A TURBULENT WEEKEND roiled Latin American politics as a coup in Bolivia forced President Evo Morales aside on Sunday and, days earlier, former Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio \u201cLula\u201d da Silva was freed from prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Morales spoke Wednesday from Mexico City, where he is in exile, and expressed interest in returning to Bolivia in the wake of what he has described as a U.S.-backed coup d\u2019etat. At the press conference, Morales encouraged the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle to continue and rejected self-declared interim President Jeanine \u00c1\u00f1ez. Past anti-Indigenous comments from \u00c1\u00f1ez, a right-wing Christian, are coming to light, adding to the backlash she already faces from Morales\u2019s supporters. Nonetheless, \u00c1\u00f1ez has vowed to call for new elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s official statement, meanwhile, praised the military coup in Bolivia and noted that the events leading up Morales\u2019s ouster \u201csend a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail.\u201d What role the U.S. may have played in Bolivia is certainly less clear than the overt attempt at regime change in Venezuela early this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Morales\u2019s journey into self-imposed exile marked the end of a remarkable era in Bolivian politics. The first Indigenous president in the modern Americas rode a populist wave to power in 2006, when Bolivia\u2019s Movimiento al Socialismo \u2014 Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS \u2014 rose amid a reshuffling of South American politics to the left in the wake of the Cold War\u2019s end. Part of this \u201cpink tide,\u201d Morales\u2019s 14 years in power saw economic gains for many Bolivians. By 2017, Bolivia\u2019s middle class had grown dramatically, and the country of around 11 million people had the region\u2019s highest growth rate \u2014 but at a cost. Deforestation rates in Bolivia spiked, and Morales pivoted to the center while embracing natural gas and mining projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The October 2019 election virtually guaranteed trouble for Morales\u2019s presidency long before it took place. Many in Bolivia viewed Morales as being \u201cpolitically spent,\u201d anthropologist and Bolivia scholar Bret Gustafson\u00a0told the Intercepted podcast. \u201cThe movements had been co-opted by the state. And any dissent within the movements had been silenced,\u201d Gustafson said. \u201cThose who had managed to become a part of the state and party structure remained loyal to Evo Morales.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MORALES\u2019S RUN FOR a fourth term was unconstitutional, according to the new constitution adopted by Bolivia in 2009. After losing a referendum to allow his candidacy in 2019, Morales approached Bolivia\u2019s Constitutional Court. Declaring that term limits violated Morales\u2019s \u201chuman rights,\u201d the court allowed him to run. Then came the race. In the two-round voting system, an election is determined after a candidate wins by 50 percent, or just by 40 percent if the candidate has a 10-point lead over the closest opponent. An outright win in the first round of voting was unexpected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe OAS is certainly being questioned, largely because of the role played by the United States and Brazil and Argentina.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the vote count, results from the unofficial, preliminary count showed Morales falling short of the first-round victory. Opposition leader and former President Carlos Mesa alleged fraud when, after a tense delay, the newly released official countshowed Morales with just over a 10-point lead, easily securing a victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Violent opposition protests swept the country and the Washington, D.C.-based Organization of American States conducted an audit. In a statement, the OAS flagged \u201cits deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls\u201d \u2014 stoking the anti-Morales protests but offering little in the way of concrete evidence of fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe OAS is certainly being questioned,\u201d Gustafson explained, \u201clargely because of the role played by the United States and Brazil and Argentina\u201d \u2014 a coalition of influential member states headed by right-wing governments \u2014 \u201cand the very outspoken role that Luis Almagro, the head of the OAS, has had trying to facilitate the ouster of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro in Venezuela.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking Wednesday from Mexico, Morales said, \u201cThe\u00a0OAS\u00a0is not in the service of the people of Latin America, less so the social movements. The\u00a0OAS\u00a0is at the service of the North American empire.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
THOUGH THE ROLE of external forces in the coup remain unclear, even the mere opportunity for the Bolivian right to surge is owed to domestic factors. Namely, support for Morales had eroded even among his most loyal constituencies: Indigenous communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Following the election, those communities came under attack. A right-wing Christian opposition figure named Luis Fernando Camacho led violent protests targeting Morales\u2019s Indigenous supporters and elected officials. An agribusiness and natural gas tycoon dubbed \u201cBolivia\u2019s Bolsonaro,\u201d Camacho is aligned with the Civic Committee movement and comes from an elite family with influence in the natural gas distribution business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anti-Indigenous racism played a role in the violence. \u201cCamacho is like many on the right wing in eastern Bolivia, who consider themselves white or white-ish,\u201d Gustafson explained. \u201cThere is a long history of anti-Indigenous racism and a long history of fascist political organizing in Bolivia that is very much wedded to symbols of Christianity.\u201d Indeed, videos posted to social media showed anti-Indigenous coup supporters burning Bolivia\u2019s Indigenous Wiphala flag and opposition leaders brandishing ostentatious Bibles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the political chaos of the past month, Gustafson pointed to the strength of Bolivian social movements. \u201cWhatever government emerges out of this, if it takes some \u2018neoliberal position\u2019 or attempts to restore the kind of racist model of rule that characterized the country for centuries,\u201d he said, \u201cthe social movements in Bolivia are going to give them a really hard time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
LAST FRIDAY, IN Brazil, one of Morales\u2019s main Latin American political allies, Luiz In\u00e1cio \u201cLula\u201d da Silva, was released after a year and a half in prison. Lula, a contemporary of Morales\u2019s among the leaders of the resurgent Latin American left, would most likely have won Brazil\u2019s 2018 presidential election. But a disputed, politically-tinged corruption conviction prevented him from running and allowed the right-wing opposition to guide far-right Jair Bolsonaro to victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere was massive corruption inside this anti-corruption probe that has really changed Brazilian politics in a fundamental way over the last five years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The judge that presided over Lula\u2019s case, S\u00e9rgio Moro, has been at the center of a major investigation by The Intercept. Co-founder Glenn Greenwald explained on Intercepted that, essentially, Moro was not a judge. \u201cHe was secretly commanding the prosecutorial task force, not just in Lula\u2019s case, but in many, many others. The prosecutors were constantly violating their ethical constraints, trying to profit off of the fame that they got from winning.\u201d Greenwald said. \u201cThere was massive corruption inside this anti-corruption probe that has really changed Brazilian politics in a fundamental way over the last five years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lula returned to the political scene rejuvenated after his release from prison, Greenwald said. Calling Morales\u2019s ouster a coup, Lula tweeted a statement of support for the Bolivian president: \u201cIt is unfortunate that Latin America has an economic elite that does not know how to live with democracy and the social inclusion of the poorest.\u201d Bolsonaro, for his part, has dismissed that a coup occurred in Bolivia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lula\u2019s statement was one among a global chorus of left-of-center politicians who spoke out against the coup. On Sunday, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., tweeted, \u201cThere\u2019s a word for the President of a country being pushed out by the military. It\u2019s called a coup.\u201d While many Democratic presidential candidates have remained silent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted, \u201cI am very concerned about what appears to be a coup in Bolivia, where the military, after weeks of political unrest, intervened to remove President Evo Morales.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Much of the U.S. mainstream media, meanwhile, has been reticent to callwhat happened in Bolivia a coup. \u201cI think it\u2019s amazing that U.S. media outlets just explicitly refuse to call it a coup and are going out of their way to say everything but,\u201d Greenwald told Intercepted. \u201cIt just shows how in U.S. discourse, \u2018democracy\u2019 means putting a leader in place who serves U.S. interest, and \u2018tyranny\u2019 or \u2018dictatorship\u2019 means a leader \u2014 even if they\u2019re democratically elected \u2014 who refuses to.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A TURBULENT WEEKEND roiled Latin American politics as a coup in Bolivia forced President Evo Morales aside on Sunday and, days earlier, former Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio \u201cLula\u201d da Silva was freed from prison. Morales spoke Wednesday from Mexico City, where he is in exile, and expressed interest in returning to Bolivia in the wake of what he has described as… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4026,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4025\/revisions\/4026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}