Carter Center to Monitor Bolivia's Elections

[Judi Lynn]

Carter Center to Monitor Bolivia's Elections
Jake Wade 1 day ago

ATLANTA (AP) -- The Carter Center is sending a small delegation to monitor Bolivia's Dec. 6 elections.

The Atlanta-based center said Thursday the team will be led by Jennifer McCoy, who directs the center's Americas Program. It said the mission will aim to assess the general environment surrounding the elections but that the delegation is too small to assess the conduct of polling procedures throughout the South American country.

The election pits President Evo Morales against former Pando state Gov. Leopoldo Fernandez.

http://www.13wmaz.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=72108&catid=52



No friend to indigenous Bolivians, Gov. Leopoldo Fernandez.
Massacre of 30 campesinos by "civicos" in Pando, Bolivia
15 September 2008 | Washington DC

In the worst violent act in the history of Bolivia's democracy, a campaign by opposition Prefects in Bolivia seeking to destabilize the MAS government, took the lives of as many as 30 people, and wounded dozens more, in the Amazonian province of Pando. Most regional governments expressed condemnation, while the United States remained silent.

As United States officials complain about the expulsion of one of more incompetent ambassadors in the region, Latin American presidents are meeting in Chile on Monday to find a more meaningful response to the crisis in Bolivia -- what some are now referring to as the most significant attack on democracy in the region since the U.S. sponsored coup of Salvador Allende 35 years ago.

On Sept 11, the anniversary of Allende's murder, at least 30 people were killed and as many as 100 were injured, when paramilitaries with the Civic Committee attacked a peaceful gathering of farmers on their way to an Assembly in the town of Porvenir. The attackers were reportedly trained and financed by the Prefect of the Bolivian department of Pando, Leopoldo Fernandez.

According to witnesses, which occurred at 3:00 am near the town of Tres Barracas, the unarmed victims were gunned down by machine gun fire from attackers perched in trees, who then pursued victims on foot. A total of 17 deaths, among them women and children, have been confirmed, but local authorities expect the toll to rise above 30. Some of the wounded were pursued to a nearby hospital, where they were subsequently killed. Others escaped into the nearby forest or crossed into Brazil, but are in danger due to lack of medical attention or continued attacks.

The Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, whose organizational members have led the campaign to block the Brazilian Madeira hydroelectric dams (San Antonio and Jirau) from impacting Bolivian territory, denounced the disappearance of more than 50 members and 26 wounded by gunfire. Many other people are unaccounted for.

Some 15 persons were captured by the attackers and turned over to the police in Cobija as if they were the criminals. At least 40 armed employees of Prefect Fernandez held the 15 as hostages before fleeing in anticipation of the Bolivian security forces.

For over a day after the attacks were first reported, neither the Bolivian government nor the Red Cross was able to respond to the emergency. Late Friday evening, the government declared a state of siege and sent forces to secure the capital city of Cobija. Two people were killed in the government's pacification of the airport. The municipality of Filadelfia was reportedly burned by assailants on Sunday.

The government announced that judicial processes were underway to detain Prefect Fernandez as the intellectual author of the Tres Barracas massacre, although his whereabouts were not known.

Land inequality: Backdrop to the political crisis
A press statement released Friday by Amnesty International stated, “the escalation of violence in the area known as the half moon (“media luna”) departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Chiquisaca, Beni and Pando over recent days gives serious cause for concern for the situation of human rights in the country. Violence has flared up at several stages of a process to reform the constitution that began in 2006, as regional sensibilities around the issue of autonomy have led to polarization in responses. Discrimination and racism against the indigenous population of Bolivia has been an underlying feature of these tensions."

The Tres Barracas massacre is the latest in a long string of violent provocations carried out by organized youth gangs in conjunction with the “media luna” departmental governors and other opposition leaders from the departments that have opposed the MAS government despite a recent referendum that endorsed the ruling party with 67% of the vote. Recent violence includes sabotage of a natural gas pipeline, vandalizing government offices, and threats to cut off natural gas exports to neighboring Brazil and Argentina.

Groups of vigilantes in Santa Cruz, including the Union Juvenil Crucenista, have targeted media outlets and NGOs, in particular those working with indigenous communities in defense of their human rights. One NGO, Centro de Estudios Jurídicos e Investigación Social (CEJIS), has been the subject of 15 attacks over the past five years, culminating with the storming of their office on 9 September, leaving many wounded. Another, Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (CIDOB), was attacked and the organization’s members were beaten. Both organizations are at the forefront of the government's land redistribution program.

Government officials estimate that a few thousand large landholders control at least 60-70% of the potentially productive land in the east, while only 5-10% of the agricultural land is in the hands of hundreds of thousands of largely indigenous farmers. The new proposed Constitution for which elections are planned in early December, sets limits on landholdings at either 5,000 or 10,000 hectares.

Leopoldo Fernandez has enriched himself as a client of Bolivia's largest landholders, at the same time doing very little to reduce poverty in the province despite rising to become one of Pando's most senior politicians since the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer. Fernandez was an official with the dictatorship of Banzer (1971-78), and Garcia-Meza (1980-81) under whom it is believed that Fernandez acquired land illegally. He later served as the head of the national land reform agency (INRA) in Pando, as well as Parliamentarian, Minister of Goverment and Prefect under the government of Hugo Banzar-Jorge Quiroga (1997-2002). His businesses include Brazil nut and cattle production, with a declared wealth of over $US 1.4 million. (see Fernandez: Butcher of Porvenir).

Descendant of the rubber bosses that enslaved the indigenous population of the Bolivian Amazon since the 19th century, Fernandez is closely associated with some of the largest loggers and sawmill operators in the Amazon (Brazilian and Bolivian), including several of the largest landowning families: Sonnenschein (21.773 hectáreas), Hecker (12.498 ha), Vaca Roca (1,000 ha), Vargas Rivera (4.890 ha), Peñaranda (4.167 ha), Barbery Paz (14.820), all of whom received land during the Agrarian Reform. (La Prensa, 12.3.07).

More:
http://www.bicusa.org/en/Article.3895.aspx

[rabs]

1. Leopoldo Fernandez? Is he running for president?

I don't know where the AP reporter Jake Wade got that Leopoldo Fernandez is a candidate.

The main rival to Evo is opposition candidate Manfred Reyes Villa, who does not have a ghost of a chance.

In fact, there was an article this week that he had bought American Airline tickets La Paz-Santa Cruz-Miami for Monday, the day after the elections. The government said he is prohibited from leaving the country because he is being investigated in the Sanchez de Lozada massacre case.

An audio tape also surfaced in which Reyes Villa was offering someone 150,000 dollars to falsify the election results by about 20 percentage points to force a runoff with Evo.

[Peace Patriot]

2. I swear, the Associated Pukes are hiring total idiots. Fernandez is Reyes-Villa's running mate.

Here's a good rundown on the prez and vp candidates:

Bolivia’s Election Part II: The Candidates for President
http://www.democracyctr.org/blog/2009/11/bolivias-election-part-ii-candidates.html

This is also interesting:
Bolivian Opposition Candidate Picks Jailbird Vice-Presidential Candidate
http://lunaticllama.com/2009/09/01/bolivian-opposition-candidate-picks-jailbird-vice-presidential-candidate/

We can't even trust AP for basic facts any more.