Declaration in response to an epidemic of violence and colonial racism unleashed with blood and fire in Bolivian territory

From the CLACSO Working Group on International Health and Health Sovereignty We express our deep condemnation and concern about the growing pedagogy of cruelty in the social, health and human rights protection crisis following the coup in Bolivia.

The breakdown of democratic order in the Plurinational State of Bolivia is a new coup d'état in the Latin American and Caribbean region that affects the well-being and collective health of the Bolivian people; and it becomes a threat as a test case for peace, democracy and regional stability.

 The network combined in the uprising of the police, military, paramilitary forces, churches and urban sectors of certain social classes and a geopolitics of Pan-American and Eurocentric power; were the center of operations and the task groups that act between the racist colonial action and the complicit silence.

 In this regard, the researchers, institutions and member centers that make up the Working Group declare:

1. The brutal repression, persecution, harassment, and denigration of the popular movements of indigenous and peasant nations and peoples, and of women; of union leaders, public managers, and the ruling political party, which is counted in violent deaths and injuries, is a spiral of unprecedented violence in a re-edition of radical and colonial fascism.

 2. To repudiate the silent colonial support of the international cooperation system for “development” and regional Pan-Americanism expressed in its international organizations (e.g., international cooperation agencies, Organization of American States-OAS, PAHO-WHO, European Union, others), the geopolitics of power of the United States and its allies in the region, and the aforementioned International Non-Governmental Organizations of the North (NGOs); which throughout the year are giving democratic lessons, defining regional humanitarian crises, and professing the “grammar” of Human Rights in a Western liberal key, but in the face of the most brutal coup d'état in recent years, which affects the physical and mental health as well as the lives of Bolivian society, they maintain their total silence, even justifying the de facto government and the ethnocidal repression in the country.

This silence stems from the aforementioned illusionist trick of making people believe that the Global North respects and understands liberal human rights and humanitarianism as "universal" for all peoples, when in reality they reproduce the same old (one might say constitutive) hypocrisy of invoking human rights to legitimize practices that could be considered human rights violations according to the Global North's script. And their diplomats and operational managers even believe this and strive tirelessly to profess their "neutrality." 

 This makes it clearer than ever that the discourse of human rights and humanitarian aid is not a solidarity-based, transformative, and critical action for social change. In reality, it operates as a depoliticized, technocratic grammar that reproduces a colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and modernizing world system.

This dominant discourse of human rights and humanitarian aid "à la carte" is what operates in the case of Bolivia, where characters of all kinds from the North and the South (in their internal colonialism) try to "give their opinions," "use Bolivian voices," that is, "justify" a bloody coup d'état tailored to liberal policies, to the theory of capitalist development and its various metamorphoses (liberal, social democratic, dependent Fordist, post-Fordist, peripheral Fordist, corporatist, state, neoliberal), to certain partisan readings of convenience and also to a metamorphosed colonialism that is constantly reproduced.

3We denounce the persecution, including the burning of her house, of the Bolivian Minister of Health, the threats against the lives of the Bolivian Ministry of Health team, and the Bolivian social medicine public health workers who were leading, for the first time in history, the universalization of healthcare from an intercultural perspective through a Unified Health System in the country.

4. We reject the persecution and arbitrary detention of the head of the Cuban Medical Brigade in Bolivia, who, according to the Cuban Foreign Minister, was detained in the United States Embassy in Bolivia, and the imprisonment of 4 Cuban public health professionals, among the more than 700 in the country, who were carrying out South-South health technical cooperation and whose freedom and lives are now at risk.

5. We reject the growing persecution of SAFCI (Family, Community, and Intercultural Health Model) medical teams, a comprehensive care model that prioritizes intercultural health, community, and nature over hospitals, medications, and health technologies. Today, these SAFCI professionals are being threatened in various departments by liberal medical corporations that have never accepted the break with Western biomedical care, the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, and its commodification.

6. We demand respect for and the guarantee of the universal right to health for all Bolivians without discrimination or persecution based on their political beliefs, ethnicity, or gender. From our South-South international health perspective, we demand that the United Nations system intercede with the de facto government of Bolivia, including the armed forces and police, to guarantee full access to medical care for injured and life-threatening protesters in the country's public health services, both in hospitals and healthcare centers, without persecution or arbitrary detentions within health facilities. We also demand an end to all repressive attacks on demonstrations and mobilizations by Indigenous, peasant, and labor movements against the coup. The recent massacre in Cochabamba is a grave step and possibly a crime against humanity perpetrated by the de facto state.

7. We want to make it clear to the representatives of Eurocentrism and colonial Pan-Americanism from the Global North, as well as to their institutions, organizations, and NGOs, that in the face of a long history of coups and repression in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially in this case against the Indigenous peoples of Bolivia, their actions and response will determine their future in Latin America and the Caribbean and with the Nations of Abya Yala. We will neither forget nor forgive.

We call upon institutions and university centers, especially those focused on collective health and social medicine in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as social organizations and movements advocating for the right to health, and popular actors across the continent, to increase regional solidarity strategies with the protests and social struggles of the Bolivian people.

#NOALCOUP #SOLIDARITYWITHBOLIVIA 

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