Word: bolivian
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...author was carrying out thesis research in a Bolivian mining community last summer when a military coup occurred...
...Bolivian University students who attended the meeting and subsequently escaped compiled a written description of the events. An excerpt describes Quiroga's assassination...
...before they would be attacked. I left Viloco on the morning of July 20, upon notice that military were coming. No one in the town had slept the previous night. Men mobilized commandos to reinforce the entrance point, and a group of women surrounded the radio, holding only a Bolivian flag in their defense. The atmosphere was unbearably tense; all were aware that they could not last long in battle, and that once the town was occupied, the military repression would be brutal...
...would this be the first time that the Bolivian military has occupied the mines and forced people back to work. Miners have a history of violent confrontations with the military which intensified beginning in the 1940s when the miners' union was first formed. Major mines were nationalized in 1952, and pressure from miners working for the state-owned enterprise (COMIBOL) led to other left-leaning reforms by the new government. In the mid-1960s a foreign financed "rehabilitation" plan phased out miners' participation in COMIBOL's management, but it took a series of massacres by the military government of Barrientos...
Right-wing forces cannot rid themselves of the political pressures from miners because mineral production has such importance in the Bolivian economy. Although miners represent only 3 per cent of Bolivia's workforce, mining provides the Bolivian government with 60 per cent of its official foreign exchange. Most recently, miners have used their clout to fight persistently for democratic elections; many in Viloco and other centers vowed to oppose this latest interruption to the final consequences. The resistance of such communities had been instrumental in staving off a 1979 attempted coup...