Thursday, November 14, 2019
Propaganda (2012) 'mockumentary' film
The film pretends to be North Korean, although it was made by a group from New Zealand.
https://tubitv.com/movies/443651/propaganda
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Haiti Anti-Government Protests Lose Momentum
Sandra Lemaire, Matiado Vilme. Voice of America. November 11, 2019
WASHINGTON/PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI - Only a few hundred people responded to the opposition's call Sunday to protest in the streets of Haiti's capital to continue pressuring President Jovenel Moise to step down.
On previous Sundays, tens of thousands have filled Port-au-Prince streets from morning to sundown.
Have the protests lost momentum? VOA Creole put the question to opposition leaders marching on Sunday.
Sen. Ricard Pierre said he thinks bribes and fear were partly to blame for the small crowd.
"A significant number of Bel Air residents have died — an area that heavily supports the efforts of the Alternative (opposition group). We have people hiding out in the poor neighborhoods because the government has threatened to kill them," the senator told VOA Creole. "There have been efforts to distribute weapons to residents of the slums. They've been offered money, offered food. But despite the massacres endured by the poor people, there are some of them in the streets today fighting (for a better life)."
VOA could not confirm the senator's allegations.
Downtown, evangelical pastor Prophete Mackenson Dorilas, who, perched atop a carnival-style truck had been surrounded by thousands of followers during October protests, was seen marching in the street with only a handful of protesters. He blamed fear and the absence of his truck for the low turnout.
"The first truck we were offered, I turned down because it wasn't what I requested. So, they said they would bring me another truck, and I'm still waiting. Some members of my church had intended to join the protest, but they heard the police was targeting protesters, so they ran away," Dorilas told VOA Creole, adding that the people also need motivation.
"The churchgoers don't like to see me walking on the street. They like to see me up high," he said.
Also marching with about a dozen protesters was former Haitian Army Col. Himmler Rebu, who described his participation as the right thing to do.
"There are two efforts happening simultaneously. There are those (members of the opposition) who are in offices working on plans and strategy, and there are those who are accompanying the people marching in the streets. So today, that's my job, " he said.
Up north
Early Sunday, tires were seen burning in the middle of a main road in the northern city of Cape Haitian. There were also roadblocks made of tree branches, rocks, metal and debris.
"These roadblocks are here because President Jovenel still refuses to resign. We will keep blocking the streets, and we will keep protesting until the president leaves," a protester told VOA Creole.
Opposition summit
Back in the capital, members of the opposition spent the weekend meeting at the Marriott Hotel to discuss the transition process that would be activated if Moise were to resign.
"We are in agreement on four aspects of the transition: governance, control, steps forward and duration," announced opposition Sen. Youri Latortue, who heads the Haitian Senate's Ethics and Anti-Corruption Committee. No further details were given.
On the subject of who would replace Moise, the group decided that the choice would be made by a five-member committee comprised of a representative of each opposition group. The transitional president would be chosen among the Supreme Court judges. The committee would also choose a prime minister.
"This is a historic event," prominent businessman Gregory Brandt, who represented the private sector at the meeting, told VOA Creole. "The country has been suffering through a complicated situation for two months now. We aren't selling merchandise, we aren't receiving merchandise. Port-au-Prince is beginning to face a scarcity of basic goods. We're facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, so we must sit down in all seriousness to discuss how we can resolve this crisis."
US aid
Last week, Rob Thayer, director of USAID's “Food for Peace” program, told VOA Creole the agency has earmarked 3,500 metric tons of emergency food aid for Haiti, which will be distributed to those in need.
In addition to the food aid, the U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort has been docked off Haiti's shores since Nov. 6 for a seven-day medical and humanitarian mission. According to the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, the ship's staff has seen more patients per day in Haiti than on any other stop of their five-nation tour.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed concern about the situation in Haiti last week on Twitter.
President Moise
Meanwhile, Moise has been busy naming new cabinet ministers, meeting with members of the diplomatic corps, and giving interviews to the foreign press. He has also increased his visibility on the streets, in the national press and on social media.
"Since my first day in office, I have always preached the same thing — togetherness, unity — because the country is tired," Moise said during a Nov. 7 speech. "Our (nation's) motto is Unity is Power. But unfortunately, this system (of government), the system that uses people, gives us a different motto which is, Divide and Conquer. Whenever a person wants to enrich himself, he pits us against each other. And when we've taken the bait and died in battle, who benefits? Not us."
Early Sunday morning, before the anti-government protest began, Moise visited police stations in Carrefour and Petionville, his press secretary announced. According to a press statement received by VOA Creole early Monday morning, Moise sought to see the working conditions for the policemen and asked for a detailed report on the current status of affairs that will be used to "better address the needs of the agents of the PNH (National Police of Haiti)."
Bolivia’s Coup Threatens the Struggle for Social Liberation and Economic Justice
Olivia Arigho-Stiles. Novara Media. November 11, 2019
The Bolivian president, Evo Morales, has been forced from office in a coup following two weeks of civil unrest and a disputed presidential election.
It is not the US-backed coup many have declared on social media, reading from the script of the recent past in Latin America. But it is a coup nonetheless, steered by the urban middle classes and ultra-right regional elites in Bolivia. It should be understood, in part, as a backlash against the redistributive and pro-indigenous policies promulgated by Morales over the past 14 years.
The decisive moment came when the head of the Bolivian armed forces on Sunday ‘suggested’ that Morales resign following a police mutiny in cities across the country over the weekend.
Morales’s house has since been ransacked (along with his sister’s), the ex-president of the electoral authority has been arrested and paraded on television, and groups of anti-government protesters have taken to the streets to burn the Wiphala, the flag representing indigenous peoples in the Andes.
Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia and a former coca grower, was first elected in 2005 with his social movement backed party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Under his tenure Bolivia has slashed poverty rates, reduced inequality, overseen economic growth while rejecting IMF debt bondage, and nationalised key industries.
Bolivia also has crucially seen the ‘indigenisation’ of the state – the elevation of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples and the centring of indigenous belief systems in public life. Morales has made powerful statements on the global stage in favour of redistribution of wealth, the recognition of indigenous rights and protection of the environment. In 2010, Morales championed the ‘Rights of Mother Earth’ law which recognises the earth as a political subject enshrined with, among other things, a right to life.
None of this was without opposition from traditional white-mestizo (mixed race) elites and international capital. Bolivia is Latin America’s poorest country, with a long history of economic exploitation by foreign powers and racist discrimination against its majority indigenous population.
Problems began in earnest two weeks ago after the elections on 20 October in which Morales secured victory in the first round but the opposition accused him of fraud. To quell the unrest, Morales invited the Organisation of American States (OAS) to audit the election. On Sunday, the OAS released its report which found there had been ‘manipulation’ in some of the electoral data.
By contrast, analysis by US think-tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research found no evidence of electoral irregularity. Prior to the election, polls has consistently predicted a victory for Morales over rival Carlos Mesa. Moreover, the OAS should not be considered a neutral arbiter in Latin American politics; it is heavily dominated by the US and has a history of tacit interference in left-wing regimes, most notably in Venezuela.
There is, of course, a longer backstory to these events. Looming large is Morales’s decision to defy a 2016 referendum in which the public voted against him running for a fourth term, then prohibited under the Bolivian constitution. Although the supreme court ruled that he could run again, the decision nonetheless generated deep popular discontent and alienated many supporters.
It was not Morales’s first unpopular move. In 2010, the president was forced to back down in a conflict over the construction of a highway through a protected natural reserve home to several indigenous communities. More recently, this summer he faced criticism from both progressive environmentalists and the greenwashing right for his handling of the catastrophic fires which swept the dry forests of Chiquitania.
Yet while the left must always be critical of its leaders in power, Bolivia provides a warning for how legitimate criticism can be co-opted by regressive forces to devastating effect.
The coup does not reflect progressive sectors and the removal of Morales is certainly no victory for the indigenous-left in Bolivia or Latin America. The past two weeks have seen the rapid ascendancy of a faction of ultra-right conservatives from the lowland city of Santa Cruz – the historical nexus of regional-class antagonism to Morales and the MAS – directed by businessman Luis Fernando ‘El Macho’ Camacho, the leader of the business group Comité Pro-Santa Cruz and reportedly a former member of a fascist youth group which recently released a video of its leaders making a Nazi salute. He was not a candidate in the election, yet he has managed to exploit the political instability to emerge as a key political player; on Sunday, flanked by armed police, he entered the Palacio Quemado in La Paz with an evangelical ally clutching a bible.
Since the election there has also been an upsurge in racist and gendered violence. Smeared on the wall outside UMSA, the public university in La Paz, were the words “Indians out of UMSA”. A MAS mayor, Patricia Arce Guzman, was attacked by opposition protesters who forcibly cut off her hair, dragged her through the street and covered her in red paint and dirt. The director of radio for the peasants union CSUTCB – an organisation allied with Morales which represents rural, usually indigenous workers – was chained to a tree while anti-government protesters ransacked the union’s headquarters.
International solidarity is pouring in, with the coup receiving widespread condemnation from the likes of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Amlo in Mexico, Chilean communist Camila Vallejo and US congresswoman Ilhan Omar. But where now for Bolivia? There is currently no government, with the president, vice-president and the president of the Cámara de Diputados all having resigned. Despite Morales’s party having a majority in the legislature, it is widely expected that Jeanine Áñez, an opposition senator, will now assume the helm.
In an emotive press conference on Sunday, former vice-president Álvaro García Linera declared: “We will return and we will be millions” – paraphrasing the last words of Tupac Katari, the Andean rebel who was brutally executed by the Spanish after leading an anti-colonial uprising in 1781. Yet recent developments suggest the struggle for social liberation and economic equality is now deeply imperilled in Bolivia.
Olivia Arigho-Stiles is a PhD candidate currently based in La Paz researching 20th century indigenous movements in Bolivia.
Fascist 'Christian' multi-millionaire leads Brazilian coup with foreign support
Bolivia coup led by Christian fascist paramilitary leader and multi-millionaire – with foreign supportMax Blumenthal and Ben Norton. Grayzone Project. November 11, 2019
When Luis Fernando Camacho stormed into Bolivia’s abandoned presidential palace in the hours after President Evo Morales’s sudden November 10 resignation, he revealed to the world a side of the country that stood at stark odds with the plurinational spirit its deposed socialist and Indigenous leader had put forward.
With a Bible in one hand and a national flag in the other, Camacho bowed his head in prayer above the presidential seal, fulfilling his vow to purge his country’s Native heritage from government and “return God to the burned palace.”
“Pachamama will never return to the palace,” he said, referring to the Andean Mother Earth spirit. “Bolivia belongs to Christ.”
Bolivia’s extreme right-wing opposition had overthrown leftist President Evo Morales that day, following demands by the country’s military leadership that he step down.
Virtually unknown outside his country, where he had never won a democratic election, Camacho stepped into the void. He is a rich and powerful multi-millionaire named in the Panama Papers, and an ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist groomed by a fascist paramilitary notorious for its racist violence, with a base in Bolivia’s wealthy separatist region of Santa Cruz.
Camacho also hails from a family of corporate elites who have long profited from Bolivia’s plentiful natural gas reserves. And his family lost part of its wealth when Morales nationalized the nation’s resources, in order to fund his vast social programs — which cut poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent.
In the lead-up to the coup, Camacho met with leaders from right-wing governments in the region to discuss their plans to destabilize Morales. Two months before the putsch, he tweeted gratitude: “Thank you Colombia! Thank you Venezuela!” he exclaimed, tipping his hat to Juan Guaido’s coup operation. He also recognized the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, declaring, “Thank you Brazil!”
Camacho had spent years leading an overtly fascist separatist organization. The Grayzone edited the following clips from a promotional historical documentary that the group posted on its own social media accounts:
While Camacho and his far-right forces served as the muscle behind the coup, their political allies waited to reap the benefits.
The presidential candidate Bolivia’s opposition had fielded in the October election, Carlos Mesa, is a “pro-business” privatizer with extensive ties to Washington. US government cables published by WikiLeaks reveal that he regularly corresponded with American officials in their efforts to destabilize Morales.
Mesa is currently listed as an expert at a DC-based think tank funded by the US government’s soft-power arm USAID, various oil giants, and a host of multi-national corporations active in Latin America.
Evo Morales, a former farmer who rose to prominence in social movements before becoming the leader of the powerful grassroots political party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), was Bolivia’s first Indigenous leader. Wildly popular in the country’s substantial Native and peasant communities, he won numerous elections and democratic referenda over a 13-year period, often in landslides.
On October 20, Morales won re-election by more than 600,000 votes, giving him just above the 10 percent margin needed to defeat opposition presidential candidate Mesa in the first round.
Experts who did a statistical analysis of Bolivia’s publicly available voting data found no evidence of irregularities or fraud. But the opposition claimed otherwise, and took to the streets in weeks of protests and riots.
The events that precipitated the resignation of Morales were indisputably violent. Right-wing opposition gangs attacked numerous elected politicians from the ruling leftist MAS party. They then ransacked the home of President Morales, while burning down the houses of several other top officials. The family members of some politicians were kidnapped and held hostage until they resigned. A female socialist mayor was publicly tortured by a mob.
Following the forced departure of Morales, coup leaders arrested the president and vice president of the government’s electoral body, and forced the organization’s other officials to resign. Camacho’s followers proceeded to burn Wiphala flags that symbolized the country’s Indigenous population and the plurinational vision of Morales.
The Organization of American States, a pro-US organization founded by Washington during the Cold War as an alliance of right-wing anti-communist countries in Latin America, helped rubber stamp the Bolivian coup. It called for new elections, claiming there were numerous irregularities in the October 20 vote, without citing any evidence. Then the OAS remained silent as Morales was overthrown by his military and his party’s officials were attacked and violently forced to resign.
The day after, the Donald Trump White House enthusiastically praised the coup, trumpeting it as a “significant moment for democracy,” and a “strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”
Emerging from the shadows to lead a violent far-right putsch
While Carlos Mesa timidly condemned the opposition’s violence, Camacho egged it on, ignoring calls for an international audit of the election and emphasizing his maximalist demand to purge all supporters of Morales from government. He was the true face of the opposition, concealed for months behind the moderate figure of Mesa.
A 40-year-old multi-millionaire businessman from the separatist stronghold of Santa Cruz, Camacho has never run for office. Like Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó, whom more than 80 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of until the US government anointed him as supposed “president,” Camacho was an obscure figure until the coup attempt in Bolivia hit its stride.
He first created his Twitter account on May 27, 2019. For months, his tweets went ignored, generating no more than three or four retweets and likes. Before the election, Camacho did not have a Wikipedia article, and there were few media profiles on him in Spanish- or English-language media.
Camacho issued a call for a strike on July 9, posting videos on Twitter that got just over 20 views. The goal of the strike was to try to force the resignation of Bolivian government’s electoral organ the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE). In other words, Camacho was pressuring the government’s electoral authorities to step down more than three months before the presidential election.
It was not until after the election that Camacho was thrust into the limelight and transformed into a celebrity by corporate media conglomerates like the local right-wing network Unitel, Telemundo, and CNN en Español.
All of a sudden, Camacho’s tweets calling for Morales to resign were lighting up with thousands of retweets. The coup machinery had been activated.
Mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Reuters followed by anointing the unelected Camacho as the “leader” of Bolivia’s opposition. But even as he lapped up international attention, key portions of the far-right activist’s background were omitted.
Left unmentioned were Camacho’s deep and well-established connections to Christian extremist paramilitaries notorious for racist violence and local business cartels, as well as the right-wing governments across the region.
It was in the fascist paramilitaries and separatist atmosphere of Santa Cruz where Camacho’s politics were formed, and where the ideological contours of the coup had been defined.
Luis Fernando Camacho was groomed by the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista, or Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC), a fascist paramilitary organization that has been linked to assassination plots against Morales. The group is notorious for assaulting leftists, Indigenous peasants, and journalists, all while espousing a deeply racist, homophobic ideology.
Since Morales entered office in 2006, the UJC has campaigned to separate from a country its members believed had been overtaken by a Satanic Indigenous mass.
The UJC is the Bolivian equivalent of Spain’s Falange, India’s Hindu supremacist RSS, and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov battalion. Its symbol is a green cross that bears strong similarities to logos of fascist movements across the West.
And its members are known to launch into Nazi-style sieg heil salutes.
After journalist Benjamin Dangl visited with UJC members in 2007, he described them as the “brass knuckles” of the Santa Cruz separatist movement. “The Unión Juvenil has been known to beat and whip campesinos marching for gas nationalization, throw rocks at students organizing against autonomy, toss molotov cocktails at the state television station, and brutally assault members of the landless movement struggling against land monopolies,” Dangl wrote.
“When we have to defend our culture by force, we will,” a UJC leader told Dangl. “The defense of liberty is more important than life.”
Camacho was elected as vice president of the UJC in 2002, when he was just 23 years old. He left the organization two years later to build his family’s business empire and rise through the ranks of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee. It was in that organization that he was taken under the wing of one of the separatist movement’s most powerful figures, a Bolivian-Croatian oligarch named Branko Marinkovic.
In August, Camacho tweeted a photo with his “great friend,” Marinkovic. This friendship was crucial to establishing the rightist activist’s credentials and forging the basis of the coup that would take form three months later.
Camacho’s Croatian godfather and separatist powerbroker
Branko Marinkovic is a major landowner who ramped up his support for the right-wing opposition after some of his land was nationalized by the Evo Morales government. As chairman of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, he oversaw the operations of the main engine of separatism in Bolivia.
In a 2008 letter to Marinkovic, the International Federation for Human Rights denounced the committee as an “actor and promoter of racism and violence in Bolivia.”
The human rights group added that it “condemn[ed] the attitude and secessionist, unionist and racist discourses as well as the calls for military disobedience of which the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee for is one of the main promoters.”
In 2013, journalist Matt Kennard reported that the US government was working closely with the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee to encourage the balkanization of Bolivia and to undermine Morales. “What they [the US] put across was how they could strengthen channels of communication,” the vice president of the committee told Kennard. “The embassy said that they would help us in our communication work and they have a series of publications where they were putting forward their ideas.”
In a 2008 profile on Marinkovic, the New York Times acknowledged the extremist undercurrents of the Santa Cruz separatist movement the oligarch presided over. It described the area as “a bastion of openly xenophobic groups like the Bolivian Socialist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspiration from the fascist Falange of the former Spanish dictator Franco.”
The Bolivian Socialist Falange was a fascist group that provided safe haven to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie during the Cold War. A former Gestapo torture expert, Barbie was repurposed by the CIA through its Operation Condor program to help exterminate communism across the continent. (Despite its antiquated name, like the German National Socialists, this far-right extremist group was violently anti-leftist, committed to killing socialists.)
The Bolivian Falange came into power in 1971 when its leader, Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez, ousted the leftist government of Gen. Juan Jose Torres Gonzales. The government of Gonzales had infuriated business leaders by nationalizing industries and antagonized Washington by ousting the Peace Corps, which it viewed as an instrument of CIA penetration. The Nixon administration immediately welcomed Banzer with open arms and courted him as a key bulwark against the spread of socialism in the region. (An especially ironic 1973 dispatch appears on Wikileaks showing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger thanking Banzer for congratulating him on his Nobel Peace Prize).
The movement’s putschist legacy persevered during the Morales era through organizations like the UJC and figures such as Marinkovic and Camacho.
The Times noted that Marinkovic also supported the activities of the UJC, describing the fascist group as “a quasi-independent arm of the committee led by Mr. Marinkovic.” A member of the UJC board told the US newspaper of record in an interview, “We will protect Branko with our own lives.”
Marinkovic has espoused the kind of Christian nationalist rhetoric familiar to the far-right organizations of Santa Cruz, calling, for instance, for a “crusade for the truth” and insisting that God is on his side.
The oligarch’s family hails from Croatia, where he has dual citizenship. Marinkovic has long been dogged by rumors that his family members were involved in the country’s powerful fascist Ustashe movement.
The Ustashe collaborated openly with Nazi German occupiers during World War Two. Their successors returned to power after Croatia declared independence from the former Yugoslavia – a former socialist country that was intentionally balkanized in a NATO war, much in the same way that Marinkovic hoped Bolivia would be.
Marinkovic denies that his family was part of the Ustashe. He claimed in an interview with the New York Times that his father fought against the Nazis.
But even some of his sympathizers are skeptical. A Balkan analyst from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, which works closely with the US government and is popularly known as the “shadow CIA,” produced a rough background profile on Marinkovic, speculating, “Still don’t know his full story, but I would bet a lot of $$$ that this dude’s parents are 1st gen (his name is too Slavic) and that they were Ustashe (read: Nazi) sympathizers fleeing Tito’s Communists after WWI.”
The Stratfor analyst excerpted a 2006 article by journalist Christian Parenti, who had visited Marinkovic at his ranch in Santa Cruz. Evo Morales’ “land reform could lead to civil war,” Marinkovic warned Parenti in the Texas-accented English he picked up while studying at the University of Texas, Houston.
Today, Marinkovic is an ardent supporter of Brazil’s far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, whose only complaint about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was that he “didn’t kill enough.”
Marinkovic is also a public admirer of Venezuela’s far-right opposition. “Todos somos Leopoldo” — “we are all Leopoldo,” he tweeted in support of Leopoldo López, who has been involved in numerous coup attempts against Venezuela’s elected leftist government.
While Marinkovic denied any role in armed militant activity in his interview with Parenti, he was accused in 2008 of playing a central role in an attempt to assassinate Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism party allies.
He told the New York Times less than two years before the plot developed, “If there is no legitimate international mediation in our crisis, there is going to be confrontation. And unfortunately, it is going to be bloody and painful for all Bolivians.”
An assassination plot links Bolivia’s right to international fascists
In April 2009, a special unit of the Bolivian security services barged into a luxury hotel room and cut down three men who were said to be involved in a plot to kill Evo Morales. Two others remained on the loose. Four of the alleged conspirators had Hungarian or Croatian roots and ties to rightist politics in eastern Europe, while another was a right-wing Irishman, Michael Dwyer, who had only arrived in Santa Cruz six months before.
The ringleader of the group was said to be a former leftist journalist named Eduardo Rosza-Flores who had turned to fascism and belonged to Opus Dei, the traditionalist Catholic cult that emerged under the dictatorship of Spain’s Francisco Franco. In fact, the codename Rosza-Flores assumed in the assassination plot was “Franco,” after the late Generalissimo.
During the 1990s, Rosza fought on behalf of the Croatian First International Platoon, or the PIV, in the war to separate from Yugoslavia. A Croatian journalist told Time that the “PIV was a notorious group: 95% of them had criminal histories, many were part of Nazi and fascist groups, from Germany to Ireland.”
By 2009, Rosza returned home to Bolivia to crusade on behalf of another separatist movement in Santa Cruz. And it was there that he was killed in a luxury hotel with no apparent source of income and a massive stockpile of guns.
The government later released photos of Rosza and a co-conspirator posing with their weapons. Publication of emails between the ringleader and Istvan Belovai, a former Hungarian military intelligence officer who served as a double agent for the CIA, cemented the perception that Washington had a hand in the operation.
Marinkovic was subsequently charged with providing $200,000 to the plotters. The Bolivian-Croatian oligarch initially fled to the United States, where he was given asylum, then relocated to Brazil, where he lives today. He denied any involvement in the plan to kill Morales.
As journalist Matt Kennard reported, there was another thread that tied the plot to the US: the alleged participation of an NGO leader named Hugo Achá Melgar.
“Rozsa didn’t come here by himself, they brought him,” the Bolivian government’s lead investigator told Kennard. “Hugo Achá Melgar brought him.”
The Human Rights Foundation destabilizes Bolivia
Achá was not just the head of any run-of-the-mill NGO. He had founded the Bolivian subsidiary of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an international right-wing outfit that is known for hosting a “school for revolution” for activists seeking regime change in states targeted by the US government.
HRF is run by Thor Halvorssen Jr., the son of the late Venezuelan oligarch and CIA asset Thor Halvorssen Hellum. The first cousin of the veteran Venezuelan coup plotter Leopoldo Lopez, Halvorssen was a former college Republican activist who crusaded against political correctness and other familiar right-wing hobgoblins.
After a brief career as a firebrand right-wing film producer, in which he oversaw a scandalous “anti-environmentalist” documentary financed by a mining corporation, Halvorssen rebranded as a promoter of liberalism and the enemy of global authoritarianism. He launched the HRF with grants from right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel, conservative foundations, and NGOs including Amnesty International. The group has since been at the forefront of training activists for insurrectionary activity from Hong Kong to the Middle East to Latin America.
Though Achá was granted asylum in the US, the HRF has continued pushing regime change in Bolivia. As Wyatt Reed reported for The Grayzone, HRF “freedom fellow” Jhanisse Vaca Daza helped trigger the initial stage of the coup by blaming Morales for the Amazon fires that consumed parts of Bolivia in August, mobilizing international protests against him.
At the time, Daza posed as an “environmental activist” and student of non-violence who articulated her concerns in moderate-seeming calls for more international aid to Bolivia. Through her NGO, Rios de Pie, she helped launch the #SOSBolivia hashtag, which signaled the imminent foreign-backed regime-change operation.
Courting the regional right, prepping the coup
While HRF’s Daza rallied protests outside Bolivian embassies in Europe and the US, Fernando Camacho remained behind the scenes, lobbying right-wing governments in the region to bless the coming coup.
In May, Camacho met with Colombia’s far-right President Ivan Duque. Camacho was helping to spearhead regional efforts at undermining the legitimacy of Evo Morales’ presidency at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, seeking to block his candidacy in the October election.
That same month, the rightist Bolivian agitator also met with Ernesto Araújo, the chancellor of Jair Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservative administration in Brazil. Through the meeting, Camacho successfully secured Bolsonaro’s backing for regime change in Bolivia.
This November 10, Araújo enthusiastically endorsed the ouster of Morales, declaring that “Brazil will support the democratic and constitutional transition” in the country.
Then in August, two months before Bolivia’s presidential election, Camacho held court with officials from Venezuela’s US-appointed coup regime. These included Gustavo Tarre, Guaido’s faux Venezuelan OAS ambassador, who formerly worked at the right-wing Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington.
After the meeting, Camacho tweeted gratitude to the Venezuelan coup-mongers, as well as to Colombia and Brazil.
To read the rest of this article, follow the link above.
When Luis Fernando Camacho stormed into Bolivia’s abandoned presidential palace in the hours after President Evo Morales’s sudden November 10 resignation, he revealed to the world a side of the country that stood at stark odds with the plurinational spirit its deposed socialist and Indigenous leader had put forward.
With a Bible in one hand and a national flag in the other, Camacho bowed his head in prayer above the presidential seal, fulfilling his vow to purge his country’s Native heritage from government and “return God to the burned palace.”
“Pachamama will never return to the palace,” he said, referring to the Andean Mother Earth spirit. “Bolivia belongs to Christ.”
Bolivia’s extreme right-wing opposition had overthrown leftist President Evo Morales that day, following demands by the country’s military leadership that he step down.
Virtually unknown outside his country, where he had never won a democratic election, Camacho stepped into the void. He is a rich and powerful multi-millionaire named in the Panama Papers, and an ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist groomed by a fascist paramilitary notorious for its racist violence, with a base in Bolivia’s wealthy separatist region of Santa Cruz.
Camacho also hails from a family of corporate elites who have long profited from Bolivia’s plentiful natural gas reserves. And his family lost part of its wealth when Morales nationalized the nation’s resources, in order to fund his vast social programs — which cut poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent.
In the lead-up to the coup, Camacho met with leaders from right-wing governments in the region to discuss their plans to destabilize Morales. Two months before the putsch, he tweeted gratitude: “Thank you Colombia! Thank you Venezuela!” he exclaimed, tipping his hat to Juan Guaido’s coup operation. He also recognized the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, declaring, “Thank you Brazil!”
Camacho had spent years leading an overtly fascist separatist organization. The Grayzone edited the following clips from a promotional historical documentary that the group posted on its own social media accounts:
While Camacho and his far-right forces served as the muscle behind the coup, their political allies waited to reap the benefits.
The presidential candidate Bolivia’s opposition had fielded in the October election, Carlos Mesa, is a “pro-business” privatizer with extensive ties to Washington. US government cables published by WikiLeaks reveal that he regularly corresponded with American officials in their efforts to destabilize Morales.
Mesa is currently listed as an expert at a DC-based think tank funded by the US government’s soft-power arm USAID, various oil giants, and a host of multi-national corporations active in Latin America.
Evo Morales, a former farmer who rose to prominence in social movements before becoming the leader of the powerful grassroots political party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), was Bolivia’s first Indigenous leader. Wildly popular in the country’s substantial Native and peasant communities, he won numerous elections and democratic referenda over a 13-year period, often in landslides.
On October 20, Morales won re-election by more than 600,000 votes, giving him just above the 10 percent margin needed to defeat opposition presidential candidate Mesa in the first round.
Experts who did a statistical analysis of Bolivia’s publicly available voting data found no evidence of irregularities or fraud. But the opposition claimed otherwise, and took to the streets in weeks of protests and riots.
The events that precipitated the resignation of Morales were indisputably violent. Right-wing opposition gangs attacked numerous elected politicians from the ruling leftist MAS party. They then ransacked the home of President Morales, while burning down the houses of several other top officials. The family members of some politicians were kidnapped and held hostage until they resigned. A female socialist mayor was publicly tortured by a mob.
Following the forced departure of Morales, coup leaders arrested the president and vice president of the government’s electoral body, and forced the organization’s other officials to resign. Camacho’s followers proceeded to burn Wiphala flags that symbolized the country’s Indigenous population and the plurinational vision of Morales.
The Organization of American States, a pro-US organization founded by Washington during the Cold War as an alliance of right-wing anti-communist countries in Latin America, helped rubber stamp the Bolivian coup. It called for new elections, claiming there were numerous irregularities in the October 20 vote, without citing any evidence. Then the OAS remained silent as Morales was overthrown by his military and his party’s officials were attacked and violently forced to resign.
The day after, the Donald Trump White House enthusiastically praised the coup, trumpeting it as a “significant moment for democracy,” and a “strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”
Emerging from the shadows to lead a violent far-right putsch
While Carlos Mesa timidly condemned the opposition’s violence, Camacho egged it on, ignoring calls for an international audit of the election and emphasizing his maximalist demand to purge all supporters of Morales from government. He was the true face of the opposition, concealed for months behind the moderate figure of Mesa.
A 40-year-old multi-millionaire businessman from the separatist stronghold of Santa Cruz, Camacho has never run for office. Like Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó, whom more than 80 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of until the US government anointed him as supposed “president,” Camacho was an obscure figure until the coup attempt in Bolivia hit its stride.
He first created his Twitter account on May 27, 2019. For months, his tweets went ignored, generating no more than three or four retweets and likes. Before the election, Camacho did not have a Wikipedia article, and there were few media profiles on him in Spanish- or English-language media.
Camacho issued a call for a strike on July 9, posting videos on Twitter that got just over 20 views. The goal of the strike was to try to force the resignation of Bolivian government’s electoral organ the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE). In other words, Camacho was pressuring the government’s electoral authorities to step down more than three months before the presidential election.
It was not until after the election that Camacho was thrust into the limelight and transformed into a celebrity by corporate media conglomerates like the local right-wing network Unitel, Telemundo, and CNN en Español.
All of a sudden, Camacho’s tweets calling for Morales to resign were lighting up with thousands of retweets. The coup machinery had been activated.
Mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Reuters followed by anointing the unelected Camacho as the “leader” of Bolivia’s opposition. But even as he lapped up international attention, key portions of the far-right activist’s background were omitted.
Left unmentioned were Camacho’s deep and well-established connections to Christian extremist paramilitaries notorious for racist violence and local business cartels, as well as the right-wing governments across the region.
It was in the fascist paramilitaries and separatist atmosphere of Santa Cruz where Camacho’s politics were formed, and where the ideological contours of the coup had been defined.
Luis Fernando Camacho was groomed by the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista, or Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC), a fascist paramilitary organization that has been linked to assassination plots against Morales. The group is notorious for assaulting leftists, Indigenous peasants, and journalists, all while espousing a deeply racist, homophobic ideology.
Since Morales entered office in 2006, the UJC has campaigned to separate from a country its members believed had been overtaken by a Satanic Indigenous mass.
The UJC is the Bolivian equivalent of Spain’s Falange, India’s Hindu supremacist RSS, and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov battalion. Its symbol is a green cross that bears strong similarities to logos of fascist movements across the West.
And its members are known to launch into Nazi-style sieg heil salutes.
After journalist Benjamin Dangl visited with UJC members in 2007, he described them as the “brass knuckles” of the Santa Cruz separatist movement. “The Unión Juvenil has been known to beat and whip campesinos marching for gas nationalization, throw rocks at students organizing against autonomy, toss molotov cocktails at the state television station, and brutally assault members of the landless movement struggling against land monopolies,” Dangl wrote.
“When we have to defend our culture by force, we will,” a UJC leader told Dangl. “The defense of liberty is more important than life.”
Camacho was elected as vice president of the UJC in 2002, when he was just 23 years old. He left the organization two years later to build his family’s business empire and rise through the ranks of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee. It was in that organization that he was taken under the wing of one of the separatist movement’s most powerful figures, a Bolivian-Croatian oligarch named Branko Marinkovic.
In August, Camacho tweeted a photo with his “great friend,” Marinkovic. This friendship was crucial to establishing the rightist activist’s credentials and forging the basis of the coup that would take form three months later.
Camacho’s Croatian godfather and separatist powerbroker
Branko Marinkovic is a major landowner who ramped up his support for the right-wing opposition after some of his land was nationalized by the Evo Morales government. As chairman of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, he oversaw the operations of the main engine of separatism in Bolivia.
In a 2008 letter to Marinkovic, the International Federation for Human Rights denounced the committee as an “actor and promoter of racism and violence in Bolivia.”
The human rights group added that it “condemn[ed] the attitude and secessionist, unionist and racist discourses as well as the calls for military disobedience of which the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee for is one of the main promoters.”
In 2013, journalist Matt Kennard reported that the US government was working closely with the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee to encourage the balkanization of Bolivia and to undermine Morales. “What they [the US] put across was how they could strengthen channels of communication,” the vice president of the committee told Kennard. “The embassy said that they would help us in our communication work and they have a series of publications where they were putting forward their ideas.”
In a 2008 profile on Marinkovic, the New York Times acknowledged the extremist undercurrents of the Santa Cruz separatist movement the oligarch presided over. It described the area as “a bastion of openly xenophobic groups like the Bolivian Socialist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspiration from the fascist Falange of the former Spanish dictator Franco.”
The Bolivian Socialist Falange was a fascist group that provided safe haven to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie during the Cold War. A former Gestapo torture expert, Barbie was repurposed by the CIA through its Operation Condor program to help exterminate communism across the continent. (Despite its antiquated name, like the German National Socialists, this far-right extremist group was violently anti-leftist, committed to killing socialists.)
The Bolivian Falange came into power in 1971 when its leader, Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez, ousted the leftist government of Gen. Juan Jose Torres Gonzales. The government of Gonzales had infuriated business leaders by nationalizing industries and antagonized Washington by ousting the Peace Corps, which it viewed as an instrument of CIA penetration. The Nixon administration immediately welcomed Banzer with open arms and courted him as a key bulwark against the spread of socialism in the region. (An especially ironic 1973 dispatch appears on Wikileaks showing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger thanking Banzer for congratulating him on his Nobel Peace Prize).
The movement’s putschist legacy persevered during the Morales era through organizations like the UJC and figures such as Marinkovic and Camacho.
The Times noted that Marinkovic also supported the activities of the UJC, describing the fascist group as “a quasi-independent arm of the committee led by Mr. Marinkovic.” A member of the UJC board told the US newspaper of record in an interview, “We will protect Branko with our own lives.”
Marinkovic has espoused the kind of Christian nationalist rhetoric familiar to the far-right organizations of Santa Cruz, calling, for instance, for a “crusade for the truth” and insisting that God is on his side.
The oligarch’s family hails from Croatia, where he has dual citizenship. Marinkovic has long been dogged by rumors that his family members were involved in the country’s powerful fascist Ustashe movement.
The Ustashe collaborated openly with Nazi German occupiers during World War Two. Their successors returned to power after Croatia declared independence from the former Yugoslavia – a former socialist country that was intentionally balkanized in a NATO war, much in the same way that Marinkovic hoped Bolivia would be.
Marinkovic denies that his family was part of the Ustashe. He claimed in an interview with the New York Times that his father fought against the Nazis.
But even some of his sympathizers are skeptical. A Balkan analyst from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, which works closely with the US government and is popularly known as the “shadow CIA,” produced a rough background profile on Marinkovic, speculating, “Still don’t know his full story, but I would bet a lot of $$$ that this dude’s parents are 1st gen (his name is too Slavic) and that they were Ustashe (read: Nazi) sympathizers fleeing Tito’s Communists after WWI.”
The Stratfor analyst excerpted a 2006 article by journalist Christian Parenti, who had visited Marinkovic at his ranch in Santa Cruz. Evo Morales’ “land reform could lead to civil war,” Marinkovic warned Parenti in the Texas-accented English he picked up while studying at the University of Texas, Houston.
Today, Marinkovic is an ardent supporter of Brazil’s far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, whose only complaint about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was that he “didn’t kill enough.”
Marinkovic is also a public admirer of Venezuela’s far-right opposition. “Todos somos Leopoldo” — “we are all Leopoldo,” he tweeted in support of Leopoldo López, who has been involved in numerous coup attempts against Venezuela’s elected leftist government.
While Marinkovic denied any role in armed militant activity in his interview with Parenti, he was accused in 2008 of playing a central role in an attempt to assassinate Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism party allies.
He told the New York Times less than two years before the plot developed, “If there is no legitimate international mediation in our crisis, there is going to be confrontation. And unfortunately, it is going to be bloody and painful for all Bolivians.”
An assassination plot links Bolivia’s right to international fascists
In April 2009, a special unit of the Bolivian security services barged into a luxury hotel room and cut down three men who were said to be involved in a plot to kill Evo Morales. Two others remained on the loose. Four of the alleged conspirators had Hungarian or Croatian roots and ties to rightist politics in eastern Europe, while another was a right-wing Irishman, Michael Dwyer, who had only arrived in Santa Cruz six months before.
The ringleader of the group was said to be a former leftist journalist named Eduardo Rosza-Flores who had turned to fascism and belonged to Opus Dei, the traditionalist Catholic cult that emerged under the dictatorship of Spain’s Francisco Franco. In fact, the codename Rosza-Flores assumed in the assassination plot was “Franco,” after the late Generalissimo.
During the 1990s, Rosza fought on behalf of the Croatian First International Platoon, or the PIV, in the war to separate from Yugoslavia. A Croatian journalist told Time that the “PIV was a notorious group: 95% of them had criminal histories, many were part of Nazi and fascist groups, from Germany to Ireland.”
By 2009, Rosza returned home to Bolivia to crusade on behalf of another separatist movement in Santa Cruz. And it was there that he was killed in a luxury hotel with no apparent source of income and a massive stockpile of guns.
The government later released photos of Rosza and a co-conspirator posing with their weapons. Publication of emails between the ringleader and Istvan Belovai, a former Hungarian military intelligence officer who served as a double agent for the CIA, cemented the perception that Washington had a hand in the operation.
Marinkovic was subsequently charged with providing $200,000 to the plotters. The Bolivian-Croatian oligarch initially fled to the United States, where he was given asylum, then relocated to Brazil, where he lives today. He denied any involvement in the plan to kill Morales.
As journalist Matt Kennard reported, there was another thread that tied the plot to the US: the alleged participation of an NGO leader named Hugo Achá Melgar.
“Rozsa didn’t come here by himself, they brought him,” the Bolivian government’s lead investigator told Kennard. “Hugo Achá Melgar brought him.”
The Human Rights Foundation destabilizes Bolivia
Achá was not just the head of any run-of-the-mill NGO. He had founded the Bolivian subsidiary of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an international right-wing outfit that is known for hosting a “school for revolution” for activists seeking regime change in states targeted by the US government.
HRF is run by Thor Halvorssen Jr., the son of the late Venezuelan oligarch and CIA asset Thor Halvorssen Hellum. The first cousin of the veteran Venezuelan coup plotter Leopoldo Lopez, Halvorssen was a former college Republican activist who crusaded against political correctness and other familiar right-wing hobgoblins.
After a brief career as a firebrand right-wing film producer, in which he oversaw a scandalous “anti-environmentalist” documentary financed by a mining corporation, Halvorssen rebranded as a promoter of liberalism and the enemy of global authoritarianism. He launched the HRF with grants from right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel, conservative foundations, and NGOs including Amnesty International. The group has since been at the forefront of training activists for insurrectionary activity from Hong Kong to the Middle East to Latin America.
Though Achá was granted asylum in the US, the HRF has continued pushing regime change in Bolivia. As Wyatt Reed reported for The Grayzone, HRF “freedom fellow” Jhanisse Vaca Daza helped trigger the initial stage of the coup by blaming Morales for the Amazon fires that consumed parts of Bolivia in August, mobilizing international protests against him.
At the time, Daza posed as an “environmental activist” and student of non-violence who articulated her concerns in moderate-seeming calls for more international aid to Bolivia. Through her NGO, Rios de Pie, she helped launch the #SOSBolivia hashtag, which signaled the imminent foreign-backed regime-change operation.
Courting the regional right, prepping the coup
While HRF’s Daza rallied protests outside Bolivian embassies in Europe and the US, Fernando Camacho remained behind the scenes, lobbying right-wing governments in the region to bless the coming coup.
In May, Camacho met with Colombia’s far-right President Ivan Duque. Camacho was helping to spearhead regional efforts at undermining the legitimacy of Evo Morales’ presidency at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, seeking to block his candidacy in the October election.
That same month, the rightist Bolivian agitator also met with Ernesto Araújo, the chancellor of Jair Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservative administration in Brazil. Through the meeting, Camacho successfully secured Bolsonaro’s backing for regime change in Bolivia.
This November 10, Araújo enthusiastically endorsed the ouster of Morales, declaring that “Brazil will support the democratic and constitutional transition” in the country.
Then in August, two months before Bolivia’s presidential election, Camacho held court with officials from Venezuela’s US-appointed coup regime. These included Gustavo Tarre, Guaido’s faux Venezuelan OAS ambassador, who formerly worked at the right-wing Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington.
After the meeting, Camacho tweeted gratitude to the Venezuelan coup-mongers, as well as to Colombia and Brazil.
To read the rest of this article, follow the link above.
The Bolivian Coup Is Not a Coup—Because US Wanted It to Happen
ALAN MACLEOD. FAIR. November 11, 2019
When the military forces the elected president to “step down” (New York Times, 11/10/19), there’s a four-letter word for that.
Army generals appearing on television to demand the resignation and arrest of an elected civilian head of state seems like a textbook example of a coup. And yet that is certainly not how corporate media are presenting the weekend’s events in Bolivia.
No establishment outlet framed the action as a coup; instead, President Evo Morales “resigned” (ABC News, 11/10/19), amid widespread “protests” (CBS News, 11/10/19) from an “infuriated population” (New York Times, 11/10/19) angry at the “election fraud” (Fox News, 11/10/19) of the “full-blown dictatorship” (Miami Herald, 11/9/19). When the word “coup” is used at all, it comes only as an accusation from Morales or another official from his government, which corporate media have been demonizing since his election in 2006 (FAIR.org, 5/6/09, 8/1/12, 4/11/19).
The New York Times (11/10/19) did not hide its approval at events, presenting Morales as a power-hungry despot who had finally “lost his grip on power,” claiming he was “besieged by protests” and “abandoned by allies” like the security services. His authoritarian tendencies, the news article claimed, “worried critics and many supporters for years,” and allowed one source to claim that his overthrow marked “the end of tyranny” for Bolivia. With an apparent nod to balance, it did note that Morales “admitted no wrongdoing” and claimed he was a “victim of a coup.” By that point, however, the well had been thoroughly poisoned.
CNN (11/10/19) dismissed the results of the recent election, where Bolivia gave Morales another term in office, as beset with “accusations of election fraud,” presenting them as a farce where “Morales declared himself the winner.” Time’s report (11/10/19) presented the catalyst for his “resignation” as “protests” and “fraud allegations,” rather than being forced at gunpoint by the military. Meanwhile, CBS News (11/10/19) did not even include the word “allegations,” its headline reading, “Bolivian President Evo Morales Resigns After Election Fraud and Protests.”
Delegitimizing foreign elections where the “wrong” person wins, of course, is a favorite pastime of corporate media (FAIR.org, 5/23/18). There is a great deal of uncritical acceptance of the Organization of American States’ (OAS) opinions on elections, including in coverage of Bolivia’s October vote (e.g., BBC, 11/10/19; Vox, 11/10/19; Voice of America, 11/10/19), despite the lack of evidence to back up its assertions. No mainstream outlet warned its readers that the OAS is a Cold War organization, explicitly set up to halt the spread of leftist governments. In 1962, for example, it passed an official resolution claiming that the Cuban government was “incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system.” Furthermore, the organization is bankrolled by the US government; indeed, in justifying its continued funding, US AID argued that the OAS is a crucial tool in “promot[ing] US interests in the Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-US countries” like Bolivia.
CEPR: What Happened in Bolivia's 2019 Vote Count?
Corporate media ignored CEPR’s finding (11/19) that “neither the OAS mission nor any other party has demonstrated that there were widespread or systematic irregularities in the elections.”
In contrast, there was no coverage at all in US corporate media of the detailed new report from the independent Washington-based think tank CEPR, which claimed that the election results were “consistent” with the win totals announced. There was also scant mention of the kidnapping and torture of elected officials, the ransacking of Morales’ house, the burning of public buildings and of the indigenous Wiphala flag, all of which were widely shared on social media and would have suggested a very different interpretation of events.
Words have power. And framing an event is a powerful method of conveying legitimacy and suggesting action. “Coups,” almost by definition, cannot be supported, while “protests” generally should be. Chilean President Sebastian Piñera, a conservative US-backed billionaire, has literally declared war on over a million people demonstrating against his rule. Corporate media, however, have framed that uprising not as a protest, but rather a “riot” (e.g., NBC News, 10/20/19; Reuters, 11/9/19; Toronto Sun, 11/9/19). In fact, Reuters (11/8/19) described the events as Piñera responding to “vandals” and “looters.” Who would possibly oppose that?
Morales was the first indigenous president in his majority indigenous nation—one that has been ruled by a white European elite since the days of the conquistadors. While in office, his Movement Towards Socialism party has managed to reduce poverty by 42% and extreme poverty by 60%, cut unemployment in half and conduct a number of impressive public works programs. Morales saw himself as part of a decolonizing wave across Latin America, rejecting neoliberalism and nationalizing the country’s key resources, spending the proceeds on health, education and affordable food for the population.
His policies drew the great ire of the US government, Western corporations and the corporate press, who function as the ideological shock troops against leftist governments in Latin America. In the case of Venezuela, Western journalists unironically call themselves “the resistance” to the government, and describe it as their No. 1 goal to “get rid of Maduro,” all the while presenting themselves as neutral and unbiased actors.
The media message from the Bolivia case is clear: A coup is not a coup if we like the outcome.
“This Is a Military Coup”: Bolivian President Evo Morales Resigns After Army Calls for His Ouster
Democracy NOW! November 11, 2019
AMY GOODMAN: Bolivia is in a state of political crisis after longtime President Evo Morales resigned Sunday following what he described as a military coup. Bolivia has been the scene of weeks of protest since a disputed election last month. Morales announced his resignation in a televised address Sunday.
EVO MORALES: [translated] To my brothers and sisters of Bolivia, the whole world, I want to inform you, from Lauca Ñ — I’m here with the vice president and minister of health — that I have decided, after listening to my friends at CONALCAM and the Bolivian Workers’ Center, and also listening to the Catholic Church, to resign my position as president.
AMY GOODMAN: President Morales spoke shortly after the Bolivian military took to the airwaves to call for his resignation.
WILLIAMS KALIMAN: [translated] After analyzing the internal conflict situation, we ask the president of the state to renounce his presidential mandate, allowing for peace to be restored and the maintenance of stability for the good of Bolivia.
AMY GOODMAN: Bolivia’s vice president also resigned Sunday, as did the head of the Bolivian Senate and the lower house. The top two officials on Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Court have been detained. Opposition leader Jeanine Áñez, who is the second vice president of the Bolivian Senate, is claiming she will assume the presidency today.
Evo Morales was Bolivia’s first indigenous leader, was credited with lifting nearly a fifth of Bolivia’s population out of poverty since he took office in 2006. But he faced criticism from some of his former supporters for running for a third and then a fourth term. Evo Morales’s whereabouts are unknown. His home was ransacked Sunday. Mexico has offered Morales asylum. Hours before resigning, Morales had agreed to call for new elections, after the Organization of American States issued a report claiming there was, quote, “clear manipulation” in last month’s election results. According to the official results of last month’s election, Morales won 47% of the vote and just narrowly avoided a runoff election. But the OAS immediately questioned the election process, sparking mass street protests. Critics of the OAS say the global body did not provide any evidence of actual vote rigging.
We go now to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, his latest piece for The Nation headlined “The Trump Administration Is Undercutting Democracy in Bolivia.” Talk about the latest developments, the resignation of President Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia.
MARK WEISBROT: Well, this is a military coup. There’s no doubt about it now, after the head of the military told the president and vice president to resign and then they did. And I think it’s really terrible the way it’s been presented, because, from the beginning, you had that OAS press release, the day after the election, which hinted — or implied, actually, very strongly — that there was something wrong with the vote count, and they never presented any evidence at all. They didn’t presented it in that release. They didn’t present it in their next release. They didn’t present it in their preliminary report. And there’s really nothing in this latest so-called preliminary audit that shows that there was any fraud in this election. But it was repeated over and over again in all the media, and so it became kind of true. And, you know, if you look at the media, you don’t see anybody — you don’t see any experts, for example, saying that there was something wrong with the vote count. It’s really just that OAS observation mission, which was under a lot of pressure, of course, from Senator Rubio and the Trump administration to do this, because they wanted — they’ve wanted for some time to get rid of this government.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain how the election went — Morales stopping the election count, resuming it — and then what kind of majority he needed to avoid a runoff.
MARK WEISBROT: OK. So, this is very important, because this has been very badly described, I think, in most of the media. You have a quick count, which is not even the official count of the election, and it’s not binding. It’s not what determines the result. It’s just something that is done while the votes are being counted to let people know what’s going on at that time. And so, the quick count was interrupted, and when it resumed — and it was interrupted with Evo leading by about 7 percentage points. And when it came back, his margin increased. And if you read the press here, any of the articles, it’s reported as though something terribly suspicious happened. He didn’t have enough votes — he needed a 10-point margin in order to — a 10-point lead over the next runner-up in order to win in the first round, and he didn’t have that when the vote count, this quick count, was interrupted — or, the reporting was interrupted, I should say. And then, you know, he got it in the last 14 — last 16% of the votes counted. He reached 10%. But if you look at what was really — so, this was reported as a very suspicious thing. And this is what’s reported over and over again to make it look like something was wrong.
But if you look at it, actually — actually, the whole vote count — you see there was a steady trend of Evo’s margin increasing almost from the beginning. And it didn’t change in the last 16%; it just continued because — and you can look at the areas that were coming in — these were rural and poor areas where Evo Morales had more support. That’s all that happened. This happens in elections. You can see this if you watch election returns in the U.S. So, there was never anything there.
AMY GOODMAN: Several Latin American leaders have criticized the ouster of Evo Morales in Bolivia. This is Argentina’s President-elect Alberto Fernández.
PRESIDENT-ELECT ALBERTO FERNÁNDEZ: [translated] What’s happening in Bolivia is that there’s a dominant class that will not resign themselves to losing power to the hands of a president who is the first Bolivian president that looks like Bolivians. That’s what’s happening.
AMY GOODMAN: And British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted Sunday, “To see @evoespueble who, along with a powerful movement, has brought so much social progress forced from office by the military is appalling. I condemn this coup against the Bolivian people and stand with them for democracy, social justice and independence. So, if you can talk, Mark Weisbrot, about the role of the Bolivian military? And what about the Trump administration?
MARK WEISBROT: Well, I think the most — you know, the Bolivian military very clearly said — I mean, before they did that, they said they weren’t going to intervene, in terms of the protests. But they very clearly — the head of the armed forces said that Evo should resign, right before he did that. And so it was a military coup. And Evo Morales is calling it that, of course. And there isn’t any doubt about it. The media hasn’t really mentioned it as much as a military coup, but it definitely is.
In terms of the Trump administration, you can look at tweets and statements from Marco Rubio right before the votes were even counted, saying that there was going to be fraud, and, you know, making it clear that they didn’t want this government to be there. And so, yeah, I think that — I mean, it’s very obvious that they supported this coup. And it’s very obvious that they pressured the OAS, where the United States supplies 60% of the budget.
And, you know, this is the problem. The media treats this OAS as though it’s really an independent arbiter here. And they do have electoral missions, and most of the time they’re clean, but they are not always. You know, in Haiti in 2011, for example, they reversed the results of a first-round presidential election without any statistical test, recount or any reason. It was completely political. And in 2000, they reversed their position, their report on the election, when the United States, as you know and you’ve reported on this show, wanted to cut off all international aid to Haiti and spent four years preparing for the coup of 2004. So, the OAS played a major role in that by changing their report on the election in Haiti. And so, I think this is a kind of a classic military coup supported by the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Mark Weisbrot, you have the CIA involvement in coups in Bolivia in 1952, in 1964, 1970, 1980. Would you add 2019 to that list?
MARK WEISBROT: I would add it to the list. I mean, we don’t have the hard evidence of what they did. You know, it’s not like 2009 in Honduras, where Hillary Clinton wrote in her memoirs that she worked in the OAS, too, to prevent the elected president, who you’ve had on this show, from coming back to the country and to the presidency. But I think we’ll probably find out more later. But it’s just — it is very obvious that they supported this coup.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier today, Evo Morales tweeted, “The coup perpetrators who attacked my house & my sister’s, who threatened to kill ministers and their kids, who humiliated a mayor, are now lying & trying to blame us for the chaos and violence that they created. Bolivia & the world are witnesses to this coup.” Among those who condemned the coup are Lula — yes, the Brazilian former president, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also big news. And we just have 30 seconds. But if you, Mark, can talk about the significance of his release from prison after a year and a half? He had been the front-runner in the election before he ultimately was imprisoned. Now he’s out. What does this mean?
MARK WEISBROT: Well, this is definitely a victory. But the thing that I worry about most is they could arrest him at any time for any reason. You have the so-called justice minister of the country who is the judge who put him in prison and in a trial that really almost everyone now knows was lacking in evidence and was really a political trial. And so, and you have, you know, a very — I don’t know how else to say, but a fascistic government. So, he is definitely in danger, and there’s going to be a need to really defend him.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Of course, we’ll continue to follow these developments. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, speaking to us from Washington, D.C. The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, resigned yesterday, saying he was ousted by a military coup.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the first-ever Presidential Forum on Environmental Justice. It’s held in South Carolina. I co-moderated. Today we play you our segment with Elizabeth Warren.
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