[News] The U.S.-Supported Coup in Bolivia Continues to Produce Repression and Tyranny, While Revealing How U.S. Media Propaganda Works

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-in-bolivia-continues-to-produce-repression-and-tyranny-while-revealing-how-u-s-media-propaganda-works/
The
U.S.-Supported Coup in Bolivia Continues to Produce Repression and Tyranny,
While Revealing How U.S. Media Propaganda Works
Glenn Greenwald - July 23, 2020
------------------------------

*Today’s SYSTEM UPDATE episode on this topic — with guests Kathryn Ledebur,
director of the Andean Information Network, who has lived and worked with
coca farmers in Bolivia for the last 30 years, and Mark Weisbrot,
co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research — will debut at
2:00 p.m. on The Intercept’s YouTube channel
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgxK9w5DSvQ>.*

[image: Bolivian Interim President Jeanine Anez takes part in a ceremony
with the police in front of the Presidential Palace, in La Paz, Bolivia
November 13, 2019. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez - RC2GAD9GFWF0]
<https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/01/RTX78P76-1579877314-e1579877416856.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90>

Bolivian Interim President Jeanine Áñez takes part in a ceremony with the
police in front of the Presidential Palace in La Paz, Bolivia, on Nov. 13,
2019.

Photo: Luisa Gonzalez/Reuters

*The U.S.-supported military coup* in Bolivia has largely disappeared from
western news outlets ever since the November, 2019 massacres
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/20/bolivia-el-alto-violence-death-protest>
of pro-democracy protesters by the right-wing faction that seized power.
But for Bolivians, the repression and tyranny that replaced their stable
and thriving democracy endures. And, predictably, the “interim President”
installed after the coup, Jeanine Áñez, continues to rule the country ten
months later, despite no possibility of being democratically elected, while
she and her party plot how to prevent an election which all polls show
<https://www.france24.com/en/20200316-morales-pick-leads-in-bolivia-opinion-polls>
will result in victory for the socialist party of toppled President Evo
Morales.

What makes the coup in Bolivia and its aftermath so worthwhile to explore
is not just the inherent importance of Bolivia itself: a country of 11
million people with a rich and unique ethnic, cultural and religious
diversity, as well as an ample supply of the now-vital resource of lithium.
It is also instructive because of how U.S. discourse evolved in support of
the coup
<https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/>,
with supposed “foreign policy experts” across the political spectrum — the
Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk, Mother Jones’ editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery,
former Obama official and Stanford Professor Michael McFaul, along with the
Economist, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — spouting outright
falsehoods to depict the destruction of Bolivian democracy as the salvation
of it.

Since the coup last October, many of the key claims used to justify the
ousting of Morales — most particularly claims by the Organization of
American States that the election resulting in Morales’ victory was
fraudulent — have been proven to have been lies
<https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/>.
Yet not a single one of the foreign policy “experts” or media outlets have
acknowledged their errors or even addressed these subsequent revelations,
because they know that there are never any consequences for journalists and
analysts as long as they remain subservient to the U.S. Government agenda
(while the New York Times reported on the studies proving the OAS claims to
be baseless, they never acknowledged that their own reporting and
editorializing treated those claims as true).

Bolivia is but the latest of a long line of thriving, stable democracies
destroyed with the support if not the outright participation of the U.S.
Government, while jingoistic media figures disseminated the propaganda used
to justify it all. And the suffering, violence, repression and tyranny left
in its wake are then simply ignored by those who helped bring it about.
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