Indymedia La Paz / El Alto has finished a book project they have been working on intensely since October. El Alto de Pie chronicles the uprising against the privatization of Bolivia's Natural Gas reserves in October of 2003. The was based in the mostly indigenous urban community of El Alto, a sprawling squatted city of more than a million people outside the Bolivian capital of La Paz.
In the course of the indigenous uprising more than 80 protesters were killed while the whole community laid the longest indigenous siege on the capital of El Alto since the 1700's. In the end the protesters won significant demands of repealing the Gas privatization, forcing the president in to exile, and demanding a constituent assembly to rewrite the Bolivian constitution and political system.
The struggle is not over, just recently Carlos Mesa, the new Bolivian President signed agreements to once again privatize the Gas reserves and export them to Argentina and Mexico.
The book is being distributed within Bolivia through activist networks. We are working on getting distribution through radical publishers and distributors in Buenos Aires to reach the South American audience. For North American and European publishing we'll probably need to work on getting a translation put together in to English. We're hoping to get a PDF up for folks who can't get access to the physical book. A tremendous amount of work went in to interviewing the major organizers of the protest, the injured during the uprising, and the families of those killed. The idea is to explain the political and social context in which this and other Bolivian uprisings have taken place.
Posted by rabble at May 31, 2004 09:05 AM | TrackBack