El Gaviero

The Nation has an interview with Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera, in which he suggests that the right wing’s collapse in that country was due, in part, to the massacre in Pando department last year–what he calls the “point of bifurcation.”
How do you explain the current dramatic decline in the influence of the right [...]

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Saturday night in La Paz ended my latest exploration of Bolivia with a bang, literally, as three thugs jumped out of an unlicensed taxi cab and robbed me. Ironically, I had booked a room in a relatively (for me) upscale hotel on Plaza España in the Sopocachi neighborhood after having been slumming it in the [...]

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Earlier this month, indigenous activists seized former Bolivian vice president Victor Hugo Cardenas’s home on the altiplano in retaliation for his campaigning against the newly passed constitution. Both Bolivian president Evo Morales and vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera paid lip service to the seizure, until now:
“The new constitution has absolute respect for private property,” Linera [...]

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One of the most interesting sights in El Alto (or “The Heights” in English)—the fast –and-loose city perched on La Ceja (“The Eyebrow”), a ridge 500 meters above the massive canyon in which lies the metropolis of La Paz—is a seven-meter-tall junk-metal sculpture of the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. It’s a testament to how [...]

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I’ve been reading up on vice president Álvaro García Linera today, a man I find immensely interesting. Part of it is my curiousness as to whether he’ll pick up the MAS mantle in 2015, when Morales cannot run for president again. From Bolivia Rising comes a speech he made in late 2007, entitled “Catastrophic Equilibrium [...]

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