For two days in early October, the sides of the barren Posokoni Hill above the mining town of Huanuni, 150 kilometres southeast of Bolivia's capital La Paz, were transformed into a war zone in the two most violent days since leftist Evo Morales was elected the country's president last December.
On October 5-6, rival groups of miners battled for control of the hill's tin deposits using dynamite and guns, leaving 17 miners and residents dead and 81 wounded.
The bloodshed in Huanuni is the latest tragic chapter in a long and complicated history of poverty and privatisation in the region.
The Posokoni mine produces some 10,000 tonnes of tin annually, a little less than half of Bolivian production and 5% of world output. Comibol, the state mining corporation, employs 1000 salaried workers at the Posokoni mine. These workers are members of the FSTMB, the Bolivian mine workers' trade union.
Also working different sections of the mine are 4000 cooperative or independent miners. These miners' earnings are dependent on finding rich seams of tin. They are prevented from unionising and their working conditions are reported to be far inferior to Comibol's workers.
Comibol was formed in 1952 when the leftist government of President Victor Paz Estenssoro nationalised the countries largest tin mines. In 1985, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, the Bolivian government froze public sector wages and fired thousands of state employees, leading to widespread unemployment. A concurrent drop in the world tin price caused many mines to close, leaving 25,000 miners without work.
While many Huanuni miners left the town to seek work, others remained and formed independent cooperatives to continue working the Posokoni tin deposit. The revival of the international tin price in the 1990s led to a massive increase in the number of cooperative miners in Huanuni — from 200 in 1995 to 4000 today.
However, in 2000, most of the Posokoni deposit was sold to a British company, Allied Deals, for the paltry sum of US$501,123 and the promise to invest $10.25 million in the first two years of business.
There were many problems in the Allied Deals-Comibol partnership and it ended in 2001. Allied Deals failed to make the promised investments and in 2002 the company, then called RGB Resources, was declared bankrupt due to fraud.
Comibol launched a legal battle for full administration rights to the Posokoni deposit, a battle it won in 2002 with the creation of Law 2400. This permitted Comibol to take over the administration of the mining activities at any deposit previously "given to transnational mining companies under auction, and which have declared bankruptcy, committed fraud or have broken their agreed upon contracts".
But this law was never enacted and the Posokoni mine has continued to operate as a joint venture between Comibol and the cooperative miners who work sections of the former Allied Deals/RGB portion of the mine.
As their numbers have increased, the cooperative miners have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the claims granted to them by Comibol.
Negotiations to clarify the ownership of the mine ended on October 4 when the cooperative miners were informed that the shares formally owned by Allied Deals/RGB would not be transferred to them.
In an October 11 article on Upsidedownworld.org, April Howard and Benjamin Dangl reported that what happened next is contested by both sides. According to FSTMB president Alfredo Aguilar, the cooperativists invaded the mine after destroying the offices of the EMH (Empresar Minar Huanuni) — Allied Deals local subsidiary company — as well as the houses of the salaried workers.
Ever Choque, a local mine workers' leader, said that when the cooperativists started to advance, throwing sticks of dynamite, "we couldn't stand there with our arms crossed, we had to react the same way".
According to the cooperativists, their intention was to take over the mine "peacefully". Their leaders said they aimed to break the compressor that brings air into the mine, and thus force the salaried workers to leave the mine.
Cooperativist leader Santos Ramirez claimed that the cooperativists were "surrounded by salaried workers from the business, as well as their wives, commanded by the army and the police". He claimed that the salaried workers advanced, throwing dynamite at the cooperativists.
In the aftermath of the bloodshed, Morales moved swiftly to dismiss mines minister Walter Villaroel, a former leader of a miners' cooperative.
In a national address on the evening of October 6, Morales said that "individualist and sectarian sectors think only of themselves and don't think about the country. They are giving a free kick to neoliberalism and do not want change… Finally, they reach acts of blood. I cannot understand that sectors who struggled against the [neoliberal] economic model now convert themselves into instruments of neoliberalism instead of helping me struggle against neoliberalism".
"Many reports and interviews indicate that the situation in Huanuni was a 'time bomb' which the Morales admininstration did not sufficiently pay attention to", Howard and Dangl reported. "The disputes between cooperativistas and salaried workers with Comibol had risen to a fevered pitch months ago, leading to numerous protests and road blockades among miners on both sides, demanding the government act.
"Both sectors have been supporters of the Morales administration. However, through the month of September, both groups blockaded main highways to draw government attention to their demands. In both cases, Morales sent Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera to accept the miners' petitions in order to end the blockades. However, no solutions were achieved."
They reported that Aguilar said that throughout this time, the government's position was "first come to an agreement between yourselves and we'll settle everything afterwards". However, in the 16 meetings held with government representatives since March 2006, every proposal was rejected by one group or the other.
"Both sectors asked the government to leave them exclusively with the Posokoni hill, to exploit [the tin] for their own benefit", Garcia told the October 7 La Razon daily. "They also asked the government to use police and military force to favour their sector to the detriment of the other."
He also said that the government officials had not addressed the conflict in Huanuni more directly because they were busy working on revising the mining code, which would have settled the dispute.
Howard and Dangl reported that the mine workers' union has accused the government of favouring the cooperativists. Other commentators have "accused the Morales administration of ignoring the growing mining dispute due to other issues, primarily the challenges of the gas nationalization and the constituent assembly held in Sucre to re-write the Bolivian constitution".
The corporate media in Bolivia has leapt at the opportunity provided by the "tin war" in Huanuni to try to discredit Morales' left-wing government. They have howled about the government's supposed lack of action and four days after the truce reached in Huanuni were criticising Morales for attending an indigenous cultural event in another part of the country.
In response to claims of government inaction, Garcia stated that sending in the soldiers, known for being trigger happy in the face of angry mobs, would be like "throwing gasoline on the fire". On the morning of the second day of the fighting, 700 police reinforcements arrived. Howard and Dangl reported that "the presence of the police was apparently enough to convince the cooperativists to retreat, but it was the archbishop of Oruro, Crist bal Bialasik, who convinced both sides to disarm".
[Material in this report was drawn from "Tin War in Bolivia: Conflict Between Miners Leaves 17 Dead" by April Howard and Benjamin Dangl. Visit <http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/455/1/>.]