For Bolivia’s unelected coup-regime, the crisis has provided a timely excuse to postpone indefinitely a May election it knew it could not legitimately win. The fascist-led regime of self-appointed President Jeanine Añez was on borrowed time, with the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) of Evo Morales surging ahead in pre-election polls and its own fraudulent power-grab last November now exposed by even the international bourgeois press. In response, the government has been stepping up repressive measures against members and supporters of MAS and manoeuvring with its US backers to rig the vote. What it could not win by fair means it was willing to win by foul – but now it does not have to, and is instead poised to cling onto power indefinitely. CASSANDRA HOWARTH reports.
Since seizing power in November 2019, the regime has arrested more than 100 politicians associated with MAS, and has threatened or brought criminal charges – usually sedition and terrorism – against 592. These include Evo Morales and the MAS presidential candidate, Luis Arce. The government and its thugs have continued to persecute MAS supporters, mobilising the army to shut down protests and teargas crowds, including children. More than 50 radio stations have been shut down for reporting on the violence that is the hallmark of the Añez presidency.
147,000 MAS supporters have been purged from the electoral register in what has been described as a ‘strategy to remove…thousands of indigenous people who had recently obtained their identity cards… The typical US strategy of destroying the people’s processes and rigging elections has been set in motion. A strategy that tries to give a democratic makeup to a puppet government’ (Popular Resistance, 13 January 2020).
The repressive conditions imposed ahead of the now cancelled May election were so severe that even the United Nations raised concerns about ‘political persecution’ and ‘the abuse of judicial procedures’, alluding to ‘hate speech and direct or indirect incitement to violence during this period (Statement by the Bolivian envoy of the UN Secretary-General, 3 February 2020).
Yet despite all attempts to suppress popular support for MAS, whose base are predominantly working class and indigenous, it was the MAS candidate Luis Arce who was the frontrunner; with a recent unofficial poll giving him 38.4% of the vote. The same poll put Carlos Mesa second with 23.3%, Jeanine Añez third with 19.9%; the fascist Fernando Camacho trailing in a miserable fourth place with only 8.1%.
So, US imperialism had ensured that key players were in place to ensure the elections gave the result it wanted. The new head of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Salvador Romero, is the former US-appointed director of the National Democratic Institute (described by Cuba’s Tricontinental magazine as ‘a quasi-independent agency of the US ruling class’). During his tenure in Honduras he helped legitimise, along with the Organisation of American States (OAS), the 2009 coup against the progressive president Manuel Zelaya. Cables released by Wikileaks have exposed his close ties to the US National Endowment for Democracy and USAID – both covers for US intervention in Latin America. He is, in every sense, US imperialism’s man. Romero replaced former tribunal head Maria Eugenia Choque, who was arrested along with other members of the TSE following the coup against Morales. One of the first acts of the TSE under Romero was to ban Evo Morales from running for president.
Meanwhile, ‘technical support’ during the election was to be provided by USAID and the OAS. The OAS deliberately paved the way for last November’s coup against Morales, denouncing that presidential election as ‘fraudulent’ with their own, now discredited, audit to prove it. At the time, the international media enthusiastically regurgitated the OAS’s bogus statistical claims of fraud, helping stoke co-ordinated protests against Morales – who was forced to flee after bought-off sections of the police and army turned against him – and providing a vital cover for Bolivia’s fascist forces to seize power with the official sanction of the US and other imperialist powers. The liberal press such as The Guardian in Britain and New York Times in the US were amongst the most ardent critics of Morales at the time. Yet now, months after the damage is done, and with no apology or apparent shame – they have published the findings of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who crunched the figures and could find no statistical evidence of fraud. The OAS audit, they say, ‘would appear deeply flawed’.
The USAID team arrived in Bolivia on 9 January to ‘prepare the ground’ for the election. Ten days later they were joined in La Paz by President Trump’s legal adviser Mauricio Claver-Carone, who immediately gave a series of interviews accusing Morales of terrorism and creating instability.
Many were already predicting that Añez would find any excuse to cancel the elections and, although Bolivia still has one of the lowest numbers of COVID-19 cases in Latin America, the crisis could not have come at a better time for her. Meanwhile, the pandemic has exposed the disdain she and the ruling class have for the country’s indigenous and working class population.
This reactionary government was shockingly ill-equipped to deal with the crisis, having expelled internationalist teams of Cuban doctors and halted the creation of a nationalised health service immediately after taking power, opting to spend $5m on weapons and chemical agents rather than medicine. Despite ample warning, as one of the last Latin American countries to register any cases of Covid-19, it made no preparations. Instead, Añez released a limited supply of facemasks adorned with her party logo while Camacho bought up the last stocks of hand sanitiser, stuck his and his running mate’s name on them, and is now selling them at hugely inflated prices. In the wealthy and reactionary province of Santa Cruz, doctors wearing ‘We are all Camacho’ signs barricaded the doors of their hospitals to prevent the entry of ambulances carrying coronavirus patients.
The coup regime had used the pretext of Covid-19 to shut down MAS rallies and campaign meetings and is now using false claims of people breaking quarantine to threaten the Chapare region – an indigenous and radical MAS stronghold that had forced the military and police out early on in the coup – with remilitarisation. While testing only 11 people a day, on average, the coup-regime is instead furthering the military dictatorship, rounding up and assaulting working-class Bolivians who cannot afford not to go to work under a regime that will not provide for its people.
In stark contrast, MAS have announced its proposals for assisting poorer Bolivians during this period. These include food parcels, a ban on workers being fired and salaries cut, brigades for the disabled, a demand that the state covers or freezes rent payments – as has been done in Venezuela – and that food, shelter and health care be provided for the homeless. Luis Arce has also said that he’s been in contact with the Cuban government who are offering to send doctors and medical supplies to assist in Bolivia – but this has been rejected by the coup regime.
The situation for the Bolivian working class is dire. There is no option for it other than to organise and mobilise, ready to fight once again to defend and restore the gains it had achieved under thirteen years of socialist government. Part of this will be the demand for universal testing and health care, a rent and debt freeze and social provisions for the poor and vulnerable.
By their friends shall you know them…
On 16 November 2019, a picture was tweeted showing the US ‘progressive’ Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez holding the Bolivian flag, flanked by four other people. One of them, Ana Carola Traverso, the originator of the tweet, wrote: ‘We met @AOC to discuss Bolivia and expressed concerns over her earlier tweet. Also chatted about current violence & democracy. She strongly supports our democratic grassroots movement and urges the interim president to stick to their mandate and call for new elections!’ Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘earlier tweet’ would have been the one describing the events unfolding in Bolivia a few days earlier as ‘a coup, not democracy’. Ana Carola Traverso is a member of the pro-coup NGO Rios de Pie. The tricolour Bolivian flag was much used by those involved in the coup as a counterpoint to the Bolivia’s indigenous, plurinational Wiphala flag. The whole sorry spectacle just goes to prove once again that you don’t have to scratch a liberal façade very hard to reveal the imperialist that lies beneath.
