Morales assassins: Bolivia gang "fought in Balkans"

[Jan Klimkowski]

According to this BBC piece, which draws no conclusions, there are links from Rozsa Flores' blog to the Camba Nation group in Santa Cruz.

in his blog, you can find links that lead to right-wing organizations in Santa Cruz, such as the "Camba Nation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/america_latin..._med.shtml

The Camba Nation claims to be a secessionist movement, demanding autonomy from the Bolivian government, but it is most definitely not a movement of indigenous Bolivians such as the Aymara and Quechua speakers.

Santa Cruz was barely on the map half a century ago. But thanks to the strength of its fertile soils and petroleum reserves, as well as subsidies from the central government in La Páz, it has grown to a city of more than 1.2 million, from 40,000 in 1950.

Today, it is a bustling metropolis of immigrants and industry, home to Croatians, Germans, and Japanese, as well as the offices for agriculture and petroleum giants like Archer Daniels Midland, British Gas, and Brazil's Petrobras. The city and surrounding region produce 42 percent of the nation's agricultural output and 34 percent of industrial GNP, according to a 2004 report by the United Nations.

Culturally, geographically, and politically, Santa Cruz is a world apart from the high plains of western Bolivia, home to the capital, La Páz, and El Alto, indigenous strongholds where last month's protests began. Newsstands here sell magazines from Brazil in front of billboards advertising John Deere tractors. In the city's cafes, young professionals talk of weekends spent in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. From sidewalk vendors to CEOs, people here are frustrated by the mounting economic toll that years of protests have had on the country, South America's poorest. But Santa Cruz's growing assertiveness is seen as a threat to many in the west.

The Aug. 12 referendum has not been sanctioned by the national government, and many western leaders view it as a means to counteract the growing power of the country's indigenous majority.

Yet its backers claim that one of the key benefits of autonomy would be to bring Bolivia's government closer to its people and allow the country's nine departments, or states, to have greater control over how their taxes are spent.

The Pro-Santa Cruz Committee has existed since 1950, but it wasn't until June of last year, when 150,000 people turned up at its rally in support of autonomy, that its agenda made national headlines. A cabildo, or town-hall meeting, followed in January, drawing more than 300,000 people into the streets here.

But as the demands from Santa Cruz gain legitimacy, the rivalry between east and west here is increasingly delineated in racial terms. It's the eastern cambas (European-descended Bolivians) versus the western collas (a term often used to refer to western indigenous people).

At one extreme are groups like the Camba Nation, which calls for independence from the indigenous cultures, described on Camba Nation's website as "slow and miserable" and prone to "conflict and communalism."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0628/p06s01-woam.html

Among other things, Santa Cruz is home to the most extreme right-wing groups in Bolivia: the Camba Nation and the Cruceñista Youth; both of them autonomist, and, to be a bit more descriptive, fascist. It was those groups that organized the aggression in Santa Cruz on October 16, 2003, against the march of indigenous and poor farmers that had arrived in the north of the department to demand Sánchez de Lozada’s resignation. They are the same people that have entire arsenals stored in their haciendas to use to attack peasant-farmers and the Landless Movement. (Did I mention that the land in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s largest department, is concentrated in the hands of just over 140 families?) They are the same people who, last Friday, in a pro-autonomy march led by the rebel government, began to raise their arms and salute the Führer they carry within them, in their hearts...

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/node/449

Secession to Maintain Ethnic Divide Santa Cruz's European-descended business elite has long desired a separatist rupture with the largely indigenous populations of the western highlands, comprised mainly of Quechua and Aymara-speaking peoples. Accounting for 55 percent of the country's 8 million citizens, the Andean nation's indigenous rely predominantly on subsistence farming and coca production as a means of survival, contributing little to the nation's industrial economy. Predominantly white and mestizo Santa Cruz, home to 2.4 million, is reputed to be the country's economic engine and historically has been chauvinistically proud of its European roots, which date back to the Spanish conquest. "The wealthy, 'white' agro-industrialists [...] view themselves as racially superior to the poor peasants of the highlands. They view the [poor peasants] as contributing little or nothing to the national wealth," commented Gill. While recent protests by the elite demonstrate frustration on the part of the prosperous lowland's over the historical split in Bolivia's economy between poor and rich, they also highlight deep racial tensions.

Santa Cruz plays host to two fiercely right-wing groups—the Cruceñista Youth, whose para-fascist ideals and actions have been broadly juxtaposed by some to the Nazi Hitler Youth movement, and the Movement for the Liberation of the Camba Nation (Nación Camba). Both groups are known for carrying out violent attacks against members of the Landless Movement, as well as subsistence peasant farmers. The larger and more vocal Nación Camba, which boasts 40,000 predominantly white and mestizo backers from both Santa Cruz and Tarija, advocates the creation of a "new Bolivia" by means of regional separation. Despite claims on the Nación Camba website that the group "rejects any form of racism," the movement's Youth Group branch was responsible for the October 2003 stoning of a large group of indigenous people attempting to enter the city of Santa Cruz in protest of former president Sanchez de Lózada's decision to export natural gas reserves.

Conveniently, direct support for Nación Camba, which claims 5,000 militants who are prepared to take up arms in support of their cause, comes from the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce (CAINCO), a body charged with representing the interests of 1,500 foreign and domestic companies holding investments in the department. Its long list of business members includes international gas companies holding gas contracts in the region, such as Repsol-YPF, Brazilian state-owned Petrobras and the notorious U.S. energy company, Enron. Each of these sectors, coincidentally, has representation on CAINCO's board of directors.

http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/.../2843.html