What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby Harvey » Wed Nov 13, 2019 8:26 pm

Interesting twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/juwugoslavija/status/1194138885749534720

The Anti-Evo/CIA connection:

This is Jhanisse Vaca Daza with Srdja Popović. Popović is most famous for being one of the student leaders of the 2000 anti-Milošević group Otpor! as well as CANVAS (the center for applied nonviolent action and strategies) seems innocuous right?

Jhanisse Vaca Daza.jpg
^ Bio at picture link.

while organizing Otpor!, Popović was trained by US soft coup specialists like Richard Miles as well as CIA ops. Richard Miles orchestrated both the 1993 coup in Azerbaijan, and went on to orchestrate a coup in Georgia. USAID sent $41m to Otpor! through NED. What happened next?

after Milošević was gone, Popovicć founded CANVAS. CANVAS is co-chaired by Slobodan Djinović, who is the CEO of Orion Telecom in Belgrade -- Orion Telecom is owned by an Amsterdam holding, of which Djinović is the only listed member. 50% of CANVAS funding comes from this shell

The 50% comes from... ? somewhere?? Washington Freedom House has provided some funding. CANVAS has "trained" "activists" in Ukraine, Georgia, Zimbabwe, Burma, Eritrea, Belarus, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Venezuela and Iran. Interesting list isn't it. Popović gets more interesting...

Stratfor, currently headed by former DSS agent Fred Burton, has collected information on activists in the Philippines, Libya, Tunisia, Vietnam, Iran, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Tibet, Zimbabwe, Poland, Belarus, Georgia, Bahrain, Venezuela, and Malaysia - information they got from Popović

Popović's wife then worked at Stratfor for a year, and Stratfor employees went to Popović's wedding. Popović has given seminars at Stratfor about organization and CANVAS, and in 2007, CANVAS trained activists against Hugo Chavez. Everywhere that Popović goes, US interests follow

He has been crucial in organizing "activist movements" with millions in US money to undermine anyone that is an enemy of the US. CANVAS is nothing more than an extension of the CIA and US neoliberal policy. This all but confirms that the anti-Evo movement is receiving US funding


It says here that Otpor founder member Srđa Popović "features prominently in Western television news items and documentaries...such as the BAFTA-winning feature documentary" How To Start a Revolution, based on the work of Gene Sharp. All very cosy.
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby Elvis » Wed Nov 13, 2019 11:18 pm

Well well well...

Neat divisions among the various regime change efforts no longer apply—it's all one operation. Who knew?

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/29/west ... zon-fires/
Bolivia, Human Rights Industry August 29, 2019
Western regime-change operatives launch campaign to blame Bolivia’s Evo Morales for Amazon fires

As Brazil’s Bolsonaro allows elite landowners to incinerate the Amazon, professional regime-change operatives like Jhanisse V. Daza seek to redirect blame for the fires onto the leftist government of Bolivia, whose President Evo Morales faces elections in October.

By Wyatt Reed

With fires set by landowners raging throughout the Amazon for nearly a month, a group of Western-backed information warriors has begun working to redirect outrage from the far-right Brazilian government toward a more convenient target.

After a flurry of media pinned the blame on everyone from poor people eating meat to China, a new target has come into focus: the leftist Bolivian government of President Evo Morales.

Originally content to merely accuse Bolivians of not responding fast enough, the regime-change machine is switching gears and making the absurd claim that Bolivia bears the majority of responsibility for the Amazon fires.

The campaign has been orchestrated by Jhanisse Vaca Daza, an anti-Morales operative identified merely as an “environmental activist” in a recent BBC report pointing the finger at the Bolivian president for the fires.

A closer look at Daza’s work, however, reveals that she is the spearhead of a network of Western organizations that trained and advised the leaders of regime-change operations from Venezuela to Eastern Europe to the ongoing anti-China protests in Hong Kong.
#SOSBolivia


Jhanisse V. Daza’s invective against Bolivia’s Evo Morales social-democratic government, which she regularly caricatures as an “authoritarian regime,” could hardly be cruder.

On her social media accounts, she has shared memes portraying the democratically elected president as a “dictator” clad in a sailor cap, and with a Hitler-style mustache that reads “no.”

Image

When the Amazon fires broke out, however, her strategy changed.

Employing the hashtag #SOSBolivia, Daza and her allies have mobilized to ensure that the environmental crisis is exploited to its maximum propaganda potential – despite reports from Bolivia’s government that more than 85 percent of the fires had been extinguished in around eight days of its operations.

A report from NASA pointing out that the fires were concentrated in Brazil, and another report explaining that Bolivia’s most-affected area, Chiquitanía, is not even in the Amazon, was also of little apparent interest to those behind the hashtag campaign.

Proponents of regime change in Bolivia, ranging from outspoken libertarians to self-proclaimed leftists, have drawn from the same playbook they’ve deployed against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba for decades. They are recycling techniques that employ economic, physical, and media-based warfare designed to undermine and delegitimize anti-imperialist governments at every turn.

The SOS hashtag was popularized in recent years among Latin America’s elite as a way of drawing attention to the supposed “dictatorships” they endure under democratically elected socialist governance. They have employed the slogan in various violent revolts of the upper classes – most notably throughout the Venezuelan guarimbas of 2014 and 2017 and the Nicaraguan tranques of 2018.

Tellingly, the most frequent users of the SOS hashtag rarely, if ever, extend their plea for international assistance to the many victims of the right-wing, US-supported governments of Honduras or Brazil.

At the core of the #SOSBolivia social media campaign is a little-known NGO named Ríos de Pie, or Standing Rivers. The group was founded just over a year ago by Jhanisse V. Daza, a self-described “human rights activist.”

Image

Though the hashtag was kicking around online for a week or so, it took off after Daza’s organization began publishing glossy infographics accusing the Bolivian government for the spread of the fires.

Twitter
Rios de Pie @RiosDePie

LO LOGRAMOS! #SOSBolivia fue tendencia en Twitter! Sigamos con la misma fuerza, no dejemos de compartir, hagamos que nuestra voz sea escuchada!

WE MADE IT! #SOSBOLIVIA was trendy on Twitter! Let's keep sharing, let's keep on making our voices heard!https://www.instagram.com/p/B1pq561HhLv/?igshid=1s5vn9mrpprtl …
47
6:47 PM - Aug 26, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy

24 people are talking about this


Their advertising materials, tweets, and publicity stunts aimed to force the Bolivian government to agree to “international aid.” And when the Morales administration accepted the token aid offered by Western states, there was scant evidence it did so because of an online public pressure campaign. That didn’t stop Daza from taking credit at a rally.

“Do you know why [the aid] arrived? Because citizens who aren’t authorities, citizens who – some of us are influencers… we organized, and pressured, and the aid arrived,” she proclaimed.

The other major goal of Daza and her allies is to gin up outrage abroad, especially among leftists in the Global North, and mobilize climate activists against Bolivia. Corporate greenwashing groups like Extinction Rebellion [tsk]— aimed less at radically challenging capitalism and more at keeping it from eating itself alive — have called for rallies outside Bolivia’s embassies this weekend throughout Europe.

And some former colonial European powers like what they are hearing. When Jhanisse Vaca Daza gave a speech for TEDx in February, outlining a “strategic nonviolent struggle” approach to overthrowing Morales, her event was sponsored by Spain’s embassy in Bolivia.

Image

Spain colonized the land of modern-day Bolivia for hundreds of years, and continues to undermine the country’s socialist government today. President Morales has lashed out at foreign powers like Spain seeking to retrench its control over his country’s political system and natural resources: “We will always fight against colonialism and imperialism.”

The coup kids go to Harvard

The push to get progressives in the imperial core to equivocate between the far-right Bolsonaro and the Pink Tide progressives is part of a larger strategy aimed at isolating Bolivia internationally by convincing its only potential allies that it is not actually socialist.

But Jhanisse Daza is hardly a socialist herself, and far from an impartial observer. Her LinkedIn hypes up her anti-government credentials, claiming that Ríos de Pie “is currently fighting the Morales regime and organizing ordinary citizens to defend their rights through nonviolent protests.”

According to her publicly available Facebook profile, Daza has a Bolivian passport and lists her hometown as the country’s capital Sucre. She has spent a significant portion of her educational and professional career in the United States, however.

She attended Ohio’s Kent State University, where her thesis focused on “Authoritarian Regimes in South America,” and subsequently completed academic programs in Britain and Chile.

Daza then studied at the elite Harvard Kennedy School, participating in its “Leading Non-Violent Movements for Social Progress” program.

Image

The Kennedy School has become a haven for expat regime-change cadres since the progressive wave swept over Latin America. Among the school’s alumni and faculty is a who’s who of the coup administration the US has recently sought to install in place of Venezuela’s elected government: Ricardo Hausmann, Leopoldo Lopez, Juan Ignacio Hernandez, and Carlos Vecchio.

These figures have since spearheaded the bid to re-privatize Venezuela’s oilfields, hoping to secure their own personal financial interests by helping to hand over Venezuela’s oil wealth to the US energy sector. They maintain plausible deniability by insisting they are mere functionaries of a would-be Venezuelan government rather than emissaries of the oil companies on whose behalf they’ve represented. (As The Grayzone reported, Vecchio is the former lawyer for ExxonMobil.)

Incidentally, Daza is indirectly linked to the longtime hard-right leader of Venezuela’s regime-change push, Leopoldo Lopez, through his first cousin, Thor Halvorssen, who supports her work through his Human Rights Foundation. (Daza also praised Lopez on her publicly available Instagram account.)

The son of a Venezuelan oligarch, Halvorssen is a former campus libertarian activist who entered the human rights industry with help from right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel, conservative foundations, and international NGOs like Amnesty International.

His Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has been referred to in media puff pieces as the “Davos for dissidents,” and indeed, it functions as a training network for exiled activists seeking to topple the governments of states targeted by Washington.

Jhanisse V. Daza @JhanisseVDaza

Happy Holidays to people I admire beyond words, thank you for setting such a great example for my generation @Billbrowder @ThorHalvorssen
10
6:54 PM - Dec 24, 2016
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See Jhanisse V. Daza's other Tweets


“Non-violent action… as a weapon of mass destruction”

This May, the HRF began issuing Freedom Fellowships to ten “anti-authoritarian” activists in places which NATO governments seek to destabilize, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Russia, and Hong Kong.

Jhanisse V. Daza was appointed by HRF as the manager of the Freedom Fellowships. On the foundation’s page, she declares that, “Thanks to the Freedom Fellowship, [she] co-founded a movement in Bolivia named Ríos de Pie. It already is becoming one of the leading non-violent resistance movements to Evo Morales’ authoritarian regime.”

Back in 2014, the BBC attended training sessions overseen by Halvorssen’s HRF at the Oslo Freedom Forum. In the basement of an Oslo luxury hotel, correspondent Laura Kuenssberg described witnessing “a school for revolution” where activists including US-funded leaders of the Uyghur World Congress and front-line activists in Hong Kong’s Occupy Central protests learned “how to be successful and topple a government for good.”


https://youtu.be/JIjVBUwpri8

The BBC’s Kuenssberg reported, “We’ve been told many of Hong Kong’s demonstrators were trained long before they took the streets to use non-violent action, as they describe it, as a weapon of mass destruction.”

Daza has been consistently involved with the Oslo Freedom Forum since 2015.

At its event in New York in 2018, she linked up with leading Venezuelan regime-change activists, including Joanna Hausmann, the daughter of US-appointed coup leader Juan Guaidó’s top economic adviser and a YouTube personality who collaborated with the New York Times for an anti-Chavista propaganda video that violated the newspaper of record’s own ethics code.

Image

Links to US government-funded regime-change groups

HRF is not the only Western government-backed regime-change group to have propelled the career of Jhanisse V. Daza.

When the Human Rights Foundation announced Daza was one of its “freedom fellows” in 2019, the organization noted that this “pilot opportunity” was sponsored “in partnership with CANVAS,” or the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies.

CANVAS also co-sponsored the online program Daza graduated from at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Students like her gained a “systematic opportunity for nonviolent social movement mid-level leaders to learn from the experiences of peers and through the coaching of Harvard/CANVAS faculty,” according to Kennedy School literature.

As The Grayzone has reported, CANVAS had been funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change.

According to internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”

CANVAS grew out of the Otpor! movement, a US-backed cadre of youth activists that brought down Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who was targeted for overthrow by NATO for being insufficiently compliant.

An email by a Stratfor staffer boasts: “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

Stratfor revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005, after cultivating opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime-change operations across Eastern Europe. Among those trained by CANVAS were the leaders of Venezuela’s coup attempt this year, including Juan Guaido, Leopoldo Lopez, and scores of figures associated with the US-supported Popular Will party.

“They’ve got mad skills,” Stratfor said of CANVAS trainers. “When you see students at five Venezuelan universities hold simultaneous demonstrations, you will know that the training is over and the real work has begun.”


Suddenly, the “real work” of professional regime change-makers like HRF and CANVAS has been concentrated on Bolivia, a progressive Latin American government that has yet to face full wrath of Washington in the way Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Cuba have.

And Daza is a direct ally of CANVAS founder Srdja Popovic, the former leader of the Western-backed Serbian regime-change group Otpor!. He has been promoting her on his Twitter account, accusing Bolivia of “bad governance” and “environmental disaster.”

Srdja Popovic @SrdjaPopovic

Bad governance leads to environmental disaster. #BoliviaFires join Brasil in #AmazonFires drama https://twitter.com/JhanisseVDaza/statu ... 1205278723
Jhanisse V. Daza @JhanisseVDaza

Thread on the current fires in #Bolivia:

Fires have been used to expand agro-cattle area before, but our current catastrophe stems from the government authorizing further fires on FOREST lands in a new alliance with private sectors who wanted these lands.https://bit.ly/2NdW9zH
View image on Twitter
17
Image
10:05 AM - Aug 25, 2019


The relationship goes back further. In May 2018, the Bolivian anti-Morales activist posted a photo with Popovic on her public Facebook page, remarking, “I’m in heaven right now.”

Image

Silence on Bolsonaro, warnings of violence against Evo

Just like her counterparts in other countries targeted by the US, Jhanisse V. Daza cloaks cynical regime-change ambitions with a veneer of humanitarian goodwill, broadcasting ostensible concern for indigenous people and other marginalized groups.

But her dubious implication that the world’s first indigenous president secretly harbors anti-indigenous sentiment has not resonated with the actual people in question. Indigenous groups in Bolivia have backed Morales’ candidacy by wide margins throughout the past three elections, and this support is largely projected to continue into the next.

Image

This is why Daza’s efforts are so crucial to ongoing Western efforts to overthrow progressive governments in Latin America. By perpetuating a narrative in which the devastating fires throughout the Amazonian basin are actually a byproduct of socialism, and not the capitalist expansionism widely acknowledged, even by mainstream media, as the source of the crisis, Daza is able to simultaneously demonize progressive governments and indemnify the far-right government of Brazil.

Her bosses at the Human Rights Foundation have not mentioned Bolsonaro once on Twitter since the far-right demagogue took power. Despite near universal condemnation from across the globe for his many racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-indigenous, and homophobic remarks and policies, the organization has kept silent.

It is clear that for the foundation and their Freedom Fellowship recipients, the externally imposed right-wing governments currently privatizing Latin America’s riches are not human rights violators worth discussing.

While she touts her Rios de Pie NGO for “spreading the use of non-violence as the main form of protest,” Daza warned on the blog of Iyad al-Baghdadi – another regime change activist promoted by HRF – that “one citizens movement alone cannot guarantee Bolivians will not take to more radical measures. Violence is a real risk when people find their will overturned by authoritarian structures.”


Wyatt Reed
Wyatt Reed is a Virginia-based activist and journalist who covers climate and racial justice movements and foreign policy issues. Follow him on Twitter at @wyattreed13.
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby Elvis » Wed Nov 13, 2019 11:29 pm

More

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/13/boli ... -programs/

November 13, 2019
Top Bolivian coup plotters were School of the Americas grads, served as attachés in FBI police programs

Commanders of Bolivia’s military and police helped plot the coup and guaranteed its success. This investigation reveals that they were educated for insurrection through notorious US military and FBI training programs.

By Jeb Sprague
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby Elvis » Wed Nov 13, 2019 11:33 pm

"they were educated for insurrection"

So then is there a class I can take?
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Nov 14, 2019 4:23 am

Elvis » Wed Nov 13, 2019 8:33 pm wrote:"they were educated for insurrection"

So then is there a class I can take?


School of the Americas was the "old school" method.
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby Harvey » Sun Nov 17, 2019 9:07 pm

Awful stories coming out of Bolivia, enabled and sanctified by NGO's like Human Rights Watch, blessed by Western governments who just got finished lecturing us about human rites in Venezuela. And that was after unleashing eight or nine years of hell upon civilian populations across the middle east. It's truly sickening.
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Nov 21, 2019 1:25 am

The media message from the Bolivia case is clear: A coup is not a coup if we like the outcome.

https://fair.org/home/the-bolivian-coup ... to-happen/

November 11, 2019
The Bolivian Coup Is Not a Coup—Because US Wanted It to Happen
Alan MacLeod


Army generals appearing on television to demand the resignation and arrest of an elected civilian head of state seems like a textbook example of a coup. And yet that is certainly not how corporate media are presenting the weekend’s events in Bolivia.

No establishment outlet framed the action as a coup; instead, President Evo Morales “resigned” (ABC News, 11/10/19), amid widespread “protests” (CBS News, 11/10/19) from an “infuriated population” (New York Times, 11/10/19) angry at the “election fraud” (Fox News, 11/10/19) of the “full-blown dictatorship” (Miami Herald, 11/9/19). When the word “coup” is used at all, it comes only as an accusation from Morales or another official from his government, which corporate media have been demonizing since his election in 2006 (FAIR.org, 5/6/09, 8/1/12, 4/11/19).

The New York Times (11/10/19) did not hide its approval at events, presenting Morales as a power-hungry despot who had finally “lost his grip on power,” claiming he was “besieged by protests” and “abandoned by allies” like the security services. His authoritarian tendencies, the news article claimed, “worried critics and many supporters for years,” and allowed one source to claim that his overthrow marked “the end of tyranny” for Bolivia. With an apparent nod to balance, it did note that Morales “admitted no wrongdoing” and claimed he was a “victim of a coup.” By that point, however, the well had been thoroughly poisoned.

CNN (11/10/19) dismissed the results of the recent election, where Bolivia gave Morales another term in office, as beset with “accusations of election fraud,” presenting them as a farce where “Morales declared himself the winner.” Time’s report (11/10/19) presented the catalyst for his “resignation” as “protests” and “fraud allegations,” rather than being forced at gunpoint by the military. Meanwhile, CBS News (11/10/19) did not even include the word “allegations,” its headline reading, “Bolivian President Evo Morales Resigns After Election Fraud and Protests.”

Delegitimizing foreign elections where the “wrong” person wins, of course, is a favorite pastime of corporate media (FAIR.org, 5/23/18). There is a great deal of uncritical acceptance of the Organization of American States’ (OAS) opinions on elections, including in coverage of Bolivia’s October vote (e.g., BBC, 11/10/19; Vox, 11/10/19; Voice of America, 11/10/19), despite the lack of evidence to back up its assertions. No mainstream outlet warned its readers that the OAS is a Cold War organization, explicitly set up to halt the spread of leftist governments. In 1962, for example, it passed an official resolution claiming that the Cuban government was “incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system.” Furthermore, the organization is bankrolled by the US government; indeed, in justifying its continued funding, US AID argued that the OAS is a crucial tool in “promot[ing] US interests in the Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-US countries” like Bolivia.

Corporate media ignored CEPR’s finding (11/19) that “neither the OAS mission nor any other party has demonstrated that there were widespread or systematic irregularities in the elections.”
In contrast, there was no coverage at all in US corporate media of the detailed new report from the independent Washington-based think tank CEPR, which claimed that the election results were “consistent” with the win totals announced. There was also scant mention of the kidnapping and torture of elected officials, the ransacking of Morales’ house, the burning of public buildings and of the indigenous Wiphala flag, all of which were widely shared on social media and would have suggested a very different interpretation of events.

Words have power. And framing an event is a powerful method of conveying legitimacy and suggesting action. “Coups,” almost by definition, cannot be supported, while “protests” generally should be. Chilean President Sebastian Piñera, a conservative US-backed billionaire, has literally declared war on over a million people demonstrating against his rule. Corporate media, however, have framed that uprising not as a protest, but rather a “riot” (e.g., NBC News, 10/20/19; Reuters, 11/9/19; Toronto Sun, 11/9/19). In fact, Reuters (11/8/19) described the events as Piñera responding to “vandals” and “looters.” Who would possibly oppose that?

Morales was the first indigenous president in his majority indigenous nation—one that has been ruled by a white European elite since the days of the conquistadors. While in office, his Movement Towards Socialism party has managed to reduce poverty by 42% and extreme poverty by 60%, cut unemployment in half and conduct a number of impressive public works programs. Morales saw himself as part of a decolonizing wave across Latin America, rejecting neoliberalism and nationalizing the country’s key resources, spending the proceeds on health, education and affordable food for the population.

His policies drew the great ire of the US government, Western corporations and the corporate press, who function as the ideological shock troops against leftist governments in Latin America. In the case of Venezuela, Western journalists unironically call themselves “the resistance” to the government, and describe it as their No. 1 goal to “get rid of Maduro,” all the while presenting themselves as neutral and unbiased actors.

The media message from the Bolivia case is clear: A coup is not a coup if we like the outcome.
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby conniption » Thu Nov 21, 2019 3:11 am

off-guardian


Nov 19, 2019

Evo overthrown, but Bolivian Socialism will be victorious!

Andre Vltchek

Image

They pledged to do it, and they did – Bolivian feudal lords, mass media magnates and other treasonous “elites” – they overthrew the government, broke hope and interrupted an extremely successful socialist process in what was once one of the poorest countries in South America.

One day, they will be cursed by their own nation. One day they will stand trial for sedition. One day, they will have to reveal who trained them, who employed them, who turned them into spineless beasts. One day! Hopefully soon.

But now, Evo Morales, legitimate President of Bolivia, elected again and again by his people, is leaving his beloved country. He is crossing the Andes, flying far, to fraternal Mexico, which extended her beautiful hand, and offered him political asylum.

This is now. The striking streets of La Paz are covered by smoke, full of soldiers, stained with blood. People are disappearing. They are being detained, beaten, and tortured. Photos of indigenous men and women, kneeling, facing walls, hands tied behind their backs, are beginning to circulate on social media.

Image

El Alto, until recently a place of hope, with its playgrounds for children and elegant cable cars connecting the once dirt-poor communities, is now beginning to lose its native sons and daughters. Battles are raging. People are charging against the oppressors, carrying flags, dying.

A civil war, or more precisely, a war for the survival of socialism, a war against imperialism, for social justice, for indigenous people. A war against racism. A war for Bolivia, for its tremendous pre-colonial culture, for life; life as it is being perceived in the Andes, or deep in the South American rainforest, not as it is seen in Paris, Washington or Madrid.

*


The legacy of Evo Morales is tangible, and simple to understand.

During almost 14 years in power, all the social indicators of Bolivia went sky-high. Millions were pulled out of poverty. Millions have been benefiting from free medical care, free education, subsidized housing, improved infrastructure, a relatively high minimum wage, but also, from pride that was given back to the indigenous population, which forms the majority in this historically feudal country governed by corrupt, ruthless ‘elites’ – descendants of Spanish conquistadors and European ‘gold-diggers’.

Evo Morales made the Aymara and Quechua languages official, on par with Spanish. He made people who communicate in these languages, equal to those who use the tongue of the conquerors. He elevated the great indigenous culture high, to where it belongs – making it the symbol of Bolivia, and of the entire region.

Gone was the Christian cross-kissing (look at the crosses reappearing again, all around the oh so European-looking Jeanine Añez who has grabbed power, ‘temporarily’ but still thoroughly illegally). Instead, Evo used to travel, at least once a year, to Tiwanaku, “the capital of the powerful pre-Hispanic empire that dominated a large area of the southern Andes and beyond, reached its apogee between 500 and 900 AD”, according to UNESCO. That is where he used to search for spiritual peace. That is where his identity came from.

Gone was the veneration of the Western colonialist and imperialist culture, of savage capitalism.

This was a new world, with ancient, deep roots. This is where South America has been regrouping. Here, and in Correa’s Ecuador, before Correa and his beliefs were purged and ousted by the treacherous Moreno.

And what is more: before the coup, Bolivia was not suffering from economic downfall; it was doing well, extremely well. It was growing, stable, reliable, confident.

Even the owners of big Bolivian companies, if they were to care one bit for Bolivia and its people, had countless reasons to rejoice.

*


But the Bolivian business community, as in so many other Latin American countries, is obsessed with the one and only ‘indicator’: “how much higher, how much above the average citizens it can get”. This is the old mentality of the colonialists; a feudal, fascist mentality.

Years ago, I was invited, in La Paz, for dinner by an old family of senators and mass media owners. With no shame, no fear, openly, they spoke, despite knowing who I was:

“We will get rid of this Indigenous bastard. Who does he think he is? If we lose millions of dollars in the process, as we did in 1973 Chile and now in Venezuela, we will still do it. Restoring our order is the priority.”

There is absolutely no way to reason with these people. They cannot be appeased, only crushed; defeated. In Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador or in Bolivia. They are like rats, like disease, proverbial symbols of fascism as in the novel The Plague, written by Albert Camus. They can hide, but they never fully disappear. They are always ready to invade, with zero notice, some happy city.

They are always ready to join forces with the West, because their roots are in the West. They think precisely like the European conquerors, like North American imperialists. They have double nationalities and homes scattered all over the world. Latin America for them is just a place to live, and to plunder natural resources, exploit labor.

They rob here, and spend money elsewhere; educate their children elsewhere, get their surgeries done (plastic and real) elsewhere.

They go to opera houses in Paris but never mingle with indigenous people at home. Even if, by some miracle, they join the Left, it is the Western, anarcho-syndicalist Left of North America and Europe, never the real, anti-imperialist, revolutionary Left of non-European countries.

They don’t need the success of the nation. They don’t want a great, prosperous Bolivia; Bolivia for all of its citizens.

They only want prosperous corporations. They want money, profit; for themselves, for their families and clans, for their bandit group of people. They want to be revered, considered ‘exceptional’, superior. They cannot live without that gap – the great gap between them and those ‘dirty Indians’, as they call the indigenous people, when no one hears them!

*


And that is why, Bolivia should fight, defend itself, as it is beginning to do so right now.

If this, what is happening to Evo and his government, is “the end”, then Bolivia will be set back by decades. Entire generations will again rot alive, in desperation, in rural shacks made of clay, without water and electricity, and without hope.

The ‘elites’ are now talking about ‘peace’, peace for whom? For them!

Peace, as it was before Evo; ‘peace’ so the rich can play golf and fly for shopping to their beloved Miami and Madrid, while 90% of the population was getting kicked, humiliated, insulted. I remember that ‘peace’. The Bolivian people remember it even better.

I covered the civil war in neighboring Peru, for several years, in the 90’s, and I often crossed over into Bolivia. I wrote an entire novel about it – “Point of No Return”.

It was an absolute horror. I could not even take my local photographers to a concert or for a cup of coffee in a decent place, because they were cholos, indigenous. Nobodies in their own countries. It was apartheid. And if socialism does not return, it will be apartheid once again.

Last time I went to Bolivia, few months ago, it was totally different country. Free, confident. Stunning.

Remembering what I saw in Bolivia and Peru, quarter of a century ago, I declare, clearly and decisively: “To hell with such ‘peace’, proposed by elites’”!

*


None of this is, of course, mentioned in Western mass media outlets. I am monitoring them, from the New York Times to Reuters. In the US, UK, even France. Their eyes are shining. They cannot hide their excitement; euphoria.

The same NYT celebrated the massacres during the 1965-66 US-orchestrated military coup in Indonesia, or on 9-11-1973 in Chile.

Now Bolivia, predictably.

Big smiles all over the West. Again, and again, ‘the findings’ of the OAS (Organization of American States) are being quoted as if they were facts; ‘the findings’ of an organization which is fully subservient to Western interests, particularly those of Washington.

It is as if by saying: “We have proof that a coup did not take place, because those who had organized the coup say that it actually did not happen.”

*


In Paris, on the 10th November, in the middle of the Place de la Republique, a huge crowd of treasonous Bolivians gathered, demanding the resignation of Evo. I filmed and photographed these people. I wanted to have this footage in my possession, for posterity.

They live in France, and their allegiances are towards the West. Some are even of European stock, although others are indigenous.

There are millions of Cubans, Venezuelans, Brazilians, living in the US and Europe, working tirelessly for the destruction of their former motherlands. They do it in order to please their new masters, to make profit, as well as various other reasons.

It is not peace. This is terrible, brutal war, which has already taken millions of lives, in Latin America alone.

This continent has the most unequally distributed wealth on earth. Hundreds of millions are living in misery. While others, sons and daughters or Bolivian feudal scum, are attending Sorbonne and Cambridge, to get intellectually conditioned, in order to serve the West.

Each time, and I repeat each time, a decent, honest government is voted in, democratically, by the people, each time there is someone who has invented a brilliant solution and solid plan to improve this dire situation, the clock begins ticking. The years, (sometimes even months) of the leader are numbered. He or she will either be killed, or ousted, or humiliated and forced out of power.

The country then goes back to, literally, shit, as has happened just recently to Ecuador (under Moreno), Argentina (under Macri) and Brazil (under Bolsonaro). The brutal status quo is preserved. The lives of tens of millions are ruined. “Peace” returns. For the Western regime and its lackeys.

Then, as a raped country screams in pain, countless international NGO’s, UN agencies and funding organizations, descend upon it, suddenly determined to ‘help refugees’, to keep children in classrooms, to ‘empower women’, or to fight malnutrition and hunger.

None of this would be needed, if the elected governments which are serving their people were to be left alone; left in real peace!

All this sick, pathetic hypocrisy is never discussed, publicly, by the mass media. All this Western terrorism unleashed against progressive Latin American countries (and dozens of other countries, all over the world), is hushed up.

Enough is enough!

Latin America is, once again, waking up. The people are outraged. The coup in Bolivia will be resisted. Macri’s regime has fallen. Mexico is marching in a cautiously socialist direction. Chile wants its socialist country back; a country which was crushed by military boots in 1973.

In the name of the people, in the name of the great indigenous culture, and in the name of the entire continent, Bolivian citizens are now resisting, struggling, confronting the fascist, pro-Western forces.

Revolutionary language is once again being used. It may be out of fashion in Paris or London, but not in South America. And that is what matters – here!

Evo did not lose. He won. His country has won. Under his leadership, it became a wonderful country; a country full of hope, a country that offered great prospects to hundreds of millions all over La Patria Grande. Everyone south of the Rio Grande knows it. Marvelous Mexico, which has given him asylum, knows it, too.

Evo has won. And then, he was forced out by the treasonous military, by treasonous business thugs, feudal land owners, and by Washington. Evo and his family and comrades have been brutalized by that extreme right-wing paramilitary leader – Luis Fernando Camacho – who is calling himself a Christian; brutalized by him and by his men and women.

Bolivia will fight. It will bring back its legitimate President where he belongs; to the Presidential Palace.

The plane which is taking Evo to Mexico, north, is actually taking him home, back to Bolivia. It is a big, big detour. Thousands of kilometers, and months, perhaps even years… But from the moment the airplane took off, the tremendous, epic journey back to La Paz began.

The people of Bolivia will never abandon their President. And Evo is, forever, tied to his People. And Long Live Bolivia, Damn It!

https://off-guardian.org/2019/11/19/evo ... ictorious/
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby PufPuf93 » Tue Nov 26, 2019 12:19 pm

New Bolivian interior minister vows to jail Evo Morales for rest of his life

Rightwing government claims former president is guilty of terrorism and sedition


The interior minister of Bolivia’s rightwing interim government has vowed to jail the former president Evo Morales for the rest of his life, accusing the exiled leftist of inciting anti-government protests that he claimed amounted to terrorism.

In an interview with the Guardian, Arturo Murillo claimed Morales had been orchestrating efforts to “strangle” Bolivian cities by ordering followers to erect roadblocks that would starve its residents of fuel and food.

Murillo claimed that an audio recording – which supposedly shows Morales giving such instructions – was definitive proof of the alleged crime and said he was “200%” certain it was genuine.
“This is terrorism and this is sedition,” he said. “We have asked for the maximum sentence … of 30 years in prison.”

Murillo added: “Any terrorist should spend the rest of their life in prison – any terrorist – Evo Morales or whoever. It’s not about whether you’re an ex-president or white or black or a campesino … In fact, it’s even worse when it’s an ex-president. An ex-president should be sentenced twice over because people trust in their president.”

Speaking to the Guardian in Mexico City, where he has received asylum, Morales rejected the accusations as “harassment” designed to prevent his return to Bolivia.

However, he declined to rule out the audio recording being genuine. “I talk to everyone who calls me. Sometimes I don’t know them. Sometimes they seek guidance,” he said.

Murillo, who is now responsible for public security in Bolivia, is one of the leading members of a rightwing caretaker government that took power after Morales fled overseas on 11 November. Morales, 60, left after Bolivia’s police and military withdrew their support following allegations of fraud in October’s disputed presidential election.

With Morales thousands of miles away, Bolivia’s new governors have launched a propaganda campaign aimed at annihilating the leftist’s reputation and legacy. Adverts on Bolivian television depict the country’s first indigenous leader as a chaos-sowing provocateur who has brought turmoil to its streets.

“Evo is summoning people to confrontations. Evo is not letting food reach the cities,” one advert claims. “The people want peace.”

In an attempt to paint Morales as a power-crazed authoritarian, Bolivian journalists were given an official “tour” of his supposedly luxurious apartment in the recently completed £26m Casa Grande del Pueblo in La Paz.

Murillo attacked Morales as part of a group of “fake lefties … who sought nothing but power” and claimed he was finished politically.

He said he was not worried targeting a leader who still enjoys significant public support might spark further unrest. “I don’t care how much it inflames things … in life you have to take risks and have the bravery to put things in order.”

“Evo Morales has lost his political career – he has lost it all – and he will never be candidate to anything else in this country,” Murillo insisted, claiming that Morales’s crimes were so bad that “he even runs the risk of Mexico asking him to leave the country”.

Murillo rejected the portrayal of Bolivia’s new government as a coven of rightwing Bible-bashers with little interest in its indigenous majority.

The interim president, Jeanine Áñez, is a conservative Catholic who has posted racist Twitter messages belittling indigenous Bolivians and declared herself interim president while clutching a huge Bible.

The desecration of the multi-coloured indigenous Wiphala flag by security forces in the days after Morales’s flight has also caused outrage.

But Murillo denied the administration was anti-indigenous. “My grandmother wore polleras [the pleated skirts used by indigenous women in Bolivia],” he insisted.

“I have a white face. My mother is Croatian. And my father’s mother wore polleras. What problem could I have with being indigenous?” he asked.

“Please, this is a mixed country, absolutely mixed. And it’s a lie that there’s a confrontation going on between the Indians and the whites. No. It’s totally wrong. This has never happened.”

Murillo admitted, however, that he felt little affection for the Wiphala.

Asked which global figures he admired, he cited Pope John Paul II (“he was a true Pope”) and criticised Pope Francis, who “has occupied himself a great deal with supporting communist governments but never worried about what these governments were doing”.

“I’m not a religious fanatic [but] I believe deeply in God,” Murillo added. “I wake up and go to sleep with Him – and I always ask Him to guide me.”

Critics have questioned the dramatic policy changes already implemented by Áñez’s government – such as cutting ties with Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela.

“We’re being governed by the four per cent,” complained one official from Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party in reference to the share of the vote Áñez’s candidate secured in October’s election.

Jim Shultz, the founder of the Bolivia-focused Democracy Centre, said the government was “doing everything wrong”.

Bolivian citizens in Buenos Aires on Saturday await the arrival of Evo Morales’ children Eva Liz and Alvaro, who were granted political asylum in Argentina. Photograph: Alejandro Pagni/AFP via Getty

“They don’t have a mandate to do anything other than keep the seat warm until there can be clean elections. But that is not how they are acting – and that is a huge mistake for the country,” he said.

“The impact is that it feeds this narrative of ‘this government has just been stolen’. That, ‘You see those crazy rightwingers … really are trying to seize power in the country’,” Shultz added.

Diego von Vacano, a Bolivian political scientist from the Texas A&M University, said he believed “a pretty significant purge” of Morales’s supporters and his pro-indigenous policies was under way.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea. Evo did transform Bolivia from almost an apartheid state into something better. He made obviously a lot of mistakes but Bolivia should assimilate those positive changes instead of trying to erase them and go back to something before Evo.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... ro-murillo
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby Elvis » Tue Nov 26, 2019 3:53 pm

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/ ... itary-guns

"Bolivian media outlet Erbol published leaked audio of conversations held from October 8 and 10 between civic leaders, former military officials, and opposition politicians who discussed 'a plan for social unrest, before, and after the general elections, with the aim of preventing President Evo Morales from remaining' in office," Flores wrote. "One opposition politician mentioned being in close contact with Sens. Marco Rubio [R-Fla.], Ted Cruz [R-Texas], and Bob Menendez [D-N.J.]."
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Dec 03, 2019 12:20 pm

Really interesting that Morales and also various journalists had listened to those audio recordings of the coup plotters before it actually happened, and that they were published online as well.

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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby cptmarginal » Sun Dec 15, 2019 11:33 pm

Wyatt Reed is The Grayzone's journalist actually reporting from Bolivia. This is his latest piece:

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/15/mas- ... ing-alive/

Image

“May the fascists burn!” reads a freshly-graffitied wall in an upper class Cochabamba neighborhood.

Within the span of just a week, Camacho and Pumari have gone from theoretical frontrunners to national laughingstocks.
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby cptmarginal » Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:14 pm

Bump

Bolivia: Senkata and Sencaba Events Under Investigation

Image

Family and friends pay tribute to Senkata victims in El Alto province | Photo: twitter/@tiempoarg


Published 19 March 2020

Bolivian Legislative Commission announced on Thursday that they will investigate the Senkata and Sencaba events in the El Alto province that took place in November 2019.

According to Victor Broda, Movement to Socialism (MAS) party deputy and Special Mix Legislative Commission’s president, the inquiring process would not be a simple data collection, but a determination on both intellectual and material responsible.

"Determine indications of who are the intellectual and material authors of this fact, the accomplices, the instigators and obviously that final report, if there is criminal responsibility, will have to be sent to the Public Prosecutor's Office," the leftist functionary explained.

The first action in the process is to hold audiences with the affected citizens and register oral and written testimonies. Interviews with the victims’ relatives and wounded ones during the confrontations will be taken as evidence. Those who were under illegal judicial processes will declare as well.

"This Thursday, March 19, marks four months without justice for those who fell in the Senkata massacre, for the widows, orphans, mothers, fathers, grandparents, friends and neighbors who lost a loved one"

Legislative Assembly will receive an official report with all the information after May 15. The administrative body will be sent to the Public Bolivian Prosecutors´ Office.

In Senkata, military assets confronted a group of protesters who were claiming to be in favor of Evo Morales, after he suffered a coup d'état. As another military contingent pulled out, it violently repressed a march in the vicinity of Cochabamba. A total of 36 people died.

The de facto government refuses to take responsibility for these events, which involved Luis Fernando Lopez Julio, Minister of Defense of the Añez administration. Bolivian Parliament deposed Lopez under accountability avoiding accusations and later reinstated by the president.

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission qualified these events as a massacre.
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby cptmarginal » Wed Jun 17, 2020 11:24 pm

Read in full with embedded links at The Intercept.

The New York Times Admits Key Falsehoods That Drove Last Year’s Coup in Bolivia: Falsehoods Peddled by the U.S., Its Media, and the Times - June 8, 2020
Glenn Greenwald
June 8 2020

[...]

The central tool used by both the Bolivian right and their U.S. government allies to justify the invalidation of Morales’s 10-point election victory were two election audits by the regional group Organization of American States — one a preliminary report issued on November 10, the day before Morales was forced from the country, and then its final report issued the next month — which asserted widespread, deliberate election fraud.

“Given all the irregularities observed, it is impossible to guarantee the integrity of the data and certify the accuracy of the results,” the OAS announced on November 10 as the country was in turmoil over the election. The next day, Morales, under the threat of force to him and his family, boarded a plane to Mexico, where he was granted asylum. The final OAS report in December claimed that “the audit team has detected willful manipulation” of the results based on “incontrovertible evidence of an electoral process marred by grave irregularities.”

But on Sunday, the New York Times published an article strongly suggesting that it was the OAS audit, not the Bolivian election, that was “marred by grave irregularities,” making it “impossible to guarantee the integrity of the data and certify the accuracy of the” OAS claims. The paper of record summarized its reporting this way: “A close look at Bolivian election data suggests an initial analysis by the OAS that raised questions of vote-rigging — and helped force out a president — was flawed.”

Image

To cast serious doubt on the integrity of these critical OAS reports, the Times relies upon a new independent study from three scholars at U.S. universities which — in the words of the NYT — examined “data obtained by the New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities.” That study, said the NYT, “has found that the Organization of American States’ statistical analysis was itself flawed.”

That study documented that the key “irregularity” cited by OAS “was actually an artifact of the analysts’ error.” It further explained that with regard to “the patterns that the observers deemed ‘inexplicable,’” the new data analysis shows that “we can explain them without invoking fraud.”

While this new study focuses solely on the OAS’s data claims and does not purport to decree the Bolivian election entirely free of fraud — virtually no election, including in the U.S., is entirely free of irregularities — the NYT explains that “the authors of the new study said they were unable to replicate the OAS’s findings using its likely techniques” and that “the difference is significant” in assessing the overall validity of the OAS’s claims.

”In sum,” the new report concludes, “we offer a different interpretation of the quantitative evidence that led the OAS and other researchers to question the integrity of the Bolivian election.“ Specifically, “we find that we do not require fraud in order to explain the quantitative patterns used to help indict Evo Morales.” The scholars’ bottom line: “we cannot replicate the OAS results.”

IT IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE to overstate the importance of the OAS accusations in driving Morales from his own country and, with no democratic mandate, shifting power in lithium-rich Bolivia to the white, Christian, U.S.-subservient right. While critics had also accused Morales of improperly seeking a fourth term despite constitutional term limits, Bolivia’s duly constituted court had invalidated those term limits (much the way that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg induced the City Council to overturn a term limit referendum so he could seek a third term), leaving anti-Morales outside agitators, such as the OAS and U.S. officials, to rely instead on claims of election fraud.

[...]


Jacobin Magazine:

Bolivia’s Post-Coup President Has Unleashed a Campaign of Terror

BY CINDY FORSTER - 05.30.2020

When Evo Morales was forced to resign the presidency last November, Bolivia received its second female head of state in its history. Technically an “interim” president, Jeanine Áñez has sought to consolidate her grip on power, and in the six months since receiving the presidential sash from the army, she has waged a ferocious war on the country’s most marginalized sectors — among them the indigenous populations and the country’s poor and working-class women.

An ultraconservative Catholic senator, Áñez hails from the thinly populated Amazonian department of Beni, a region whose indigenous peoples first made the demand for a constituent assembly in the 1990s. But Áñez is no ally of indigenous Bolivians. She believes indigenous spirituality to be a sign of Satan, and upon seizing power in the days after November 10, she declared the national government to be “at last” free of paganism. Her partisans trampled upon and burned the Wiphala — the banner of indigenous unity — prompting tens of thousands of indigenous people to pour into the streets in protest.

Áñez’s actions have a broader context in the region. In recent years, class hatred among Bolivian conservatives has turned very ugly, and it now resembles that of the protest mobs in Venezuela that in 2017 killed over 120 people, many of whom were set on fire. There, conservatives claimed their violent protests proved the socialist government’s ineptitude. The Bolivian right, for their part, have made constant threats to burn people alive, going so far as to target high-level officials from Morales’s former government.

This dovetails with a broader political project, directed from Washington, to destroy the Movement toward Socialism (MAS), led by Evo Morales. For twenty-five years, Morales has repeatedly been a target of their assassination plans. The dirty war of the United States reaches into every corner of Bolivia.

Long before the elections of October 20 last year, right-wing political parties had been sowing lies about the MAS government. It is a matter of record that the most egregious narco traffickers are closely tied to the oligarchy, but the Right claims that MAS is a gang of drug lords. Similarly, Bolivia’s neoliberals are tremendously corrupt, yet they pin charges of corruption on MAS.

When it comes to women’s rights, the Morales-led government of 2006 to 2014 made more progress than any other presidency, yet some urban and international feminists accuse MAS of irremediable sexism. The civic committees held up by the Right as heroes of democracy train middle-class and elite youth to attack the poor. Their rage against indigenous women is ferocious. Today in Bolivia, millions of women are fierce adherents of the country’s Right. Indeed, for centuries, middle- and upper-class women in Bolivia have identified as European, and have been loyal allies of their menfolk in upholding the country’s cruel labor systems and extracting inordinate privileges. It was this arrangement that MAS shattered when it came to power in 2006.

In the first days of the coup, when escalating violence forced Evo Morales from office despite having won the general election, Jeanine Áñez was there to fill the position. Hailing from the Amazonian cattle-ranching region of Beni, she has a law degree but has mostly worked as a local television personality. Her first husband was mayor of Beni’s capital and, until his recent death, had a string of corruption charges following him.

Her current husband, Héctor Hernando Hincapié Carvajal, is a far more ominous figure. A failed politician from Colombia, he is nevertheless a high-level political operator in Colombia and, like Áñez, comes from a rural area deeply enmeshed with the narcotics trade. He has been a member of four political parties notorious for their close association with drug traffickers and describes himself as a partisan of Álvaro Uribe, the Latin American leader of the ultraright and two-time president of Colombia. Even so, Hernando Hincapié roundly criticized Uribe for not being sufficiently right-wing, since as president, Uribe failed to “renovate the Supreme Court and left us a cancer.”

Áñez’s political party, the Movimiento Demócrata Social, is called center-right, but the party is the voice of lowland business magnates who promoted the division of the country, which most would define as an act of treason. Their desires are often enforced by paramilitary groups of long standing with open fascist sympathies. In the last elections before the coup, Áñez won the party’s only senate seat (out of thirty-six senators in total), and the party won four house seats (out of 130 in total).

Despite her own narrative, supported by corporate media in Bolivia and internationally, Áñez was never in line for presidential succession. The army and police command nonetheless ordered a national blockade so that she could implement their joint plan. Áñez said she would mobilize the official fleet of helicopters to bring all parliamentarians to the capital, La Paz, but the helicopters only brought the right-wing representatives to the Plurinational Legislative Assembly.

The coup-makers prevented MAS legislators, who have a two-thirds majority of seats, from returning; they were instead forced to come by land and so faced paramilitary pursuit and harassment at coup regime checkpoints. In La Paz , MAS legislators had to literally fight their way into the Assembly, as their offices were being ransacked.

Áñez’s lies continued to multiply: an agreement between MAS and pro-coup legislators was made to convene parliament. Into that agreement, the pro-coup people inserted a false statement that both sides had accepted Áñez as interim president. Anti-MAS media published the lie everywhere. MAS denounced it, but they were drowned out by the corporate broadcasts.

In terms of freedom of expression, Áñez’s presidency smacks of the era of Bolivia’s modern dictatorship, which lasted from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Censorship of progressive media began in the run-up to the coup and escalated onward, with some fifty community radio stations attacked, as well as popular print media. Áñez has banned the MAS digital library, an impressive project of the MAS vice president and renowned intellectual Álvaro García Linera. Journalists were killed, tortured, and driven underground. Áñez nonetheless asserts that under her rule, Bolivia has passed from dictatorship to a thriving democracy.

Áñez has decreed special privileges for police and military forces across the country. Her Presidential Decree 4078, issued just two days after the coup, gave soldiers and police protections from any legal consequences for violence they might commit in pursuit of what Áñez terms a recovery of “civilized” society.

With that in place, five days later, she ordered the first massacre in a place called Sacaba, near the city of Cochabamba. People were shot from the ground and shot from the air, where helicopters hovered. Security forces targeted streams of protestors pouring in from the coca region of Chapare, the base of Evo Morales’s struggle from the time he was a young union leader. The coca farmers under Evo’s leadership generated the policies that most effectively lowered coca cultivation that is dedicated to cocaine production, as compared to the rest of the continent.

Another massacre took place four days later at the Senkata gas plant in El Alto, an indigenous city that gave more than sixty lives to bring down a neoliberal president in 2003. The victims of the Senkata massacre say that bodies were sequestered by authorities so as not to be counted, including those of a peasant woman and a young girl. Again, the interim president denied the government hurt anyone.

Under Áñez’s presidency so far, thirty-six demonstrators and innocent bystanders have been killed by soldiers and police. But Áñez swears the security forces have not fired a single bullet. She claims that the massacre victims were shot by their peers or by foreign agents. It is an open secret that a team of CIA and State Department personnel advise the interim president’s every move.

In a coded message to her conservative base, Áñez decorated the military men who committed the massacre. On November 15, she increased military spending by more than $5 million to buy the loyalty of her henchmen. These gestures, it seems fair to suggest, are also designed to incite violent reactions among the families of those killed, injured, and imprisoned.

On March 5, the thirty-five-year anniversary of the city of El Alto was used for similar provocations. Right-wing politicians arrived to declare themselves the country’s saviors. Áñez was surrounded and escorted by a phalanx of police and soldiers, and apparently, she and her advisers were hoping for more bloodshed, because they had mobilized ambulances and firefighters to be on hand.

That day, cameraman René Guarachi filmed the reaction of the security forces to El Alto inhabitants when the latter protested the presence of Áñez. They had just held a mass to honor the massacre victims who died in the neighborhood of Senkata. The footage shows uniformed forces firing tear gas on residents while gases poured into a school, causing terror. The crying children were met with police aggression.

Guarachi works with the media outlet of the Bartolina Sisa Confederation, an enormous network of indigenous and campesina women. He streamed the footage of the repression live on their website, which was ultimately viewed by 800,000 people. For transgressing the de facto state censorship, Guarachi was tortured.

Another act of terror was also a personal message to Evo Morales and followed a MAS meeting in Argentina with the exiled president. The meeting planned an electoral strategy to return the poor to power. Marcial Escalante, the vice president of MAS in Yapacaní, was kidnapped on December 20 after returning home from the meeting with Morales. Yapacaní is a stronghold of MAS resistance in the right-wing department of Santa Cruz, located in the lowlands. Like many MAS cadre, Escalante had not lived in his home since the coup repression started. But that night, he visited. The kidnappers wore civilian clothes. They beat his wife as they seized him. Strangely, he ended up in police custody. He was released because they could not pin any charges on him.

Áñez, when she proclaimed herself president in La Paz, had long since given her blessing to paramilitaries or “shock groups” across the country. Under her rule, these armed bands attacked mothers and wives who wished to present their testimonies of the Senkata massacre to representatives of the United Nations and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

In the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, the paramilitaries are mounted on motorcycles, carrying homemade explosives and weapons with which they attack working-class women and anyone who looks uncommitted to Miami values. Áñez praised their efforts and made them a gift of fifteen additional motorcycles.

Since Áñez came to power, countless attacks have occurred against indigenous women who were guilty of nothing but wearing their traditional dress, the pollera. The paramilitaries are armed and ready to inflict this kind of terror whenever their political bosses give the order.

In a more complicated act of hypocrisy, Áñez has tried to position herself as a protector of women who are victims of violence. She claims to be the key player against femicide, even though it was MAS who launched an extraordinary campaign to halt violence against women — a campaign cut short by the coup regime.

For many, the pain induced by Áñez’s peculiar promotion of womanhood is reflected in the coup government’s decision to release from prison a group of elite young men — among them the scions of oligarchical families of the lowland region of Santa Cruz — who, shortly before the coup, had been tried and sentenced for the gang rape of a young woman they knew personally. Such impunity is standard in countries ruled by the rich, but this vile pattern was changing in Evo’s Bolivia. The young men’s parents are adherents of the most violent faction of the paramilitary right, and probably its richest sector. The victim was hospitalized in agony for weeks, her genital region destroyed, before she died. Áñez stands with the country’s elites, who place blame on the young woman for going out with the rapists.

Those who criticize Áñez or question her claims to represent women face censorship and violence. One woman, a graduate student in feminist studies who voiced her opinions on social media, was subject to death threats. She escaped an attempted gang rape and was forced to go into hiding. Conservative women celebrate her attackers.

All the while, Áñez and the far-right leaders who rule the lowlands have given a hero’s welcome to elite terrorists and murderers. One politician they released from jail was serving time for the massacre of thirteen campesinos. A number of fugitives returning to Bolivia are politicians who fled the country to avoid corruption charges. Others worked hand in glove with the US embassy to stoke civil war and plot magnicide between 2008 and 2009. For the right, they are freedom fighters, recovering the lost paradise of Bolivia’s neoliberal elites.

Most women in Bolivia want quality health care that is free of charge for all, an initiative that had just been instituted by MAS before the coup, but which is — unconstitutionally — being dismantled by the current government, along with much of the MAS program.

In concert with US designs, Áñez falsely accused, imprisoned, and harassed Cuban doctors, then broke relations with Cuba unilaterally. After the evacuation, and in language uncommonly harsh for Cuban diplomacy, their foreign minister called Áñez “a liar, a coup-maker and a self-proclaimed president.” The doctors were forced to return to Cuba to protect their physical safety, but their absence, together with the defunding of government-provided health care, has already wrought devastation before the pandemic.

Food for nursing mothers and young children, free universal education, and dietary supports for the elderly were all critical MAS policies for many years, embraced by women, who benefited directly from them. Áñez axed the program for mothers and their small children, abandoned elders to their fate, and put education programs on the chopping block. Now she claims to be forming programs with very similar names, but people are protesting for want of food. Most recently, Áñez distributed face masks with her party logo.

In the February 8 Peace and Civility Accords proposed by Evo Morales, women’s rights were again central. His proposal has been ignored by the Right. The accords would seek to “eradicate hate speech entirely, and racism and all forms of discrimination.” They would “eradicate fake news” and instead, encourage “debate of ideas and political programs” like health care and education.

In keeping with a sentiment often attributed to women, the Peace and Civility Accords would “disarticulate all paramilitary and shock groups” and agree not to attack political campaign headquarters, the Wiphala, the ballots, or the people transporting and counting votes in the upcoming elections.

This vision of MAS is echoed in CARICOM’s (Caribbean Community’s) call on December 18 for an end to racist violence perpetrated against the indigenous in Bolivia, which the Caribbean nations managed to get passed in the belly of the monster itself, the Organization of American States (OAS).

In Bolivia, marchers against the coup have been chanting the name of Túpac Katari, the indigenous Aymara leader who, alongside his wife, Bartolina Sisa, and his sister Gregoria Apaza, almost brought down the Spanish regime in 1781. For ten years before the uprising, Túpac Katari traversed the high country and subtropical regions, persuading campesinos of the necessity to take up arms. Their descendants share a collective conscience that is impenetrable to their class enemies. The two women were commanders and critical negotiators who built indigenous unity: Gregoria united the Quechua and the Aymara.

In all this, the poor, who are mostly indigenous, are not completely powerless. Indigenous people streamed into the cities by the tens of thousands to protest the stolen elections of October and the various outrages of the new regime. Women spoke with rage and passion and continue to do so, knowing that they can be taken prisoner at any moment, to be beaten, tortured, and raped in detention. Such outrages are common and systematic, according to the poor.

Even so, concessions have been wrung from the de facto government. Tens of thousands of marchers, together with the MAS majority in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, relentlessly pressured Áñez to overturn Decree 4078, the free-fire permission given to soldiers and police that assures no criminal prosecution for the killing or injuring of civilians. Under tremendous pressure from campesinos and the urban poor, the coup president agreed to remove the military from the streets.

Despite these gains, the demobilization of the military was soon reversed by Áñez. In anticipation of the closing date of her interim presidency, January 22, Añez sent some seventy thousand soldiers to cities and towns all over the nation, attempting to ban the public broadcast of Morales’s speech that marked the constitutional end of his presidency.

The barrage of insults intensified. After months of coup-regime forces denigrating and brutalizing women in polleras in public, Áñez called for a new law that would recognize indigenous women as part of the national patrimony.

In the second week of March, Áñez faced another setback. MAS legislators forced the removal of her defense minister, Fernando López Julio — an extraordinary feat. López had refused to appear before the Plurinational Legislative Assembly despite constitutionally sanctioned requests from that body. The legislators had wanted to question López minutely about the massacres over which he presided. He stepped down. Nonetheless, almost immediately, and in brazenly anti-democratic fashion, Áñez reappointed López to the same post.

Today, Bolivia’s health system is in shambles, and the country has among the lowest rates of testing for the COVID-19 virus anywhere in the Americas. Laboratories in the main cities have collapsed. Doctors who voted for the Right are now marching in the streets to demand promised protective gear. Even the president of the Council of Bishops of the Catholic church, Monseñor Ricardo Centellas, criticized Áñez for her trail of broken promises in the fight against the virus.

Her erstwhile right-wing allies have joined the poor majorities in demanding that Áñez allow elections to take place, something Áñez has been paying lip service to but trying to postpone ever since she entered the National Palace. MAS leads in the polls, even though the polltakers have never reached into the Bolivian countryside.

Most Bolivians recognize that ultimately, the future of the country lies in the hands of millions of indigenous people, campesinos, and urban workers who are organizing to dethrone Áñez and any other usurper.

The Bartolina Sisa Confederation of indigenous and campesina women has become perhaps the most outspoken voice of conscience against the coup regime led by Áñez. One of the largest grassroots organizations in a country that is famous for its social movements, “the Bartolinas” emerged in 1980, helping to found MAS in the 1990s, and have never faltered in their commitments to “land and dignity” for the majority of women. On December 20, they declared that they would not allow US intervention in Bolivia.

Their leadership gave an ultimatum to the national police at a time when the highest coup authorities were threatening to invade the zone of Chapare, where coca farmers have built a seamless unity, and where Evo Morales helped give birth to the struggle as a young union leader. In Chapare, homemade barricades closed off all the roads to protect against Áñez’s security forces.

Áñez claims to believe that every cocalero is a “terrorist,” but the cocaleros associated with MAS have led the country in creating solutions based on grassroots control of the enormous legal market for coca leaves, a medicinal, nutritional, and spiritual foundation of Andean society. Now they are trucking tons of their tropical fruit to people on the edge of starvation outside the Chapare, and facing arrest and imprisonment for that solidarity.

During the quarantine, which is enforced by roaring platoons of police on motorcycles and soldiers with assault rifles, negotiations were held that achieved the return of the police to Chapare in exchange for the Áñez government agreeing to reopen banks and gas stations that had been shut and blockaded by the de facto regime.

Characteristic of the battle unfolding between elite and indigenous women, the Bartolina Sisas had told the police they would be allowed to reenter Chapare if and when they asked forgiveness of the people for the deaths and injuries they had caused the day of the Sacaba massacre. Áñez is up against a tidal wave of dignity.

When asked if she expected Áñez to start killing them again if MAS won the presidential vote, a campesina woman in the Andean highlands responded, “Yes, of course. But we’re trained, we’re conscious, and if they steal the elections again, all of us will take the streets, peacefully. Vast numbers of people are willing to die for this process of change, and we will prevail.”
The new way of thinking is precisely delineated by what it is not.
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Re: What does Empire have to do with the coup in Bolivia?

Postby cptmarginal » Wed Jun 17, 2020 11:29 pm

norton ash » Tue Nov 12, 2019 10:39 pm wrote:Lamumba plays Allende Kong in a wet Ortega bodega.


I laughed at this the first time and it's still funny now
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