Categories: General Market Commentary
Topics: General Market Commentary

Bolivia’s Desperate Miners Are Doing Desperate Things-Like Murder

Bolivia’s Desperate Miners Are Doing Desperate Things—Like Murder

Everyone knows who killed Rodolfo Illanes. So why is his death such a mystery?

 

by Monte Reel

March 2, 2017

From BloombergBusinessweek

 

Rodolfo Illanes, the vice minister in charge of domestic affairs in Bolivia, held his cell phone to his left ear and struggled to hear the voice on the line. Dozens of angry men crowded around him, some holding heavy wooden sticks, some shouting insults. They were miners, and for a week they’d been blocking several strategic highways throughout the country, demanding changes to a new national mining law.

“They’ve taken me hostage, minister,” Illanes said, speaking on the phone to Carlos Romero, Bolivia’s minister of government affairs. “I was just entering Mantecani alone, and I was counting how many miners were on the hillsides. …”

He’d left the capital city, La Paz, early that morning, Aug. 25, with his driver, and they’d arrived at Mantecani about two hours later. Traffic on the four-lane highway was backed up for miles, blocked by piles of boulders, burning tires, and thousands of protesting miners. The driver steered his Toyota Land Cruiser off the pavement and parked on the rocky plain.

Illanes confronted a sweeping vista: At 13,500 feet above sea level, there were no trees on the chalky plateau, only scattered eruptions of scrub brush. Thin lines of white smoke uncoiled from distant fires. Hundreds of miners, members of a loose federation of mining cooperatives, walked the hills between their temporary encampments and the highway they’d paralyzed.

When the first miners confronted Illanes, they viewed him as an enemy spy. The day before, two miners had been killed at a roadblock in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba. The exact circumstances of their deaths were murky. Police had been tossing tear gas canisters to clear the roads, and miners were lobbing dynamite toward the police to push them back. Miners said federal police shot the two men, but the government insisted that none of the officers at the blockade had been armed. Dozens of miners were arrested, accused of inciting violence.

Now, as they surrounded Illanes, the workers wanted the jailed protesters released. Illanes handed his cell phone to the miners so they could explain their demands to his boss, Romero. With his hands now free, Illanes pressed a white handkerchief to his nose; when he pulled it away, it was bright red.

One of the miners admitted to Romero that several of the men had roughed up Illanes, but he said things had calmed down. “Listen, we’re not mistreating your friend—we’re guarding him,” the man told Romero. “But we need you to do your part, too.” To guarantee Illanes’s safety, the miner said, the government had to release the jailed miners and tell the police to back off.

About a half-hour later, Illanes called the minister again; his abductors were running out of patience, he said. A rumor was swirling around the blockade that another protesting miner had been struck by a bullet. As Illanes spoke to Romero, several of those crowding around him shouted threats.

“It’s life or death!”

“Ten minutes! Or else we butcher you!”

In La Paz, Romero announced news of the kidnapping, and the media scrambled to follow up. One radio station managed to call Illanes in the middle of the ordeal (“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he insisted), and cell phone video of the confrontation surfaced on the web, presumably uploaded by an anonymous miner. But Illanes stopped responding to calls late that afternoon. His driver, who had been separated from him that morning, had escaped to safety after being beaten, but he had no idea where the miners had taken Illanes. The blue Land Cruiser had been blasted with dynamite and burned to a colorless shell.

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