Caitlin Johnstone
I just keep tripping on how
dumb this
latest US-backed military coup is. It’s in Bolivia in case you’ve lost
track, which would be perfectly understandable since US-backed coups have
become kind of like US mass shootings–there’s so many of them they’re starting
to blend into each other.
I mean, for starters the
justifications for this one are so cartoonishly reachy and desperate it boggles
the mind a bit. The main argument you’ll see in favor of the coup is that Evo
Morales was elected after Bolivia’s high court ruled that he could run for a fourth
term, but the (democratically
elected) court ruled
against a 2016 referendum on presidential term limits.
That’s it. That weird,
pedantic appeal to a particular interpretation of bureaucratic technicalities
is the whole entire argument in support of a literal military coup backed by
the United States.
And make no mistake, that’s
exactly what this was: the military ousting a government is precisely the thing
that a coup is. The coup’s Christian
fascist leader Luis Fernando Camacho openly tweeted that the military was
actively pursuing Morales’ arrest prior to the ousted leader’s escape to
Mexico, a tweet he later deleted presumably
because the admission makes it much harder to call this military coup anything
other than the thing that it is. The Grayzone has published
an article documenting this coup’s many ties to Washington. Put it all
together, and you’ve got a US-backed military coup.
Camacho has deleted the tweet
Golinger links to openly admitting that the military were pursuing the arrest
of ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales. Luckily it's been archived here: http://archive.is/iSq8U
https://twitter.com/evagolinger/status/1193704121565696000 …
As happens every single time
the US tries to overthrow a government these days, social media is currently
swarming with small, brand-new and suspicious-looking accounts, many
of which are publishing
the same words verbatim, all defending and supporting the coup. Some of
them try to argue that Morales rigged last month’s election, but that’s totally
bogus and evidence-free. Others try to claim that “the people” of Bolivia
opposed Morales, strongly implying that he was universally loathed, but that
claim is invalidated by the
election results and the massive
demonstrations against the coup.
So the only actual argument
really boils down to “Well he ran for another term, and yeah he won, and yeah
the democratically elected high court ruled he could run again, but a loud and
violent minority of Bolivians don’t want him to be president. What choice do
you have in such circumstances other than to support a literal military coup?”
Which is just so crazy. That’s
how low the bar has sunk for supporting the toppling of a government today. They
don’t have to claim he’s starving his own people. They don’t have to claim that
he’s using chemical weapons. They don’t have to claim that he’s governing
without the consent of the voting populace. Just “Yeah well some of us don’t
like him and there’s some paperwork we disagree on.”
I mean really, how much lower
can the bar get for when a US-backed military coup is justified? “Oh, that
government needed to be toppled because the leader got a parking ticket once”?
“Well the president wore white after Labor Day, and that’s a fashion atrocity”?
So the Morales-supporting line
of succession has been ousted and many of his supporters in the
government arrested by
masked men, and now the US-approved interim
president is an appalling
racist and absolute
dimwit who calls to mind a very low-budget Bolivian version of Sarah
Palin.
Bolivian Sarah Palin is the
nation's new US-approved interim president. https://twitter.com/historic_ly/status/1194758297334755328 …
It’s absolutely amazing how
many people all across the political spectrum have been sucked in by this
ridiculousness. How lost do you have to be to believe that this US-backed
military coup is different from all the others? How many times is Charlie Brown
going to run up and try to kick Lucy’s football?
That bitch is never gonna let
you kick that goddamn football, Charlie Brown. And this US-backed military coup
isn’t going to be any more moral, legal or beneficial than all the others.
The Bolivian opposition, @OAS_official, US government and
mainstream media manufactured a phony narrative of election fraud, setting the
stage for the fascist coup against @evoespueblo.
I explain how it happened:
