Andean Information Network

On March 9th, 2013, the Bolivian government passed a new comprehensive and progressive law to combat violence against women.  The law includes preventative measures, wide-ranging services to survivors of abuse, and severe penalties for violence against women.  The law represents a great advance from previous legislation, which did not consider spousal rape a crime and [...]

“Las heridas causadas por las dictaduras permanecen…” Fotografía : Gonzalo Ordoñez para RAI Bolivia ha tenido más golpes militares que ninguna otra nación en el mundo.   Hugo Banzer (1971-1978) y Luis García Meza (1980-1981) han sido los dictadores bolivianos más notables del siglo veinte.  Sin embargo, más de 30 años después de haberse restaurado el [...]

“The wounds caused by the dictatorships remain…” Photo credit: Gonzalo Ordoñez for AIN Bolivia has had more military coups than any other nation in the world.  Hugo Banzer (1971-1978) and Luis García Meza (1980-1981) were the most notorious Bolivian dictators in the Twentieth Century.  More than 30 years after restoration civilian rule, however, victims of [...]

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL NEWSFLASH 30 October 2012 Bolivia: Chilling attack on radio journalist A radio journalist in southern Bolivia is said to be in critical condition after several masked men broke into his studio and set him alight while he was on the air on Monday. The attack on Fernando Vidal, 78, who owns and is [...]

The Wall Street Journal’s recent article from August 1st, “Jailed American’s Drug Case Stokes Tension With Bolivia,” fails to acknowledge the many discrepancies in the Ostreicher case, dramatically exaggerates the effect the case has had on Bolivian-US relations, and contrives false connections between Ostreicher’s case and other drug-related cases.  Prolonged pretrial detention and harsh conditions [...]

Prison Detainees in Bolivia: Bad Fruit of a Slow Judiciary System On June 3, 2011, the Bolivian antidrug police arrested Jacob Ostreicher, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, New York, for money laundering and involvement with drug trafficking.  Ostreicher, a flooring contractor who had invested in a rice-growing agricultural venture, had come to Santa Cruz to [...]

Since the legal recognition of community justice in the 2009 constitution, Bolivia’s political opposition and the press have repeatedly blamed Morales administration legal reform initiatives for a supposed increase in lynching. For example, the Economist asserted: “Many rural Bolivians have no access to the courts. The new constitution drawn up by Mr. Morales’s party and approved in [...]

Jeffrey Sachs casts himself as the US’s ‘progressive’ candidate to head the World Bank, and from his analysis it’s clear that he is a better economist than historian. Nothing reveals this more plainly than reviewing some of the ‘facts’ on Bolivia in his Economic Reforms in Bolivia, Poland in the 80s and 90s, A Look [...]

The protracted conflict over road construction through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) has stemmed, in large part, from the government’s failure to first consult the affected indigenous communities as required by the 2009 Bolivian Constitution. In an effort to ease tensions, a congressional commission has retroactively defined draft legislation for “prior consultation” [...]

Insight Crime’s “Massive Overcrowding Allows Bolivia’s Prison Gangs to Flourish” accurately highlights some of the endemic problems faced by Bolivia’s prisons. Yet, the crisis is not new; it began soon after the passage of drug control Law 1008, when the prison population swelled with prisoners detained on low-level drug charges. At the peak of the [...]