Annotations for Countries: South Vietnam

For our feature today, we'll be talking with Mary Elizabeth Harding, an American citizen who worked for 14 years in Bolivia with the Roman Catholic Order of Maryknolls Sisters. Mary was arrested on December 5th in Bolivia and charged with belonging to a terrorist organization. International press coverage and protests were credited for securing her release this last January 14th. Mary, how did you happen to go to Bolivia in the first place and what kind of work were you doing?

Well, I went to Bolivia in 1959 as a Maryknoll sister. I was assigned there and I worked for about four years with children in a little parish school in Cobija, Bolivia. Then I went up to La Paz, which is the business center and the political center of the country, and I began to see through my work with public school children there, how very difficult life was for working class people in Bolivia. I was aware that the religious community was more accepted by the people who owned the business, the people who owned the factories and in La Paz than the working class people. I began to question my commitment to the religious community, and in 1970 I asked to be released from Maryknoll. That time I was working in a factory. I stayed on working in the factory until about a year later, then I began teaching English to support myself.

What kind of factory was it?

It was a plastics factory. Came this little factory where we made a plastic tooling and bagging and little plastic artifacts, little kitchen utensils, spoons, cups, saucers, things would be stamped out of these hydraulic machines.

What were the working conditions there and wages?

It was a pretty difficult place to work. The machinery was very old, very unreliable. Accidents were frequent, and when I say accidents, I mean bad accidents because remember, these machines close under tons of pressure. Now when they don't open again, then until they're ready, and if you got a hand or your fingers caught in the machine, it meant you lost that part of your hand.

What were the circumstances of your arrest and how were you finally released?

Shortly after I went to La Paz, I began to question the role of my religious community as being an agent in bringing about the kind of changes that I felt were needed in Bolivia. I began to develop a friendship with many young people in the country who also had reached this level of questioning how much longer we could go on. The way we saw it, we were putting band-aids on a completely sick, corrupt body, and we felt that to really put Bolivia back in the hands of Bolivians would mean a drastic, a radical change in her whole economic and political system. I really consider it an honor to have met some of these young people. Most of them are no longer alive. One fellow died in the guerrilla focal that took place in 1970.

I became very concerned about the question of the conditions of the people who were arrested in the country. I was very concerned for the political prisoners and I was very active in a group. See, there was actually a committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Bolivia, which had a recognized charter from the United Nations. But the situation was so tense and has been so tense and so difficult since August of 1971 when Hugo Banzer Suarez came into power, that we were literally afraid to reactivate this committee, to organize a committee which would try to defend the human rights of people arrested for political reasons in Bolivia. We set up kind of a network of reaching the prisoners with supplies, with food or clothing or medical things. Then they in turn let us know of the condition of the people in the prisons and who had been arrested and where they were. It was the only way the families of the prisoners could keep in touch with the people in the prisons.

You were arrested last December?

I was arrested on the 2nd of December, and I was released on the 14th of January. I was arrested by these secret agents that are used by the police now. They're not uniformed men. They carry no identification. You're transported in automobiles that have no license plates. I was taken to the Ministry of the Interior and I was pretty badly treated there for a few days, and I think that's quite significant. I don't know if people realize, I think some people think that the brutal treatment or the torturing of political prisoners goes on kind of around the fringes of the government, that the government doesn't really have the responsibility for, can't really control it. That's not true. No, I know in my own case, I suffered several beatings right there in the Ministry of the Interior. I know the case of a 67-year-old woman, Delfina Burgoa, who was arrested and taken to the Ministry and beaten, terribly tortured for information.

I remained in the Ministry for about 12 days, and then I was taken to the police station where I stayed in solitary confinement for four weeks, and then I think it was a accumulation of pressures. People here in the States were writing letters to me in care of the president of the country. People were writing letters to Senator Kennedy because I'm from Massachusetts and to Senator Church because they knew that—Well, he had made some very interesting observations about American economic assistance, which were picked up in the Bolivian newspapers, and I had sent those clippings to him and kind of maintained a contact with him. So those people put on the pressure that they could, and my friends in La Paz were continually visiting the consul and the Minister of the Interior.

Is your case unusual in Bolivia, or are there many people in Bolivia who are in prison for political reasons?

There must be a thousand people right now in prison in Bolivia. That might not impress you terribly when you think of 200,000 political prisoners in South Vietnam. But when you remember that there's—the Bolivian population is 4 million and some. The people who would be politically aware, the people who live around the cities, who would be more conscious of what's going on, what was involved in the change of government, that wouldn't be more than maybe 300,000 people. When you take into consideration the fact that periodically 20 or 30 people are released from jail and sent out of the country, and then another 20 or 30 take their places in the jail, the number of a thousand becomes very relative.

Are most of these political prisoners people that are involved in organized subversion of the government or—It seems like that would be harder.

Subversion is a very good term. It's pretty hard to define what subversion is all about. This particular government, the government of Hugo Banzer Suarez, considers any criticism or any offering of alternative solutions for Bolivia's problems as subversion. The people in the jails in Bolivia are many students, professional people, there are many women in prison. No respect is made for a woman's condition. I know of several cases of women who were expecting children when they were arrested and pretty badly beaten up. I know of a case of a Bolivian intellectual, a man who founded the Partido Indio in Bolivia. He was accused of criticizing the government and these secret agents went to his house to arrest him, but they didn't find him. The only one in the house was his nine-year-old grand-nephew, so they took that child. He was later released among the men who escaped from Quati back in November of '72.

There were many young fellows in that group, 15, 16 year old boys. I know people who have been murdered. I know people who have suffered very serious consequences as a result of the treatment they received in prison. Now, no one who's in jail in Bolivia who's considered a political prisoner has ever passed to the judiciary process. No one has ever had a trial. The right to habeas corpus is not respected. This guarantee is written into the Constitution, but General Bond said, wrote it right out by a supreme decree, and the Association of Professionals challenged the president on that. They challenged the constitutionality of that, and when they did, their leader, the man who was the head of the Association of Professionals, was arrested.

Mary, there's a lot of criticism of US support of military dictatorships in, for instance, Brazil, Argentina, and other Latin American countries. What's the US policy toward the Bolivian government?

The United States policy is very clear towards the present Bolivian government, and it was very clear towards the government that just preceded General Hugo Banzer Suarez. The man who was in office before, he was in office for some 10 months, and he received $5 million worth of economic assistance. The American company, the construction company, Williams Brothers, that was building the pipeline to pipe out the natural gas just couldn't complete its contract. They couldn't complete the construction of that pipeline under General Torres, but it was miraculously completed under Hugo Banzer Suarez and the amount of economic assistance to the General Suarez was–in the first six months of Suarez' period, he received nine times what Torres had received in a year—in 10 months.

The United States has very direct economic interests in Bolivia. Bolivia has very rich mineral reserves. Everyone's heard of Bolivian tin. Well, Bolivia also has deposits of zinc, tungsten, radioactive materials, and a real wealth of petroleum resources. The Denver Mining Corporation is now investing some $10 million dollars in exploiting the tungsten outside of Aruro and the Union Oil Corporation of California has been given the franchise to develop the oil reserves down in the Santa Cruz area. Bolivia right now represents a very good place to invest capital from the United States of America.

Mary, what do you think North Americans can do to help the Bolivians in their struggle against repression?

I think the best thing North Americans can do for Bolivians or other Latin Americans, other third world people, is to become politically aware and conscious of what's going on here right in their own country. When we talk about economic assistance and how that's used to manipulate the internal politics of countries like Bolivia, there's a long history of this in Bolivia, we're talking about dollars and cents that we as American citizens pay into in the form of taxes. I think we have to become conscious of the fact that this money that we kick in is used then to manipulate other countries.

The United States government, state department officials who are represented in the embassies of foreign countries are, they are not to let the Bolivians know how the United States, how American citizens feel for them and are really anxious to see them develop their own country. They're there for the specific reason of protecting the investments of United States' economic interest. Like the Oil Corporation of California that we mentioned, Gulf had tremendous money invested in Bolivia and received some seven times more in profits than she lost in that famous $80 million loss when Gulf was nationalized.

Thank you, Mary. We've been talking today with Mary Elizabeth Harding, a former Maryknoll sister who spent 14 years working in Bolivia, was arrested last December by the Banzer government in Bolivia, and finally released in January of this year.