June 30, 2008

By Roger Burbach

Like many third world countries, Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations. With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta--including wheat, rice, corn, soy oil and potatoes, as well as meat—has risen twenty-five percent over the past year with prices gyrating wildly in the local markets.

By Roger Burbach

The illegal referendum held on Sunday to declare autonomy in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s richest province, is backed by the Bush administration in an attempt to halt the leftward drift of South America. While the US embassy in La Paz blandly declares its support for “unity and democracy” in Bolivia, the government’s Interior Minister Alfredo Raba states what is widely known, that the United States “has an agenda more political than diplomatic in Bolivia, and this agenda is linked to opponents of the current government.” Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of the country, bluntly declares: “The imperialist project is to try to carve up Bolivia, and with that to carve up South America because it is the epicenter of great changes that are advancing on a world scale.”

By Roger Burbach 

While both Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales are trying to transform their countries, the upheaval in Bolivia is very different from Venezuela’s in that it is led by the Indian majority against the historically dominant "k’aras," meaning whites and mestizos. A current showdown over efforts to draft a new constitution is exemplary of this divide. Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

By Roger Burbach

Evo Morales, the first Indian president of Bolivia, is forcing a showdown with the oligarchy and the right wing political parties that have stymied efforts to draft a new constitution to transform the nation. He declares, "Dead or alive I will have a new constitution for the country by December 14," the mandated date for the specially elected Constituent Assembly to present the constitution.Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linares states, "Either we now consolidate the new state - with the new dominant forces behind us, or we will move backwards and the old forces will again predominate." A leading trade union leader, Edgar Patana, put it bluntly: "The final battle has begun, and the people are prepared for it."

By Isabella Kenfield & Roger Burbach

In the Brazilian state of Paraná, Valmir Mota de Oliveira of Via Campesina, an international peasant organization, was shot twice in the chest at point blank range by armed gunmen on an experimental farm of Syngenta Seeds, a multinational agribusiness corporation. The cold blooded murder took place on Sunday, October 21 after Via Campesina had occupied the site because of Syngenta’s illegal development of genetically modified (GM) seeds. Via Campesina and the Movement of the Landless Rural Workers (MST), the main Brazilian organization involved in Via Campesina’s actions, are calling the murder an execution, declaring, “Syngenta used the services of an armed militia.”

By Roger Burbach

This article is published in NACLA’s Report on The Americas, The Multipolar Movement? Latin America and the Global South, September-October, 2007**

Vow to Continue Struggle for Land and Against Agribusiness Interests

By Isabella Kenfield

Last week the Brazilian Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) held its fifth National Congress in Brasília, the country's capital.

By Roger Burbach
March 23, 2007

Featured in the Guardian UK