While a 1996 law provides specialized institutions to receive denunciations of physical abuse, assault and violence, a climate of impunity often prevails. Of 442,056 cases brought to authorities from 2007 to 2011, just 27,133 even made it to prosecutors, and just 9.13% had resulted in guilty verdict or plea by mid-2012 (La Razón). Stated another way, just one of ever 178 complaints yielded a conviction. This builds upon the fact that justice is almost always delayed in the Bolivian justice system: of over 100,000 domestic violence cases begun in 2012, just 51 were closed by February 2013.  Even when domestic violence escalates to murder, accountability does not increase; none of the 120 gender-related murders in 2012 have yet resulted in a conviction (Erbol).

(trigger warning: descriptions of sexual and physical violence, and one deeply offensive denial are included after the jump)

Now, however, two cases have broken one part of that logjam: a legal framework that treated family violence as a lesser crime. When a politician in Chuquisaca was filmed in the act of raping an unconscious worker in his building, he was thrown out of his political party (the Movement Towards Socialism) and, after a delay, arrested and held without bail. When a police lieutenant with a history of assaulting his estranged wife beat her to death, a national manhunt sent him fleeing into the countryside, where he was eventually found dead. Hanalí Huaycho, the woman he murdered, happened to be a prominent young journalist, and her colleagues joined the chorus of calls for new policies on gender-related violence. With both incidents still in the national consciousness, and news anchor Claudia Fernández (the wife of the vice president) among those tear-gassed at a demonstration denouncing violence against women, legislation to address the problem was greenlighted through the Plurinational Legislative Assembly and made law.

Serious questions remain, however, about the practical willingness of the Bolivian criminal justice system to address these kinds of crimes. The cases that brought the matter to light illustrate just how challenging ending this kind of violence is likely to be.

The parliamentary rapist

In late December, a member of Chuquisaca’s Departmental Legislative Assembly, Domingo Alcibia Rivera, walked across the parliamentary chamber and raped a woman who worked in building while she was unconscious. The incident was recorded on the buildings security cameras. Technician Raúl Daza leaked the recording  to the press, who proceeded to use the video, unedited, online and in news reports. The case set off a media firestorm in Bolivia, and was covered in a Spanish newspaper and Jezebel.

Unlike some prior cases,* the overwhelming evidence led Alcibia’s colleagues to disavow his conduct and call for meaningful consequences. President Evo Morales called for his resignation and the Movement Towards Socialism expelled him and an alleged accomplice from its ranks. As the scandal went public, Alcibia held a press conference where he sought to redefine rape based on his own intoxication: “but it wasn’t even rape, I was drunk to the point of indecision, and don’t remember anything. I was so flagrantly drunk that I can’t even remember.” (“pero ni siquiera es violación, yo estaba indeciso de borracho, no recuerdo nada. Estaba tan flagrante de borracho, ni siquiera me acuerdo.”)

Despite the evidence on national television, the prosecutor’s office hesitated to press charges, since the survivor had not made a formal complaint to the police. Minister of Justice Cecilia Ayllon was placed in the unenviable position of explaining that under Bolivian law, rape is (and this is real legal jargon) “a crime between parties,” meaning that the survivor must seek charges against the perpetrator before the case can be opened. Days later, however, public outrage moved prosecutors to act and Alicibia and Humana were charged with unlawful use of public goods (presumably the chambers themselves) and jailed. In mid-March, Prosecutor Fernando Pacheco reported that the gathering of statements from witness was proceeding.

Recently, however, the case has taken another depressing turn. Covering an interview with the Justice Minister, the left-leaning newspaper Página Siete reported that “one of the victims” (implying more people were victimized that night) faced brutal attacks from her husband after he learned that she was raped. “We have learned, although not with certainty,” reported Ayllon, “that one of these people has been cruelly beaten by her husband. Another one of them, or the same woman, we don’t have information as to whether or not it is the same, was thrown out of her home. We are speaking of a culture that repeats itself, that has made it so those women have to disappear.” Ayllon described her ministry’s attempts at following up with these women, including offering psychological and legal services, but admits that the government “lost track of them” in Santa Cruz department. Prosecutors have not opened a case against the abusive husband.

Aside from this atrocious victim-blaming and victim-bashing, which seems to have happened without any consequences for the batterer, there are many indications that the original rape is part of a broader pattern. At the time of his bail hearing, Domingo Alcibia described a feeling of betrayal at his colleagues, and went on to say, “It wasn’t just us, there were other fellow assembly members and even the assembly president and his advisor.” (It’s unclear if he meant these individuals did more than get drunk on public funds.) The technician who had the video was contacted by the Assembly President: their accounts differ, but the technician alleges the president ordered the tape to be erased.

According to Bolivian feminist Maria Galindo, the act does reflect a broader pattern:

We have received countless testimonies about the way that [government] celebrations of the inauguration of public works, and of the birthdays of high officials, and others [occasions are carried out] with the intention of getting women drunk to the point of losing sense and will, in order to abuse them. This is not the first case, and if we are finding out about it now, it is because this time there was a security camera video. También en este sentido son innumerables los testimonios que recibimos sobre la forma como las celebraciones de entrega de obras, de conmemoración de cumpleaños de altos funcionarios y otras donde la intención es alcoholizar a las mujeres hasta que pierdan toda noción y voluntad para abusar de ellas. No es el primer caso y si conocemos de este es porque hay una grabación de las cámaras de seguridad

Galindo’s January editorial about the challenges survivors face now seems eerily prescient:

The victim did not have any opportunity to make a legal complaint because she has already been socially humiliated and surely has been repudiated in her own circles. This is a woman whom the assembly member has pillaged of her voice, of her dignity, and of her life. If the Minister of Justice requires the victim’s complaint in order to begin an investigation, what she is requiring is impunity for the rapist. But this is not the first time that a woman victimized by the abuse of power cannot file a complaint out of fear, out of solitude, and because in a patriarchal state like ours, it is the victim who has to demonstrate her innocence. La víctima no tiene ninguna oportunidad de denunciar porque ya ha sido socialmente humillada y seguramente en su círculo de afecto repudiada. Es una mujer a la cual el asambleísta ha despojado de voz, de dignidad y de vida. Si la ministra de justicia pide la denuncia de la víctima para poder iniciar el proceso, lo que está pidiendo es la impunidad para el violador. Pero no es la primera vez que una mujer víctima del abuso de poder no puede denunciar por miedo, por soledad y porque en un estado patriarcal como el nuestro es la victima que tiene que demostrar su inocencia.

The Lieutenant murderer

Hanalí Huaycho Hannover, a young television journalist for the PAT network, had filed repeated complaints that her husband, police Lieutenant Jorge Clavijo Ovando beat, emotionally abused, tortured, and threatened her with death. Fourteen complaints stretched from 2008 to 2013. She had legally separated from him and was in the process of filing for a divorce. On February 11, he escalated his abuse one final time, killing her with 15 to 20 blows to her lungs and heart. After being denied access to three hospitals (no clear reason seems to have been reported), she was received at Hospital Obrero and quickly pronounced dead. Her mother and five-year old child were both injured during Clavijo’s furious assault, which began during an argument about the divorce and his affair with another woman.

Just four of Huaycho’s fourteen legal complaints resulted in any action, and none brought him to justice. In a written appeal about her first attempt to appeal to the police, Hanalí wrote:

The police would only listen to my complaint, and then notified him [my husband], and left us alone in the office indicating that we should settle our situation by talking. They didn’t even call for [medical] attention. In summary, they did not carry out even one protective action for me or my small child. I presume that this omission and failure to carry out their functions and complicity on the party of the Brigade [for the Protection of Women] is due to the fact that the aggressor is a member of the Police. “Se limitaron a escuchar mi denuncia, lo notificaron y nos dejaron solos en la oficina indicando que arreglemos nuestra situación conversando. No le llamaron siquiera la atención. En resumen, no efectuaron acción protectora alguna a mi favor y de mi pequeño hijo. Presumo que esta omisión e incumplimiento de funciones y complicidad por parte de las autoridades de la Brigada se debió a que el agresor es un miembro de la Policía”

Huaycho’s case against her husband was plagued by delays and this kind of inaction. Even when her husband threatened to kill her and her lawyer during depositions taken on her divorce, no precautionary measures were taken to protect her.

However, the brutal murder of this highly visible journalist did finally alter the treatment of her husband, and the politics of domestic violence. Huaycho’s colleagues in the press publicized a February 13 march against violence against women, which was joined by legislators and female ministers in government. Per standard policy, Bolivian police resisted the march entering into the Plaza Murillo, unleashing teargas against the demonstrators. Vice President Álvaro García Linera, who married a prominent journalist last September, spoke out against gender violence and joined the push to pass a new law on violence against women. Meanwhile, the lieutenant who had been shielded from prosecution through five years of violence became public enemy number one. A nationwide manhunt was activated. In the end, Clavijo’s body was found suffocated and hanging from a tree in the the Yungas of northern La Paz. His decaying body was identified using DNA and the death has been ruled a suicide. The case of Huaycho’s murder has been closed.

Challenges with the new law

The Comprehensive Law to Guarantee Women a Life Free of Violence was signed into law on March 9. The Andean Information Network offers a detailed account of its provisions, including this summary:

The law includes preventative measures, wide-ranging services to survivors of abuse, and severe penalties for violence against women.  The law represents a great advance from previous legislation, which did not consider spousal rape a crime and dictated sentences of only 4-10 years.

Everything about these two cases points to the extreme difficulty of making the new law work. Harsher penalties can only function once a complaint is accepted and acted upon, and Bolivia’s criminal justice system is already paralyzed by insufficient resources and long delays. Standard theories of criminal deterrence begin from the idea that the certainty of punishment is far more important that its severity.

While it’s vitally important that rape has been recast a public crime, rather than a “crime among the parties,” physical assaults like those committed by the Chuquisaca rape survivor’s husband have long been prosecutable without the victim’s complaint. Yet, even under the glare of publicity, the government has not moved to press charges. The terrible social stigma attached to rape survivors will remain a deterrent to accountability. Even more seriously, the tendency of powerful men to see rape and disciplinary violence against “their” wives and daughters is likely to continue. As Huaycho’s fruitless appeals to the previous bureaucracy designed to protect women show, formal institutions and tougher laws may not be enough.

Meanwhile, a missing survivor of rape, and thousands of women who have filed fruitlessly for protection await action.

* In another example of  horrifying rape news, an alternate member of the national legislature was indicted in January for raping his 12-year-old daughter. The highland indigenous confederation CONAMAQ has expelled him, but the parliamentary ethics committee seems to be dragging its feet on following suit.

And,

These protections should be spread far more widely. Collectivities of dissent should be spared grand juries. Health care should be for all, gay or straight; married or single; salaried, waged, or unemployed. Love in all its forms should be regarded as a blessing, celebrated by neighbors and friends, and honored by strangers. People should find their homes regardless of borders.

This week’s demands on marriage equality are just small asks compared to these. But they’re so easy to say yes to.

xo

I don’t usually repost my comments in the world of social media, but since a couple people asked… I live between a circle that has come to celebrate LGBT equality, with this week’s cases as a big symbol, and a circle where the priority of marriage for LGBT movements has long been rightly questioned. I hope this very short piece challenges people in the first circle to expand their demands and visions, and those in the second circle to embrace the limited but daring requests being put forward this week.

p.s. See also: Caitlin Breedlove, Thoughts on the Supreme Court & Gay Marriage: “I believe the way forward is not the same old fight of picking sides. The question, instead, becomes: how do we move from the push for a US-based civil right for some, to the struggle for liberation for all?” Shay O’Reilly, LGBT Activists Look Beyond Marriage To A Bigger Gay Agenda. Laura Flanders, Take the Oath: A Critic of Marriage Gets Teary: “…if we care so much about loving and honoring and comforting and cherishing someone else, what if, as a society, we took that oath to one another?”

Since at least the 1990 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the conversation about the relation between human economic development and the planet on which it happens has centered around the phrase “sustainable development.” To begin with, the idea of development is a way of shoehorning two very different goals into one word: for the poorest and those concerned with them, “development” is having the basics: food, water, education, housing, health care; while for the richest use the same word for building the enterprises, real estate deals, and financial arrangements that make them richer. After a generation of conversations about whether the economic and demographic growth of humanity could be sustained by our finite planet, “sustainable development” was a catchphrase designed to underlie a conversation that talked about environmental and economic issues. Like the word development itself, there was always a bit of magic to the wording. Environmentalists could feel like they were demanding that development be limited to that small subset of economic systems that were actually compatible with the limited resources of the planet (these were the “sustainable” forms of development). Champions of economic growth could seek out policies that would make growth continue forever (development that would be sustained). Big contradictions were swept under the rug.

The triple bottom line (CC-BY-SA by Triplebotline)

In the 1990s, the companion idea to sustainable development was the parallel existence of the economic, the social, and the environmental. UN conferences don’t really plan the direction of the planet, since nearly all of our effects on the environmental are organized as economic activities: decisions about them are made as economic and resource policies, the actions of corporations and the loans of private and public financial institutions. With this in mind, environmentalists tried to pressure and cajole economic institutions into taking the Earth into account. Literally. The metaphor that was created was the so-called “triple bottom line.” This was basically a request for businesses to put their environmental impact alongside their profit and loss statements. And the idea was that the effect on business owners, society, and the planet, were all similar measures of how right or wrong a particular course of action was. When I had the occasion, in my brief environmental advocacy career, to attend socially responsible investment conferences, the triple bottom line was just a big a buzzphrase as sustainable development was at the United Nations. The fact that any business was just a subset of society, and so didn’t necessarily need a separate account, didn’t really bother anyone. (After all, this was basically a tool for appealing to powerful interests to consider the Earth and humanity, too, alongside their own self interest. It was always intellectually and morally dishonest.) Inside the UN process, this idea was replicated as a “three pillars” (people, planet, profit) model of development.

This week’s intervention from scientists recognizes the growing blowback from damage to the environment upon the possibilities of social advancement and economic growth. The Nature article starts from evidence that “humans are transforming the planet in ways that could undermine development gains.” In response, it urges a rethinking of the triple bottom line:

First … we need to reframe the UN paradigm of three pillars of sustainable development — economic, social and environmental — and instead view it as a nested concept. The global economy services soci ety, which lies within Earth’s life-support system.

sustainable development … should therefore be redefined to “development that meets the needs of the present while safeguarding Earth’s life-support system, on which the welfare of current and future generations depends”

In short, Earth is finally recognized as the outside, without which there can be no social or economic development.

Sustainable Development Goals chart, from Griggs et al. article in Nature.

Colombia’s indigenous confederation takes up the conversation in a different place, grounded on defense of their communities, who have long recognized the Earth as the foundation for their ways of living. Indigenous peoples have most often experienced development as an economic process built on colonizing their territories and extracting their resources for use elsewhere. In the global South, the sale of these raw materials has been the income source for “social development” elsewhere, while many indigenous communities get a shrinking or degraded landbase. The Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) had previously laid a critique (es) of the Millennium Development goals, which exclude any specific consideration of indigenous people and focus on the individual distribution of a small proportion of global wealth, rather than on rethinking the economic model.

Now, three Colombian indigenous organizations are offering their own additions to the Millennium Development Goals, five new goals to be achieved in a decentralized way:

1) the protection of indigenous territory;
2) indigenous self-government;
3) the self-development of indigenous communities on the basis of equilibrium and harmony;
4) free, prior and informed consent as a condition for developments on indigenous land; and
5) the ‘institutional redesign’ of the state in its relations with indigenous peoples.

Their intervention proposes making these goals as quantifiable and verifiable as the MDGs:

The third goal, of achieving self-development on the basis of equilibrium and harmony, for example, covers subcategories such as indigenous women’s rights, education, indigenous and intercultural health services, and harmony between mankind and nature. The education sub-theme includes the specific indicator of the number of teachers in a given territory who are teaching through indigenous languages. The harmony with nature sub-theme includes the indicator of the number of hectares of indigenous land replanted with native species.

Technocratic objectives are what set apart the MDGs from previous rounds of international targets. However, finding quantitative MDG goals that apply to every situation gave room for only certain very common problems—lack of sanitation, poverty defined by a dollar threshold, maternal mortality—to be addressed. This indigenous initiative is attempting to put locally defined rights, and the relationship with the environment back onto that agenda. The 200-page document is just one example of how indigenous peoples have inserted themselves into global conversations on humanity’s long-term future. By engaging with the global planning around the MDGs, they are raising that voice again.

It remains to be seen whether the power balance among profit, planet, and people can be made to reflect the intellectual reality that people depend on the planet, or to reflect the possibility that the economy could serve the vast majority of people rather than the other way around. A real shift requires changing the conversation, but also pressure to change that balance of power.

* Development is a rightly contentious term, but since the major challenges to it are all incorporated in these two critiques, I’ll just use scare quotes this once. If you’re wondering what is meant by this contentious term in the first place, consider these descriptions of economic development and the right to development.

(This blog post also appears at Amazon Watch’s Eye on the Amazon blog.)

Subcentral TIPNIS leader Fernando Vargas Mosua and Adolfo Chávez, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB), addressed the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on Friday, March 15. The hour-long hearing was the culmination of a weeklong trip aimed at putting the Isiboro Sécure situation on the hemispheric human rights agenda. The visit came in the third year of high-profile campaign to prevent the Bolivian government from building a highway through the Isiboro-Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS; past coverage).

Since their march to La Paz in 2011, residents of TIPNIS have experienced restricted freedom of movement. Military detachments, variously labeled an “environmental brigade,” an anti-narcotics measure, and part of “integrating the territory under state control,” restrict access and have hampered the activities of external organizations. Boat fuel, the essential ingredient of mobility on the rivers, has been tightly regulated as a “narcotics precursor.” Meanwhile the Bolivian government backed its own parallel leadership for CIDOB and assisted in evicting Adolfo Chávez and the rest of its elected officers from their headquarters in Santa Cruz. Domestic and Amazon Basin-wide indigenous organizations continue to recognize his leadership.

At the headquarters of the Organization of American States, the indigenous representatives offered a wide-ranging presentation concerning all of the events since the inauguration of the Villa Tunari–San Ignacio de Moxos highway project. Adolfo Chávez introduced his compatriot and to ask that indigenous and individual rights be protected by the IACHR. Fernando Vargas described the territory and the project and presented the struggle of his people as a defense of the territory, of their rights, and the natural environment. “We cannot be accomplices,” he said, “to the destruction of the environment and global warming.”

The leaders called the IACHR’s attention to a series of violations of the collective and individual rights of the sixty-four indigenous communities. Their community structures, including local traditional leaders called corregidores and the territorial organization Subcentral TIPNIS, have been bypassed by the government as decisions are made about the route for a Cochabamba-Beni highway. Police officers and military troops attacked and imprisoned hundreds of members of a pro-TIPNIS indigenous march on September 25, 2011. Despite formal complaints and the presentation of forensic reports on injuries to seventy protesters, the official investigation into abuses that day remains stalled.

At the conclusion of the 2011 march, the government capitulated and passed Law 180, designed to permanently protect the territory as an “intangible zone.” However, a December 2011 agreement between the government and the indigenous communities to implement the law was never put into effect. Instead, the government has unilaterally declared that “intangibility” means that nearly all economic activities – including eco-tourism, sustainable nut and cacao harvesting, and other projects previously approved – must be suspended until the communities accept the construction of the highway.

In 2012, the Bolivian government approved a Law 222 allowing for a community consultation on the future of the territory. However, the terms of this consultation were never coordinated with the local indigenous organization, despite an order from the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal that the consultation would only be legal if agreed to. The government’s consultation went ahead despite multiple institutions complaining that it failed to meet the most basic of international standards. The “consultation” was accompanied by the public bestowing of gifts and development assistance that were explicitly conditioned on acceptance of the highway. Late last year, a joint survey team led by the Catholic Church and the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, found that the consultation was neither free, nor informed, nor prior – the essential conditions of its legitimacy.

Fernando Vargas sought the Commission’s presence to clarify the facts, its intervention to maintain in force Law 180, and its determination that the Bolivian government’s obligations to protect the TIPNIS indigenous’ collective rights have not been met.

The Bolivian government brought a sizable delegation to the Commission, led by Minister of Government Carlos Romero. For its part, the Bolivian government’s presentation reviewed another version of the TIPNIS story that focused on who should represent the interests of the indigenous community. Most of its allotted time was given to pro-government indigenous leaders, Melva Hurtado, Pedro Vare, Carlos Fabricano, and Gumercindo Pradel. Respectively, they come from the parallel CIDOB leadership elected while the 2012 indigenous march was still in La Paz, a Beni indigenous organization, and communities on the Sécure River and in the colonized zone of TIPNIS who are affiliated with the coca grower’s movement. . The strategy of the government had two sides: bringing these allies to speak on one hand, and on the other hand treating their demands as totally independent of its campaign to promote the highway. In response, Adolfo Chávez offered another point of view by saying that these figure’s presence was the best illustration of the division among indigenous communities created by the government, and of the lack of respect it has for indigenous people’s own processes of self-government.

In his presentation, Minister Romero denied that any highway project yet exists in TIPNIS, continuing to claim that Segment Two of the highway is entirely independent of Segments One and Three. With the annulling of the government’s contract with the Brazilian construction firm OAS, he said, the project which had begun is now “merely a possible road” in the future. Therefore, he claimed, the 2012 consultation is now a “prior consultation” as required by international standards. He said the current government is more indigenous than any previous one, describing the representation of indigenous people in the national executive and legislature and the titling of Native Community Lands like TIPNIS.

With a session of just one hour, and the lengthy presentation by the government (finally cut short by the Commission), little time remained for questions from the dais. But two members of the commission offered some. What was the form of environmental impact statement generated before the consultation process? What were the norms that regulated that consultation? What was the specific evaluation offered by the indigenous of the likely environmental and social impact of a highway?

The Bolivian indigenous leaders brought with them abundant documentation ranging from their legal title to the territory to detailed community-by-community documentation of the flawed consultation process of the government. They extended an invitation to the Commission to visit the territory and to take a stand on the legality of government actions over the past two years. A full response from the Commission is expected in the months to come.

During their trip, the indigenous leaders also aired their concerns with the American Bar Association,  American diplomatic officials, legislators in the House and Senate Human Rights caucuses, and Georgetown Law School.

Fernando Vargas, president of the Subcentral TIPNIS, speaks alongside Adolfo Chávez, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB) in Washington, DC. The two leaders were on a five-day trip to draw attention to human rights violations in the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park in Cochabamba and Beni departments of Bolivia.

However, the topic of Oruro’s mobilization is quite unusual. Over four weeks of protests have been waged on what is a symbolic issue: the naming of the newly expanded airport (the expansion and new routes require it to be redesignated as an international airport). The pre-established name, Juan Mendoza Airport honored an aviation pioneer from the department. But on February 7, the region’s parliament chose to honor a different native son, President Evo Morales Ayma, by re-naming the airport after him. Surprise and discontent about the sudden renaming accompanied the airport’s re-opening the next day. The first strikes on the issue took place on February 27 and 28, endorsed by both the COD and the Civic Committee. Unions of miners (notably from the famous mines in Huanuni) and the ever-strident teachers have been vocal participants.

The conflict is particularly surprising given the strong and consistent backing from the region for President Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS-IPSP) political party. The department gave 79.46% of its votes to the MAS-IPSP in the 2009 general elections, and all but one of its representatives in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly belong to the party. Evo Morales migrated with his family out of Oruro to the Chapare valley region in Cochabamba, but he is a highly respected native son. During the 2010 regional strike by Potosí, Oruro’s Civic Committee was one of the counterweights to a mobilization that was highly critical of the president.

Criticisms from the Civic Committee had already begun by last December, when the national government kicked off construction a museum of the “democratic and cultural revolution” in Morales’ hometown, the village of Orinoca, Oruro. Then, Civic Committee President Sonia Saavedra questioned the  priorities for investment from national government funds:

We need projects that are truly icons for tourist development. I don’t deny the value of the museum that will be built in Orinoca, but we also would like to see that the things that are really necessary to be built are built. What should be more at hand is to ensure that people of the country and from abroad come and see the richness of our department. “Necesitamos proyectos que realmente sean íconos de desarrollo turismo, no desvaloro el museo que se va construir en Orinoca, pero también quisiéramos que se construyan los que realmente van a ser necesarios y están más a la mano para que venga gente del interior y exterior del país para que vean la riqueza de nuestro departamento”

Saavedra urged funds for the Museum in Oruro commemorating the city’s world-famous festival, and suggested that water and irrigation were more important priorities for Orinoca than a stadium with 8,000 seats for a town of 2,000 people.

The past month’s discontent has been met by a series of accusations from the departmental government, who have variously accused “a press bought by the right,” conspiratorial actors intending to produce a coup, and other figures as standing “behind” the campaign. However, many mobilization are attempted in Bolivia, while only a few reach this scale. To gain this level of adherence requires a real willingness of people to stay away from work and join in mass efforts at pressure. However surprising, there is little doubt that this willingness is genuine. Moreover, the region’s political leanings are not in doubt. Rejecting the accusations of right-wing ties, Orureño journalists issued a statement declaring:

We journalists have never been from the right, to the contrary we have always been of the left, but from the humble left, wich fights for justice and equality among all, for seriousness and responsibility; on the other hand, the supposed leftists are taking on the poses of the right: self-important, irrational, and unwilling to dialogue. “Los periodistas nunca hemos sido de derecha, más por el contrario, siempre hemos sido de izquierda, pero de la izquierda humilde, que lucha por la justicia, la igualdad entre todos, la seriedad y la responsabilidad; en cambio, los supuestos izquierdistas están asumiendo poses de la derecha, soberbios, irracionales y faltos de diálogo”

More recently, Saavedra rejected the renaming in this way: “It’s a servile act by the [departmental] Assembly members who want to erase the history of Oruro. Juan Mendoza was the first Bolivian pilot born in this land.” “Es una actitud servil de los asambleístas que quieren borrar la historia de Oruro. Juan Mendoza fue el primer piloto boliviano nacido en esta tierra.”

So the current strike can best be understood as an act of resistance to the symbolic centralization of power, and the beginnings of a personality cult emerging around the president. That this resistance is coming from his own home region reflects the critical and diverse currents that make up Bolivian political culture.

The president himself has tried to remain aloof from the conflict, noting that he had never asked for any public works to bear his name and urging Orureños to work out the conflict among themselves. However, as the conflict enters a second month, national officials have begun to disqualify participants in the protest, repeating local accusations, and suggesting that the preference for Mendoza over Morales has an anti-indigenous, racial component. The Observatorio on Racism reacted skeptically on twitter.

Several proposals have been floated to resolve the conflict, including referring the matter to the Constitutional Tribunal (there are legal restrictions on naming works after living people), naming the airport Juan Mendoza and the terminal after Evo Morales, and simply calling the place Oruro International Airport. Today, however, the strike goes on.

A giant coca leaf made out of coca leaves built during January 2011 protest in support of global legalization of coca chewing

Update, January 11: It’s official. Bolivia’s stance has been accepted. Thirteen nations filed objections, far fewer than were needed to block Bolivia’s readmission: the United States, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, and Sweden.

The Bolivian government campaign to alter the international legal status of chewing coca leaves (a practice known locally as acullicu) is expected to take its first major step forward later this week. On that day, unless 63 other countries step forward to block the move, the country’s objection to including the practice as a form of narcotic drug use under the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs will be accepted as a reservation to the treaty. In effect, the country will stand relieved of a treaty obligation to criminalize coca chewing (which theoretically was required by 1989). Coca chewing remains a widely accepted and legal practice in Bolivia, and coca growers are an important constituency, organized into two regional unions.

The logical and more consequential step would be to remove coca chewing from the convention altogether, but this requires a consensus of parties to the convention. (Removing coca chewing from the convention would not have resulted in its global legalization, but rather left in place national laws on the substance.) A Bolivian effort to do just that failed in 2011 when the United States and 17 other countries filed objections. Anthropologists in the United States, along with drug policy and Latin American policy advocates, had urged the Obama administration to avoid taking this stance, signing on to a letter that argued, “Coca chewing is central to the cultural identity of millions of indigenous Andean people, and has been for many centuries. Rejecting Bolivia’s amendment conflicts with the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” This effort at persuasion fell on deaf ears.

Stymied in the broader effort, Bolivian diplomats began a new approach in June 2011. They moved to temporarily leave the convention—while promising to uphold its other requirements—and rejoin with a reservation concerning coca chewing. Their re-adherence was formalized in January 2012, and other parties had twelve months to file objections. That period runs out Thursday, January 10, 2013. Again, the Obama administration has raised a complaint, so far joined only by the United Kingdom, Italy, and Sweden. For Bolivia to not be accepted, this total must rise to 62 by Thursday.

So, a small diplomatic victory over the criminalization of coca chewing seems likely this week. Evo Morales announced that Peru, among other countries, may follow in Bolivia’s footsteps. Last year, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa called the criminalization “a genuine attack on collective rights and an insult to the ancestral peoples of Bolivia. un verdadero atentado a los derechos colectivos, insulto a los pueblos ancestrales bolivianos.” In Bolivia, a public celebration is planned for late this week.

Those who died in 2012 were as follows:

• Abel Rocha Bustamante, 27, and Michael Sosa, 23. Shot by police in the January Yapacaní conflict. (This blog’s coverage: 1|2)
• Eliseo Rojas, 22. Reportedly electrocuted on a fence while attempting to storm police barracks during the Yapacaní conflict.
• José Mamani Mamani, protester in Mallku Khota mining dispute, died of bullet wounds to the neck apparently fired by police on July 5.
• Ambrosio Gonzáles, 45. Died from a police bullet during the July 31 operation to retake the Caranda gas plant, in Buenavista, Santa Cruz, which was seized by protesters demanding that a roadway and bridge be built.
• FSTMB member Héctor Choque. Killed by an explosion of dynamite during fratricidal protests in La Paz between his union of mining employees and cooperative miners over the disposition of the Mallku Khota mine following its nationalization.
• Óscar Omar Cruz Mallku, 17, dead from a gunshot, and Oscar Ricardo Gómez Bertón, 27, dead from wounds after a police raid on illegal used car sellers in Challapata, Oruro faced public resistance by the sellers.

*Police killed four protesters in 2007 and 2010. If one excludes the October 2012 Challapata event as a confrontation with criminal entrepreneurs during a raid, then all three years have the same number of police killings in political situations.

 This mask to protect against suffocating gases is not worn by a soldier nor by a militiaman, but rather a youth in North America on strike, who goes forth here well protected from the effects of teargas.

No further details are provided about the strike or the source of the image.

Contempt law ruled unconstitutional: The Tribunal found, in Judicial Ruling 1250/2012, that the law prohibiting contempt (“desacato” ) towards senior public officials through defamation is an unconstitutional violation of the freedom of expression. The court advised public officials that they may use civil court procedures to deal with slander, and nullified the law in its entirety. Numerous opposition figures, including the center-left Mayor of La Paz, Luis (Lucho) Revilla, and the right-wing Governor of Santa Cruz, Ruben Costas, have been indicted under this very broad statute following complaints from the governing Movement Towards Socialism party.

The “Marcelo Andrés Santa Cruz” Anti-corruption Law cannot be applied retroactively: In the first legislative session under the new Constitution, the Movement Towards Socialism supermajority wasted no time in approving a new law criminalizing corruption. The law allows for severe penalties against officials who took bribes or other compensation to change policies. It was designed to give the government room to revise contracts and licenses approved under improper influence, and to recover fortunes which had been pilfered from the government. However, it was also referred to as the “Guillotine Law” (including by the Vice President) for its ability to end the political careers of past government officials. On Wednesday, the court sharply limited this aspect, finding that the law may not be applied retroactively “when the sanction [it imposes] is more severe or the act being judged would not have constituted a crime when it was carried out.”

Gualberto Cusi speaks out on TIPNIS: The Constitutional Tribunal had already ruled on the TIPNIS consultation, insisting that any process establishing the will of the communities in the Isiboro-Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory about the proposed Villa Tunari–San Ignacio de Moxos highway, which would cut through the region and accelerate already serious deforestation, must occur in a mutually agreed framework. Justice Gualberto Cusi—the judge who received the most votes in last year’s judicial election—denounced the current consultation process as a “disaster” that violates the indigenous inhabitants’ rights. Further, the justice suggested that the TIPNIS indigenous may need to look outside Bolivia for protection of their rights: “I believe that in Bolivia, no[, nothing can be done.] It will have to be the indigenous who appeal these acts to international tribunals. Yo creo que en Bolivia no (se puede hacer algo), tendrán que ser los indígenas quienes apelen a estos hechos en tribunales internacionales.” The most likely forum for international appeals is the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, which has been a pathbreaking forum for indigenous rights.

None of these rulings would be particularly exceptional for a high court around the world, but this particular high court is in its first year, and came out of a controversial nominating and election process which was boycotted by multiple opposition forces. For it to strike down major laws embraced by the governing party and publicly embrace human rights standards around freedom of expression, indigenous consultation, and ex post facto laws makes this something* of a Marbury v. Madison moment for the new court.

* The analogy is inexact since a Constitutional Tribunal began operation in 1999.