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It is entirely appropriate that the Ibero-American Presidents Summit (IAPS) takes place in Bolivia this year. For just a few weeks earlier, Bolivia was the site of a historic, perhaps epoch-making confrontation between a corrupt neo-liberal elite backed by the US Embassy and the Armed Forces and the peasants, workers, students and urban poor committed to regaining sovereign control over their energy sources and domestic markets.
November 6, 2003
It is no accident that the IAPS takes place in Santa Cruz, the only city in all of Bolivia where the fleeing president sought to provoke an ill-fated business backed coup. The popular uprising of October 2003 has truly heroic dimensions, but it is only the opening wave of a continent-wide struggle that is emerging throughout Latin America.
To understand this emerging confrontation it is important to briefly survey the protagonists of the change, the nature of the polarization between empire builders and their vassal regimes on the one hand and the mass socio-political movements on the other hand, placing this in the context of the historical shifts in power over recent decades.