Victor Jara – El Derecho de Vivir en Paz
You’re listening to Back in the USSR on 93.3 FM CFRU,
this is Siegfried, and tonight I want to draw attention to a crime of massive
proportions that has been unleashed upon the population of a majority
indigenous nation at the heart of the Land of the Condor, South America. I want to talk about the violent overthrow of
the first ever indigenous president in the Americas and the brutalization of
his people by monsters. And I want to talk
about how the same people, long oppressed by colonizers and imperialists beyond
their borders, are fighting back and resisting en masse in the streets and in
the countryside against the fascistic forces trying to crush them along with
their way of life and hard-won freedoms.
Brothers and sisters, I want to talk about what has been happening in the
country Bolivia and explain to you why Evo Morales, a man of the indigenous Aymara
nation and deposed president of Bolivia, who is now living in exile in Mexico,
stated last week that “Dictatorship has returned to Bolivia” and why Nick Estes
of the Guardian (himself of the Lower Brule Sioux nation) described his
overthrow by US-backed forces as “a coup against indigenous people”. Upwards of 90% of the Bolivian population is
indigenous, and, as I intend to make clear, the coup plotters who have taken
over the country, with the support of countries like Canada, do not represent
them and have nothing on their agenda but colonialism and racist violence.
First of all, I’ll tell you something that you don’t
know. In November 2010, I helped to
organize a conference at the University of Guelph entitled “Canada-Bolivia Relations in the Next Decade”, which included the former Bolivian minister of
agriculture, Hugo Salvatierra Gutierrez, as a keynote speaker. We had several other speakers too, Judy
Rebick of rabble.ca was one of them. I
was part of a Bolivia solidarity organization at the time, which was largely
responsible for putting on this event, and, although that organization was
short lived and that conference in late 2010 was the only major event we ever
did, it was still a real turning point for me.
It was really the first time that I’d engaged in that kind of
international solidarity work. And I
remember meeting Hugo face-to-face, having coffee with him and the other
organizers at the Second Cup over at Gordon and College. He talked about the progressive gains that
had been won by the people of Bolivia since the election of Evo Morales in 2006,
especially by the indigenous population, and at the end I wished him good luck –
in French, seeing he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Spanish, and
French was the only other language that we both somewhat understood. So what’s going on in Bolivia now, which
threatens to destroy all that has been built in that country over the past 13
years, has a personal dimension for me and is particularly important to me.
Evo Morales was a humble coca farmer and long-time trade
unionist when he was elected president of Bolivia in 2006, propelled into
office by powerful indigenous social movements that had long been fighting
against neoliberalism and attempts by previous administrations to violently
impose the most ruthless form of capitalism on the Bolivian people. From these movements emerged an indigenous vision of socialism, in which radical leftist ideas merged with the values of
Pachamama (the indigenous Earth Goddess of the Andes).
Once in power, the indigenous-led Movement for
Socialism (MAS), Morales’ political party, nationalized key industries and set
up social and medicare programs that reduced extreme poverty by more than half
and lowered Bolivia’s Gini coeffecient (the international standard measurement
of income inequality) by 19%. For the
first time, most of the indigenous population of Bolivia was able to emerge from
poverty and had access to free healthcare and education. Cuba assisted in this massive expansion in
the quality and scope of healthcare, dispatching hundreds of doctors and health
professionals to the country over the years (all of whom were detained or
expelled by the new right-wing government following the November 2019 coup, putting
a tremendous strain on the healthcare system as the victims of violence flooded
the now understaffed hospitals).
But there were other impressive victories and
achievements. During the presidency of
Evo Morales, Bolivia made what Nick Estes called “a great leap forward in indigenous
rights” by adopting a plurinational model of governance for the whole
country. Once confined to the margins of
a deeply racist colonial society, indigenous languages and culture are now an
integral part of the nation. The
indigenous concept of “Bien Vivir”, which promotes living in harmony with one
another and with the natural world, has been written into the country’s
constitution, and the Wiphala, the indigenous multi-colored flag, became an official
national flag, while 36 indigenous languages became official languages
alongside Spanish.
Evo Morales and the MAS political movement that he
lead, did what capitalism has no intention of doing: redistributing wealth to the
poorest and most oppressed people in society while uplifting and empowering those
most marginalized. He nationalized the
country’s natural gas reserves, using the money on social programs for the
people. Just prior to the coup in 2019,
he was moving to nationalize Bolivia’s vast lithium reserves, a key component
in electric cars, so that the money from that industry would benefit the
Bolivian people rather than the multi-national corporations. Unsurprisingly, since the coup, Tesla’s stock
price has skyrocketed.
After he was forced from office last week by the
Bolivian military, and forced into exile in Mexico, Evo Morales said that “My sin was being indigenous, leftist, and anti-imperialist.”
So when Jeanine Anez, the right-wing opposition
senator who was unlawfully proclaimed president after the coup, publicly said
“I dream of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rites” and that “the city is
not for Indians, who should stay in the highlands or the Chaco”, it should surprise
no one. Anez declared herself interim
president while holding up a large bible, even though she failed to get the
required quorum in the senate to do so.
That also didn’t stop the United States, the EU and Canada from recognizing her,
thus giving their blessing to the coup and the carnage that’s followed.
When Anez was being illegally sworn in, after the overthrow
of an elected president by the military, a man named Luis Fernando Camacho was
standing next to her. Camacho is a leader
of the Christian far-right in Bolivia, is part of a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group
that wears the Iron Cross and other fascist regalia and practices the Roman
(Sieg Heil) salute, and was instrumental in organizing fascist mobs and racist death
squads to terrorize the supporters of Evo Morales in the streets, along with
anyone who looked indigenous. Camacho
stormed the presidential palace after Morales’s forced resignation, bible in
hand, conveying a blatantly anti-indigenous message that “Pachamama will never
return. Today Christ is returning to the
government palace. Bolivia is for
Christ.”
The coup-leaders and their supporters brutally
displayed the racist colonialism of their politics from the start. Wiphala flags, symbols of indigenous pride and
official status as the national flag, were lowered and burned. Police officers cut the Wiphala from their uniforms
and joined the fascist street violence against indigenous people and government
supporters. The mercenary motivations of the police were later revealed via leaked documents. In a brazen display of bribery and imperialist interference in Bolivian sovereignty, Bruce Williamson, the U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Bolivia was found to be responsible
for donating one million dollars to each military chief and 500 thousand
to each police chief.
MAS members’ houses were burned. Evo’s home was
ransacked. Masked armed men began rounding up suspected MAS supporters and
indigenous people in the streets, loading them into the back of trucks. Indigenous
peoples demonstrating in the streets in support of Evo Morales, the
democratically elected president of the country, have been met with lethal force
by the police, who have been officially exempted from all criminal prosecution
by the coup regime and are free to kill or brutalize whoever they want in the
name of “law and order”. The death toll
currently stands at 23 as November 18, with hundreds of injuries and thousands of arrests. The full scope of the armed
forces has been unleashed on demonstrators, with security forces using live
ammunition, tanks and even attack helicopters to destroy resistance to the
coup. Neither the Western media, nor major
humans rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch
have acknowledged these massacres. The
media downplays and mischaracterizes them as “clashes” while the head of Human Rights Watch
even praised the coup for supposedly “defending democracy”! But even the cold-blooded
massacre of nine people by the military last Friday in the city of Cochabamba and
police repeatedly using live ammunition against crowds of indigenous
demonstrators hasn’t stopped more and more people from coming into the streets
to resist the coup. The same social
movements that ushered Evo and MAS into power have taken to the streets to
defend the gains of their indigenous revolution.
All of this happened in the wake of the October 20
elections in Bolivia in which Evo Morales was re-elected by the considerable margin
of ten percentage points over his nearest rival, the neo-liberal former
president Carlos Mesa (47.08% vs 36.51% according to the official vote count). The right-wing
immediately cried fraud, but no evidence of electoral fraud ever emerged. The Organization of American States (OAS) led
by the notoriously right-wing and pro-US Luis Almagro, cited “irregularities”
without yet providing documentation. And
certainly the racist right-wing in Bolivia didn’t wait for evidence for going
on a murderous rampage. The OAS
effectively supported the coup from the start and played a key role in energizing the Bolivian political right.
In an effort to contain the fascist violence and
lynch-mob-style terrorism in the streets, Evo agreed to a new round of
elections last weekend to appease the right-wing, but was instead removed from
office hours later by the military…the same military whose top officers were
almost all trained in the United States at the notorious School of the Americas
in Fort Benning, GA, a U.S. Army installation where many of the most brutal
death squads and torturers in Latin American history cut their teeth. That was when he fled to Mexico, fearing the very
real threat of assassination at the hands of the right-wing vigilantes and
their backers in the police and military.
Thus the 47% of the population that voted for Morales in the election
had their votes stolen in one blow. Bloody repression is ongoing as the illegitimate coup government tries to consolidate itself.
Evo Morales held power in Bolivia for thirteen
years. Some people on the left
criticized him for running for a fourth term in office, even though the
Bolivian Supreme Court ruled that he could do so legally. As Nick Estes notes, “For our indigenous president,
after five centuries of colonization, 13 years was not long enough.”
“We will come back,” Evo recently assured supporters,
quoting the 18th-century indigenous resistance leader who fought against the
Spanish Empire, “and we will be millions as Tupac (Katari) said.” The struggle is not over.
Bolivia’s future, like that of Chile, where massive
protests against a right-wing government and fascist police violence are
ongoing, is in the streets where the people continue to rise up against the
brutal regime imposed on them by local capitalists, the Fortune 500 and their backers
in Washington. For the indigenous people
of Bolivia, this is a battle for survival against a racist coup regime that is
unconcerned about shedding indigenous blood.
But the people will win. As
Thomas Sankara once said, “When the people stand up imperialism trembles” and
the people are standing up all across the world.
Mercedes Sosa – Solo le Pido a Dios
Robbie Robertson and the Red Road Ensemble – Ghost Dance
The reason I played those two songs back-to-back,
Mercedes Sosa’s version of the iconic Latin American protest song that
translates as “I only ask of god”, and indigenous Canadian musician Robbie
Robertson’s song “Ghost Dance” about resistance to settler-colonialism in North
America is because I want to emphasize just how connected the struggles of
indigenous people are across two continents.
One of the most moving moments of my life happened when I was in
Washington D.C. in 2015 with a delegation from the Communist Party, from the
Latino community in Toronto and an indigenous delegation from Six Nations to
take part in a protest outside the World Bank in solidarity with the then
government of Ecuador’s legal efforts to make the oil giant Chevron pay for
what it had done to the Ecuadorian Amazon and its indigenous inhabitants. Delegations came from all over for this
protest action, from across North America and from South America as well. And when I saw an elder from Six Nations
joining hands with Rigoberta Menchu, the great Guatemalan indigenous
activist, I saw Turtle Island and the Land of the Condor come together. And I’m sure the people standing guard at Uni’stoten
now are praying for their brothers and sisters in Bolivia, who are also
fighting to protect unceded indigenous lands and resisting genocide.
There are many way that people resist oppression, brothers
and sisters, and music and song are among the most powerful tools that
oppressed people and their allies have.
And I strove to be an ally this past weekend, at the Guelph poetry slam,
when I sang a song that the Irish singer Christy Moore wrote in tribute to the
great Victor Jara. And for those of you
who weren’t at the Ebar on Saturday to see me do that, I’ll be happy to perform
it a second time for you right here and now.
But first, I want you to know a little bit about who I’m talking about,
and why, in light of the protests in Chile and Bolivia, I felt the need to sing
a song to educate people about this brave man – because going into this, I was
sure that almost no one at the Ebar that night would know who he was or be
familiar with his music. For all our
plastic slogans about multiculturalism, genuine internationalist education isn’t
big in Canada.
Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez was a Chilean teacher, theatre director, poet,
singer-songwriter, political activist and member of the Communist Party of
Chile. A distinguished theatre director, he devoted himself to the development
of Chilean theatre, directing a broad array of works from locally produced
Chilean plays, to the classics of the world stage, to the experimental work of
Ann Jellicoe. Simultaneously he developed in the field of music and played a
pivotal role among neo-folkloric artists who established the Nueva Canción
Chilena (New Chilean Song) movement which led to a revolution in the popular
music of his country under the Salvador Allende government. Shortly after the Chilean
coup of 11 September 1973, he was arrested, tortured and ultimately shot to
death with 44 bullet shots by machine gun fire. His body was later thrown out
into the street of a shanty town in Santiago. The contrast between the themes
of his songs, on love, peace and social justice and the brutal way in which he
was murdered transformed Jara into a symbol of struggle for human rights and
justice across Latin America.
So that’s who I was paying tribute to when I got up
and sang on stage for the first time in my life. And this is the song I sang.
Victor Jara by Christy Moore
Victor
Jara of Chile,
Lived
like a shooting star,
He
fought for the people of Chile with the songs on his guitar,
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
When
Victor was a peasant boy,
Barely
six years old,
He
sat upon his father’s plow and watched the earth unfold,
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
When
the neighbors had a wedding,
Or
one of their children died,
His
mother sang all night for them with Victor by her side,
Her
hands were gentle,
And
her hands were strong.
He
grew up to be a fighter,
Stood
against what was wrong,
He
learned of people’s grief and joy and turned it into song,
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
He
sang for the copper miners,
And
those who farmed the land,
When
he sang for the factory workers they knew Victor was their man,
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
He
campaigned for Allende,
And
he canvassed night and day,
Singing
“Take hold of your brother’s hand, the future starts today,”
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
When
Pinochet took Chile,
They
arrested Victor then,
They
caged him in the stadium with 5000 frightened men,
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
Victor
picked up his guitar,
His
voice resounded strong,
He
sang for his comrades till the guards cut short his song,
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
They
broke the bones in both his hands,
Beat
him on the head,
Tortured
him with electric wires then they shot him dead,
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
Victor
Jara of Chile,
Lived
like a shooting star,
He
fought for the people of Chile with the songs on his guitar,
His
hands were gentle,
And
his hands were strong.
Victor Jara – Manifiesto
Victor Jara – Deja la Vida Volar
"There are no borders in this struggle to the
death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because
a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country's
defeat is a defeat for all of us." - Che, 1965, who was captured and
killed while doing his internationalist duty at La Higuera, Bolivia, 1967
Christy Moore – Companeros
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