Since October 9, the city rose up against the powers-that-be demanding that the sell-out of the gas be stopped and the government ousted -two clearly political demands supported by the majority of the local population.
Since then, production, transport and trade were all grounded to a halt. The indefinite general strike called by the COB was mostly felt in El Alto, right from beginning. Many big enterprises were shut down, and the same happened in medium and small sized ones. The schools also walked out. Not a single vehicle circulated in the district. Just the ambulances and the press were given permission to circulate by mobilsing neighbours. Even the famous "July 16th fair" was called off, an open air market regularly held in the neighborhood, and in which some 40,000 small shopkeepers participate every Tuesday and Sunday. All the roads running through El Alto, which connect La Paz with the rest of the country, were cut off.
Only occasionally did the army and the police manage to open the road leading to the city of Oruro. They were forced to move as an occupation army in foreign territory. They were seeking to fend the airport and the access to the motorway running downwards into the La Paz valley off the protesters" assault, and also some strategic points and big enterprises such as the Customs warehouses, the Senkhata fuel plant and the Coca Cola corporation.
The mobilization keeps growing by the hour. Hundreds of thousands participate in the protests, the rallies, the open meetings, the clashes, the siege on premises protected by the military during the day. When night falls, almost every single corner of the neighborhood is lit by the fires of the "vigil". In those areas where the main "front lines" are, all the streets are cut by trenches, barricades or fires. Spontaneous meetings and assemblies have sprung up everywhere, to discuss the latest news, vent the anger and reassert the fighting disposition. There is a high tension in the air. One has to know how hard life in El Alto is to understand the strenuous effort and sacrifice this entails for the impoverished local toilers: many of them must walk as many as 60 or 100 blocks before dawn breaks. Many others -women in the main- give up, in a disciplined manner, on their daily pittance coming from the sale of the "cato", an income on which all their families depend on (...) There is a revolutionary buzz that can be sensed in the atmosphere of high tension, the radicalized ways of struggle, the political avidity and a disposition to fight to the end, all of which flow from down deep within the masses.
A spontaneous insurrection under way
The slogan of "civil war until the gringo is out" was taken up by thousands of people, ranging from the relatives of the victims of the repression, the leaders of the neighbors" juntas and those in a number of organizations that joined in the struggle, down to the humble rank-and-file men and women. Thus, a "civil war" means stepping up the mass mobilization by resorting to physical clashes, i.e. a military one, with the government and the state"s apparatus of repression. The heavy-handed tactics of the government and te escalation of the violence gave that slogan a mass appeal. As a matter of fact, each blow delivered by the repression was met so far with bolder steps taken by the protesters, who developed ways of self-defense.
The provocations launched by the government both on Thursday and Friday brought about heightened clashes. The government deployed military and police forces on a big scale, to forcefully open up the road for the buses and trucks coming the city of Oruro and allow the circulation of fuel trucks out of the Senkhata Plant to furnish La Paz, which on the brink of a transport shut down due to the lack of gasoline. The repression, which was conducted as if it were a raid into enemy land, provoked the first casualties and unleashed the wrath that had been simmering in previous days. Surrounded by hundreds of troops with tanks and armoured vehicles, the caravan thrusted into the neighborhood furiously cracking down onto the mobilising population that was fighting back with whatever was at hand. Two protesters were killed and many people were injured with live ammunition. Protesters responded to the tear gas and the bullets by hurling stones, burning tyres, and even Molotov cocktails and shots coming from gunfire. The headquarterts of Electropaz and others were looted and burned down by the crowd. After the murder of José Luis Atahuichi, a miner from Huanuni, and many others, was known, the police station in Santiago II was raided. The population took the weapons away with them. The water works in neighboring Incachaca were occupied by hundreds of peasants. The idea of going down into the city center en masse and encircling the bourgeois neighborhoods in the Zona Sur spread like a wild fire. The crowd fought inch by inch against the security forces.
In fact, two powers were colliding in El Alto: a battered state power on one hand, which lost control over a city of 800,000 inhabitants, except for some small strategic areas, and a nascent power flowing from the mobilization of the toilers and the people, which actively challenged the powers-that-be on all terrains...
Bloody Sunday
The most vicious crackdown was unleashed in El Alto. In Ventilla, two people were killed there, one of them a Huanuni miner, one week ago. On Friday the 10th, more people were killed and many more injured. But the worst was to come on Sunday, the day when the government launched the fiercest repression, after realising it was losing control by the hour. There were dozens of casualties and one hundred injured during the events on Sunday 12th. It is all too obvious that this vicious crack-down was orchestrated, in cold blood, by the government and the upper echelons of the army and the police, in a last-ditch attempt at drowning the El Alto revolt in blood by means of a military occupation of the land seizing upon the chance provided a supposedly quieter Sunday atmosphere.
However, the military deployment since the early morning, when an attempt was made to take back the various roads to break open the blockades, was met with a generalized resistance that spread from Río Seco to Santiago II, from Ballivián to the neighborhoods along the motorway. El Alto, far from giving up, rose even with more fury and determination, defeating the military assault on the district.
El Alto points to a way out
The funerals of the victims turned out to be mass political rallies, at which the determination to fight and bring down the government was ratified. The impact across the nation and worldwide is shattering, and the abysmal gap separating the government and the massses puts in jeopardy all attempts at a "dialogue" made by the leaderships bent on a negotiation. The tidal wave of outrage sweeping the country forced all quarters in society to come out and call to step up the demonstrations.
The El Alto insurrection was a mortal blow for Sánchez de Lozada, sparking off an indefinite general strike for real. On October 14th and 15th, the toilers and the peasants stage a general strike and mount a siege of La Paz. Victory wil be achieved by re-enacting an insurrection like in El Alto, this time in La Paz.