[News] What the Right Wing in Latin America Means by Democracy Is Violence

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/what-the-right-wing-in-latin-america-means-by-democracy-is-violence/ 



  What the Right Wing in Latin America Means by Democracy Is Violence

by Vijay Prashad - January 24, 2020/*
*/
------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was a curious exchange. Frustrated by the attacks on his party—the 
Movement for Socialism (MAS)—former president of Bolivia Evo Morales 
made an audio recording in which he called upon his supporters to form 
militias. Maximilian Heath of Reuters went to Argentina to speak with 
Morales about this leaked recording; Morales said 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bolivia-evo/bolivia-exiled-ex-president-morales-calls-on-radio-for-armed-militias-idUSKBN1ZC066>, 
“In Bolivia, if the armed forces are shooting the people, killing the 
people, the people have the right to organize their security.”

Morales’ anxiousness is rooted in fact. The Inter-American Commission on 
Human Rights—a body of the pro-U.S. Organization of American 
States—reported <https://tinyurl.com/sbr258t> in December 2019 that 
there have been a series of massacres conducted by the armed forces of 
the current interim government in Bolivia. The use of the word 
“massacre” in this report is significant; these were not clashes or 
conflicts, but the targeted murder of civilians who supported MAS and 
Morales.

The interim president of Bolivia, Jeanine Áñez Chávez, has made 
inflammatory statements about the indigenous support base of MAS and 
Morales. She has frequently spoken of them with derision, even saying 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/14/what-the-coup-against-evo-morales-means-to-indigenous-people-like-me> 
that she dreams of a Bolivia without “satanic indigenous rites” and that 
“the city is not for the Indians.” Áñez signed Supreme Decree no. 4078 
that exempted the military from any criminal responsibility for its use 
of force; she wants to ban MAS, and her interior minister has filed a 
warrant for the arrest 
<https://twitter.com/ArturoMurilloS/status/1207354063349800962?s=20> of 
Morales. This is a rapid and disturbing attack on the political fabric 
of Bolivia.

*Apology*

Morales’ statement about militias came merely as a way to say that he 
worried about the repression and violence occasioned by the interim 
government and the military, now immune from prosecution. U.S. President 
Donald Trump’s main envoy to Latin America—Mauricio Claver-Carone (who 
organized the bankrupting $57 billion loan to Argentina 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-10-argentina-goes-back-to-the-imf/> 
when he was the U.S. director at the International Monetary Fund)—went 
to Bolivia and attacked 
<https://www.paginasiete.bo/nacional/2020/1/19/es-inaceptable-que-evo-use-argentina-para-fomentar-inestabilidad-violencia-243909.html> 
Morales. Morales, Claver-Carone said, is fomenting insurrection from 
Argentina. This is a bizarre statement.

Morales was re-elected in 2014. There was not a whiff of impropriety in 
that election. He had a mandate to remain in office until January 2020. 
Even if there was a problem in the 2019 election, he should have 
remained in office until this month. But he was removed by a U.S.-backed 
military coup. That coup is not the insurrection that worries 
Claver-Carone. What worries him is that Morales is concerned about his 
supporters who are being intimidated and killed 
<https://www.defensoria.gob.bo/>. It was not the coup, but Morales’ 
statement of anguish that became the scandal. Morales then apologized 
<https://www.eldiario24.com/nota/argentina/443421/evo-morales-se-disculpa-polemica-propuesta-crear-milicias-populares-bolivia.html> 
for his statement.

*Elections*

Bolivia will face an election on May 3. The Movement for Socialism Party 
nominated Luis Arce Catacora, Bolivia’s former minister for the economy, 
as its presidential candidate, and David Choquehuanca, Bolivia’s former 
foreign minister, as its vice-presidential candidate. MAS has been 
deeply bruised. More than 100 government officials from the MAS party 
are either in detention or face criminal charges, while a handful are in 
the Mexican embassy in La Paz (they have been denied safe passage to the 
airport).

The anti-coup uprising in Chapare province led the interior minister 
Arturo Murillo to make a statement 
<https://www.lostiempos.com/actualidad/pais/20191211/murillo-advierte-al-tropico-cuidado-que-ponerse-duros-no-tengan-elecciones> 
that he would perhaps disenfranchise the entire province if the 
rebellion continues (the rebels burned down 
<https://www.opinion.com.bo/articulo/cochabamba/hotel-quemado-murillo-es-vigilado-lugarenos/20191210220056740770.html> 
a hotel that he owns). Supporters of MAS and its party workers are 
afraid to leave their homes, let alone campaign in the election. 
Morales’ statement came as a mirror of their own anxiousness.

No one imagines that there is going to be a “fair election.” The Trump 
administration has said it will send a USAID team to Bolivia to monitor 
the situation, and then to resume U.S. aid to the country; the U.S. will 
also monitor the elections. Between the U.S. monitors and Supreme Decree 
no. 4078, the conditions for a fair election simply do not apply.

And not many outside the region seem to have any problem with this 
attack against democracy.

*‘Staggering Number’*

On January 14, the UN’s human rights body released a brief statement 
<https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25461&LangID=E> 
on the killings of human rights activists in Colombia. The UN said that 
a “staggering number of human rights defenders” were killed last year in 
Colombia; by the UN’s count, between 107 and 120 activists were 
murdered. In 2018, 115 human rights defenders were killed, and in the 
first two weeks of January of this year, 10 human rights defenders have 
already been murdered. Most of them are from left-wing people’s 
organizations.

The UN numbers are conservative. For 2018, the Center for Research and 
Popular Education Peace Program, based in Colombia, documented 
<https://www.cinep.org.co/Home2/component/k2/690-informe-ddhh-violencia-camuflada-la-base-social-en-riesgo.html> 
1,151 death threats, 648 assassinations, and 304 cases of physical 
injuries. But the UN’s trendline is correct. Of the murders last year, 
98 percent took place in very poor rural areas. The killers, the UN 
suggests, are “criminal groups and armed groups linked to illicit 
economies in areas vacated by the FARC-EP 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/newsletter-50-2019-war/>.” 
In other words, right-wing paramilitary groups and their affiliated drug 
gangs have taken advantage of the peace treaty signed by the Left to 
terrorize the countryside.

In the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/peace-neoliberalism-and-political-shifts-in-colombia/> 
on Colombia (December 2019), the argument is made that the Colombian 
oligarchy does not want to move toward peace because this would shift 
the needle of Colombian politics toward the people’s movements and the 
Left. The continuation of the war—now as assassination and 
intimidation—favors the oligarchy. They prefer this violence to 
democratic politics.

These targeted murders and this targeted intimidation is only one part 
of the problem in Latin America. The other is that this region—with its 
outrageous social inequality—experiences violence at extreme levels. 
While Latin America is home to only 8 percent of the world’s population, 
33 percent <https://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/04/29/mundo/021n1mun> of all 
homicides occur in the region. This includes high violence against young 
men, and it includes the highest rates of femicide in the world. None of 
the right-wing governments are interested in addressing this fundamental 
problem for the hemisphere.

What the government of Iván Duque is doing in Colombia is what the 
interim government of Jeanine Áñez is doing in Bolivia—both are using 
extreme state violence against trade unionists and peasant organizers, 
against socialist leaders and indigenous leaders. This extreme violence 
undermines the possibility of democracy and allows the oligarchy to be 
re-elected in polling booths where the Left not dare enter.

*Héroes del Ñancahuazú*

In 2016, Evo Morales inaugurated the General Juan José Torres 
Anti-Imperialist Command School in the town of Warnes. General Juan José 
Torres was the socialist president of Bolivia in 1970-71. He was 
overthrown in a coup by the Bolivian general favored by the CIA, Hugo 
Bánzer. Bánzer had closely worked with the Nazi leader Klaus Barbie to 
set up the CIA-run Operation Condor to search out and kill any and every 
communist in the hemisphere. They killed Torres in 1976. The combination 
of the CIA, Nazis, and the oligarchies of the region is not something 
from the past: Brazil’s culture secretary—Roberto Alvim—recently 
plagiarized 
<https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2020/01/17/roberto-alvim-e-demitido-da-secretaria-de-cultura-apos-copiar-discurso-nazista/> 
a speech from the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.

The interim government’s interim Defense Minister Luis Fernando López 
said that his government has renamed the Anti-Imperialist school. “We 
are not anti-anything,” he said 
<https://erbol.com.bo/nacional/escuela-antiimperialista-pas%C3%B3-llamarse-h%C3%A9roes-del-%C3%B1ancahauz%C3%BA>, 
as if his government is not anti-Morales, anti-MAS, and anti-communist. 
The school has been renamed Héroes del Ñancahuazú.

In 1967, Che Guevara and his National Liberation Army of Bolivia 
operated near the Ñancahuazú River in Bolivia’s southeast. The 
government of General René Barrientos Ortuño, the CIA agent Félix 
Rodríguez, and the Nazi Klaus Barbie ran the operation to destroy 
Guevara’s campaign. They named their operation the Ñancahuazú Campaign. 
The Anti-Imperialist School in Bolivia now honors the men—led by a CIA 
agent and a Nazi—who killed Che Guevara. It sends a message to the Che 
Guevaras of today: We will get you. This is the democracy of the 
oligarchy in Latin America today.

/This article was produced by //Globetrotter/ 
<https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/>/, a project of the 
Independent Media Institute./

/*Vijay Prashad’s* most recent book is No Free Left: The Futures of 
Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015)./

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