https://socialistaction.org/2019/11/27/bolivia-anatomy-of-a-coup/
Bolivia: Anatomy of a Coup
Socialist Action / 17 hours ago
Self-declared president Jeanine Añez and fascist coup leader Luis
Fernando Camacho hold an oversized bible while announcing Añez as
interim president following the coup.
By JEFF MACKLER and LAZARO MONTEVERDE
On Sunday October 20, Evo Morales was re-elected president of Bolivia
with 46.85 percent of the vote against his nearest competitor, Carlos
Mesa, who received 36.74 percent. In anticipation of a Morales victory,
the U.S. corporate media launched a fake news disinformation barrage
nine days earlier, aimed at discrediting the result and setting the
stage for a well-orchestrated fascist-led coup. Presented to the world
as a popular democratic revolution against a dictator, the coup was led
by fascist groups in alliance with Bolivia’s defecting police and army.
The relentless media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
aptly reported: “The New York Times’ editorial (11/11/19) accused
Morales of ‘brazenly abusing the power and institutions put in his care
by the electorate.’ The Washington Post (11/11/19) alleged that ‘a
majority of Bolivians wanted [Morales] to leave office’ – a claim for
which they provided no evidence – while asserting that he had ‘grown
increasingly autocratic’ and that ‘his downfall was his insatiable
appetite for power.’ TheWall Street Journal (11/11/19) argued that
Morales ‘is a victim of his own efforts to steal another election,’
saying that Morales ‘has rigged the rules time and again to stay in
power.’” FAIR’s corporate media accounting goes on to list several major
media outlets in the country that dutifully sang the same song.
Not a single major daily challenged these baseless accusations. These
“manufacturing consent” specialists were unanimous in denouncing Morales
and his re-election long before the votes were tallied. The Bolivian
coup was conceived as a relatively quiet U.S.-supported regime change
endeavor in comparison to the overt and monstrous full court failed coup
that U.S. imperialism conducted against the Venezuelan government of
Nicolás Maduro several months earlier.
On November 10, twenty-one days after his election victory, Morales, in
the name of “peace” and to avoid “violence and bloodshed,” resigned the
presidency and fled to Mexico at the invitation of President Andrés
Manuel López Obrador. On November 22, Morales told a New York Times
reporter in Mexico that the coup leaders had placed a $50,000 “wanted
dead or alive” price tag on his capture. Mexico’s air force jet sent for
the rescue operation arrived via a circuitous route, including a stop in
Paraguay after several nations – including U.S.-allied Peru and Ecuador
– denied flyover or refueling rights. Mexico’s Foreign Secretary Marcelo
Ebrard, who greeted Morales upon his arrival, denounced the coup as well
as the concerted interference with Mexico’s effort to retrieve Morales.
No doubt the U.S.-backed coup makers had informed their allies of
Morales’s departure plans, while evaluating the merits and demerits of
arresting, if not murdering him by the still-undeclared formal coup
leaders.
While Morales’s political party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) holds a
majority in Bolivia’s congress, right wing Senator Jeanine Añez Chavez
declared herself interim president, in violation of Bolivian succession
laws and via a meeting conducted without a required quorum. Senators and
congressional representatives from MAS were physically excluded from the
meeting. With nobody from the Morales’ ruling party present to object,
Añez promoted herself to the head of the Senate, a position that she
said put her in line to be the country’s interim president, since both
Morales and his vice president had resigned. Appearing later at the
presidential residence wearing the presidential sash, Añez hoisted a
Bible as she appeared on the balcony to signify Bolivia’s return to its
white racist Christian conqueror past. “This Bible is very important to
us,” said Añez. “Our strength is God. Power is God.” The fascist coup
leader Luis Fernando Camacho (see more below) was more explicit stating,
“The Bible returns to the presidential palace. The Pachamama [“Mother
Earth” in the Quechua language] will never be back to the government.
Bolivia belongs to Jesus Christ,” not to the heathen natives, he might
have added.
Invoking a Christian god as the source of political power was aimed at
repudiating Morales and his Aymara indigenous roots, in a nation where
62 percent of the population are of indigenous origin—mostly Aymara,
Quechuan and Guarani, with indigenous peoples speaking 37 native
languages, all formally recognized by the 2009 constitution approved
during the Morales presidency. Another 20 percent of the population are
Mestizos – people with mixed ancestry (indigenous and white Europeans).
An estimated 10-15 percent are white. Bolivia’s 2009 constitution
changed the country’s name from the Republic of Bolivia to the
Plurinational State of Bolivia in recognition of the multi-ethnic nature
of the country and the enhanced position of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples.
Morales was South America’s first indigenous leader since independence
from Spanish colonial rule in 1825. The multicolored Wiphala flag that
represents the many Andean indigenous groups and the Andean cross, or
chakana, filled the halls of power in Bolivia during Morales’ three
terms. The coup leaders demonstratively tore down Wiphala flags from
state buildings while police officers did the same, ripping the Wiphala
insignias from their uniforms.
During the months preceding the election, Morales had been prohibited
from running for re-election by term limits, but those were later
declared unconstitutional by the Bolivian Supreme Court. Under Bolivian
law, the presidential winner must win a majority of votes cast or earn
40 percent of the vote and be more than 10 percent of the votes higher
than their nearest competitor. If this threshold is not met, the top two
candidates are to face off in a second round run-off election. Bolivia
also uses a quick count system (called TREP for its acronym in Spanish)
along with the official count. The quick count is to give voters and the
media a rough idea of how the election is going. When the quick count
reached almost 84 percent of the total vote, the results showed that
Morales had 45.71 percent of the vote while his opponent Carlos Mesa had
37.84 percent, a difference of 7.87 percent of the votes, which could
have triggered a second round election if these were the final figures.
They were not! The election commission, as is stipulated by Bolivian
law, then stopped the quick count because the official count had begun
and quick counts stop once 80 percent of the votes are tallied. In
addition, quick counts report results from urban and wealthier areas
sooner than working class districts and rural regions where Morales is
overwhelmingly popular. Quick counts are acknowledged as biased by all
governments that use them, and by the international NGOs that promote them.
As soon as the quick count was halted, however, the Bolivian opposition
cried “fraud” a spurious charge immediately echoed by the world’s
corporate media, which simultaneously insisted that Morales had stopped
the count in order to throw the election into his “black hole,” that is,
to his allegedly corrupt ballot counters. In Bolivia, all ballots are
counted by hand and by individuals approved by the election commission.
Election centers are overseen by all parties to the election as well as
by international observers. The final result announced by the electoral
commission indicated that Morales had indeed won the election by
exceeding his nearest opponent by a margin of 10.11 percent.
The internationally broadcast fraud accusations were accompanied by
media-manufactured reports that Morales “thugs” had been systematically
attacking innocent and unarmed election protestors. In truth, the
anti-Morales and anti-MAS mobilizations were orchestrated by the coup’s
shock troops, provided by various armed fascist groups. They met with
little or no resistance. Their central leader was Luis Fernando Camacho,
who soon emerged as a key player in the coup. Camacho grew up in the
Santa Cruz Youth Union [UJC in its Spanish abbreviation], a fascist
paramilitary group notorious for racist violence against indigenous
peoples, assaults, and assassination plots against Morales and other MAS
leaders. The group has strong ties to fascist groups in Europe and
strong links to the CIA.
Camacho’s forces began attacking the election centers while votes were
being counted and activists and elected officials from MAS were present.
Residences of MAS officials were ransacked, a woman who was a mayor from
a MAS city was publicly tortured. Family members of MAS activists were
kidnapped. Morales’s sister was captured while her house was burned to
the ground. No doubt Morales himself was similarly threatened and likely
“offered” the alternatives of resigning and issuing his well-publicized
statements calling for “an end to the violence” and “new elections” (as
if to repudiate his own election), or face his assassination by the
fascist and U.S.-backed coup plotters, along with his family and
political associates. Reports from revolutionary currents inside Bolivia
recount the round up and arrest of some thousand class struggle fighters
as the fascist forces quickly moved to minimize resistance. Upon his
arrival in Mexico on November 12, Morales thanked President López
Obrador statingthat Mexico had saved his life after he received death
threats in Bolivia (Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12).
Michael G. Kozak, acting assistant secretary for the State Department’s
Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, tweeted on the same day that U.S.
authorities “look forward to working” with Añez and other leaders in
Bolivia “as they arrange free & fair elections as soon as possible.”
President Trump chimed in with his support for Añez while other State
Department officials insisted that there was no coup on Bolivia. The New
York Times joined the chorus with a full-page article by “Interpreter”
Max Fisher entitled, “Bolivia Crisis Shows the Blurry Line.” Said
Fisher, “The Cold War binary of ‘bad’ coups and ‘good’ popular revolts
no longer applies. But the labels persist, with important consequences.”
The “consequences, no doubt,” are vital as U.S. “law” supposedly
prohibits aid to any regime that comes to power via a military coup. We
note here only in passing that the 2014 fascist-led coup in Ukraine did
not prevent the U.S. from pledging $400 million in military aid to that
regime!
Morales’s calls on the Bolivian army and the police to protect his
government fell on deaf ears. Police units almost immediately abandoned
their posts, including protecting government buildings. They joined the
fascist-led marches against the Morales government. When the head of the
army called for Morales to resign, the coup was completed. As with the
U.S. coup effort in Venezuela, reports are emerging that various
generals and police officials were secretly offered U.S. bribes to
defect. The price of a Bolivian general, according to these reports, was
said to be $1 million, while lower racking police officials were said to
be had for $100,000 – both sums a mere pittance to be paid by CIA
officials via a briefcase stuffed with bills printed by the U.S.
Treasury for such occasions! But the heads of Bolivia’s police and
military are no strangers to political intrigue. Defecting
commander-in-chief of Bolivia’s police Vladimir Yuri Calderon served as
military attaché at Bolivia’s embassy in Washington, D.C. until December
2018. Defector Williams Kaliman, who heads Bolivia’s armed forces, held
the same position between 2013 and 2016.
The myth of election fraud was generated by the rightist/fascist
political opposition in cooperation with the international media and the
Organization of American States (OAS), the latter largely funded by the
U.S. and infamous for its support to U.S.-orchestrated coups and
military aid to Latin American dictatorships. OAS Secretary General Luis
Almagro distinguished himself as a U.S. stooge earlier this year by
recognizing the unelected, self-declared, U.S.-appointed “president”
Juan Guaidó’s envoy as Venezuela’s “official OAS delegate.”
On the basis of no evidence, the OAS expressed “grave concerns” about
the halt to the quick count. The head of the OAS delegation was forced
to resign after his anti-Morales political positions were revealed, but
the damage was done.
One week after the coup, the death toll stood at 27 and climbing. When
anti-coup forces from El Alto (The Heights), a largely indigenous city
of one million, re-constituted their Popular Assemblies, elected new
leaders, damned the coup, and proceeded to march on the nearby capital
city of La Paz, they were met with the full force of the fascist thugs,
now inseparable from the defecting police and army. Unarmed, and in
numbers perhaps of a few thousand, they were turned away with little
resistance as the coup makers and their advisers had decided in advance
to pose themselves as democrats rather than fascist butchers.
Nevertheless, police massacres have been reported in two regions.
It is clear how the coup took place. It is also clear who did it and
why. The coup was organized by the white ruling class of Bolivia in
collaboration with U.S. imperialism. Carlos Mesa, the opposition
candidate and a former president who was forced to resign in June 2005
by mass protests after two years in office, has been coordinating with
the U.S. government to overthrow Morales and the MAS party for years, as
revealed in the WikiLeaks documents. Camacho has strong ties to U.S.
intelligence and European fascist groups. Both represent the white
ruling class of a settler state based on the exploitation of the
indigenous peoples and the resources of Bolivia.
The coup represents a grave defeat for the Bolivian masses and for
working people around the world. Its lessons must be learned by
revolutionaries everywhere. Morales and MAS are neither anti-capitalist
nor socialist. Both Morales and his political party remain firmly
committed to the capitalist framework of economic development. They
emerged during the Latin American “pink tide” or “pink revolution”
period some twenty years ago that saw reform-minded and “progressive”
governments come to political power in Venezuela, Ecuador, Uruguay, and
Argentina.
While adhering to the capitalist framework, Morales did register some
impressive gains for the workers and indigenous people of Bolivia. He
created a multinational and multicultural political system; he created a
social safety net and social programs that cut extreme poverty by over
half, although Bolivia’s poverty rate remains among the highest on the
continent. He also massively increased foreign investment and profits in
the country, re-negotiating, not nationalizing, gas and oil contracts
and carrying out a small land reform – 5.4 million acres of state-owned
land.
He did little to challenge the power and curb the profits of the
capitalist class. What little he did, however, was too much for a
Bolivian ruling class and its imperialist allies, wedded to the death to
the super-profits of a neoliberal model of capitalism. Perhaps the final
straw that doomed his government was his anticipated $2.5 billion trade
deal with China for the development of lithium mining. In addition to
its major oil and natural gas reserves, the latter among the highest in
Latin America, and its vast tin resources, Bolivia holds 70% of the
worlds known lithium reserves. Lithium is a crucial component in cell
phones, computer batteries and electric cars. While Morales required
some transnational company to partner equally with the COMIBOL, the
Bolivian National Mining Company, and Bolivia´s national lithium
company, the YLB, the terms of these ever negotiated and re-negotiated
agreements always contained an assortment of loopholes that allowed for
the reduction of Bolivia’s share of the profits. Experts in these
matters have repeatedly demonstrated that the claimed Bolivian
“nationalizations” of gas and oil facilities were little more than
re-negotiations of the pre-Morales era, where the lion’s share of
profits remained in foreign hands, albeit with some terms that allowed
for the Morales government to implement significant social reforms,
especially at a time when world oil and gas prices had peaked. The
lithium deal with China is now up for grabs, with the Bolivian ruling
class and its associated transnational mining behemoths expected to be
the biggest winners.
Morales came to power in 2006 in the midst of a series of massive
working class mobilizations organized through powerful and democratic
Popular Assemblies across the country and accompanied by general strikes
led by the Bolivian Workers Center (COB), the chief trade union
federation in the nation. The COB’s most powerful component was the
Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB), a mass force that had
been led by revolutionary socialists in the early 1950s. In the face of
mass working class mobilization that threatened capitalist power and
prerogatives in 2004-5—and at a time when the overt corruption of the
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and Carlos Mesa government had reduced their
credibility to near zero—Morales and his parliamentary-oriented MAS
entered the political scene as a relatively safe alternative to the
organized power in the streets. The ruling rich preferred a Morales
presidency coupled with some gas and oil concessions to the new
government, rather than risk a direct confrontation with mass forces
intent on their physical removal. Morales received ninety percent of the
vote in 2006. But his Movement Toward Socialism was nothing of the kind.
Bolivia’s vast land and natural resources, its banks and financial
institutions remained in the hands of the ruling rich, as did the
state’s repressive apparatus – the army and police.
Morales arrived in “power” as the guarantor of capitalist stability. As
with all the “pink tide” governments at that time—that is, neither
communist red nor neoliberal capitalist white—all pledged fealty to
socialism in the abstract but ensured that capitalist power would not be
challenged in the concrete. Morales promoted illusions in the loyalty of
the state’s army and the police that for decades, if not centuries, have
been capitalism’s final guarantor of its privileges and profits.
In Bolivia until the coup, as with all the pink tide “revolutions,” the
name of the game was and remains maneuver – the implementation or lack
of measures to simultaneously satisfy the needs of the vast masses of
workers and peasants on the one hand and their capitalist bosses on the
other – an impossible task that history has repeatedly doomed to failure.
The Bolivian coup undoubtedly represents a tragic setback in every
respect. The once nationally organized assemblies of people’s power of
2003-05 have been largely reduced to a near underground existence. The
once-militant leadership of the COB at the height of the coup turned
right and formally joined the reactionary chorus demanding Morales’s
resignation! However, angered and disgusted at Morales’s endless
concessions to capital, including banning unionization of so-called
cooperative mining endeavors, the COB found itself on the wrong side of
the barricades when unity against the coup makers was the decisive issue
of the day!
Thus, the prerequisite for an effective fightback against Bolivian
capital and its imperialist backers was entirely absent, that is, a mass
revolutionary socialist party deeply embedded in all the struggles of
the masses for justice, equality and freedom and dedicated to the
abolition of capitalism itself. Bolivia’s proud history in challenging
and defeating imperialist-backed coups and their associated imposed
dictators repeatedly informs us that it has never been the unwillingness
of the masses to fight and bring into being the socialist future, but
rather the absence of a mass revolutionary socialist party steeled in
struggle and aimed at decisive action at the critical moments in history
when socialist revolution is on the immediate agenda.
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November 27, 2019 in Uncategorized.
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David Hume
“ In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees
of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral
evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. ”
― David Hume,
