By María Botey
Three years after a spectacular police operation in which various workers and executives of the Bolivian mining company Tierra, S.A., were detained on charges of having diverted precursor chemicals for the manufacture of cocaine, four of the defendants were sentenced to terms of four to eight years in prison and the factory and its mining concessions were confiscated.
The plant's workers, who refuse to lose their source of employment, consider the sentence to be the result of a highly irregular prosecution organized by international competition (Chilean and American) acting with the complicity of the prosecuting attorney and other obscure Bolivian interests to take control of the continent's mineral reserves.
Originally published in ¡Por Esto!, Mexico
Founded in 1984 according to a Belgian plan aiming at creating employment in the historically marginalized area south of Potosí, Tierra produces boric acid in its plant located in Apacheta, nine kilometers from the Chilean border. After many difficult years, Tierra became profitable in 1998, employing 250 workers in Bolivia and fifty in Chile, and exporting nine hundred tons of product to five continents. It was rewarded for business success by the Chamber of Commerce of Bolivia in 1999 and 2000.
Faithful to its social mission, Tierra has dedicated much energy to worker training, awarding university scholarships to the best students on the condition that they return home, and supporting three medical doctors who provide health services to the surrounding villages in coordination with the Bolivian Health Chest. It is proud to maintain more than 200 kms. of highway that its trucks use, something the Bolivian government hardly carries out throughout the country. It was recently cited by the United Nations as the world's second best poverty eradication project among twenty countries.
The ordeal of the Potosino workers began when a group of Bolivian lawyers repurchased debt that Tierra had contracted with International Investment Corporation, a dependency of the International Development Bank, and began various strategies to take control of the borax-producing deposits the company exploits. Tierra won in court.
A short time later, Aug. 28, 2000 Bolivian and Chilean drug police financed by the DEA carried out Frontier 2000, a joint operation in which multiple human rights abuses were committed that was presented to the media as a spectacular success. As a result, the plant was ordered closed and fourteen executives and workers were detained, accused of supposedly illegally importing sulfuric acid -- a borax production requirement whose transportation and use is regulated in Bolivia because it is a precursor for the manufacture of cocaine -- and diverting of nearly ten thousand metric tons of it to the drug trade in Chapare.
The company defended itself by demonstrating that the entire importation had been legal from the beginning, and had all of the authorizations of the Vice ministry of Social Defense for importing sulfuric acid, whose importation is controlled by the customs authorities. They also alleged that customs and tax authorities never went made out the required post-import documents, despite many requests by the company.
The precursors diversion accusation was based on a report by a FELCN functionary asserting that only .8 kilos of sulfuric acid per kilo of ulexite are required to manufacture a kilo of boric acid. This theoretical presumption was refuted after the Frontier 2000 operation by four studies under the supervision of the Technical University of Oruro (Bolivia), an official government commission and a team of independent experts, which confirmed that the amount of sulfuric acid necessary for the production of boric acid varies but averages one to one.
If the accusation were true it would signify that hundreds of tanker trucks would have been transporting sulfuric acid all along the 1,500 kilometers that separate the production plant and Chapare, a route full of military checkpoints for the control of controlled substances, coca and its chemical precursors. Not a single truck was ever detained nor has the existence of the money proceeding from the illegal sale ever been proven.
As widely reported in the Bolivian media at the time, when the plant closed the workers and their wives and children marched on La Paz and struggled for fifteen months to reopen it, which they achieved after the acceptance of the naming of a judicial supervisor for plant administration. Production started up again, back salaries were paid little by little, and Tierra installations were expanded and improved.
They also began a national and international campaign in which they gathered 3,500 signatures, among them Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. Despite this, in a parallel prosecution under customs law that took place in Potosí in the middle of June, the former executive president was sentenced to four years in prison and one of his associates to two. Neither the defendants nor their lawyers were physically present because they had to attend final hearings on the judicial process in La Paz, but the judge refused to take this into consideration.
Finally, on June 18, the La Paz court decreed the confiscation of the company, its deposits to be auctioned by the government, and penalties of twelve years in jail for Guillermo Roelants, the executive president, a Belgian residing in Bolivia twenty years, eight years for Oscar Bollanti, the ex administrative manager, four years for former Tierra lawyer Mabel Esrada and four years for Carmen Rosa Burgos, owner of the mining concessions. The defense announced that it will appeal the decision.
The workers called the process a trick. They said that the prosecution's intention to transfer the company to the government clearly demonstrated the aim of converting it into political booty in order to hand it over to the international competition that is trying to gain control of the immense ulexite deposits, calculated at more than five million metric tons. Almost the entire Latin American borax market is controlled by US Borax. The other transnational is IMC Chemicals.
Returning to Potosí after mobilizing in La Paz to be present at the sentencing, the workers asserted that they would defend their source of work by all means. They threatened to carry out pressure tactics such as blocking the highways if the plant's functioning were affected in any way. They and the company's executives see the decision as another demonstration of the absence of reliable justice in the country, whose judges are immersed in all kinds of pressures and influences. As a result the prosecution in drug trafficking cases (supported by the DEA) never loses its cases and be discredited in public opinion, even when its accusations are unsustained.
MARIA BOTEY is a Catalán journalist living in Cozumel, Mexico, who writes principally for ¡Por Esto!, Mexico's third largest daily newspaper. She recently came back from an extensive research trip in the Bolivian highlands.
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