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Translated by: ClajadepCanada
La Paz, October 14, 2003 (hr. 19:10).- A multitude of thousands and thousands of workers and residents of the main cities of Bolivia’s interior have demanded today the resignation of president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, in relentless mobilizations centered up to now in the highlands area.
Supported by these gigantic manifestations, that open a new and dangerous front against the neoliberal government throughout the occident and the valley regions, the miner Jaime Solares, top leader of the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) called today for the people to remain firm and to deepen the social mobilization to recover the gas and oil for all Bolivians.
“We are not going to back-down”, he said this evening in the middle of precarious barricades being raised in a centric area of the city of La Paz, while a total halt of activities is kept in La Paz and El Alto.
Solares made a call to labour and social organizations to immediately set up “committees of self-defence to stop groups of vandals that want to take advantage of the social revolution” and to impede that government irregular groups detain and repress the leaders of the protest.
“The only way to pacify the country is that Goni (Sanchez de Lozada) abandon the government”, warned the leader of the COB, entity that groups workers, peasants and middle class unions of Bolivia, strengthened by a growing popular mobilization that has quickly grown in the interior of the country.
The mobilizations were of great multitudes in Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosi, Sucre and in the north of Santa Cruz in Yapacani, where thousands and thousands of workers, students, sectors of the middle class and residents of the poorest neighbourhoods won the streets in repudiation of the massacre unleashed in La Paz and El Alto. The multitudes demanded the immediate resignation of Sanchez de Lozada.
“Out Sanchez de Lozada, out of Bolivia”, demanded, for example, the executive of Sucre’s Workers Central before multitudes few times seen in the history of the city.
From other smaller districts there was also information about marches and blockades and the beginning of marches in direction to La Paz to reinforce the popular struggle, that began to agitate from bellow once again, from the grass roots.
“We must deepen the social mobilization”, signalled Solares, by reassuring that the overwhelming mass movement that is taking place throughout the country will not take long to burry Sanchez de Lozada and to neutralize the fire capacity of the Army, that up to now has left 64 dead and two hundred wounded within the civilian population.
“I call on the brothers, patriotic military personnel, to stop firing against their people”, said Solares, while a pronunciation attributed to a group from the military who would have decided to demand the resignation of Sanchez de Lozada, was made known through the radial network Erbol .
At the closing of this dispatch, in La Paz and El Alto during the entire day there was a precarious truce, interrupted at times by disorder and clashes between the military against peasants and residents in the southern outskirts of the government quarters.
Today, the neighbours of the two cities in sisterhood for the massacres made a break in the struggle to keep vigil over their dead, to heal the wounded and to entrust their lives to the mother land before resuming the battle.
