Word: viloco
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...Radio Viloco was crucial to these organizing efforts in the countryside, and also was the only means of communication among mining centers. At 10:00 each evening. Radio Viloco and seven other miners' radios formed a network in order to exchange news and messages of solidarity. On July 18, the network reported that one nearby radio station had been occupied, that another had been strafed by the air force, and that a military offensive in the town of Huanuni had been repulsed by miners and peasants. The next morning a meeting in the countryside was interrupted by a special report...
...fourth day of the coup, the military still had not entered Viloco. In part, this reflects the community's strategic location. Unlike the largest mines. Huanuni and Catavi, the winding mountainous road to Viloco is easily protected and the town's location in a ring of hills makes bombing and strafing from the air very difficult. In addition, Viloco is a smaller mine, and according to official statistics has been losing money for many years; Huanuni, on the other hand, was a primary target because it is one of the few profitable nationalized mines...
Despite these factors, everyone in Viloco knew that it was only a matter of time 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...
...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...
...been more widespread and militant. Since international journalists were expelled from the country in mid-August and national newspapers censored documentation of atrocities committed in these first weeks has rarely reached the international press. Excerpts from a letter by two miners' wives from Caracoles, a mining center near Viloco, to the archbishop of La Paz describe the coup's aftermath...