Resolution
After a televised recording of a Bolivian Army captain, Robinson Iriarte de la Fuente, firing a rifle into a crowd of demonstrators wounding many and hitting high school student Víctor Hugo Daza in the face, killing him, intense anger erupted. The police told the executives of the consortium that their safety could no longer be guaranteed. The executives then fled from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz. After coming out of four days of hiding, Oscar Olivera signed a concord with the government guaranteeing the removal of Aguas del Tunari and turning Cochabamba's water works over to La Coordinadora. Detained demonstrators were to be released and Law 2029 repealed. The Banzer government then told Aguas del Tunari that by leaving Cochabamba they had "abandoned" the concession and declared the $200 million contract revoked. The company, insisting that it had not left voluntarily but been forced out, filed a $40 million lawsuit in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, an appellate body of the World Bank, against the Bolivian government, "claiming compensation for lost profits under a bilateral investment treaty." On the day following Víctor Hugo Daza's funeral, Óscar Olivera climbed to his union office's balcony and proclaimed victory to the exhausted crowd. The demonstrators declared that they would not relent until Law 2029 was changed. To get a quorum to amend the law the government even rented planes to fly legislators back to the capital. In a special session on 11 April 2000 the law was changed.
Read more about this topic: 2000 Cochabamba Protests
Famous quotes containing the word resolution:
“Unfortunately, many things have been omitted which should have been recorded in our journal; for though we made it a rule to set down all our experiences therein, yet such a resolution is very hard to keep, for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such obligations, and so indifferent things get recorded, while that is frequently neglected. It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Had I been less resolved to work, I would perhaps had made an effort to begin immediately. But since my resolution was formal and before twenty four hours, in the empty slots of the next day where everything fit so nicely because I was not yet there, it was better not to choose a night at which I was not well-disposed for a debut to which the following days proved, alas, no more propitious.... Unfortunately, the following day was not the exterior and vast day which I had feverishly awaited.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)