Oscar Olivera, General Secretary of the Federation of Factory Workers of Cochabamba, together with organizations and unions from this department express their solidarity with their bothers and sisters in Pando.

[THE FOLLOWING IS A TRANSCRIPT OF OLIVERA’S STATEMENTS AT A PRESS CONFERENCE ON SEPTEMBER 16, 2008]

The social movement organizations, along with the Human Rights Assembly, have been meeting these past few days, to above all publicly express firm and fraternal solidarity with the brothers and sisters from Pando, who have been the victims of massacre, assassinations, humiliation, aggressions and violations by paramilitaries commanded and organized by Leopoldo Fernández, the Governor of that area.

This massacre reminds us of the many other massacres that the working people of the city have suffered in the past, and it is because of this that we express solidarity in this situation.

This aggression is nothing but a showing of the impotence of the oligarchic groups–for example, the land-owners, the heads of agro-industry, the bankers, and some media-owners– who cannot accept the inevitability of the change that the Bolivian people, particularly the people of Cochabamba and La Paz, have spearheaded since the year 2000, with the Water Wars.

We want to affirm our decision to go further with the democratic process, since anything else would simply serve to further enrich the multinational companies and to allow for impunity and hate to continue, and therefore we cannot be on the sidelines of this situation. We are facing the kind of aloneness and abandonment that the government has left us with, and this must be understood very well, that while they continue to massacre people, while Bolivians fight each other, there are very few authorities and people concerned with this serious situation from which this country and the Pando area are suffering.

In this sense we call on the humble workers from the country and the city to take back their own autonomous spaces of liberation and free will for the social movements. This group of social organizations therefore calls on all Cochabamba residents and Bolivians whose hearts are hurting to say that we can form an inter-institutional committee with the head of the Human Rights Assembly and the Ombudsman to investigate and sentence all of those who have just massacred the Bolivian people.

We also want to plan a day of mobilization that will fundamentally say to the Bolivian people that we have to find a way to get rid of the hatred and the suspicions, and to say to everyone that we have to continue with this process regardless of all of the difficulties and adverse circumstances that this moment is presenting. This day of mobilization will above all direct the attention of members of the government to the deep problems from which at this point in time many parts of society and many parts of the country are suffering.

This has been a little bit of an update on what we have done. I would like to finish by saying something very important that a brother from the Zona Sur [southern neighborhood of Cochabamba] said: not twenty years, nor thirty years, nor one hundred years of condemning the killers of our brothers and sisters can bring them back.