What is happening in Bolivia?
A massive popular mobilization is demanding the resignation of the President, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and several ministers, including the Minister of Defense. On October 16 hundreds of thousands of demonstrators filled the main square in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. The presidential palace, guarded by tanks and trenches, is surrounded by demonstrators. The mobilization arises out of a non-violent movement primarily involving Aymara peasants, an indigenous group making up about a quarter of Bolivia’s population, based in El Alto, an Aymara city of some 700,000, but now extending according to Forrest Hylton, a knowledgeable researcher on Bolivia, to”the hillside neighborhoods of Upper Miraflores, Munaypata, Villa Victoria, Villa del Cármen, Villa Fátima and the Cemetery of La Paz”. (1) In September, the movement had grown, in Hylton’s words, to encompass “Rural and urban schoolteachers; students studying to be schoolteachers; parents of conscripts; retired miners; Aymara peasant leader
