Lessons from two weeks of a hard battle to recover the Departmental Association of Coca Producers (ADEPCOCA)
5 October 2021
Arce or the giant with feet of clay
The powerful MAS Government is weak on the streets. They enraged the Yungas coca growers by taking away their coca leaf trading market to hand it over to a pro-government leader. After two weeks of conflict, this Monday thousands of coca growers arrived in La Paz, defeated the police in the final battle, and recovered the Departmental Association of Coca Producers (Adepcoca).
In humiliating images for the Bolivian Police, the country’s television networks showed live how the troops left the conflict zone running. As happened in the previous two weeks, they fired hundreds of tear gas, but fell back and were unable to maintain security on the Adepcoca perimeter.
It is a political, social, and strategic defeat for the Government that planned the assault on a private institution, with the objective of politically subduing the Yungas coca growers, whom they could never domesticate since the Evo Morales regime and are the stone in the shoe of the Chapare coca growers and their lifetime leader.
And it is a strategic defeat because the Government decided to cancel the parallel market for the commercialization of coca leaf that operated in a union of transporters in the Kalajahuira area, convinced that it had taken over Adepcoca two weeks ago.
There are direct people responsible. The main one is the Minister of Government, Eduardo Del Castillo, who publicly recognized the pro-government leader Arnold Alanes as the new President of Adepcoca, but also the General Commander of the Police and the Departmental Commander of La Paz because the takeover of the coca-producing entity, the protection of infiltrators, the excessive repression, and the abuses of journalists took place under their command.
What would correspond in a Government that respects itself is for the Minister of the area to present his resignation from office because he revealed that the current administration of Luis Arce is something similar to a giant with feet of clay, that all the power that he shows in his media speeches is nothing more than a shell without substance.
The colonels who command the Police at the national and departmental level would also have to be ousted due to their inability to comply with the political order to consolidate the usurpation of Adepcoca, but above all because of the anxiety and terror that they caused in the villages of Fatima and El Carmen, with the gasification of hospitals and the repression even of neighbors who had nothing to do with the coca-growing conflict.
In these 11 months, since Luis Arce assumed the Presidency on 8 November 2020, he removed commanders in the Armed Forces three times without thinking twice. It is time for the Police to stand firm, which in almost 40 years of democracy is commanded by a colonel when the Government has at its disposal the Law of Promotions to Generals of the Olive Green.
President Arce will be in power for one year in a month and it is clear that he will reach November 8th, 2021, at his worst, not because of effective opposition strategies, but because of the fronts that his own administration opened up in recent weeks, provoking alert from coca growers, indigenous people, union members, businessmen, transporters, civic [members], doctors, journalists, regional authorities, citizen platforms and the diversity of churches.
It is imperative that the President explain to the country how he intends to deal with the multiplicity of conflicts that he faces and that they can begin to converge and strengthen one another, putting the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) in a difficult situation in the exercise of power. Arce cannot remain silent, as he usually does, because uncertainty or even doubt can begin to pierce the considered hard core of the MAS.
What happened this Monday at noon in Adepcoca, after an hour of hard confrontation in Villa Fatima, has been the first defeat of the MAS in the streets, a scenario in which it was invincible. In the short term, new victories may come for the sectors opposed to the Arce government because it is already known that it has the appearance of a colossus, but deep down it is weak and fearful.
Source: http://www.cabildeodigital.com/2021/10/arce-o-el-gigante-con-pies-de-barro.html
