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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/27/right-wing-coup-bolivia-complete-junta-hunting-dissidents/">https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/27/right-wing-coup-bolivia-complete-junta-hunting-dissidents/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">With the right-wing coup in Bolivia
nearly complete, the junta is hunting down the last remaining
dissidents</h1>
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.</div>
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<h3><font size="-1">By Wyatt Reed - <span
class="cat-links"> </span> <span class="posted-on"><a
href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/27/right-wing-coup-bolivia-complete-junta-hunting-dissidents/"
rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published"
datetime="2019-11-27T00:28:44-05:00">November
27, 2019</time></a></span></font></h3>
<p><span><strong>La Paz, Bolivia</strong> – 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. </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>“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.”</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>Hours later, I received a brief message from him:
</span><span>“Bro, I can’t talk right now. I’m in jail.”</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>After the interview with Koba, he waved off my
suggestion that we get a beer. </span></p>
<p><span>“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. </span></p>
<p><span>“That truck could belong to the cops, or the
paramilitaries,” he remarked, as we circled a
roundabout multiple times to allow it to pass.</span></p>
<h3>“Not a single shot was fired”</h3>
<p><span>Since their country was taken over by <a
href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/bolivia-coup-fascist-foreign-support-fernando-camacho/">far-right
landowning elites</a>, virtually every leftist
Bolivian with a public profile has begun to feel the
heat. Even relative newcomers to politics bear the
scars of repression. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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 </span><i><span>polleras</span></i><span>,
the traditional dresses worn by many of Bolivia’s
indigenous women.</span></p>
<p><span>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 </span><a
href="https://twitter.com/wyattreed13/status/1198737206724190210"><span>seemingly
endless series of victims’ family members</span></a><span>
told the OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights (CIDH) that the real number was most certainly
higher, as many as 25 deaths. </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>But the military junta now in control begged to
differ. Interior Minister Arturo Murillo has publicly
insisted that “not a single shot was fired.” </span></p>
<p><span>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.” </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<h3>A laboratory for junta’s post-truth information war</h3>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>Prestige and prominence is no protection under
the rule of the junta. Even five</span><span>-time
Emmy-winning journalist Carlos Montero and Juan Manuel
Karg were forced from the country after </span><a
href="https://twitter.com/CarmenEGonzale2/status/1198409636573073408"><span>one
fanatically right-wing senator labelled them
“insufferable communists”</span></a><span> who were
“sticking their dirty noses in Bolivia.” </span></p>
<p><span>Police hit an Al-Jazeera reporter transmitting
from the Plaza Murillo in La Paz </span><a
href="https://twitter.com/malonebarry/status/1195513931881680901"><span>in
the face with tear gas</span></a><span> as she
attempted to deliver her report.</span></p>
<p><span>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 </span><a
href="https://twitter.com/pvillegas_tlSUR/status/1197632855041552385"><span>was
officially removed from the airwaves</span></a><span>
on November 21st. </span></p>
<p><span>But the repression of international media has
paled in comparison to the right-wing repression of
local Bolivian media. </span><span>Within days of the
coup, </span><span>José Aramayo, director of Radio
CSUTCB – an ally of Morales – </span><a
href="https://twitter.com/Mision_Verdad/status/1193326073737629696"><span>was
chained to a tree</span></a><span> as paramilitary
members frogmarched his staff out of their office. </span></p>
<p><span>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, </span><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/24/bolivia-evo-morales-vow-jail-rest-life-arturo-murillo"><span>which
now runs PSAs warning that Evo Morales is trying to
starve the audience</span></a><span>.</span></p>
<p><span>“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 </span><i><span>cocaleros</span></i><span>
and El Alto people are killing themselves.”</span></p>
<h3>“Everything is upside down”</h3>
<p><span>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.” </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>Everything,” he says, “is upside down.” </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>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.” </span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
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