Bolivia's Nationalization by Decree

by Gretchen Gordon

The smell of gas hangs strongly in the air as a crowd of flag-waving Bolivians celebrate outside the Petrobras Gualberto Villaroel oil and gas refinery. A state worker clad in a tan work suit and hardhat props a wooden ladder against the front wall of the refinery just beneath the blue metal letters that read PETROBRAS, and ascends the ladder as the crowd looks on.

He carries a laminated banner with the name "Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos," or YPFB, Bolivia's former state oil and gas company, essentially privatized in the mid-1990s through a process called "capitalization."

On May 19, four Mapuche rights activists resumed their open-ended hunger strike at the Hernan Enriquez hospital in Temuco, in southern Chile's Region IX (Araucania). Mapuche activists Juan Patricio Marileo Saravia, Florencio Jaime Marileo Saravia and Juan Carlos Huenulao Lienmil and non-Mapuche supporter Patricia Troncoso Robles began their fast on March 13 in Angol prison; they suspended it on May 14 in the Temuco jail after Chilean legislators promised to consider a bill to allow their supervised release. As part of the deal, the four prisoners were transferred from the Temuco jail to the hospital. The four are serving 10-year prison sentences imposed under the terms of a widely criticized anti-terrorism law.

Boogie for your right to defy gringo imperialism, y'all. From Reuters, May 23:

CARACAS - Among the shabby high-rise tenements overlooking Venezuela's capital, hip-hop beats rather than the usual gunfire kept the Caracas neighborhood of Pinto Salinas awake one night recently.

Colombia is the worst humanitarian disaster in the western hemisphere, and the worst on the planet after Congo and Darfur. But the world is paying very little attention—even as Ecuador is starting to look more and more like the next domino. From the UN News Center, May 5:

The United Nations refugee agency is appealing for just $69,000 by the end of the month — a mere $10 per person — to help 7,200 Colombians who have fled into Ecuador from violence in their homeland.

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Ecuadoran secondary school student Jhonny Montesdeoca was killed on April 6 during demonstrations in Cuenca to oppose signing the Andean Free Trade Agreement (known as TLC in Spanish) with the US and to demand the expulsion of the US-based company Occidental Petroleum (OXY). Montesdeoca died of a gunshot wound in his back. Another secondary school student, Javier Loja, was hospitalized after being shot in the foot. Students carried out violent mobilizations all day in Cuenca, according to the Ecuadoran media, especially near Cuenca State University; the two students were shot in that area.

The Colombian Attorney General's office suspended for 90 days retired army general Pablo A. Rodriguez and Col. Javier V. Hernández for failing to provide security for the village of San José de Apartadó, the self-declared "peace community" in the wartorn Urabá region of the country. The ruling said that the officials' actions left the community "vulnerable to illegal armed groups on several occasions."

We sure hope this is just a couple of lone wackos and not the beginning of a destabilization campaign against Evo Morales. An AP report indicates suspect Triston Jay Amero of California "has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since he was seven-years-old"—which is comforting for us, even if it doesn't seem to have done him much good. Still, that doesn't mean he wasn't being paid or manipulated by the CIA (or somebody). From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 26:

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

RIO GRANDE DO SUL: MST SEIZES ESTATE

On Feb. 28, more than 2,000 members of Brazil's Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) from 14 encampments in the state of Rio Grande do Sul began occupying the Fazenda Guerra, a large estate in Coqueiros do Sul municipality. It was the largest single land occupation since the late 1990s. According to Ana Hanauer, of the MST's coordinating body in Rio Grande do Sul, the occupying families are using wooden construction materials to build permanent housing and an educational facility on the site, turning the property into an MST settlement, instead of the more typical encampment of temporary plastic-covered tent-like structures. The MST is demanding the immediate settlement of the 2,500 families still living in such temporary encampments in Brazil's southernmost state. Some of these families have spent seven years living in the encampments; only 220 families have been able to move into settlements over the past three years in Rio Grande do Sul. Most of the families who participated in the Feb. 28 occupation were forcibly displaced by Military Police on Feb. 23 from an encampment on the side of Highway RS-406, in Nanoi.