We publish this english translation of the article of Análysis y Opinión:
The protests have not stopped and continue to grow in sectors throughout the country.
What is behind the protests in Bolivia? This is the title of the journalistic article published on January 10 in Telesur, referring to the conflicts that the Bolivian government maintained with doctors and that began to involve other sectors of the popular movement. The focus of the article was to discover what were the interests of those mobilized against the government since Evo Morales had satisfied their demands with the agreements signed.
Telesur takes a journalist supporter of the regime as a source, it could not be something different, because it is a media linked to revisionism and international opportunism and supporter of the so-called "progressive governments" that are in open political crisis.
The question is why they keep the protest in the streets if they have already signed an agreement (referring to doctors) giving solution to their demands. The answer to the hand is, citing Evo Morales and his "special journalist" Iván Canelas Lizárraga, there is a conspiracy of the right that wants to discredit the president.
But it is the members of the pickets of the hunger strike and the mobilized personnel, together with the health workers, who are most opposed to the measures of the government of Evo Morales and criticize its leaders, even calling them traitors, for agreeing with the government.
Telesur has recognized that not only the health sector is still in protest, but also the transporters and the Bolivian Workers' Union, but their "specialist" continues to point to the medical leadership as the spur of the protests to reflect that it is a "privileged sector" natural ally of the "traditional right", "conservative" and "coupists". The approach of this "progre" media hides the context of the facts and follows a line set by the regime, it does not reflect the facts.
To date the protests have become widespread in the country. The medical sector (which has already signed an agreement with the government) and public health workers have joined citizen organizations, trade unions, small merchants, members of transport, professional associations, urban neighbourhood committees, peasant organizations, coca farmers from Adepcoca de los Yungas and artisans, even hairdressers announced their rejection of the new Code of the Penal System.
These organized movements of the popular camp are, for the government, "the coup plotters in Bolivia", the "rush to the right", these are the "apolitical satellites used by traditional parties", according to Álvaro García Linera, or "the decadent action of traditional middle class ". The government has fallen with a number of accusations for exercising political action to reject the new Code and also for the re-election of Evo Morales as a candidate for the Presidency.
Telesur's other approach is to accuse the media of highlighting the protests and not the decisions of Evo Morales in the conflict. The "specialist" Canelas emphasizes that it is the strategy of the right to appropriate the media and he accuses the neo-liberal media of serving its sponsors. Nothing new because the government insists, through all its spokespersons, that its main opposition is the media, a constant source of its loss of prestige.
Telesur does not say that much of the media is in the hands of the government of Evo, in addition to having a Ministry of Communication dedicated to propaganda. Several years ago the government created a community radio system, repeaters of the state radio station Patria Nueva, that is, government propaganda that distorts the facts. At the same time the government has suffocated, via restriction of publicity, to several important radio media, such as Erbol, to make it desist from its critical line until placing it with a tolerant profile to its government.
Something similar has happened with some nationally tuned television channels, including two large ones (ATB and PAT) that were bought by government-affiliated capitals and changed their editorial line. The government also has, in other television stations, docile programs and journalists that serve it weekly as an escape valve to their political problems. Something similar happens with written media.
The censoring force of the government regarding public opinion and critical journalism is no small thing. The doctors reported that a television spot made by them to explain their demand was rejected by television channels, while the government was bombing propaganda against the protest. Only after the complaint about this censorship some media disseminated the aforementioned advertising. These facts do not appear in the article, what is behind the protests in Bolivia? of Telesur.
What undoubtedly exists is a great fatigue of the population with the government. In Bolivia everyone knows that what the government signs today, it negates tomorrow, as happened with the TIPNIS, Evo Morales does not give any guarantee.
The economic crisis generates protests
However, although popular discontent is expressed in political struggles, it is the economic crisis that pushes the social struggle. The popular sectors that previously supported Evo Morales, today take to the streets to protest, exercising, as it could not be otherwise, a political action against the economic and social-fascist policies of the Morales government.
The problem in the background is not in the legal measures that are approved or not. In the protest on Thursday, January 11, the police persecuted university students inside a church, locked them up and tortured them savagely. The laws do not work to punish those brutal facts, no policeman is investigated for having committed torture.
Laws are one thing and the daily practice of justice is another. The practice of public officials and repressive apparatuses, despite being regulated, is not governed by laws, they work according to the needs and interests of the government in office. All reactionary governments, including that of Evo Morales, violate their own rules when they need it because we live in an apparent State with rules for coexistence among equals but in reality it is a class State to defend the interests of the ruling classes and those who exercise power temporarily, in this case the people of Evo Morales and his supporters.
Opportunism
The people are organizing themselves for the struggle and in the ranks of the protest the old conservative parties, the opportunism and the caudillism that accustoms to traffic with the popular struggles are camouflaged. These groups distil anticommunist propaganda to oppose the government of Evo, however there is a growing popular participation that denounces the conservative opposition and Evo Morales. All this is part of a process of maturity of the current struggle and the protests of 2017, such as that of Achacachi and the factory workers.
The different interests of different sectors in the protest do not remove legitimacy from these struggles, their lack of clear and consistent direction, either, is part of their development process, both political and organic. This only needs the revolutionaries who in a firm participation next to the popular movement sweep away the opportunistic ballast that tries to give it the wrong direction. In spite of the internal contradictions that the sector in struggle has, it turns out to be an infamy the qualification of the government of "seditious movement of the right".
Contradictions in the MAS
The contradictions and interests of the group are not exclusive to the current popular movement, they are fundamentally the government. Evo Morales and his government are not leftist and much less anti-imperialist, it is a social-fascist government that carries out a program of a faction of the ruling classes, which conciliates and favours imperialism, the big bourgeoisie and the landlords, its program it does not aim at transforming the social system; on the contrary, it has served to save the old State from its general crisis and to restructure it.
But it also has strong contradictions that condition its actions. Evo Morales pays political bills to various sectors that support him (not simply the cocalero, peasant or mining unions under his command), including sectors of the big bourgeoisie. For example, throughout Bolivia, its alliance is with livestock sectors mainly (Beni and Pando), and its representatives are in parliament, in governments and mayor posts. These people do not come from the popular sectors at all, they were the alliances that Juan Ramón Quintana got, leader of the MAS and former Minister of the Presidency, today ambassador in Cuba.
In Santa Cruz the articulations with the dominant sectors (large and medium-sized companies) were made by Carlos Romero, current Minister of Government. The government says in its propaganda that the opponents in Santa Cruz are all big businessmen or landlords in decline, what neither the government nor García Linera says in their smart analysis is that their alliances with CAINCO (large private entrepreneurs of Santa Cruz) or with agribusiness sectors are consolidated.
Organically, these large sectors have not been structured in the MAS, they have only obtained favours. However, other middle business sectors did organize with the government. Curiously, the MAS has two separate structures in Santa Cruz: that of the average businessmen and that of the neighbourhood sectors and popular merchants. The MAS has created a separate space in its structure for whites and blacks who can not live together. To this we can add the alliance that the government got years ago with a sector of the fascist Unión Juvenil Cruceñista [Santa Cruz Youth Union], the decadent and bullying conservative sector that was at the service of the most feudal of politics in Santa Cruz.
On the other hand, the allies that the government has in the peasant and worker sector are essentially an addict and well-bribed directing crust, which also strive to get positions in the state apparatus or other spaces of power. Most of these sectors have taken over the administration of the State. Álvaro García's analysis with reality is totally contradictory, when he refers to the "new plebeian sectors" that exercise the state administration in both acts of decolonization and emancipation of the Bolivian people.
Although it is true that the state administration has taken on another skin colour, it is also true that the dynamics of the old State remain the same, it remains so corrupt, atrophied and overwhelming. Both the sinecure and the payment of bills for electoral support are the real interest of these officials, particularly those appointed as a political fee. This is something recognized by the masters themselves, they have leaked videos of talks that certain directors or MAS militants give to public officials of how this works. The official's job is reduced to participate in any demonstration of support for the government and to make "voluntary contributions" to the party that are automatically discounted in each monthly salary payment.
This is the "plebeian emancipation" that Alvaro Garcia admires so much, this is the great achievement of the decolonization of the state apparatus that takes away the sleep of some of the MAS's pachamamaists as well as the ex-chancellor David Choquehuanca and the current Fernando Huanacuni. The reality is far from that fantasy that some officials sell in international forums or in chairs at universities around the world. The public administration is governed by an enormous traffic of economic and political interests that sometimes the government can not handle, and it comes to light especially in electoral campaigns. The "strategist of power" Juan Ramón Quintana acknowledged, in an audio, that if Evo Morales does not go to the presidency, his party was going to explode because there are people willing to take their eyes off to obtain positions of power.
The MAS is a reactionary party and its government is also a pot of crickets and a string of contradictions, there is no such thing as a cultural democratic revolution, administrative revolution, moral revolution, etc. That is part of the vacuous demagogy to deceive the people. The MAS process does not come close to the heels of the revolutionary processes that built true socialist societies, where thousands of men and women from the town built authentic processes of emulation and sacrifice to build the new society. The MAS is not capable of inspiring that spirit of surrender, it is not capable of mobilizing the masses at that level, its convocation under fascist control is increasingly in crisis, its officials seek not to be identified as part of the government and even the word masista (derived from MAS) has become an insult.
