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href="https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Bolivia-Elections-Well-Launch-a-Coup-if-Evo-Wins-20191020-0005.html"
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<h1 class="reader-title">Bolivia Elections: 'We’ll Launch a Coup
if Evo Wins'</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Cindy Forster - 20 October
2019 </div>
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<p>The U.S. embassy is always fighting the old race wars,
but its ambitions are larger.</p>
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<p>Elections in Bolivia on October 20 are being watched
closely by those who have followed the astounding
successes of that majority Indigenous nation, now led by
an Indigenous social movement and its mestizo allies
called the Movement toward Socialism (MAS). MAS, which
is both a gathering of labor and grassroots coalitions
and a political instrument, has presided over one of the
hemisphere’s most vibrant economies, especially if
measured by human happiness.</p>
<p>MAS President Evo Morales Ayma is seeking reelection
and leads the contenders by some 20 percent in the
polls. He is a survivor of brutalization by the elite
troops of Bolivia and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
When he was a union leader, they badly beat him and
apparently thought he was dead. His neighbors were raped
by the soldiers, their homes set aflame. Small coca
farmers tell that the United States wanted to eradicate
the poor and not the drug trade, because the oligarchy
was deeply enmeshed in international cocaine trafficking
and the U.S. worked with them hand in glove.</p>
<p>We can assume that Bolivians who think this way are
always in the target sights of the United States. Women
coca farmers, who are mostly Indigenous, took the
initiative to organize collectively from the 1980s
forward. At moments of national tension between the left
and the right, Indigenous women across the country are
beaten by rightwing militants, insulted, and driven out
of public spaces in the cities. The twentieth-century
elites are trying to win back their privileges through
elections, however, facing probable defeat, they are
calling for massive disobedience on the grounds of voter
fraud – a claim with no evidence. Bolivia’s Indigenous
cardinal, recently appointed by the pope, called on all
the candidates to respect the vote of the people. The
vote can be followed in real time on mobile devices. </p>
<p>Events in Bolivia are badly distorted by most
mainstream press that prefers the old ways of doing
things: The era when the U.S. embassy had an office
inside the National Palace and another in Bolivia’s
central bank, before MAS came to the presidency in 2006.</p>
<p>The wisdom of MAS lay in their decision to move with
all possible speed to install the foundations of
people’s power in this nation of 11.5 million. Facing a
recall referendum from the right in 2008, MAS launched a
process of mass participation to invent a constitution
worthy of the people. Bloody aggression was the response
of their political opponents. </p>
<p>The same rightwing shock brigades in the large lowland
city of Santa Cruz that brutalized the poor over a
decade ago, a group calling itself the Union of Santa
Cruz Youth (UJC) that is fond of the symbols of fascism,
mobilized its members to create chaos at a huge MAS
rally on October 15. Their homemade weapons and bombs
were discovered. They beat a police officer, who was
hospitalized in critical condition. The third candidate
in the polls, corporate executive and now senator Oscar
Ortiz, defends the UJC as upstanding youth. Ortiz
promoted, unsuccessfully, the violent secession of the
lowland regions in 2008, with the assistance of the U.S.
ambassador who had presided over the partition of
Yugoslavia.</p>
<p>The Constitution guarantees diverse practices of
democracy: Indigenous or communal, participatory or
grassroots, and representative or electoral. In the
coming 5 years, MAS wishes to anchor rights already in
place, to root them so deeply they can never be removed:
economic sovereignty, cultural dignity for 36 Afro and
Indigenous nations, full personhood for women and an end
to violence, in a nation that now enjoys the
third-highest ratio of women politicians on earth,
universal and free health care, universal and free
education, and universal retirement benefits.</p>
<p>Starting in the first years of MAS governance, sweeping
agrarian reform was enacted with generous credit. Over
half of Bolivians receive state bonds based on need, and
these have kept children in school, eased the hardships
of elders, and cut infant mortality by half. Not even
the leading rightwing candidate, Carlos De Mesa, dares
to touch these programs, or so he says. De Mesa was the
vice president of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the
president who ordered repression that killed 67 people
in 2003, in the Indigenous city of El Alto during the
working-class protests to defend Bolivia’s gas from sale
to foreigners. </p>
<p>According to Evo Morales, De Mesa was anointed as the
U.S. embassy candidate at an embassy function in 2017.
De Mesa’s program is that of the International Monetary
Fund.</p>
<p>Working-class and peasant politicians achieved majority
control of the legislature years ago, many of them young
because MAS was able to lower the age limit from 30
years to 18. Their presence has secured an array of
gender rights, and respect for ancient spiritual
practices that the evangelical right terms “witchcraft.”
More recently, MAS legislators are trying to clean
corruption out of the judiciary. </p>
<p>None of the eight opposition parties are socialist.
They are opposed to an array of state programs
subsidizing cell phones, cooking gas hook-ups,
electricity, internet, piped water, and housing for
those in need at low interest rates that has benefited
hundreds of thousands of people. </p>
<p>In thirteen years since coming to power, MAS has guided
Bolivia from one of the hemisphere’s nations with the
greatest indices of human suffering, to a ranking among
the five countries in the region with the most
egalitarian distribution of income. Poverty has been cut
by more than half and Bolivia enjoys the healthiest
economy in South America. </p>
<p>The economic strategy called miraculous by agencies of
the United Nations such as the Food and Agriculture
Organization and the Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean, by rightwing journals, by the
BBC, and even by the World Bank, is premised on “the
bellies and the wallets of all Bolivians.” These are the
words of Abrahám Pérez of the Bolivian Network for the
Practice of Critical Economics, which in the 1990s
devised a systematic plan based on “the constant
strengthening of internal demand,” precisely “to
withstand the shocks and assaults of the global
economy.” </p>
<p>The strategy has involved, first, progressive
nationalization of natural resources and companies
serving fundamental needs. Second, building the
industrial capacity to process subsoil resources has
yielded many millions in added value. Third, the state
invested the profits from expropriated companies and
subsoil riches in the most pressing needs of the poor
majority. In addition, a significant amount of the
redistributed wealth comes from the flattening or
lowering of the highest salaries of public servants.
These straightforward and successful measures are
anathema to the opposition parties.</p>
<p>Coup plans</p>
<p>Since the beginnings of MAS power, the attempts to
overthrow a government made up of Indigenous, youth and
women have been varied and intense, but almost always
with the same core actors, people who absorbed the
riches of the country during the neoliberal era when
they themselves governed. </p>
<p>The emotions of the right have reached a fever pitch
with the elections. Constitutionally recognized flags of
Indigenous unity –the wiphala– are being banned from
opposition rallies, burned and dirtied. Women who are
Aymara street vendors and Quechua MAS members have been
attacked during rightwing rallies in public plazas. Men
who attend public MAS meetings suffer greater physical
violence from the gangs of opposition youth who attack
the perimeters of the political meetings. One can see
such things as an effigy of the Indigenous president
held up on a stick, swinging like a lynched corpse.
While the neoliberal elites welcome into their midst
Indigenous individuals who think like themselves, it’s
clear that their party faithful are fighting the old
race wars.</p>
<p>The U.S. embassy is always fighting the old race wars,
but its ambitions are larger. Bolivia’s MAS is widely
admired for its extraordinary economic skill, and for
its courage in international arenas where Bolivian
leadership has challenged the world to achieve peace, to
reverse climate change, to honor the planet, its waters
and of course its original peoples, to abolish borders,
to dismantle U.S. hegemony, and to forge a coherent
challenge to neoliberal thinking and practice. </p>
<p>The U.S. has staged coups with much less reason, and
president Evo Morales reports that such coup plans are
in progress according to “information gathered from
so-called civic committees in Cochabamba and in La Paz,
that involve former or inactive-duty military men, as
well as some members of the Santa Cruz civic committee.
They have been meeting. I have recordings of their
conversations, they are preparing and saying: ‘We’ll
launch the coup d’etat if Evo wins’.” </p>
<p>Bolivia votes today to decide on a political project
that serves us all.</p>
<p><em>By Cindy Forster, professor of history in
California, now collecting testimonies of African and
Indigenous struggle in the Caribbean and Latin
America.</em></p>
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