming in on an house on the hill surrounded by adrenalin-charged men accompanied by the flat tones of the news commentator saying that a few campesinos were hiding inside the house. Local politicians without shame justified the violence arguing that it was in protest at Evo Morales’ visit to the region scheduled for that day.

And then back to the square, and the loud war-cries of the noticeably mixed-race young thugs. “Este es Sucre, Carajo, Este es Sucre Carajo” (This is Sucre, goddamit. This is Sucre, goddamit.) Young urban men, some no doubt with campesino grandparents spitting out hatred directed at their own. Next to me watching the TV coverage, my Bolivian flatmate was crying.

Sadly this incident isn’t unique. I have heard of ever more examples of attacks on indigenous people and particularly any leaders associated with the government. Most are ignored by the press. Just two days before the recent events in Sucre, two Congress MAS deputies’ denounced the fact that they had been attacked and threatened on a visit to Sucre. It received two paragraphs in one of the national newspapers.

Whilst in Lima, I talked to Wilmer Flores, a MAS deputy from the Sucre region who recounted how he had been chased from the public square and cornered by a group of students who stamped on him, beat him, shouting “Kill the Indian. Let’s kill them all one by one.” It was as one of them started with broken glass to try and scratch his eyes out that a policeman happened to pass and the group escaped. His attempts to find his potential murderers have met a brick wall of complicity and evasion from all Sucre’s legal authorities.

More:
http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2008/05/colonial-backlash-reflections-on-recent.html