Marlene Rojas Ramos died at the age of 8 from a gunshot while playing on the upper floor of her adobe house in Karisa, a district of the small Aymara town of Warisata, in the department of La Paz.
Minutes before her death, on the afternoon of Saturday, September 20, 2003, the sound of gunshots in the air had caught the girl’s attention. Members of the Bolivian Army had entered Warisata to accompany the operation in the Police area.
For several days, the farmers had blocked the routes in rejection of the decision of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (1993-1997 and 2002-2003) to export gas to the United States through the ports of Chile.
Marlene’s father, Eloy Rojas Mamani, had left the house in the morning to hide on the hill. He was afraid of being persecuted for his participation in roadblocks.
“Already in the mountains, I heard a young man shouting my name. He told me that Marlene had been killed,” Rojas Mamani recalls 20 years later, from La Paz, in conversation with BBC Mundo.
The security operation that Saturday in which the Army and the Police tried to regain control of Warisata, to allow a group of tourists who were in a nearby town to advance, ended with a dozen people injured and six dead, including Marlene .
In Bolivia, 58 people died due to military repression of protests. That episode, known as the October Massacre, is one of the darkest in the recent history of Bolivia.
“I swore that my daughter’s death would not go unpunished. The guilty would have to pay their penalties,” says Rojas Mamani.
After trying unsuccessfully to go to justice in Bolivia, the relatives of eight people murdered by the Armed Forces in 2003 filed a civil lawsuit in the United States against former President Sánchez de Lozada – known as ‘Goni’ – and the former Minister of Defense, José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín.
At that time, both resigned from their positions, pressured by the protests, and left the country on October 17, 2003, to go into exile on American soil, in southern Florida.
In that same place, more than a decade later, in 2018, the Fort Lauderdale justice system declared them responsible for the deaths of civilians in the October Massacre, according to the United States Torture Victims Protection Act, and He considered that they should financially compensate the relatives of the deceased.
Last week, Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín agreed extrajudicially that they will compensate, for an undisclosed amount, the relatives of the victims.
In this way, the agreement between the parties marks the closure of the legal battle of more than 16 years between Marlene’s family and the former president of Bolivia.
“We have beaten them on their own court, in their home, in the United States. This agreement is a message for anyone who wants to be president: to never again use the military and police to massacre the people of Bolivia,” says Rojas. Mamani.
The start of the protests
The town of Warisata, one hour from the capital of Bolivia, is recognized for having been the fuse that lit the protests of October 2003.
It was after the events that occurred that day that the peasants radicalized their position before the government: the dialogue was suspended and the Central Obrera Boliviana – the most important union in the country – asked for the president’s resignation for the first time.
But that has not been the only story of the town. Warisata is known for the Higher Teacher Training School, a pioneering experiment in indigenous schooling that took place in Bolivia from 1931 to 1940.
“Here everyone is a teacher,” Rojas Mamani describes his people. That’s why Marlene used to ask him why he wasn’t one of them. The girl’s father did not lack the desire to dedicate himself to teaching, but since he was little he had no other option than to earn money by cultivating the land.
It was in September 2003 that Warisata abandoned the calm to become the first trench of the so-called “Gas War”, when members of the Armed Forces repressed the peasants with tanks and bullets, many of them armed with sticks, stones, whips and some old rifles.
At that time, the country was emerging from a period of great economic crisis, in which Evo Morales (2006-2019) led the opposition.
Soldier Edwin Aquilar Vargas testified before the Florida courts that, at first, the military squad that entered Warisata did not fire because they did not have the order from their superior to do so.
But later, that order changed.
The members of the Army switched from non-lethal to lethal ammunition by order of Lieutenant Miranda, according to Aguilar. “From the moment we entered the town, [Miranda] “he ordered that we had to shoot anything that moved.”
According to Stephen Raber, Sánchez de Lozada’s lawyer, the compensation agreed upon now does not imply accepting responsibility for the deaths at the hands of the Armed Forces.
“There was never evidence that the president or his Defense Minister gave orders to the military to open fire or use lethal force against civilians,” he tells BBC Mundo. “Plaintiffs had the opportunity to present such evidence, but were unable to do so because no such evidence exists.”
Marlene’s mother, Etelvina Ramos, who was in the room when her daughter was shot, testified in court that while covering Marlene’s wound she saw a group of soldiers pass through the window. Therefore, without hesitation, Etelvina took refuge with her other children in a windowless ground floor room for fear of receiving another shot.
Rojas Mamani returned home thanks to a warning from a man, who told him that his wife was looking for him because the girl had been killed. “I scolded him. I felt angry with him when he told me. I thought he was joking, that he was playing a bad joke on me, I never thought it was real,” recalls the father.
When he returned he found Marlene lying on the floor, bathed in blood and lifeless.
The search for justice
At first, Marlene’s father thought of taking justice into his own hands, that is, confronting the military and asking for clarification of the facts. But her older brother prevented her from committing something reckless.
“They are armed, you have nothing, you won’t be able to do anything,” he stopped him with the words. “We have to protect and take care of ourselves, protect the blessed soul of the girl.”
On the day of the funeral, Marlene’s family was accompanied by social organizations in the area. “They asked me not to disappoint the blood shed, to seek justice,” says the girl’s father.
And that is how a long judicial process began, full of obstacles, first in Bolivia and, since 2004, in the courts of Florida.
“At the beginning of this trial they told us that we could not do it because Goni is one of the most powerful people in Bolivia. But the victims have shown that no one is untouchable,” Thomas Becker, the family’s lawyer, tells BBC Mundo.
20 years after Marlene’s death, the girl’s parents along with the relatives of seven other victims agreed extrajudicially with the former president and the former Minister of Defense to resolve the legal dispute.
According to the joint statement of September 29, the parties reached a conciliation that grants the relatives of those murdered in Bolivia financial compensation for a secret amount and prohibits any new legal action for the events of September and October 2003. .
“The decision to reach an agreement does not mean that the defendants admit their responsibility for the events in question,” says Raber, lawyer for the former president and former minister, who clarifies that the parties are not authorized to speak about the resolution.
For Rojas Mamani, the agreement does not repair the loss of Marlene but it sets a precedent. “From now on, no president with the intention of massacring the Bolivian people will be saved by escaping to other countries. I bet that we Aymaras will have justice, and that is what happened.”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c874lnrlnp5o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-05 13:20:06
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