Bolivia: Bureaucrats from the ruling party want to fire Javo Ferreira, a leader of the LOR-CI

January 29, 2014

No more political persecution to Javo, the militant miners and the Left Opposition!

We condemn the persecution launched by the bureaucracy of the COB and the MAS against Javier Orellana (Javo), leader of the LOR-CI, to get him fired from his job as a teacher in the Twentieth Century National University (UNSXX), with false arguments and without any evidence. The agents of the MAS prompted a resolution in the Miners’ Federation against Comrade Javo, elected not long ago as a member of the Teachers’ Federation of the UNSXX, requesting his “definitive removal,” that is, his firing, without any real reason (they allude to vague “inconsistencies” and a “lack of respect”), despite his even having union status.

The motivation is clearly political: Javo, like the mineworker Mario Martínez (Chairman of the Political Commission of the Workers’ Party – the PT), 22 mineworkers from Huanuni, Comrade Mauge, a health worker activist in Cochabamba, and a member of the Workers’ Federation of the Department [province], and other activists and union militants, are confronting lawsuits and a distinct type of attacks for the “crime” of promoting the formation of the PT, resolved in Congresses of the Bolivian Workers’ Federation (COB), and at other events, like the Congress of Huanuni at the beginning of 2013, that had 1,300 delegates. The upper echelon of the COB and groups of the miners’ bureaucracy, at the service of the governing party, decided to bury the process of the PT, trampling on those resolutions and violating the traditions of the Bolivian workers’ movement and the statutes of the COB. Moreover, they have launched a campaign of falsehoods and persecution against the Left and the workers that are promoting the PT (Workers’ Party).

This process puts on the table the need for the politically independent organization of the working class, reflecting the process of groups of workers breaking with the government of Evo Morales, a process expressed in big workers’ struggles like the strike last June. The MAS, committed in its pacts with businessmen and the transnational corporations to keep wages low, to make miners’ jobs uncertain and handing over mining to the extractive greed of the big firms, is launching this harsh offensive against what is considered, with good reasons, as a danger to the MAS predominance in the union movement. This is something that they need more than ever on the eve of a new election, in which Evo aspires to get his third presidential term.

We condemn the attempt to expel Javo and the persecutions and sanctions against Mario Martínez, the 22 miners from Huanuni and other militants, as an unjustifiable attack on the most basic principles of union democracy and rights of political organization of the workers. We call on the forces that make up the FIT, on the militant unions and students’ organizations, to support the campaign in Javo’s defense.