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A Letter from Social Leader Oscar Olivera in Cochabamba, Bolivia

By Oscar Olivera Foronda

February 6, 2006

To our compañero and compañera Narco News readers:

This is a letter from a collective in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where many victorious and proud social struggles are going on, where spaces are appearing for encounters between different people: the Water Coordinating Committee, our brothers in the rural farmlands, the Water Committees from the southern part of the city, the young workers of Semapa* (the public water utility refounded after the 2000 Water War), the brave women of the April Foundation, the factory workers young and old.

Oscar Olivera Foronda

All of us find ourselves tyrannized by neoliberalism’s communications media. That is why our voices are getting stronger and stronger, and must become even stronger still, accompanied by mobilizations, so that the news find an echo, a response, and attention from the powerful, and so that our anguish and needs be known everywhere, where the simple and working people are also fighting, just like us.

That is why many of us have turned to the Internet as an alternative medium. And we have all seen the trustworthy, truthful, and committed Narco News articles that come out of Bolivia. We have come to know many of the Narco News compañeros and compañeras that work around the world, and we have met Al Giordano as well. They all seem to us like the water of Cochabamba: nearly transparent but always moving with their articles and commentaries.

That is why we ask that other readers who use Narco News every day, or simply when time permits – because life is too hard to spend all of it on the Internet – support the existence and continued activity of this publication. And that they especially support its most valuable asset: the men and women who are out reporting and struggling with the people, like Luis Gómez, the Mexican who is now equally a man of El Alto and La Paz, and to whom we now owe many aynis.*

We invite you to chip in with soles, pesos, euros, bolívares, dollars – in other words, any kind of money – so that these people, our brothers and sisters, don’t disappear on us.

You can donate online, here:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or send your checks, made out to “The Fund for Authentic Journalism,” to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 241
Natick, MA 01760 USA

We’re going to pass the hat here at the Coordinating Committee, among all those mentioned at the beginning of this letter, so that all of us can continue to exist and to safeguard our histories that are still being written.

Un abrazo,

Oscar Olivera Foronda
Cochabamba, Bolivia, February 5, 2006

* Andean word for communal work.

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