On Oct. 20, 2019, Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia for a fourth time, defeating the runner-up, former president of the centrist Civic Community (CC) party, Carlos Mesa. As the leader of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), a Leftist Bolivian political party which had held power since 2006, Morales oversaw sweeping reforms to redistribute the wealth of the country — long concentrated in the hands of a wealthy white ruling class — to its Indigenous majority, who represent over 60% of the country’s population.
Although his popularity among poor, rural, and Indigenous Bolivians is unrivaled, Morales and his government have not been without their critics, mostly stemming from the country’s urban middle and upper classes. Many of Morales’ critics on the Right have pointed to the abolition of term limits under his government in 2017, which occurred in 2017 when Bolivia’s Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal declared the two-term limit of Bolivia’s constitution to be a violation of the international American Convention on Human Rights, as evidence of an authoritarian streak in Morales’ governance. It was criticisms such as these which added legitimacy to the protests which broke out in Bolivia after the CC alleged that Morales had falsified the results of the election to avoid a run-off vote.
A key leader of the protest movement which emerged in Bolivia following Morales’ re-election was Luis Fernando Camacho. A multi-millionaire named in the Panama Papers, Camacho got his start as a leader of the Santa Cruz Youth Union, a Far-Right paramilitary group notorious for racist violence. While the Far-Right in support of by Camacho did not make up the entirety of the protest movement, they were responsible for a variety of high profile actions, including the Nov. 7 kidnapping and public humiliation of the MAS-affiliated Indigenous mayor of a small town in the Cochabamba province.
In response to the accusation by CC and the protests that followed, Morales agreed to an audit of the election by the Organization of American States, a Washington, D.C., based organization which, though ostensibly a neutral monitor of electoral legitimacy, has long served as a cudgel by the U.S. and its Latin American allies against Leftist governments viewed as a threat to U.S. hegemony in the region.
On Nov. 10, the OAS claimed to have found irregularities in the vote count of Bolivia’s election, although they were unable to demonstrate evidence of fraud. Nonetheless, as the increasingly violent protests backed by segments of the country’s police forces raged on, Morales agreed to a second vote. The opposition had been granted what they wanted: a chance to defeat Morales’ supposedly authoritarian government through free and fair elections.
Less than a day later, Morales and other key members of his government fled the country for asylum in Mexico. The military had stepped in, asking Morales to step down in a coup d’etat. Oddly enough, few, if any, mainstream U.S. news outlets reported it as such, preferring to say that Morales ‘resigned after protests,’ a technical truth which does as much to obfuscate reality as a lie.
On Nov. 11, Jeanine Áñez, a previously obscure senator and member of the minor Democrat Social Movement party, unilaterally declared herself interim president, and was immediately recognized as such by the governments of the U.S., Canada, and Brazil. She stood out by entering the presidential residence carrying a comically oversized Bible, declaring that “[t]he Bible has returned to the palace.” This, combined with since-deleted Tweets openly mocking Bolivia’s “Indians” for their “Satanic” rituals, left little doubt on her stance towards Bolivia’s Indigenous majority.
While the U.S. media fawned over Áñez for her alleged restoration of democracy in Bolivia, she embarked on a variety of sweeping policy shifts unusual for an interim presidency, the constitutional duty of which should theoretically only be to organize elections within 90 days. She broke off diplomatic relationships with the Leftist governments of Venezuela and Cuba, and unceremoniously deported over 700 Cuban doctors from the country. Most drastically of all, she declared that any actions taken by the police and armed forces in suppressing resistance to the new government of Bolivia would face no legal consequences, effectively giving the armed representatives of the state the license to murder at will.
Soon after Morales’ departure, new protests swept the country, this time stemming from Bolivia’s mostly rural and Indigenous lower classes, the traditional support base of MAS, and the group which has most benefited from its policies. The protests were not only over the ouster of MAS, but also the clear anti-Indigenous stance of the interim government. In fact, the cabinet Áñez had appointed did not contain a single Indigenous person, and police were filmed removing and burning the wiphala (Indigenous flag) from their uniforms.
Áñez’s government responded with violence and terror, murdering dozens of protestors and injuring hundreds more in the days following the coup. In addition, her government began the process of hunting down and arresting MAS members and Left-Wing journalists on charges of ‘sedition’, despite MAS still having a ⅔ majority in Bolivia’s Congress.
For observers familiar with the history of Right-Wing coups in Latin America, the behavior of Bolivia’s new government should be unsurprising. The violent repression of popular protests, the crackdown on Leftist elements of society, the nationalist and religious rhetoric are not unusual for Latin American coup regimes, from Somoza in Nicaragua to Pinochet in Chile. Another element that each of these governments had in common, however, was support from the United States.
For students at Connecticut College, the tragic events unfolding in Bolivia might seem far off, irrelevant to our daily lives. But we should all be concerned about the overthrow of a democratically elected government in a region where popular rule has constantly been undermined by the very country in which we live. More than that, we should be aware of the fact that we directly benefit from the coup in Bolivia.
Right-Wing coups have historically meant large scale privatization and extraction of natural resources for the benefit of U.S. corporate interests. Bolivia contains 70% of the world’s lithium deposits. In the days leading up to and directly after the coup, the stock value of Tesla, a company which manufactures electric cars which run on lithium batteries, skyrocketed. Not only electric cars, but also the phones, computers, and other electronic devices we use on a daily basis, are made with lithium extracted from Bolivia. For the Bolivians protesting against the new government, this coup represents a threat to day-to-day existence. But for U.S. tech companies, it represents an investment. And every one of us owns a piece of the stock. •
