Coup

A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia

Linda Farthing, Thomas Becker

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642596847
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In three dramatic weeks in October and November 2019, the fourteen years of progressive change that Evo Morales' pink tide government had worked to implement in Bolivia and beyond came to a screeching halt. President Morales was forced to resign after protests against his re-election to a fourth term in allegedly fraudulent elections erupted among the urban middle classes, anti-indigenous racists, and prominent conservative politicians. The country's far right used the ensuing crisis to orchestrate a successful coup, with military and police backing, paving the way for a repressive "transition" government led by Jeanine Áñez to take power. The Áñez government quelled popular protests with lethal force, shut down critical media outlets, and targeted members of Morales' political party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Despite postponing elections three times, the Áñez government was eventually forced to call elections in October 2020. The MAS swept back into power, winning elections with 55% of the vote and returning democracy to the country. This book tells the story of this year of upheaval in Bolivia, providing a critical analysis of the 14 years of the MAS government that preceded it as well as the MAS return to power in 2020. It includes personal stories and commentary from women and men on the streets, leaders in social movements, members of the MAS party and government, survivors of Áñez's abuses, and intellectuals.

PART I: THE COUP

CHAPTER 1

THE “PROCESS OF CHANGE” CUT SHORT

A couple of hours after Evo Morales fled Bolivia’s nineteenth-century presidential palace on November 11, 2019, Luis Fernando Camacho swept in with a police escort, holding a Bible and a Bolivian tricolor flag. The pastor accompanying him swore, “Never again will Pachamama [Indigenous Mother Earth] return here.”¹

The leader of the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee, Camacho held no official position, but in little more than two weeks following the contested election on October 20, this 39-year-old right-wing Catholic zealot had mobilized a testosterone-laced discourse to seize center stage and, in the tumult, to spearhead the expulsion of the president. In the process, he had shut down the country’s fourteen-year experiment with progressive politics and hijacked the longest-running democratically elected government Bolivia has ever had.

The October 20 election appeared fair, like the five previous votes administered by Morales’s government since his landslide win in 2005.² However, a carefully cultivated narrative about fraud pushed by the opposition dominated that night. Just when Morales’s closest rival in fourteen years, former president and vice president Carlos Mesa, had enough votes to force a second round, the quick vote count was suspended for nearly twenty-four hours. The Organization of American States (OAS) denounced “irregularities” at a press conference late that evening, and Mesa called for resistance, decrying “monumental fraud.” Bolivia exploded.

A protest movement spilled out onto city streets, largely comprised of young people from the middle and upper classes. Every night for almost three weeks, the demonstrators alleged fraud, despite any tangible proof. Fueled by rhetoric calling Morales a dictator, their opposition was enabled by Morales’s violation of the country’s constitution by running for a fourth term, in disregard of his defeat in a 2016 referendum on whether he could stand again. The protestors demanded either a runoff with Mesa, or a new election. For the first time since Evo’s election in late 2005, the discourse of democracy rested firmly in the hands of the opposition.³

Students at the nightly rallies in La Paz’s upper-middle-class neighborhood of Sopocachi insisted they were demonstrating “to defend democracy, so that my vote is respected.” But when pressed on how they define democracy, the answer was mostly a blank stare or some version of “getting Evo out” because “he’s been in power too long.”⁴ As the weeks wore on, the nightly protests became more raucous and violent. Behind the scenes, Mesa and other opposition figures called for Morales to resign.

On Wednesday, November 6, Camacho announced that he would show up at the presidential palace and demand that Morales relinquish office immediately. In the face of this obvious publicity stunt, Mesa urged him to wait for the results of an audit conducted by the OAS. Camacho not only ignored Mesa, but by the end of the week had largely eclipsed him.

“I will never participate in another meeting with Carlos Mesa,” Camacho told the local newspaper, La Razón. “I realized we were supporting a person who didn’t care about the people’s vote.”⁵ Further pleas from Mesa and the OAS to respect the constitution and allow Morales to finish his remaining time in office fell on deaf ears. Later revelations indicate that in fact Mesa played a decisive role in orchestrating the coup, leading Evo to accuse him of being its principal instigator.⁶

By Friday, the police in Bolivia’s fourth-largest city, Cochabamba, had mutinied against Morales. Then they rose up in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. Later, Camacho and his supporters would openly brag that they had bribed the police with promises of increased retirement pay.⁷

Gangs supporting Camacho began to bully lawmakers from Morales’s Movement for Socialism (MAS) party into resigning, including the heads of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, leaving the constitutional line of accession vacant.⁸ “They told us they would kidnap our relatives and burn down our houses,” said a MAS lawmaker from the southern department (state or province) of Potosí.⁹ The minister of mines, a governor, a mayor, and the head of the Chamber of Deputies, as well as some of their family members, were kidnapped or attacked, and the campesino union headquarters was vandalized. Morales supporters launched several assaults as well, including burning down the houses of two of their leading opponents in La Paz.

That Saturday, Camacho gave Morales a 48-hour ultimatum to leave office. The announcement took Mesa’s team by surprise. Suddenly they found themselves confronting a rapid-fire and seemingly well-orchestrated unconstitutional seizure of power by Christian conservatives.

“How can he do this?” a top Mesa staffer asked. “He must have backing from somewhere,” a prominent local journalist commented.¹⁰ The usual suspect in Latin America, the United States, had provided overt but limited funding to local opposition NGOs to spread fake news, and the US supported what later proved to be a contested OAS audit of the elections. However, concrete evidence of who funded the unpredictable bully Camacho has yet to surface.

On Sunday morning, the military abandoned Morales. Six weeks later, Camacho revealed that his father, businessman José Luis Camacho Parada, had “sealed the deal” with them, which suggests that, like the police, the military had been bought off. The leaders of the armed forces successfully pressured commander in chief Williams Kaliman to “suggest” that Morales leave office. That Morales resigned hours later confirms just how much power Bolivia’s military still wields.

A jubilant crowd poured into La Paz’s central square in front of the presidential palace and the Plurinational Legislative Assembly to celebrate. “We’ve won our democracy back,” said one protestor as he waved the national flag.¹¹

Two hours after Evo and his vice president, Álvaro García Linera, fled to Morales’s home in the Chapare, opposition leaders—joined by the Brazilian ambassador (in part as proxy for the United States), representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the European Union, as well as Camacho’s lawyer and other opposition leaders—met at La Paz’s Catholic University. There, they decided that the second vice president of the Senate, evangelical Jeanine Áñez, would be Bolivia’s next president. Even though Áñez’s party was part of a coalition that had won only 4 percent of the vote, she proclaimed herself president two days later to a mostly empty legislative chamber. Some MAS lawmakers, who held the majority, were too frightened to show up, and those who did deliberately withheld quorum. Áñez then met with the armed forces and the police to guarantee their support before entering the palace brandishing a huge Bible as a military official pinned on her presidential sash.

Not far beneath the surface of this spectacle were Bolivia’s centuries-old racism and white supremacy. The 2006 election of Evo Morales, an Indigenous leftist, had upset Bolivia’s status quo like nothing since the country’s 1952 revolution. Political scientist Marcelo Arequipa characterizes the movement that overthrew Morales as driven by three emotions: vengeance against uppity Indians, resentment of the supposedly preferential treatment of Indigenous people under Morales, and the fear that the white minority has held since the founding of the republic that the Indigenous majority would violently overthrow them.¹² The opposition burned wiphalas, the Indigenous emblem that had morphed into a second national flag under the MAS. Many police in the highlands, almost all of whom are of Indigenous origin, ripped the wiphala off their uniforms in the days that followed, identifying it as a symbol of the MAS. For sociologist Pablo Mamani, this desecration was “an act of hate, vengeance, humiliation, insult and human degradation.”¹³

Once it was over, it became clear that Bolivia’s far right had taken advantage of mass protest by largely urban middle and upper classes over Evo’s unconstitutional run for a fourth term, using violence and bribes to seize the state. The outcome was a more authoritarian and undemocratic government than the one the opposition accused Morales of running.

WHY EVO FACED A CRISIS

“How could it have happened? How did we lose our president so quickly?” wept a woman at a November 2019 march against Jeanine Áñez’s takeover. On the heels of one of the longest periods of stability in the country’s history, a government that had held power since 2006, and controlled the legislature since 2009, had unraveled in less than a month.

While Morales’s departure from the national stage had been a long time coming, no one could have imagined such a rapid collapse. After fourteen years of inevitable errors and oversights, many voters were ready for something new. Economist Armando Ortuño describes this as “an indifference, a demobilization, an ‘I don’t care’ attitude.”¹⁴ Damian López, a natural gas installer from Potosí, always supported the MAS, but his approval was starting to wear thin. “We want the process that Evo and his political movement started to continue,” he said, “but it’s time for him to go and a new generation of leaders to replace him.”¹⁵

Their apathy was not simply on account of the tedium of the same leader; voters themselves had changed. Opposition to the MAS had mushroomed, and the social movements that had thrust them into power were, for the most part, shadows of their former selves. For political scientist Fernando Mayorga, the overthrow of Morales was, by every indication, a well-orchestrated effort to reaffirm the hegemony of the traditional oligarchy and to replace the MAS’s state-centric economic model with the previous neoliberal one.¹⁶

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES

In the Bolivia of 2019, the Indigenous cultural revival the MAS had brought, and the drop in discrimination that accompanied it, had increasingly less relevance as rural areas were hollowed out by migration to the cities. In many highland regions, like Tahua, on the edge of the vast salt flat Salar de Uyuni, only the elderly remain—leaving ten families in a village that had once been home to one hundred. Roberto Mamani Soliz, whose parents live there, is a secondary school math teacher in nearby Potosí. “I come back several times every year to help my parents with the quinoa crop,” he explained, threshing the native seed by hand. “They can’t manage it on their own and it’s their main food source.”¹⁷

Some of the young, who are rapidly losing both the language and culture, only return to the countryside for festivals. Scholar-activist Félix Muruchi Poma worries that “if we don’t actively work to keep our traditions alive, thanks to city living and the internet, we will completely lose them.”¹⁸

Muruchi taught history to university students, who proved to be the most unpredictable element in the 2019 election. Half the population is under thirty-five, and they are more urban, educated, and middle class than their parents. Armando Ortuño argues: “For many older migrants, Evo Morales was someone to emulate and identify with…. For their children, Morales didn’t … connect so automatically with their aspirations of becoming professionals in a culture defined by urban life and consumerism.”¹⁹

Most of this generation had never known any government except the one led by...