Resisting Austerity

LE PAZ, Bolivia-While the women of Bolivian mining communities drink tea infused with coca leaves to assuage the pangs of hunger from their week-long hunger strike, the United States is deploying aircraft and ground troops in the Beni, the center of the world's cocaine production.

The committees of striking housewives in mining districts, organized on a national basis since January 1986, are challenging the New Economic Policy (NEP) promulgated by Bolivian president Victor Paz Estenssoro. The NEP, an IMF-backed attempt to resolve the country's financial crisis and allow it to begin paying back U.S. loans, would close mines considered to be unproductive, turn others into cooperatives, and relocate many miners to the lowlands.

Thousands of miners have already been laid off and the government has so far failed to provide financial assistance to the miners it has relocated. Widows and unmarried women have been relocated without the land and tools that were promised by the government. In order to survive IMF austerity measures, miners in Siglo XX, Catavi, Oruro and Potosi have been drawn into cocaine production-the only viable economic activity left in the region. Others, who once flocked to the cities in search of work only to end up in shanty towns, have returned to the mining centers.

Closing the mines deals a disastrous blow to the economies of Potosi and Oruro, two major departments-the equivalent of U.S. states. Both have been mining centers since the colonial period-in Oruro the Inca operated silver mines before the Spanish conquest. Every institution, including the church, university, banks, and market depend on the mining economy. Most of the products sold by the peasants and produced in the factories are bought by the miners.

The precipitous closing of the nationalized mines, say many miners, is directed more by the desire to control the most militant sector of the working class than by economic necessity. The Federation of Mineworkers Unions (FSTME) has put forth an Emergency Plan to try to salvage the region. The plan calls for investments in exploration, technology and recovery operations in order to maximize returns in the transition period from tin mining operations to more profitable ones like wolfram, bismuth, lead, zinc, copper, silver, cadmium and gold. The plan also rejects selling the tin slag piles to private companies as the government proposes. These could be worked at lower costs by the existing work force while a controlled phasing out of exhausted mines takes place, the miners say.

In Oruro and Potosi, the miners have been joined by both housewives and civic committees in calling for the rehabilitation of the mines. The movement also won the support of peasant unions which have protested both the closing of the mines and the NEP tax plan.

"We cannot pay the new taxes," said one campesino. "Even when we have a good year, we cannot pay the tax."

In a country where the per capita income is $288 a year, people are unable to feed themselves, let alone bear a debt burden that works out to $552 per person.

The struggle to keep the mines opened has catalyzed the religious and academic communities. At the center of the storm, however, are the housewives who are unable to feed their children. The government has failed to issue food supplies to COMIBOL (the Bolivian Mining Company) stores for months and workers who earn less than a dollar a day cannot feed themselves or their families.

"What we receive is not enough to live on," said the secretary general of the Oruro Housewives' Association. "In the morning we have a little bread, and if the children eat it, there is nothing for the afternoon. Every two davs COMIBOL gives us ten rolls. They have not given us any pay."

When the government failed to respond to their urgent pleas for reconsideration of the controversial \EP, civic committees, union groups, campesino confederations and housewives' associations from Oruro and Potosi organized a"March for Life and Peace" in August that was to start in Oruro and end in La Paz. The marchers sought to bring an urgent message to President Paz Estenssoro and the representatives who had ignored pleas from the provinces. When the marchers arrived at the half-way point of Patacamaya, they were met by tanks and troops. They then were allowed to proceed to Calamarca, about 70 kilometers short of their original goal.

In Calamarca, four regiments of the Bolivian army surrounded the town and with the help of ten armored tanks, a helicopter and two fighter planes, contained the marchers on a battlefield. In violation of international covenants, Red Cross ambulances were stopped on the highway. And reporters and parliamentary representatives were prohibited from making contact with the marchers. The government had declared a State of Siege and 8,000 soldiers were mustered into action.

When the army attempted to evacuate the marchers by forcing them into army trucks, the women resisted. They waited on the road all that day, and the following day 35 buses of the National Transport Company were sent to take the people back to their districts.

The next day, workers in Siglo XX declared a hunger strike. Dozens of workers set up pickets at the mines and in social clubs in the district. The strike spread to mines in Oruro, Huanuni, Colquecharca and Potosi. Housewives joined in on the fifth day.

The State of Siege remained in effect throughout the weeks that followed. The government rounded up rectors of the Universities of Potosi and Cochabamba. Over two hundred leaders of unions, student groups, and civic committees were arrested. The number of hunger strikers increased. They demanded that the mines be preserved as state enterprises and that the process of nationalization be extended to include some private mines. They called for freedom for those who were detained. And finally they called for removal of the U.S. troops. A dialogue between the leaders of the FSTMB and the government was finally initiated by religious leaders.

On September 13, 1986, the dialogue between mine federation leaders and the government produced an agreement to keep the mines open and retain them as state property, with closing permitted only after a careful study by professional geologists and economists. The agreement also provided for the release of university, civic and union leaders who had been detained and promised freedom of action for civic and union groups.

June Nash is professor of anthropology at The City College of New York and editor of Women, Men and the International Division of Labor.