Things are getting serious... Or so they say

The political situation in our autonomist little corner of Bolivia is getting interesting to say the least. El Presidente de la Republica, (indigenous) Evo Morales, has successfully managed to tweek the law-making process to make it a little easier for his party (Movimiento A Socialismo or MAS) to enact land reforms. This is a touchy issue throughout Latin America, where, generally, a few hundred (mainly white) rich famillies own vast tracts of land while poor peasants are left with next to nothing. Evo has taken it upon himself to try to rectify 500 years of such injustice by redistributing some of the land currently owned by these few families to (mainly indigenous) peasants.

This is making the rich and powerful, who seem to be concentrated in Santa Cruz and neighbouring Tarija, quite outraged. There are people hunger striking in the principal Plaza of Santa Cruz, Tarija is threatening to cut of gas supplies to the rest of the country, and there is talk of a national strike that could bring parts of the country to a halt in the next couple of days. We got a letter from the Canadian consulate warning us to stay away from any protests and are feeling a little bit uneasy about the situation overall.

To make matters worse, most of the ´news´ channels in Santa Cruz help fuel the anti-evo sentiment by providing a very one-sided and rediculously over-dramatic portrayal of the issues (complete with scary music and weird camera angles to emphasize the effect).

The only real alternatives are CNN Español, which has some US-bias, but at least attempts to appear unbiased, and Evo Morales´ good friend Hugo Chavez´s very own Telesur, which runs a nauseatingly redundant series of adds supporting Evo and attacking his opponents in every commercial break.

With this sort of media coverage it is no surprise that the country, or at least this part of it, is becoming very polarized. What will come of the situation remains to be seen.