Bolivia: "The accession to the office of President is with Evo Morales comparable to the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa”

When Evo Morales takes office as the head of government in Bolivia as the democratically elected representative of the Indian majority, it marks a landslide in the country, according to the Society for Threatened Peoples International (GfbV), comparable to the election of Nelson Mandela as the President of South Africa in 1994. The 46-year old Aymara Indian will take up his office officially on Sunday.

"All too long Latin Americans, Europeans and US Americans have taken it for granted that a minority coming from Europe can exploit economically and hold in political tutelage or suppress the Quichua and Aymara majority in the country”, says the President of the GfbV, Tilman Zülch. "Almost unnoticed by international observers movements like Minka and Mitka sprang up in Bolivia in the 1970s, demanding recognition of the Indian languages and cultures and referring here to the historic and cultural traditions of the Inca empire.”

Their representatives had at the invitation of the GfbV in the course of several visits of Indian delegations to Europe in 1976/77 called for an understanding of this history, holding it up as a parallel to the way of thought obtaining here, which sees ancient Athens and Rome as the cradle of European civilisation. The Aymara leader Constantino Lima, the political prisoner who, with the assistance of an international campaign in which the GfbV took part, was released from a windowless cell measuring eight-foot by eight (6.25 sq. m), said at the time: "We got organised because we recognised that under the present circumstances we would never find justice. The whites control everything and we were being constantly abused and mishandled.” This was part of his report on a massacre from the days of the Bolivian dictator General Hugo Banzer in 1974, in which 1300 people were killed.

"The Indian movements of the Quichua and Aymara had at that time already called for a change of government in Bolivia. Through the election of Evo Morales in December 2005 this has become reality and gives hope to the members of the two large people of the Andes and of the 28 smaller Indian communities of Bolivia. They have been treated up to the present day as second-class citizens, and their culture was discriminated against or disparaged,” says Zülch.

Morales was invited by the GfbV to Vienna in 1995, to give evidence at the 38th Meeting of the International Drugs Commission of the United Nations for the de-criminalizing of the coca leaf and to allow the legal marketing of coca products like tea, chewing-gum, toothpaste or soft drinks. "Coca is not cocaine, a coca producer is not a drugs dealer and coca consumers are not drug addicts”, he said in one of his statements. For the people of the Andes, with whom coca growing has a tradition going back thousands of years, the leaves of the bush are used as a food supplement and stimulant or are used at religious ceremonies.

At our home page www.gfbv.de you will find background texts on the change of government in Bolivia.