[News] Bolivia's racist coup is trying to drown resistance in blood

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-bolivias-racist-coup-trying-drown-resistance-blood?fbclid=IwAR1_R0-bErG7nRFk3S2Qn963ytB6OAzGn7XCRUYerLeTPbBR1qSg0_tROYE 



  Bolivia's racist coup is trying to drown resistance in blood

Sunday, November 17, 2019

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. 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, 
<http://cepr.net/publications/reports/bolivia-elections-2019-11> 
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.


-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20191118/9424a687/attachment.htm>