She reports Morales supporters blocking roads and generally trying to bring the country to a halt. She demonstrates no awareness that such acts are violence against the good functioning and continued health of the nation.
She reports police/military efforts to dislodge them as horrendous oppression. And she notes, with obvious disapproval, the ejection of obvious Cuban and Venezuelan trouble-makers from the country.
Let’s try another point of view. Is there any evidence the military is rooting Morales supporters out of their homes, fields and workplaces? None that she reports. It might eventually come to that, but there is no sense it has happened yet, or in fact ever will.
So ... what group is instigating trouble and which is reacting? Indigenes are instigating and the authorities are reacting. In playground language, the indigenes are “asking for it.”
What the authorities are doing is dealing, at times harshly, with people gathered in mobs who refuse to allow the nation to function in the absence of Evo Morales. And of course there are racial slurs, the battle lines are in fact largely racial.
Morales was an indigene, an Aymara Indian. The protestors are indigenous. The new acting leader is from the nation’s other ethnic population, Latin America’s, and Bolivia’s, mestizo majority. Here is the country’s ethnic mix, as reported in the CIA’s World Factbook:
Mestizo (mixed white and Amerindian ancestry) 68%, indigenous 20%, white 5%, cholo/chola 2%, black 1%, other 1%, unspecified 3% ; 44% of respondents indicated feeling part of some indigenous group, predominantly Quechua or Aymara (2009 est.)Relatively clearly, many Bolivians want the country to continue to function, with or without Morales. A sizable group of indigenous don’t. Hence, conflict and violence.
