Scoop: Gómez: The Reappearance of the Nazis in Bolivia

Luis Gómez reports today on the resurfacing of the ugliest of tendencies among Bolivia's ruling class: a homegrown neo-Nazi movement. In the nation where Klaus Barbie worked for years as a high- ranking secret police official after World War II, and where for even longer a white elite has maintained its privilege at the expense of an indigenous majority, the sudden appearance of the Radical National Socialist Union of Bolivia, writes Gómez, is significant: "Just like the so-called Movement of the Camba Nation - which usurps the moniker 'camba' from the peasants and indigenous of popular extraction in Santa Cruz but is made up of rich, white people -the URNSB is one of the organizations that protects the desires of whites in Bolivia. Both groups, with different degrees of viciousness, talk of the future and what it holds for their 'people,' whether it be supremacy or the complete control of the department of Santa Cruz. And they can't be too far from each other, despite the efforts of the Camba oligarchy not to appear racist: in the House of Culture in Santa Cruz, right on the city's main avenue (24 de Septiembre), there is a revealing photo: a carnival group, in which the participants, in order to 'dance and make merry,' have dressed up as Ku Klux Klan members. (Has Sergio Antelo, intellectual leader of the Camba Nation, seen this? Could they be relatives of his?) So, the white 'aristocracy' of Santa Cruz is not beyond such demonstrations. siehe auch: More Demons Loose in Bolivia. The Reappearance of the Nazis. They weren’t dead, kind readers, just hiding in their dung pile. The Nazis (the Radical National Socialist Union of Bolivia, or UNRSB in its Spanish initials) have taken advantage of these days of uncertainty to return to the public stage. And this correspondent cannot believe that it is just a coincidence. Because while the political class (the political parties of all stripes and the state powers) dedicate themselves to negotiating in the darkness, while gas becomes scarce in the homes of the city of El Alto (for nearly a month supplies have been short), while the Santa Cruz oligarchy makes its latest efforts to maintain its system of life, men (and perhaps women) appear who display the most decedent and repugnant traits of our recent history: the fascists, the racists, the liars, the genocidal…