Former Bolivian President to pay damages to families of protestors killed during his tenure
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A former Bolivian president and his defence minister have agreed to pay damages to the families of people killed by the military during their government, in a landmark settlement that sets a precedent by which other foreign leaders could face accountability for human rights abuse in US courts.
The settlement concerns events in 2003, when massive protests broke out over then president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s plan to export Bolivia’s natural gas. The army was sent to clear blockades in the largely Indigenous and working-class city of El Alto, killing more than 60 protesters and injuring hundreds.
Both Sánchez de Lozada and his defence minister, José Carlos Sánchez Berzain, resigned and fled to the US, where they have lived ever since. In 2007, a civil lawsuit was brought against them in the US by eight Bolivian families whose relations were killed in 2003.
Eleven years later, a federal jury found them responsible for the killings and awarded the plaintiffs $10m in compensatory damages. Both defendants appealed, but as a result of the agreement on Thursday, they have withdrawn their appeal and agreed to pay an undisclosed sum in compensatory damages to the families.
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https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/former-bolivian-president-pay-damages-families-protestors-killed-during-his-tenure
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Memory’s Struggle Against the Labyrinth of Power
The Trial of Former Bolivian President Sánchez de Lozada and His Accomplices for the Massacres of 2003
By Luis A. Gómez
Part One of a Special Series for The Narco News Bulletin
December 21, 2004
On the morning of October 15, 2003, while the demonstrations that two days later would take down a president spread through La Paz and El Alto, the mineworkers’ leaders of Oruro province decided to march to the capital to support the rebels. In the La Salvadora mine, a 36-year-old woman, widow, and mother of six children between the ages of two and twelve, joined the miners’ contingent. Filomena León, who months later would tell her story before the cameras of Verónica Auza and Claudia Espinoza, was among the people who arrived that morning in the town of Patacamaya, a little more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from La Paz.
Filomena León a few days before her death.
Photo: Verónica Auza
“I don’t know how they surprised us. We were getting out of the car peacefully to drink some tea.”
The soldiers had orders to stop the caravan, and held back the miners with gunshots. First, they burst the tires on the miners’ trucks and seized their few belongings, then they attacked the miners, who, armed with sticks of dynamite, resisted the offensive. The palliri (woman miner) was among those injured in the clash. “I felt the bullet, just the bullet. I haven’t risen since. I was ahead of the soldiers and the bullet entered me from behind. I don’t remember anything else.” The high caliber projectile embedded itself in Filomena’s spinal cord. For months, in at least two public hospitals, the brave woman slowly lost her health and will to live; she was paralyzed, and her younger children couldn’t even recognize her.
On April 30, nearly six months after being shot, Filomena León died of a lethal infection at the La Paz Clinic Hospital, according to the Gas War Memorial Testimony – a book put together by Auza and Espinoza to record the dozens of deaths, the hundreds of wounded and mutilated, that were the high price paid by the Bolivian insurrection last year. In the last weeks of her life, one could see a fist-sized hole in her back. Filomena’s sweet voice and black, abundant braids left this land forever. The same happened to Teodocia Morales Mamani (who was pregnant), Marcelo Chambi Mollinedo, Ramiro Vargas Astilla, and many other Alteños (from the city of El Alto), Aymara peasant-farmers, children and grandparents, men and women. And today, despite the Bolivian National Congress having authorized their prosecution, those responsible for so much pain go unpunished.
More:
https://www.narconews.com/Issue35/article1138.html
~ ~ ~
Gone, But Not Forgotten:Why Bolivians want the United States to extradite their exiled ex-president
Why Bolivians want the United States to extradite their exiled ex-president
WES ENZINNA MAY 2, 2007
When, on Oct. 15, 2003, Filomena León was shot in the back by military soldiers in the Bolivian town of Patacamaya, near El Alto, she had no reason to believe hers would be anything other than an anonymous death in the Andes.
“I was in front of the soldiers and the bullet entered me from behind, into my spine,” León, an indigenous miner and mother of six, told Verónica Auza and Claudia Espinoza, editors of Gas War Memorial Testimony. The shot left her paralyzed, and she told Auza and Espinoza on April 20, 2004, “[After being shot] I wanted to die. … I still feel the same.” She died 10 days later from a lethal infection.
But three years later, as the country struggles to rebuild its economy and empower its large indigenous population, Bolivians are rallying to remember?–?and vindicate?–?the death of León as well as 66 others who were slain.
. . .
President Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada, widely recognized as the architect of Bolivia’s neoliberal “shock therapy,” had orchestrated the gas deal, and on Oct. 11 he ordered the military into El Alto to quell the protests and break the blockades. By the end of October, more than 60 demonstrators were dead and 400 wounded?–?the result of soldiers firing “large-caliber weapons, including heavy machine guns,” into the crowd, as the Catholic Church testified in a public statement. León, stopped by troops along with four others, was unarmed when she was shot. Among the others killed were small children and a pregnant woman. In the wake of the massacres, Sánchez de Lozada fled the country for the United States, where he remains today.
. . .
For a country where Indians were banned from walking on the sidewalk until 1952 and where neoliberal policies were typically carried out at gunpoint, Sánchez de Lozada’s trial would give the nation’s indigenous majority something they’ve always been denied. Says Guzman, “The extradition of Mr. Sánchez de Lozada, as part of a process that is in strict accordance with Bolivian laws, has only one meaning for the Bolivian people, and that meaning can be summarized with a single word: justice.”
More:
https://inthesetimes.com/article/gone-but-not-forgotten
~snip~
On the morning of October 15, 2003, while the demonstrations that two days later would take down a president spread through La Paz and El Alto, the mineworkers’ leaders of Oruro province decided to march to the capital to support the rebels. In the La Salvadora mine, a 36-year-old woman, widow, and mother of six children between the ages of two and twelve, joined the miners’ contingent. Filomena León, who months later would tell her story before the cameras of Verónica Auza and Claudia Espinoza, was among the people who arrived that morning in the town of Patacamaya, a little more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from La Paz.
“I don’t know how they surprised us. We were getting out of the car peacefully to drink some tea.”
The soldiers had orders to stop the caravan, and held back the miners with gunshots. First, they burst the tires on the miners’ trucks and seized their few belongings, then they attacked the miners, who, armed with sticks of dynamite, resisted the offensive. The palliri (woman miner) was among those injured in the clash. “I felt the bullet, just the bullet. I haven’t risen since. I was ahead of the soldiers and the bullet entered me from behind. I don’t remember anything else.” The high caliber projectile embedded itself in Filomena’s spinal cord. For months, in at least two public hospitals, the brave woman slowly lost her health and will to live; she was paralyzed, and her younger children couldn’t even recognize her.
On April 30, nearly six months after being shot, Filomena León died of a lethal infection at the La Paz Clinic Hospital, according to the Gas War Memorial Testimony – a book put together by Auza and Espinoza to record the dozens of deaths, the hundreds of wounded and mutilated, that were the high price paid by the Bolivian insurrection last year. In the last weeks of her life, one could see a fist-sized hole in her back. Filomena’s sweet voice and black, abundant braids left this land forever. The same happened to Teodocia Morales Mamani (who was pregnant), Marcelo Chambi Mollinedo, Ramiro Vargas Astilla, and many other Alteños (from the city of El Alto), Aymara peasant-farmers, children and grandparents, men and women. And today, despite the Bolivian National Congress having authorized their prosecution, those responsible for so much pain go unpunished.
The Death Sentence
In a story of courage and strength, Bolivia’s poor, most importantly its Aymara indigenous population, defended their natural gas in September and October of last year, blockading highways and paralyzing El Alto and La Paz. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, serving his second term as president, hoped to export this valuable natural resource to the United States through Chilean ports, against the will of the people. During the conflict, soldiers and police constantly fired on people armed only with sticks, stones, and occasionally dynamite. As in the case of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, or of the insurrection in Argentina in 2001, the repressive forces of the Bolivian state had “orders from above”; a license to kill.
More:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue35/article1138.html
By Paulina Villegas
September 28, 2023 at 6:50 p.m. EDT
Bolivian plaintiffs from the Aymara community outside a federal court on April 3, 2018, in Fort Lauderdale, after a jury found former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and his former minister of defense Carlos Sánchez Berzain responsible of extrajudicial killings of their relatives during the unrests in October 2003. (Leila Macor/AFP/Getty Images)
Twenty years ago, Eloy Rojas Mamani made a promise to his 8-year-old daughter Marlene at her funeral: He would not rest until he found justice for her death.
She’d died inside their home in the highlands of Bolivia when a bullet from a government sniper lanced through her chest amid a deadly episode when government forces massacred dozens of civilians, mostly indigenous people. This week, Mamani said, that day finally came thanks to the resolution of a landmark U.S. court case.
. . .
Former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, center, exits the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with his lawyer Stephen Raber, on March 20, 2018. (Leila Macor/AFP/Getty Images)
The case marks the first instance a living, former head of state has stood trial in a U.S. civil court and been found responsible for human rights abuses under their leadership abroad, legal experts said.
. . .
The resolution culminates a years-long legal battle led by Rojas Mamani and seven other Bolivian families who sued Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzain in 2007 under the U.S. Torture Victim Protection Act. The case accused them of instructing military forces to intentionally kill and injure their unarmed relatives during a period of widespread unrest known as the “Gas War.”
“This trial has offered indigenous Aymara people, some of the poorest people in one of the poorest countries in the world, a message that even campesinos can win against the most powerful and that no one is above the law,” said Thomas Becker, director of the University Network for Human Rights and the leader of the legal action, using a Spanish term referring to farmers.
Sánchez de Lozada, commonly known as Goni, a U.S. educated, market-friendly mining magnate, ruled Bolivia from 1993 to 1997 and then again starting in 2002. When the staunch U.S. ally in his second term began trying to sell the nation’s natural gas reserves to private corporations for export, the plans caused an uproar, and thousands of largely indigenous Bolivians flooded the streets to protest.
. . .
One former soldier in the Bolivian military later testified in U.S. court about what happened after Sánchez de Lozada sent the military to quell the demonstrations. He told the court that he was ordered to shoot at “anything that moves” in a civilian community. Another said he witnessed a military officer kill a soldier for refusing to follow orders to shoot at unarmed civilians. Witnesses also recounted that tanks rolled through the streets and “soldiers deliberately fired deadly shots,” at unarmed civilians, some while they were inside a home or a building. Others were shot while they were “hiding or fleeing,” according to court documents.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/28/bolivia-sanchez-de-lozada-civil-lawsuit-settlement/
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https://web.archive.org/web/20230928225615/https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/28/bolivia-sanchez-de-lozada-civil-lawsuit-settlement/
