If a miracle does not occur, one of those miracles that sometimes happen in Bolivia and when the presence of the Church is necessary for it to happen, the day after tomorrow we will be in the department of Santa Cruz going through the indefinite strike that has been hailed by a council . The characteristic of this strike, which occurs because the Government does not want to carry out the Population and Housing Census that it should have done this year, is that the president of the Civic Committee, Rómulo Calvo, will be absent from the strike; something inconceivable. And Calvo will be away because he is under permanent house arrest with a guard in sight, for stupid things that seem cuchufletes, and that are nothing but part of an obvious revenge.
Just as Calvo is locked up in his home, without even the right to work, the governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, is being harassed by the masista justice, forced to appear to testify in the Prosecutor’s Office often enough to disturb his life. We already know that he is accused of being the author of a coup that did not exist, when the cowardly flight of Evo Morales, in the face of the anger of a people cheated by fraudulent elections, and, in essence, because Morales himself is a fraud .
Santa Cruz is going on indefinite unemployment next Saturday (I write on Tuesday the 17th) claiming the census, naturally, but annoyed by the contemptuous and arrogant attitude of the rulers of the day. Cruceños don’t like strikes because they prefer work. But the strikes have spread in our department like a plague, precisely infected by the marches, strikes and blockades that Evo Morales imposed, even before taking command of the nation, when, as a coca grower leader, he blocked the Santa Cruz highway for weeks to Cochabamba, causing terrible economic damage to the country.
The strikes that took place in our city were determined by councils, which is legal and legitimate. Not like now it happens throughout the national territory when La Paz has daily marches and blockades. Or how we see the interoceanic highway that should be the transit of Brazilian soybeans to the Pacific, which is blocked in Pailón or wherever, due to the unfulfilled claim of a little school, the lack of a health post or the rape of a woman.
It is obvious that the Brazilian producers chose not to pass through Bolivia and we are left with our modern and expensive desert road. The blockade on the highway to Argentina also paralyzes us and the reason could be anything from the lack of rain to the claim that a cow was run over by a truck and its owner is asking for compensation for the damage.
Bolivia is the nation of strikes and blockades, and for this reason, before being the “land of contacts” that our old diplomats longed for, today it is the land to be avoided at all costs. We Cruceños suffer from this, but we are already infected and we don’t know how to cure ourselves of the disease.
We do not like the strike, whose next step is the blockade. But we don’t like cheating either. And since the Government did not comply with carrying out the census this year, nor does it want to do it next year, and it is no longer believed that it plans to do so, there has been no other way than the one imposed by the council.
It is clear that centralism does not want tax sharing of economic resources, nor equity in parliamentary seats. He does not want to touch the electoral roll because the fraud is over. Nor does he want it to be known that Bolivia is a mestizo nation, because the false story ends but that it suits them from the Indian country. So, how to believe them in their good faith?
That the strike be peaceful is everyone’s wish and if an agreement is reached, the better. But we must also insist that political persecution, imprisonment and abusive preventive detentions can no longer be tolerated.
That they do not persecute the leaders of Santa Cruz, but that they release innocent people such as the mistreated former president Jeanine Añez, as well as the civic leader from Potosí, Marco Pumari, and, what fills all measures of inhumanity, the former mayor of El Alto Soledad Chapetón , recent mother, prey to masista hatred. The foregoing, added to more than twenty soldiers and it is not known how many former ministers and politicians, who wait in their cells for the day that the MAS justice system tells them what their fault was.
“We don’t want unemployment, we want a census”, journalist Carlos Valverde has constantly repeated. Let’s see if a solution appears in the hours that lie ahead.
