[News] With the right-wing coup in Bolivia nearly complete, the junta is hunting down the last remaining dissidents

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/27/right-wing-coup-bolivia-complete-junta-hunting-dissidents/ 



  With the right-wing coup in Bolivia nearly complete, the junta is
  hunting down the last remaining dissidents

On the day of my scheduled interview with a leftist Bolivian journalist, 
I learned that he had been disappeared. Every outspoken opponent of the 
military junta is a target and subjected to charges of sedition.


      By Wyatt Reed - November 27, 2019
      <https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/27/right-wing-coup-bolivia-complete-junta-hunting-dissidents/>

*La Paz, Bolivia* – A brutal military junta that seized power from 
Bolivia’s democratically elected President Evo Morales is violently 
repressing a working-class indigenous-led uprising, and the country is 
rapidly falling under its control.

Soldiers in military fatigues prowl the streets, enforcing a series of 
choke points around the seat of power. Anyone perceived as standing 
against the status quo is now subject to being arrested on charges of 
sedition or terrorism. Dissident journalists and Morales sympathizers 
have been forced into hiding, leaving the house only when necessary.

“It’s a fascist dictatorship, there’s no hiding it,” says Federico Koba, 
a left-wing journalist who asked that I not use his real name for fear 
of arrest. “There are paramilitary agents going around the city taking 
pictures and pinpointing who’s who. Who is a leader, who is recording 
the protests, who is recording the repression.”

I met with Koba, an activist and journalist with the leftist news site 
La Resistencia Bolivia, on the evening of November 24th. I had initially 
planned to meet with his co-worker, who asked that I refer to him by the 
pseudonym of Carlos Mujica because he too feared being jailed for his 
activism.

But on the day of our scheduled interview, Mujica never showed up. He 
was lying low, having had his house searched and ransacked by police the 
night before the coup.

Hours later, I received a brief message from him: “Bro, I can’t talk 
right now. I’m in jail.”

Mujica’s friends went to every prison in the city looking for him, but 
he was nowhere to be found. The next day, he was released after an 
intense interrogation session in an unlisted facility. He immediately 
went into hiding, disconnecting himself completely from social media, 
which his peers now believe has been compromised by the coup regime.

The atmosphere was grim when I met with Koba and some of his colleagues. 
“We know for sure we’re on a list – we’ve seen it, and what they did to 
Carlos confirms it,” one member of La Resistencia told me.

After the interview with Koba, he waved off my suggestion that we get a 
beer.

“Maybe someday, after all this is over, we can do that,” he said. So we 
drove around under the cover of darkness instead, doubling back and 
making frequent turns to make sure we weren’t being followed.

“That truck could belong to the cops, or the paramilitaries,” he 
remarked, as we circled a roundabout multiple times to allow it to pass.


      “Not a single shot was fired”

Since their country was taken over by far-right landowning elites 
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/bolivia-coup-fascist-foreign-support-fernando-camacho/>, 
virtually every leftist Bolivian with a public profile has begun to feel 
the heat. Even relative newcomers to politics bear the scars of repression.

Minutes after I met another Bolivian citizen journalist, who had first 
picked up a camera just weeks before, as the coup kicked off, he hiked 
up his pant leg to show me the wound he’d sustained the day before. He 
had been shot with a rubber bullet while documenting the military’s 
offensive against the residents of El Alto.

Days after the coup sent Morales into exile, residents of the mostly 
indigenous working-class city of El Alto encircled a gas plant called 
Senkata, cutting off the nearby Bolivian capital of La Paz from its main 
source of cooking gas. In response, the same military and police forces 
that had conspired with fascist paramilitaries to force Morales from 
office unleashed a ferocious wave of violence on the largely unarmed 
protesters.

I arrived just after the worst of the massacre. The “terrorists” – as 
the Bolivian military junta and press have dubbed the self-organized 
patrols of mainly unarmed indigenous youth and mothers – were decidedly 
less violent than one might expect. Instead of the guns and dynamite 
which coup-supporting Bolivians insist they wield, I saw only cell 
phones and /polleras/, the traditional dresses worn by many of Bolivia’s 
indigenous women.

But that did little to prevent them from being mowed down over the 
course of several hours. While the official death toll from the Senkata 
massacre now stands at nine, a seemingly endless series of victims’ 
family members 
<https://twitter.com/wyattreed13/status/1198737206724190210>told the 
OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) that the real 
number was most certainly higher, as many as 25 deaths.

Their harrowing testimonies painted a picture of unhinged soldiers 
firing at random out of helicopters and from sniper perches. Mothers 
sobbed as they held up photos of their children. Many had been gunned 
down as they went to or from work; still more had simply disappeared.

Nearly a week later, their families are beginning to assume that they 
were killed by soldiers, who subsequently hid the bodies in order to 
lower the official number of casualties.

But the military junta now in control begged to differ. Interior 
Minister Arturo Murillo has publicly insisted that “not a single shot 
was fired.”

It was an account echoed by the head doctor of the Corazon de Jesus 
Trauma Center. He allowed me inside the medical clinic only after a crew 
of five nurses had scrubbed the puddles of blood from the floors. The 
doctor then insisted that only two of the victims could be confirmed as 
gunshot victims, and that their wounds were consistent with a .22 
caliber weapon – in his words, “non-military weapons.”

How someone with no training as a forensic pathologist could come to 
such a conclusion is confounding, but what is well known in Bolivia 
today is that any medical professional who contradicts the official 
narrative risks criminalization.

After a video of a crying medical professional in Senkata denouncing the 
horrific violence went viral, he was arrested just days later after the 
Bolivian regime accused him of being a “fake doctor.”


      A laboratory for junta’s post-truth information war

The wrath of the Añez junta government extends across the Bolivian left. 
Virtually anyone who represents a perceived challenge to the status quo 
is liable to be hit with manufactured charges of “sedition” or “terrorism.”

As Koba explained during our clandestine nighttime drive, “they are 
trying to repress not only protesters that march, but anyone that says 
different from what the government says is happening. So they are 
repressing any media outlet that tries to show the repression and the 
assassinations, the killings, and show the evidence, and show the 
protests, and show the marches. Everything that’s against the coup is 
being harassed and is being attacked.”

He continued: “A lot of small and medium-sized media outlets have been 
shut down or have been forced to not show what’s going on, and others 
have been paid to show what they tell them to. So it’s a very serious 
situation in the freedom of speech department – not only the human 
rights department – because as I think the world has seen, these guys 
haven’t held back in using all the force at their disposal.”

Prestige and prominence is no protection under the rule of the junta. 
Even five-time Emmy-winning journalist Carlos Montero and Juan Manuel 
Karg were forced from the country after one fanatically right-wing 
senator labelled them “insufferable communists” 
<https://twitter.com/CarmenEGonzale2/status/1198409636573073408>who were 
“sticking their dirty noses in Bolivia.”

Police hit an Al-Jazeera reporter transmitting from the Plaza Murillo in 
La Paz in the face with tear gas 
<https://twitter.com/malonebarry/status/1195513931881680901>as she 
attempted to deliver her report.

And Telesur, one of the last remaining news channels to give a voice to 
opponents of the coup government, had numerous correspondents kicked out 
of the country on accusations of “sedition” before the station was 
officially removed from the airwaves 
<https://twitter.com/pvillegas_tlSUR/status/1197632855041552385>on 
November 21st.

But the repression of international media has paled in comparison to the 
right-wing repression of local Bolivian media. Within days of the coup, 
José Aramayo, director of Radio CSUTCB – an ally of Morales – was 
chained to a tree 
<https://twitter.com/Mision_Verdad/status/1193326073737629696>as 
paramilitary members frogmarched his staff out of their office.

As Koba explained, Bolivian media outlets now face a choice: either you 
take a bribe, or your life will be made extremely difficult. In this 
atmosphere, opposing viewpoints are virtually non-existent on Bolivian 
TV, which now runs PSAs warning that Evo Morales is trying to starve the 
audience 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/24/bolivia-evo-morales-vow-jail-rest-life-arturo-murillo>.

“We are almost alone in showing what’s going on,” Koba said of the 
threatened band of leftist reporters still active in Bolivia. “The 
traditional media is just showing what they can’t hide. But they of 
course deny the evidence. They say that these were inside jobs – that 
/cocaleros/and El Alto people are killing themselves.”


      “Everything is upside down”

In the Alice in Wonderland “post-truth” reality enforced by the junta, 
he exclaimed, “The progressives are the fascists. They say that we are 
the fascists! They say that we are the violent ones, that we are the 
terrorists. They say that we are the ones who performed the coup from a 
long time before with this alleged fraud, this supposed fraud.”

While a few scattered progressives in the US Congress have registered 
their condemnation of the coup, the damage has been done, and the plot 
has been fulfilled.

The far-right demagogues who forced Morales have consolidated control, 
and as Koba says, “they tried to turn everything upside down so the 
‘election fraud’ was a coup, and the coup was a return to democracy; the 
paramilitary forces are pacifying forces; the fascists are the democrats.”

Everything,” he says, “is upside down.”

Bolivia has become “a huge laboratory for post-truth and 21st century 
coups that use everything that they have gathered up from their 
experiences in Nicaraguan and Venezuela, onto Honduras…. Brazil and 
Argentina,” Koba maintained.

In 2008, “they tried to throw a coup here, and they were unsuccessful, 
but they learned from their mistakes…. This has been a laboratory to use 
all of their guns – the post-truth, the paramilitary, the civil 
movements being financed by NGOs and by foreign fascist organizations.”

Now, Koba warns, “anyone who says that this isn’t a transitional 
government is accused of creating sedition. And everything is sedition. 
Posting on social media is sedition, talking about the violent 
repression is sedition, saying what you think is sedition.”

According to Koba, “The only thing that they haven’t been able to do, is 
to convince the international community that this is a democratic 
transition. Of course, that’s the only thing that we have in our favor, 
that the international community has seen the repression, has seen all 
the human rights violations.”

As Bolivia returns to the dark days of de facto rule by a ruthless, 
US-backed military junta, Koba’s voice is among only a few who still 
dare to speak out in protest.

After a long and sobering discussion, we returned to downtown La Paz. I 
shook his hand and wished him well, unsure when – or if I would see him 
again.


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