Bolivia: Coup d'état and settling of scores

Matias Bosch Carcuro
Professor at APEC University (UNAPEC) – Dominican Republic.
Grandson of former president Juan Bosch

“They have the power, they can overwhelm us, but social processes cannot be stopped by crime or force. History is ours and it is made by the people.” These are the words of Salvador Allende, in his speech from the La Moneda Palace, besieged by the coup plotters on September 11, 1973.

The event that evokes these words today is the overthrow of Evo Morales Ayma and his entire government, including the president of the Senate, prompted by the appearance of the police and military leadership demanding their resignations. The homes of officials were marked and raided, including Morales's own. Shock troops with heavy weaponry roamed the streets; groups like the "Juventud Cruceña" (Santa Cruz Youth) staged the Nazi salute on camera; the monument to José Martí in the city of Santa Cruz was desecrated; and the military violently repressed the protests. It was a dramatic scenario that governments, former presidents, Nobel laureates, the former Secretary General of the OAS, and leaders from around the world have unequivocally denounced, despite the expected exceptions.

How can we understand this event?

No one could accuse Evo Morales's government of plunging Bolivia into an economic and social crisis: quite the contrary. According to ECLAC data, the country's economy has grown by an average of 4.9%, almost doubling in size from $16 billion in 2005 to $29 billion in 2018. GDP per capita rose by 50%, from $1,725 ​​in 2005 to $2,586 in 2018.

In the South American context, Bolivia has been seen as something of a miracle. Most notably, these gains were achieved while simultaneously reducing inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient. Bolivians experienced significant wealth growth and, moreover, became 21% less unequal. As a result, over the same period, overall poverty decreased by 41% and extreme poverty by 47.4%.

A magic formula? No: State policies aimed at recovering natural resources (especially gas, metallic minerals, and lithium), clear rules to counter corporate and financial power, greater tax fairness, and strengthened public services that guarantee human and social rights. The most recent of these policies was the launch of the Unified Health System, designed to overcome the underfunding, fragmentation, and precariousness of the healthcare system, which has operated according to income, geographic location, type of insurance coverage, and socioeconomic status of citizens.

Measured as a percentage of GDP, public social spending increased by 27.1% from 2005 to 2014. Specifically, spending on health rose by 28.1%, on education by 15.2%, on housing and services by 51.7%, and on social protection by 15.1%. During this period, the percentage of the state budget allocated to social spending increased by 77%, practically doubling the previous level. Consider this: a dynamic economy, increasing wealth, well-being, and equality, even amidst falling global commodity prices and when several neighboring nations entered recession or experienced negative growth.

This is key to understanding why Evo Morales governed for 14 years with virtually no crisis of popular support. Conflicts, such as those in eastern Bolivia at the beginning of his term, and later those concerning the highway in the Tipnis region, had more to do with power struggles and thematic/sectoral disputes, sometimes involving corporate and union interests, than with the social and electoral legitimacy of the political process. More recent problems, such as the well-known "gasolinazo" (gas price hike), were defused without much difficulty. Nevertheless, any unrest was always portrayed in the mass media as proof of the failure of "Bolivian socialism" and the advent of "conflict."

Beyond these approaches, the defense of national wealth and the rights of the people when Evo was a union leader and opposition figure was later combined with a stability that manifested itself in electoral victories with 54% in 2005, 64% in 2009 and 61% in 2014. In addition, the political refounding of Bolivia into a Plurinational State in 2009 with a new Constitution was supported by 61% of the voters.

In the last elections, Evo Morales had obtained a significantly smaller number of votes, but still enough to win. Given the opposition's allegations, he invited the OAS to observe and then audit the elections. Strictly adhering to the agreement with the organization, even though the OAS indicated that he was the candidate with the most votes and without waiting for the final report, he accepted the recommendations and early last Sunday called for new elections.

Within hours, and with a suspicious silence from the OAS and its early-rising Secretary General, who issued a preliminary report on Twitter at 5 a.m., he was forced by the military to resign and then go into exile, under death threats. This November 12th, two days later, Mr. Luis Almagro reappears with the news that, according to his interpretation (absent from the official report), the coup d'état was carried out by Evo Morales “on October 20th”—the very same president with whom he agreed on October 30th to the audit and the offer of recommendations to resolve the conflicts! You'll see some strange things, Sancho. Did the OAS analysts know they were working on a report whose political, rather than technical, verdict had already been decided beforehand?

Since there has been no economic crisis or social upheaval, some say that all of this is due to Evo Morales's "desire to perpetuate himself in power"; that this unleashed "fraud," followed by opposition mobilizations, as if that were enough to explain the dizzying events and spare us further explanation. It can't be that simple. Not even the OAS auditors ever spoke of fraud; no one has presented a single piece of evidence. Long before, the CEPR, based in Washington, had verified the reliability of the results, and no one could refute that with more convincing documents.

On the other hand, no one will see the military forcing Angela Merkel to resign in Germany, where she has been in power for exactly the same number of years and in 2017 received only 33% of the vote. Nor would any president, like Trump, claim this is “a message” to other leaders, as if he were yelling at farmhands on his own private estate.

One element is key: as Alberto Fernández, the president-elect of Argentina, has said, the era of foreign-backed coups has returned to Latin America. And we could say with complete certainty that it never really left: after the supposed “transitions to democracy,” Panama was invaded in 1989; in 1990 and 1994 there were two consecutive electoral coups in the Dominican Republic; and subsequently, military coups, parliamentary coups, fraud, and massacres in Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil, including the attempted overthrow of Rafael Correa in 2010. Not to mention the quasi-police state of Colombia, the mass human rights violations in Chile in the last month, or the silence surrounding the self-appointment, fraud, and subsequent repressive massacre perpetrated by the de facto Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, a participant in a narco-government; and, of course, an active member of the “Lima Group” led by Almagro.

Now, with the constitutional order broken in Bolivia and a second-rate right-wing leader like Jeanine Añez, a public enemy of the plurinational character of the Bolivian state and of the Wiphala flag, intending to assume the “presidency” by entering the government palace with the Bible – group photo included – it might be worthwhile to consider a message circulating on social media, authored by Pepe Mujica, a man whose republican, decent, and democratic character is beyond question:

“For me, it’s a clear coup d’état, no question about it. There’s an ultimatum from the army, the police are confined to their barracks, period. What do you call that? Then they say the cause was supposedly fraud, and this and that—how do you prove that when so many polling stations were set on fire? And secondly, what sense does it make if, when a new election was announced, the coup machine didn’t stop? What does the repression against homes and families have to do with it, right in front of the Bolivian armed forces? It’s obvious there’s a coup d’état.”

He continues: “(…) Anything is possible, but it doesn't justify the lynching, the things that are happening (…) The door was open to a new electoral process and to start over, nor did they want to opt for the other path (…) Bolivia is very rich, it is said that it has 70% of the essential material to make the new batteries, we all know that there is an energy shift happening in the world. I am not accusing because I have no proof, I am suspicious based on history (…) the regrettable thing is that Bolivia had taken a leap forward and many of the poorest sectors, especially the indigenous people, had reaped the rewards of a considerable effort.”

“There are people mixed up in all this who had to do with gas ownership; I don’t know if they’re settling old scores, all of this fills us with suspicion. The old liberalism is sick, it’s been hacked, because neoliberalism has no qualms about allying itself with fascist-like attitudes; that’s not typical of the old liberalism…”

In short, many explanations are needed to understand what lies behind this overthrow, setting aside clichés and simplistic liberal platitudes criticizing "reelection" or "autocracy." There is Bolivian, Latin American, and global geopolitical history at stake, and the vilified but unavoidable class struggle is always staring us in the face.

Beyond the successes or failures, the correct or incorrect decisions and calculations of Evo Morales, which anyone is free to evaluate, the weight of coups lives on and hangs over Latin America, speaking and manifesting itself in its historical destiny. The right-wing figures who are now seizing power in Bolivia, the repression in the streets, the opportunism of Carlos Mesa himself, who yesterday represented Morales's government in The Hague and now calls it a "tyranny," echo the words of Pepe Mujica and lead us once again to Allende, in that last speech:

“Foreign capital, imperialism, together with reaction, created the climate for the Armed Forces to break with their tradition, (…) the same social sector that today will be in their homes, waiting with someone else's hand to reconquer power to continue defending their gains and privileges,” said the martyred president in La Moneda 46 years ago.

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[+] Latin American and Caribbean Front
in the struggle for democracy and the people

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