Bolivia: The golpistas must be punished
To oppose imperialism and defend democracy, the coup-plotters in Bolivia have to be held accountable.
The return to power of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party after the 2019 coup, has been followed by a swift effort to hold the golpistas accountable. In response, the US media has taken up the State Department’s line, shedding crocodile tears over alleged civil rights abuses. Ironically, these same voices utterly failed to condemn a right-wing coup which led to a year-long period of political violence that left at least 30 dead and thousands more injured or arrested. These disingenuous commentators are now wringing their hands over the arrest and prosecution of the guilty parties. Those of us concerned with genuine democracy in Latin America should ignore them, looking at similar machinations that previously occurred in Brazil.
First Time Tragedy
In 2014, the Brazilian judiciary and federal police launched Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash), an anti-corruption campaign targeting top government officials and captains of industry. It was hailed by the mainstream press, international anti-corruption experts, and even the United Nations, as the model for combating corruption in the Third World. This became especially the case after the investigation targeted and ultimately deposed Workers’ Party (PT) president Dilma Roussef and imprisoned her widely popular predecessor Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva.
The fact that Roussef’s impeachment and Lula’s prosecution occurred in the face of such massive popular opposition was cited as proof of the progress of Brazil’s young democracy. After all, in order to sustain the rule of law, it’s essential that the judiciary not be swayed by something as trifling as the popular will. At the time, those on the left who argued that the charges were a political hit job meant to circumvent the right wing’s inability to dislodge the PT from power democratically were dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Nevertheless, the Intercept obtained documents in July 2019 proving definitively that the judges and prosecutors leading the charge in the campaign were colluding with the United States and right-wing elements within the Brazilian state to target the leadership of the PT.
In 2018 the far right-wing Jair Bolsonaro was able to capture the presidency with Lula languishing in prison. During his three years in office, Bolsonaro has racked up more than thirty impeachment measures due to allegations of corruption and incompetence, and has allowed more than 13 million Brazilians to be infected with Covid-19 with more than 330,000 deaths—all while denying at various points the existence or the danger of the disease. In February 2021, Operation Lava Jato was unceremoniously disbanded, after having served its political purpose.
Second Time Farce
Having learned nothing – or rather, hoping that their audience would have learned nothing – the bourgeois press in the US repeated its willful ignorance in its reporting on the crisis in Bolivia. In April 2019, Human Rights Watch published the headline “Bolivia: Dozens of Judges Arbitrarily Dismissed – OAS Should Condemn Threat to Judicial Independence.” The article accuses then-president Evo Morales and his MAS party of undermining democracy by dismissing judges for political reasons. Understandably, Morales heeded the lessons of history and refused to tolerate right-wing judges poised to use the judiciary against his government, as witnessed in Brazil. These were not the only complaints against his alleged authoritarianism, of course. Military officials felt MAS was foisting its ideology onto the military with its policy of requiring officers to be trained at the government-run Anti-Imperialist Military Academy, designed as a counter to the US-based School of the Americas. They also objected to Morales’s policy of limiting the military budget as a means to prevent a coup.
Despite these accusations of overreach, subsequent events would show that Morales’s preventive measures did not go far enough. After Morales won the October 2019 presidential elections by an 11% margin with 88% voter turnout, the Organization of American States (a regional supra-governmental organization dominated by the United States and the right-wing governments associated with the Lima Group) produced a report alleging electoral fraud.
Mirroring the events in Brazil, the international press reported the Lima Group’s findings as fact, despite independent studies that refuted the claims. Anti-MAS protests led by rightwing groups erupted across the country, especially in the wealthy districts. The police and military refused to confront rioters or even protect MAS meetings. The head of the military, General Williams Kaliman, said that the military would “never confront the people among whom we live.”
By November, Kaliman had “asked” Morales to resign. After all of the leading MAS officials stepped down, Christian fundamentalist senator Jeanine Áñez was installed as interim president. The same military and police which had so nobly refused to “confront the people” as they attempted to overthrow the MAS government, then proceeded to repress anti-coup protesters with brutal force. Episodes of repression included massacres in the indigenous regions of Senkata and Sacaba. They then set out to round up key Morales supporters on charges of sedition and terrorism. Meanwhile, subsequent investigations have found no evidence of fraud. Apologies have yet to be forthcoming from those who reported it.
History Need Not Repeat Itself Again
In spite of the 2019 tragedy, Bolivia has reemerged as a beacon of hope for global resistance against imperialism and neoliberal exploitation. In the face of a brutal crackdown, the indigenous peoples’ and workers’ movements effectively brought the country’s economy to a halt through a combination of general strikes and blockades surrounding the major cities. Mass resistance to the coup regime forced the interim government to quickly agree to new elections scheduled for October 2020.
Mass resistance to the coup regime forced the interim government to quickly agree to new elections scheduled for October 2020.
With Morales no longer running, MAS candidate Luis Arce won the elections, this time with an even more commanding 55% of the vote. Interim president Áñez and her party did not even compete in the election due to the absence of support. In March of this year, Áñez and several of her top ministers were arrested for their role in the coup and for subsequent political violence and repression.
The so-called human rights experts and the liberal press are, in general, not bold enough to deny or defend the atrocities of the Áñez regime. Instead, they insist that now that MAS is back in power, they must proceed as if nothing has happened, leaving their would-be murderers and capturers untouched. Human Rights Watch has already condemned the arrests of Áñez and her accomplices, declaring on March 22 that “Bolivia Should End Revenge Justice.”
The slippery use of language in the reporting of this series of events is striking. For example, whereas Morales “took power”, Áñez merely “filled the power vacuum.” When the capitalist press bothers to make explicit arguments rather than relying on linguistic tricks, they rely on a combination of legalistic pedantry and historical ignorance. They point out that the presidency constitutionally passed to Áñez as a result of MAS’s departure from executive office, casually ignoring the guns pointed at their heads!
The people peddling such naive pacifism are at best useful idiots for violent reaction, and cynical accomplices at worst. Left to roam free, the political criminals they defend will continue to pose a threat to democracy. History has demonstrated this fact time and again, from Hitler’s short stint in prison after the Beer Hall Putsch, to unprosecuted war criminals in the United States continuing to occupy the highest political offices even after engineering the Iraq war under false and fabricated pretenses.
Already, the more openly reactionary press is already calling for US intervention. The Washington Post Editorial Board proclaimed that “The Biden administration should lead a regional effort to preserve democratic stability in this long-suffering country, lest crisis turn into catastrophe.” This is how the press manufactures consent for US intervention. The “objective” human rights organizations publish their “concerns” about this or that official enemy, and then these concerns are laundered through the mass media in such a way as to whitewash an imperialist intervention. Anyone concerned with what a real “effort to preserve democratic stability” would look like should consult with the families of thousands of victims of US sponsored death squads across Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Colombia.
To insist, in the name of human rights and democracy, that the coup-mongers be free to act as a beacon for reaction and imperialist violence across the region, is to demand that the social movements which defend those principals unilaterally disarm in the face of their mortal enemies. It is an invitation to suicide. Whatever objections that can be made against Morales or MAS’s politics, the Bolivian people and their government should be congratulated for refusing to succumb to this moral blackmail. The international Left must prepare itself to repeat Bolivia’s current endeavor towards popular justice, and be ready to take it further.
Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.
