Bolivia’s White Supremacist Coup Regime Determined to Quench Resistance in Blood
"The fury of Bolivians cheated of their elected government has to be subdued with terror"
Bolivia’s coup regime seems determined to drown the opposition in blood. Protesters demonstrating for the return of elected president Evo Morales have been gunned down in La Paz and while marching on Cochabamba.
Accurate figures are hard to come by, since the Bolivian government is clamping down on free reporting. [23 dead at the last count.] Journalists have been attacked by police; foreign reporters threatened with deportation, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The IACHR and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights might sound the alarm over lethal force by the security forces, but “president” Jeanine Anez wants more of it: signing a decree exempting troops from criminal responsibility for anything they might do during “the restoration of order and public stability.”
Given that Anez is now notorious for a tweet in which she declared La Paz “no place for Indians” and demanded that indigenous peoples go back to the mountains or the plains, it is hardly surprising she is unconcerned at shedding indigenous blood.
The coup in Bolivia has been explicitly racist, burning the indigenous Wiphala flag, involving bizarre prayer ceremonies celebrating the “return of Christ” and expulsion of Pachamama, or Mother Earth, from the presidential palace and parliament in a symbolic victory of the descendants of white Spanish Catholic colonists over native American heathens who had the effrontery to elect one of their own as president.
But there are further reasons why Anez needs to smash opposition quickly. Of all the US-inspired reactionary takeovers in Latin America in recent years, that in Bolivia is the most blatant.
Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff was removed in a “constitutional coup” where crooked senators and parliamentarians combined to override the popular vote. But there is nothing constitutional about either Morales’s overthrow or Anez’s investiture.
As the US-based Centre for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR) confirms in a detailed study, Morales’s first-round victory in last month’s presidential elections was in no way irregular. The result was in line with most polls. A late surge for him was predictable and normal, the result of the rural and indigenous districts that have always disproportionately supported him taking longer to count.
There was no justification for the Organisation of American States claim that there were problems with the vote. Even if it had been correct, nobody — the OAS included — disputed Morales’s first-place position, only whether he had won by enough to avoid a second round.
The certain knowledge that he had both won the election and would win any re-election lay behind opposition leaders’ refusal to countenance his offer of dialogue and a second vote. Today it lies behind Anez’s insistence that he will not be allowed to run in any new election and will be arrested if he tries to return.
The fury of Bolivians cheated of their elected government has to be subdued with terror before events in what is now a volatile continent spiral out of the Bolivian military’s control. A collaborator over the border in Argentina leaves office on December 10; his successor Alberto Fernandez has denounced the coup.
Protests against Chile’s right-wing regime are again erupting as President Sebastian Pinera backtracks on concessions. In Ecuador, Lenin Moreno’s bid to blame mammoth protests against his own neoliberal regime on Cuban medical aid projects shows how panicky the Latin American right is.
A bid by Venezuelan wannabe Juan Guaido to revive the anti-government movement there was outnumbered in Caracas by a “march against fascism” that condemned the terror in Bolivia, while the horrifying nature of the right’s revenge in the latter country is a taster of what would follow a successful Venezuelan coup.
Calls for restraint from organisations such as the UN don’t cut it. Bolivian protesters face violence because they are exposing the illegitimate character of the government. International solidarity must include immediate pressure for an end to the violence — but should extend to demanding the return of the country’s elected leader.
Source: Morning Star
People learn the hard way what it means to not have a 2nd Amendment.
There is no such thing as ‘democracy’–all systems are more-or-less oligarchies.That is the nature of things. So any talk of adherence to ‘democratic principles’ is just unrealistic nonsense for the masses and useful-idiot pretend intellectuals.
White supremacy reveals it’s hand as it did with Angus Bachus here in South Africa (the Covenant is for Jews and Afrikaners only!) recently!
The more inroads they make and coups, the more indigenous rights, existence and legitimacy are eroded!
After Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya…this is the next hunting ground to assuage the war mongers!
Rightly…THIS IS a developing story!
While I am in sympathy with much of this article, I very much object to the following:
“The one time there is an actual white supremacist takeover the liberals predictably line up behind it”
First, the word “liberal” is misused so often today, it is becoming meaningless, and this quote represents just another misuse.
No liberal can possibly support the coup. Liberals don’t ignore democratic principles, they are defined by them.
The fact is that there are almost no liberals in the United States and in many places under its dominance. But isn’t that what you expect to find at the heart of a brutal empire? Its people all nurtured on twenty-four-hour-a-day political cant and corporate press propaganda?
America is a place, after all, where a football player can’t even make a brief, respectful gesture of protest against police violence without literally being booed and heckled, even being insulted by high officials.
Empire- and Pentagon-loyalists like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden and most of the Democratic contenders are not liberals, no matter what views they may hold about social programs.
In fact, America’s political party system leaves almost no room for careers in opposition to empire and the crushing weight of the military and security services.
By definition, empire and the military represent the antithesis of democratic and human values. They represent telling others what to do and using force if they don’t.
Two, we have had other “white supremacist” takeovers. Very much so.
As in Ukraine. That coup could not have happened without the work of extremists like the Azov Battalion.
America’s covert support of such outfits in 2014 was publicly displayed by a photo of America’s appointed Proconsul to the Coup Government, Joe Biden, smiling broadly, while vigorously shaking hands with the commander of that dreadful neo-Nazi outfit.
Indeed, you could argue that all American-induced coups and interventions abroad are of that nature, even if some of the actors used inside the target country are not white. You do have to use the material at hand for a coup, don’t you?
The guys running the show from Washington could very much be viewed as sympathetic to many of the world’s “white supremacists.” Just look at photos of the faces gathered around the Cabinet table or sitting in attendance at the Oval Office.
And the long-term record supports that impression. Until the actions of others in the world made it no longer sustainable, Washington vigorously defended and cooperated with the former white Nationalist government of South Africa, just as today it vigorously supports the brutality of Israel’s apartheid government.
And Washington has had a hand in many coups and interventions against democratic governments over the years, but they were democracies with either “non-white” majorities or major “non-white” components of support, as in Egypt or Iran or Libya or Guatemala or Panama or Chile or Haiti.