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href="https://fair.org/home/how-the-global-norths-left-media-helped-pave-the-way-for-bolivias-right-wing-coup/">https://fair.org/home/how-the-global-norths-left-media-helped-pave-the-way-for-bolivias-right-wing-coup/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">How the Global North’s Left Media
Helped Pave the Way for Bolivia’s Right-Wing Coup</h1>
<b>by Lucas Koerner - December 10, 2019<br>
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<p>In our brave new age of <a
href="https://globalsecurityreview.com/hybrid-and-non-linear-warfare-systematically-erases-the-divide-between-war-peace/">hybrid
warfare</a>, corporate media play the role of
ideological heavy artillery within the arsenal of
Western imperialist powers. Day in and day out,
“reputable” establishment outlets bombard progressive
and/or anti-imperialist governments in the Global South
with endless salvos of smears and libelous
misrepresentations (e.g., <b>FAIR.org</b>, <a
href="https://fair.org/home/media-delegitimize-venezuelan-elections-amid-complete-unanimity-of-outlook/">5/23/18</a>,
<a
href="https://fair.org/home/distorting-past-and-present-reuters-on-nicaraguas-armed-uprising/">8/23/18</a>,
<a
href="https://fair.org/home/dictator-media-code-for-government-we-dont-like/">4/11/19</a>,
<a
href="https://fair.org/home/vox-cia-iran-saudi-arabia-middle-east-cold-war/">7/25/19</a>).</p>
<p>The cumulative effect is to delegitimize any government
that does not abide by Western dictates, justifying
coups, murderous economic sanctions, proxy wars and even
full-scale invasions. The recent US-sponsored coup
d’etat in Bolivia is an instructive case study. In the
leadup to Evo Morales’ military ouster, Western media
routinely impugned the indigenous president’s democratic
credentials, despite his having won re-election by a
sizeable margin (<b>FAIR.org</b>,<a
href="https://fair.org/home/media-conceal-chiles-state-criminality-delegitimize-bolivian-democracy/">
11/5/19</a>).</p>
<p>But corporate outlets have not been alone in attacking
Morales. Progressive and alternative media in the Global
North have long portrayed Bolivia’s deposed Movement
Towards Socialism (MAS) government as repressive,
pro-capitalist and anti-environment—all in the name of
“left” critique. Regardless of the stated intention, the
net result was to weaken already anemic opposition
within Western imperial states to the destruction they
inflict abroad.</p>
<h3><b>Equivocating around the coup</b></h3>
<p>In the wake of the November 10 coup, corporate
journalists predictably played their part in gaslighting
the public, presenting the fascist putsch as a
“democratic transition” (<b>FAIR.org</b>, <a
href="https://fair.org/home/the-bolivian-coup-is-not-a-coup-because-us-wanted-it-to-happen/">11/11/19</a>,
<a
href="https://fair.org/home/western-media-whitewash-bolivias-far-right-coup/">11/15/19</a>).</p>
<p>Truly astonishing, however, was the response of Western
progressive media, whom one might have expected to
unequivocally denounce the coup and demand the immediate
reinstatement of Evo Morales.</p>
<p>A dismaying number did not.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of Morales’s ouster, <b>Towards
Freedom </b>(<a
href="https://towardfreedom.org/story/kristallnacht-in-bolivia/">11/11/19</a>,
<a
href="https://towardfreedom.org/blog-blog/silvia-rivera-cusicanqui-bolivias-lesson-in-triumphalism/">11/15/19</a>,
<a
href="https://towardfreedom.org/story/bolivia-evos-fall-the-fascist-right-and-the-power-of-memory/">11/16/19</a>)
published the perspectives of several Bolivian and Latin
American intellectuals playing down the reality of a
coup d’etat and drawing false equivalences between the
Morales government and the fascist right. Other articles
posted in days prior accused the government of fraud,
justifying the coup to come (<b>Towards Freedom</b>, <a
href="https://towardfreedom.org/story/upheaval-in-bolivia-lurches-towards-disaster/">11/8/19</a>,
<a
href="https://towardfreedom.org/story/bolivia-new-elections-are-not-enough/">11/10/19</a>).
The Vermont-based outlet, with <a
href="https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/special-reports-archives/waging-peace-in-the-cold-war-toward-freedom-and-the-non-aligned-movement/">historic
ties</a> to the Non-Aligned Movement, declined to
publish any alternative Bolivian points of view
unambiguously opposing the coup.</p>
<p>Other progressive outlets correctly identified Morales’
overthrow as a coup, but felt compelled to question the
indigenous leader’s democratic legitimacy for the sake
of “nuance.”</p>
<p>While condemning the coup and rightly dismissing the
baseless electoral fraud allegations, the editorial
board of <b>NACLA Report on the Americas</b> (<a
href="https://nacla.org/news/2019/11/13/nacla-statement-coup-bolivia-solidarity-bolivians-resisting-military-intervention">11/13/19</a>)
nevertheless refrained from voicing solidarity with
Morales and the MAS party. Instead, the publication took
MAS to task for the “slow erosion of progressive
aspirations” and its failure to transform the
“patriarchal and prebendal political system.” Even <b>NACLA</b>’s
denunciation of the coup was at best lukewarm, citing
“MAS’s own role and a history of political
miscalculations,” before noting that “the unfolding
pattern of rightist revanchism, the role of oligarchic
forces and external actors, and the final arbitrating
role played by the military, suggests that we are
witnessing a coup.”</p>
<p>A subsequent article published by <b>NACLA</b> (<a
href="https://nacla.org/news/2019/11/15/Bolivia-Morales-Camacho">10/15/19</a>)
preferred to debate whether Morales’ military ouster
constituted a coup, failing to note the baseless
character of the OAS’s fraud allegations and attributing
the fascist right’s “racialized violence” to
“polarization.” The authors, Linda Farthing and Olivia
Arigho-Stiles, actually made the outlandish claim that
assessing if Morales’ ouster was bad for democracy was
“complicated.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a <b>Verso Blog </b>interview (<a
href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4493-the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-macho-camacho-jeffery-r-webber-with-forrest-hylton-on-the-coup-in-bolivia">11/15/19</a>)
with Forrest Hylton and Jeffrey Webber made no call for
Morales’ democratic mandate to be respected, instead
urging international leftists to “insist on the right of
Bolivians to self-determination” without “refrain[ing]
from criticism of Morales.”</p>
<p>Far from outliers, these editorial positions are very
much par for the course in progressive media coverage of
Bolivia over the past months and years.</p>
<h3><b>The making of an ecocidal murderer </b></h3>
<p>In the leadup to the October 20 election, many outlets
drew or otherwise insinuated false equivalences between
Morales and Brazilian ultra-right President Jair
Bolsonaro in response to the tropical forest fires in
both nations.</p>
<p>Despite rejecting such an equivalence, <b>NACLA</b> (<a
href="https://nacla.org/news/2019/08/30/understanding-fires-south-america-amazon">8/30/19</a>)
nonetheless blamed the policies of both “extractivist
governments” for “stoking destruction in the Amazon and
beyond,” while casting Global North countries as having
a responsibility to exert effective “pressure” in lieu
of paying their historically accrued climate debt.</p>
<p>Others were less subtle. Writing for UK-based <b>Novara
Media </b>(<a
href="https://novaramedia.com/2019/08/26/its-not-just-brazils-forests-that-are-burning-bolivia-is-on-fire-too/">8/26/19</a>),
Claire Wordley explicitly compared the Morales
government to Bolsonaro in Brazil, calling MAS policies
“every bit as extractivist and damaging as those of the
capitalists Morales claims to hate.” More damning, she
cites Jhanisse Vaca-Daza, a <a
href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/29/western-regime-change-operatives-launch-campaign-to-blame-bolivias-evo-morales-for-the-amazon-fires/">Western-backed
regime change operative</a>, to disparage the Morales
government’s handling of the fires.</p>
<div id="attachment_9011256" class="wp-caption">
<p id="caption-attachment-9011256"
class="wp-caption-text"><em>Manuela Picq (<strong>Truthout</strong>,
<a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/bolivian-president-evo-morales-ecocide-is-a-genocide/">9/26/19</a>)
charges Evo Morales with “genocide.”</em></p>
</div>
<p>A piece in<b> Truthout </b>(<a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/bolivian-president-evo-morales-ecocide-is-a-genocide/">9/26/19</a>)
took hyperbolic slander to new heights, likening Morales
to Bolsonaro and accusing the Bolivian leader of
“genocide.” “Evo Morales played green for a long-time,
but his government is deeply colonial…like Bolsonaro in
Brazil,” Manuela Picq wrote, going on to cite unnamed
“Bolivians” who brand the indigenous president a
“murderer of nature.” Picq offered no analysis
concerning how Western leftists’ failure to shift
imperialist political-economic relations has contributed
to Global South countries’ ongoing dependence on
extractive industries.</p>
<p>The “extractivist” critiques of Morales are hardly new,
going back to his government’s controversial 2011 plan
to build a highway through the Isiboro Secure Indigenous
Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). As Federico
Fuentes pointed out in <b>Green Left Weekly </b>(republished
in <b>NACLA</b>, <a
href="https://nacla.org/news/2014/5/21/south-america-how-%E2%80%98anti-extractivism%E2%80%99-misses-forest-trees">5/21/14</a>),
the dominant extractivism/anti-extractivism frame of the
conflict served to obscure the political and economic
dimensions of imperialism.</p>
<p>While the highway did indeed engender important
endogenous opposition—which was largely centered on the
route, rather than the project per se—the main
organization behind the protests, the Confederación de
Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia, was being <a
href="http://isj.org.uk/the-morales-government-neoliberalism-in-disguise/">financed
by Washington and backed by the right-wing Santa Cruz
oligarchy</a>.</p>
<p>Although the USAID’s funding of the Confederación is
publicly notorious, many progressive outlets prefer to
omit it from their reporting (<b>NACLA</b>, <a
href="https://nacla.org/article/contested-development-geopolitics-bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-conflict">8/1/13</a>,
<a
href="https://nacla.org/blog/2017/08/22/why-evo-morales-reviving-bolivia%E2%80%99s-controversial-tipnis-road">8/21/17</a>,
<a
href="https://nacla.org/news/2019/11/19/bolivia-morales-coup">11/20/19</a>;
<b>ROAR</b>, <a
href="https://roarmag.org/essays/bolivia-authoritarianism-mas-elections/">11/3/14</a>,
<a
href="https://roarmag.org/essays/bolivia-morales-cocaleros-repression/">3/11/14</a>;
<b>In These Times</b>, <a
href="http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/14202/indigenous_movements_clash_with_latin_americas_left_turn/">11/16/12</a>;
<b>Viewpoint Magazine</b>, <a
href="https://www.viewpointmag.com/2019/11/18/origins-of-the-crisis-on-the-coup-in-bolivia/">11/18/19</a>).
When foreign interference is mentioned, it is generally
presented as an unsubstantiated allegation from the
Morales government.</p>
<p>In a particularly revealing case, <b>ROAR</b> (<a
href="https://roarmag.org/essays/bolivia-authoritarianism-mas-elections/">11/3/14</a>)
detailed, among its laundry list of “authoritarian” MAS
abuses, “obstructing the free functioning of…several
NGOs that have sided with the TIPNIS protests,” but
avoided any mention of foreign and local right-wing ties
to those same NGOs.</p>
<p>This whitewashing of imperialist structure and agency
ultimately allows Morales to be vulgarly caricatured as
a two-faced “strongman” who “gives to the poor but takes
from the environment” (<b>In These Times</b>, <a
href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/17850/bolivias-president-the-two-faces-of-evo">8/27/15</a>).</p>
<h3><b>Passive solidarity?</b></h3>
<p>The “extractivist” critique circulated by many
progressive outlets foregrounds a more generalized
reproach of the MAS for failing to live up to its
socialist discourse.</p>
<div id="attachment_9011257" class="wp-caption">
<p id="caption-attachment-9011257"
class="wp-caption-text"><em><strong>Jacobin</strong> (<a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/morales-bolivia-chavez-castro-mas/">10/29/15</a>)
saw in Morales’ administration “disquieting new
forms of class rule and domination.”</em></p>
</div>
<p>Writing in <b>Jacobin </b>(<a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/managing-bolivian-capitalism/">1/12/14</a>;
also see <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/morales-bolivia-chavez-castro-mas/">10/29/15</a>),
Jeffrey Webber accused the MAS of running a
“compensatory state,” whose legitimacy “conferred by
relatively petty handouts runs on the blood of
extraction.” Under this top-down “passive revolution,”
the “repressive” state “co-opts and
coerces…opposition…and builds an accompanying
ideological apparatus to defend multinationals.”</p>
<p>Webber’s long-running argument that the legacy of
Bolivia’s MAS government is “<a
href="https://isreview.org/issue/73/rebellion-reform">reconstituted
neoliberalism</a>” has been challenged by critics, who
<a
href="https://isreview.org/issue/76/government-social-movements-and-revolution-bolivia-today">point</a>
to the shifting terrain of class forces under Morales.</p>
<p>Bracketing the empirical veracity of Webber’s claims,
it is striking that he dedicates virtually no space to
exploring the role Western imperial states play in
reproducing Bolivia’s extractive model and constraining
possibilities for its transcendence.</p>
<p>Rather, the focus is always on MAS’s allegedly
insidious agency “on behalf of capital,” and scarcely
ever on Western leftists’ own anti-imperialist
impotence, which never appears as an independent
variable in explaining the Global South’s revolutionary
failings.</p>
<p>The political effect of such one-sided analysis is to
effectively equate the “neoliberal” MAS with its
right-wing opponents, given that, as Webber put it,
“Morales has been a better night watchman over private
property and financial affairs than the right could have
hoped for.”</p>
<p>Such lines might come as a surprise to current readers
of <b>Jacobin</b>, which has fiercely opposed the coup
(e.g., <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/bolivia-coup-evo-morales-jeanine-anes-indigenous-violence">11/14/19</a>,
<a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/coup-bolivia-history-evo-morales-jeanine-anez">11/18/19</a>,
<a
href="https://jacobinmag.com/2019/12/bolivia-coup-evo-morales-jeanine-anez">12/3/19</a>),
whose fascist brutality has thrown to the wind any
notion of left/right equivalence. But by now, the damage
is already done.</p>
<h3><b>Anti-imperialist reckoning </b></h3>
<p>For all the current talk of a <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/seattle-world-trade-organization-protests-socialism">leftist
resurgence</a> in the Global North, it is a paradox
that anti-imperialist movements are weaker now than they
were at the height of the Iraq War 15 years ago.</p>
<p>It is undeniable that the absence of popular opposition
to Western imperial interventions, from Libya and Syria
to Haiti and Honduras, has paved the way for the coup in
Bolivia and the ongoing onslaught against Venezuela.</p>
<p>It is likewise indisputable that Western progressive
media coverage of the Morales government and its
left-leaning counterparts in the region has not helped
to repair this void of solidarity. This editorial stance
is particularly troubling, given Morales’ outspoken
international advocacy against <a
href="https://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/21/evo_morales_opens_climate_change_conference">climate
change</a> and for<a
href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israel-is-a-terrorist-state-seven-times-bolivia-and-morales-took-a-stance-for-palestine/">
Palestinian liberation</a>.</p>
<p>None of this is to proscribe criticism of Morales and
the MAS. Indeed, in the context of places like Bolivia
and Venezuela, the task of left-wing media is to produce
critical, grassroots analysis of states and popular
movements that is anti-imperialist in both content and
form. That is, the contradictions endemic to the
political process (e.g., the TIPNIS dispute) must be
contextualized within the imperial parameters of the
capitalist world-system. Moreover, Northern progressive
outlets—no matter the intensity of their critiques of
the state and political process—must stake a clear
editorial position defending Global South governments
against Western intervention.</p>
<p>The firm positions taken by <a
href="https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1193657983219257344">Jeremy
Corbyn</a> and <a
href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-stance-on-bolivia-matters/">Bernie
Sanders</a> against the coup in Bolivia are a hopeful
sign on the political front. The job of progressive
media is to produce truly alternative journalism
dedicated to effectively resisting empire.</p>
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