11 – The Bolivian National Revolution of 1952-Today

This is just a simplified guide. The questions are not central to the discussion in this class, but rather basic starting points.

Prof. Jorge Majfud

1. What was the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 about?
2. What were the causes and consequences (results) of this revolution?

The Secretary of State to the Secretary of Defense (Lovett)

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v04/d136

This document is a transcript from the August 16, 1983 broadcast of ABC Nightline, hosted by Hugh Downs, reporting on the case of Klaus Barbie. Barbie, the former Gestapo chief in Lyon during World War II (known as the “Butcher of Lyon”) was responsible for torture, deportations, and the deaths of thousands. After the war, instead of being immediately prosecuted, he was recruited in 1947 by U.S. counter-intelligence agents of the U.S. Army.

During the early Cold War, American intelligence agencies valued Barbie for his anti-communist expertise. When France sought his extradition for war crimes, U.S. officials shielded him to protect intelligence operations. With indirect American assistance, he fled to Bolivia in 1951, where he lived for decades under an alias.

In 1983, following a Justice Department investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice acknowledged that U.S. authorities had helped him avoid prosecution and formally apologized to France. The report exposed the moral compromises of the Cold War, showing how strategic priorities delayed justice for Nazi crimes until Barbie was finally extradited and brought to trial.

Haz clic para acceder a CIA-RDP90-00552R000605690003-4.pdf

Other Nazis recrutes by the CIA for Latin America

Bolivia in the 21st century

Bolivia 2006-2013 (During Evo Morales administration):

Highest Foreign Direct Investment in South America

Poverty Reduced by 25 Percent, Extreme Poverty Reduced by 43 Percent: Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America, but poverty has been on a downward trend in recent years after stagnating at a very high level for almost a decade.

Large Increase in the Minimum Wage: One explanation for the decrease in poverty and inequality is that Bolivia has rapidly increased the real (inflation-adjusted) minimum wage. From 2005-2014, the real minimum wage increased by 87.7 percent.Source: INE.

High Level of International Reserves: International reserves act as a buffer against external shocks, preventing balance of payments crises. Bolivia’s buildup of reserves has allowed it to avoid the often harmful conditions that come with IMF borrowing; the country operated under IMF agreements almost continuously for 20 years until Morales took office in 2006. Bolivia’s international reserves are currently more than 48 percent of GDP, higher than even China; there is room for Bolivia to put these resources to greater productive use, for example in public investment.

Economic Growth: Bolivia has grown much faster over the last 8 years under President Evo Morales than in any period over the past three-and-a-half decades.

Source: International Monetary Fund.

   2. High Level of International Reserves: International reserves act as a buffer against external shocks, preventing balance of payments crises. Bolivia’s buildup   of reserves has allowed it to avoid the often harmful conditions that come with IMF borrowing; the country operated under IMF agreements almost continuously for 20 years until Morales took office in 2006. Bolivia’s international reserves are currently more than 48 percent of GDP, higher than even China; there is room for Bolivia to put these resources to greater productive use, for example in public investment.

Source: Banco Central de Bolivia (BCB).

3. Nationalization Shifts Hydrocarbon Revenues to the Public Sector: A referendum vote in mid-2004 indicated public support for a greater state role in the hydrocarbons sector, and in May 2006, newly-elected president Evo Morales renationalized Bolivia’s oil and gas industries. The increased tax revenue has allowed Bolivia to vastly increase its macroeconomic policy space. Some of this revenue went into reserves, as noted above, and Bolivia also increased public investment (below).

Source: BCB.

4. Highest Foreign Direct Investment in South America: While the business press consider nationalizations to be anathema to attracting international investment, Bolivia actually had the highest level of foreign direct investment, as a percent of GDP, in South America in 2013.

Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

        5. Public Investment is High and Increasing: Since 2006, Bolivia has made it a priority to increase public investment spending. Over the last 8 years, total public investment doubled as a percentage of GDP.

Source: Viceministerio de Inversión Pública Y Financiamiento Externo.

     6. Poverty Reduced by 25 Percent, Extreme Poverty Reduced by 43 Percent: Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America, but poverty has been on a downward trend in recent years after stagnating at a very high level for almost a decade.

Source: Instituto de Estadística de Bolivia (INE).

     7. Economic Inequality Decreases: Bolivia has been praised by Alicia Barcena, the head of the Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), as being “one of the few countries that has reduced inequality … the gap between rich and poor has been hugely narrowed.” As shown below (by decile), the income of the poorer sectors of the population has grown much faster since 2006 than that of the higher-income households.

Source: Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean.

    8. Large Increase in the Minimum Wage: One explanation for the decrease in poverty and inequality is that Bolivia has rapidly increased the real (inflation-adjusted) minimum wage. From 2005-2014, the real minimum wage increased by 87.7 percent.Source: INE.

  9. Social Spending Increases Over 45 Percent In 7 Years: Public spending on health, education, pensions and poverty alleviation programs experienced a significant increase (of 45 percent) in real terms, but did not fully keep up with overall growth in the economy.

Source: Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas Públicas.

     10. Pursuing Alternatives to the Drug War: In 2008, the U.S. added Bolivia to a short list of countries that had “failed demonstrably” to meet international counternarcotics agreements. Bolivia has been on the list ever since, despite having reduced the amount of coca in cultivation. Outside the U.S., President Morales has received praise for his “Coca Yes, Cocaine No” policy that emphasizes protecting human rights, and recognizes traditional, legal uses for the coca plant.

To see a spreadsheet with the underlying data, as well as links to sources, click here.

Notice: The following pages are not mandatory readings. They provide a historical background drawn from “The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America” that may be considered for this topic.

1964. Blacks, Indians and the poor must not bear arms

La Paz, Bolivia, November 3, 1964—Despite the extraordinary growth of Bolivia’s economy and despite the purge of its left-wing allies, such as Vice President Juan Lechín, the elected president Víctor Paz Estenssoro must leave the Palacio Quemado. During his administration, Bolivia had received a 600 percent increase in aid from Washington under the umbrella of the Alliance for Progress, largely for the reorganization of its national army. As is tradition in peripheral countries, one of its promoted generals, in this case his vice president, General René Barrientos, is tasked with carrying out the military coup.

The now deposed president had been one of the central figures of the 1952 Revolution. One of the few armed revolutions to succeed in 20th-century Latin America and the only popular revolution tolerated by Washington. On May 22 of that year, 43 days after the armed triumph of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had sent a confidential report to President Harry Truman warning him of the need to recognize the popular revolution led by Hernán Siles Zuazo and the Marxist Juan Lechín. It would be the first and last time in the history of Latin America that a United States government would support a popular revolution rather than a conservative coup. Why? How can such an aberration be explained? The ambassador had explained that, if it didn’t, Bolivia would become even more radicalized against the presence of U.S. companies.

Truman accepted Acheson’s suggestion, and some changes in the richest yet poorest country in South America took shape at lightning speed. For the first time, Indians and miners began to exist as human beings. During the first revolutionary government of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the main tin mines were nationalized, an extensive land reform was carried out, the right to vote was extended to all illiterate Indigenous people, and rural schools were created where a teacher had never before set foot.

For all of this to be possible, the revolutionaries never laid down their arms. In fact, the National Revolution dismantled the army, the traditional armed branch of the Creole oligarchy. But Washington and the ruling elite in Bolivia had a very simple plan: to reverse the process. That is, to disarm the miners and peasants and reorganize a strong army, as in the rest of the continent. All of this was achieved a few years later. Now, the custom of transferring wealth from the bottom up is called security, and the plan to once again hand over the country’s most valuable resources to foreign interests is called national defense.

The sacred Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791, establishes, in a single line: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Naturally, as in other parts of the constitution, as in the Declaration of Independence and as in subsequent laws, neither Black people, nor Indigenous peoples, nor Mexicans were included in the category of “the People,” but merely as inhabitants. This has been and will be the banner of the conservative right in the United States, where those who consider themselves apostles of Jesus identify with firearms as love identifies with sex. Although during the American Revolution at the end of the 18th century (and due to the inefficiency of George Washington’s army) militias effectively fulfilled the role of guerrillas in colonized countries, today by “militia” one does not mean guerrilla fighters but individuals who do not need to go to any war because the powerful armies of Washington take care of that. For centuries, even after Black people in the United States became citizens 99 years ago, firearms were restricted to the use of whites. Although later Black people will claim the same right to carry them, the police and militias of this country will see them as potential criminals, while whites will continue to be perceived as honest citizens defending individual liberty in the land of laws. Of course, none of these brave souls ever used their powerful weapons of war against their government in Washington, but all those who in the countries of the southern border claimed the same right were perceived like Indigenous peoples and Black people in the United States, that is, as an imminent and dangerous threat. Consequently, they were crushed.

Every time Latin American revolutions resorted to the reasonable and civilized use of the ballot box and their citizens voted for change, independent democracies were destroyed by a military coup or replaced by an obedient democracy. When they resorted to the inevitable use of firearms, they were demonized, but they resisted much longer.

In the case of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, the democratic reforms proved too radical, so the next step was obvious: Washington will begin to demand that the new Bolivian government disarm the militias that made it possible and, in their place, consolidate a traditional army. The request is the same that has been repeated countless times, later buried in the oblivion of history, as was the case with Nicaragua of Sandino. On May 10, 1927, the envoy of Washington, Henry Stimson, in an agreement with President Adolfo Díaz, negotiated an election under occupation with the condition of “general disarmament of the country.” As in the United States, firearms are for adults and for children only when they are white.

But if before the Cold War the custom was to send the marines to install some local dictator or to govern directly with one of their own officers, from now on the central idea will be to aggressively invest in national armies to continue doing the same. One of the figures of the revolution, President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, will fall in love with the presidential seat and begin to align himself with the directives of Washington. As requested, during his second presidency, he will consolidate a strong army in Bolivia until he himself is overthrown by a new coup d’état. The coup, which ended another democracy, was also organized in the pristine offices of the CIA. From today onward, Bolivia will suffer other oligarchic dictatorships with the help of Nazi criminals, such as the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, hired by the CIA to help suppress popular movements that were strategically labeled as “communist,” as if only communists were capable of fighting for social justice, individual liberty, and the human rights of the people.

As in almost all Latin American crises, the traditional role of its armies has been neither to fight any war against any invader nor will it be, but to suppress their own peoples when they rebel against the exploitation of powerful local and foreign interests, protected by dictators installed and sustained by the great imperial powers. In Latin America, empires had more success when popular rebellions came to power through elections. This was the case of Venezuela in 1948, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Haiti in 2004, and so many others. They failed spectacularly when these revolutions came through armed action, not from their armies but from their rebel militias. This was how it happened in Mexico in 1920, Bolivia in 1952, Cuba in 1959, and Nicaragua in 1979.

Paz Estenssoro (like Andrés Pérez in Venezuela and so many others in the region) had come to his first presidency as a revolutionary first and then as a progressive reformer. After a couple of terms, and himself a victim of his own concessions in the 60s, he would end up as an allied servant of a Washington that in the 80s would seek to rid itself of some scandalous fascist dictatorships that followed a binge of coups with one of the worst records of human rights violations in the history of the hemisphere.

From nationalizations and reforms in favor of the people, Paz Estenssoro would become another champion of privatizations and a protector of sacred foreign corporations. That is why he would survive and be elected for a fourth time in 1985 to extend the neoliberal wave to Bolivia, this time under the blessing of a government legitimized at the ballot box. There would be no coup because the people, unaware of the plan for privatizing reforms (as in the Argentina of Carlos Menem), would vote for Washington’s candidate. The popular protests accusing him of betrayal will be labeled as manipulations by the usual sellouts. Peasant and union leaders will be kidnapped and imprisoned until everything returns to the calm of resignation.

(…)

1980. The Aryans of Bolivia

La Paz, Bolivia. July 17, 1980—Drug traffickers pressure President Lidia Gueiler to appoint her cousin, a graduate of the School of the Americas, General García Meza, as Commander of the Army. General Meza is a trusted man of the former dictator Hugo Banzer and belongs to the right-wing faction of the Bolivian army, which is upset by the investigations into human rights abuses in the country. In this bloody Cocaine Coup, the Nazi Klaus Barbie, a CIA operative, plays a significant role.

Just as in the United States the powerful racist ideology of Anglo-Saxon superiority permeates the past century and ends up influencing and even inspiring Adolf Hitler, German Nazis had a significant ideological and moral influence on American high society before World War II, until the traumatic experience turns them into official enemies and sends them to the basements of their executive towers. After the war ends and the hunt for Nazis begins, these same agents become crucial for the establishment of the CIA in Europe and for the founding of NASA through Operation Paperclip. During these years, a foundational phenomenon occurs: the United States’ main ally against Germany, the Soviet Union, becomes the sole remaining enemy and, consequently, almost the only obsession and excuse to continue a tradition of illegal and forceful interventions that dates back to the previous century. One of the crucial groups in Washington reporting on Soviet activities was the Gehlen Organization, an espionage network created by Hitler and adopted by the CIA. Its leadership was left in the hands of General Reinhard Gehlen, assisted by a hundred other Nazi war criminals, former members of the Gestapo and other divisions of the SS paramilitary group. For the old Nazi guard, the communists were the primary enemies. The alliance with Washington was not only an opportunity for revenge but also a matter of survival. For this reason, informants in this Nazi spy network exaggerated the military and operational capabilities of the Soviets, who were then struggling to recover from the devastation of the war—a devastation that never affected the United States in the same way. (World War II had ruined the major European powers that, up to that point, had dominated the geopolitical stage). Similarly, both CIA propaganda in Latin America and the region’s upper classes and leaders employed this method: the CIA exaggerated Moscow’s ability to act in Latin America, while the ruling criollo classes waved the specter of communism to ensure the flow of millions in assistance from Washington to their military dictatorships or far-right paramilitary groups.

It is no coincidence that the coup-plotting military now displays a flag with the Nazi swastika, nor will it be a coincidence that this tradition survives, even if in the basements of some barracks, well into the 21st century. Decades earlier, the CIA had sent some of these Nazi criminals, such as Otto von Bolschwing and Klaus Barbie, to advise the dictatorships in their fight for freedom.[1] Von Bolschwing is a veteran criminal from Hitler’s secret service, the paramilitary SS directly responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews and other inferior races until the end of the Second World War. The CIA hired him as a spy after he briefly served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. Bolschwing’s boss, Adolf Eichmann, was kidnapped in Argentina by the Mossad and executed in Israel in 1962, but Bolschwing remains untouchable due to his service against all kinds of popular movements in Europe. To avoid extradition to Israel, he was sent to California, where he worked as vice president of the Trans-International Computer Investment Corporation, a company that held contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. This year, some details about Bolschwing’s Nazi past became public. A year later, the Department of Justice will have no choice but to prosecute him, accusing him of lying about his true past. Bolschwing will die on March 7, 1982, at the age of 73, in a nursing home.

Like Eichmann and many others, Klaus Barbie managed to escape through the popular ratlines with the help of the victors. Unlike Eichmann, Barbie had managed to get on the payroll of the intelligence agencies of the United States and Germany in 1947 and supplemented his income with the sale of quinine, and alongside two other prominent Nazis, Friedrich Schwend and Hans Rudel, with the arms trade. According to a 1986 internal publication that the CIA would declassify in 2010, Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death from Auschwitz, had been captured by Washington agents in 1947 in Austria and was declared dead that same year in Europe, and then several times in South America (before reappearing in Peru, Paraguay, Argentina and marrying in Uruguay), as had other war criminals such as Friedrich Schwend, sent to Peru, and Walter Rauff, supervisor of the SS gas chambers, responsible for the deaths of a hundred thousand people and employed by the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, and Augusto Pinochet’s secret police, DINA. According to the report published in the 25th issue of Covert Action, republished by the CIA on June 3, 2010, “all collaborated in the repression of leftists, especially when the CIA had to organize the coup against Allende“.

After the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, which Harry Truman did not dare to suppress in one blow due to the absence of a powerful national army and the presence of strong, heavily armed popular militias, the United States followed a more gradualist strategy. To support a process of restoring democracy in Bolivia, in the 1950s the U.S. government allied with President Víctor Paz Estenssoro to rearm the army and disarm the popular militias. The sacred Second Amendment in the United States, considered by conservatives in this country as the main reason why, apparently, there was never a dictatorship in the United States, did not apply to poor countries populated by Indians who did not know how to govern themselves.

During these years, the neighboring country (the Chile of Augusto Pinochet, one of the CIA’s and Washington’s protégés) kept active the famous and paradoxical Colonia Dignidad, founded by the German Nazi Paul Schäfer Schneider. Although this colony will become known for its systematic sexual abuse of hundreds of children and young people, for now it is recognized in the barracks of Santiago for its expertise in torture. Making an individual suffer for hours and days without dying is an art that Colonia Dignidad contributed to the new Chilean government, which until then lacked experience in the matter.

Since the 1960s, Klaus Barbie had gained the respect of the German community in Bolivia (many of whom were Jewish) and, in particular, of the high society of Cochabamba under the name Klaus Altmann. Barbie was acquainted with prominent members of society, such as the officer graduated from the School of the Americas in Georgia and dictator Hugo Banzer, Alberto Natusch Busch, grandson of former president Germán Busch and president himself for two weeks in 1979, and his successor, Lidia Gueiler Tejada.[2]

In 1980, Klaus Barbie, also known as the Butcher of Lyon for his systematic killings of French prisoners during Hitler’s best years, stood out once again as part of the intelligence behind the bloody coup d’état led by General Luis García Meza against President Lidia Gueiler.

Gueiler also belonged to the German community but was Jewish and a bit left leaning.

(…)

2019. Indians out of Bolivia

La Paz, Bolivia. November 11, 2019—Amid social protests and to avoid a bloodbath, President Evo Morales, a survivor of several plane crashes, boards a flight to Mexico. At the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, some students paint on one of its walls: “Indians out of UMSA.” Ten years after the Washington-backed coup in Honduras, history rhymes again, as it did throughout the past century, but resorting to more subtle forms of media and narrative manipulation.

On November 15, the new de facto president, Jeanine Áñez, decrees that any member of the Armed Forces who participates in the repression of demonstrations “will be exempt from criminal liability.” Over the course of seven days, eleven people are massacred and 120 are seriously injured in the town of Sacaba. Four days later, in Senkata, another eleven people are killed and 78 are injured in clashes with police and military forces. The harassment and deaths under the new dictatorship promoted by Washington and its secretariat, the OAS, will continue in different parts of the country, albeit with less media coverage. Although several organizations will denounce the repression and massacres, the new Minister of Government will claim that the protesters killed themselves: no repressor would think of shooting someone in the back with a .22 caliber pistol.

In Bolivia, Indigenous people have always been a minority, making up just 60 percent of the population. A minority in the newspapers, universities, prestigious schools, clergy, politics, and television. For centuries, the minority to the world was the invisible, exploited majority of their own country. Since the time of Franz Tamayo and long before, Indigenous people had been conveniently accused of being drunkards, lazy, and insensitive, because only a few laborers were seen on Sundays, when they wasted their meager wages in some village tavern. The rest of the time they spent underground.

In 2004, Bolivia’s representative in the Miss Universe pageant, known for its hegemonic racism and sexism, Gabriela Oviedo, had clarified: “Unfortunately, people who don’t know much about Bolivia think we’re all Indigenous from the West of the country… La Paz reflects that image, poor people, short people, Indigenous people… I’m from the other side of the country, the East, where it’s not cold, it’s very hot; we’re tall, we’re white, and we speak English.” But since racism had already fallen out of favor long before, it had been replaced by other forms of discrimination, like the flaws of culture and someone else’s corruption. Two years earlier, in the 2002 elections, the U.S. ambassador had campaigned against the candidate of the poor Indigenous people: “Bolivians —he declared— must seriously consider the consequences of voting for leaders linked in any way to drug trafficking.” Everyone knew he wasn’t referring to the coca monopoly imposed by Coca-Cola in Peru to avoid competition and the rising cost of their star ingredient, nor to the coca imported from Bolivia by the same multinational.[3] Nor was he referring to the main producer of cocaine illegally exported to the United States, Colombia, a country militarized by Washington since the sixties, nor to its president Álvaro Uribe (linked to the most powerful drug cartels by Washington’s own agents and ambassadors) but rather to the coca grower activist and presidential candidate of Bolivia, Evo Morales.[4] The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, the Cuban Otto Reich, warned the Bolivian people that if they dared to elect the indigenous union leader, U.S. aid to the country could be cut off.[5]

Of course, Morales lost the 2002 elections, and President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was elected for a second term by a Senate resolution, since the most-voted candidate did not reach half of all votes cast. As in previous cases in Latin America, the election of a Washington-backed figure (that is, of the Creole oligarchy and its servants) automatically meant that the democratic system was functioning cleanly and fairly. As the supposed stability maintained by silencing the masses ended a year later in a bloodbath in the streets of La Paz, Sánchez was replaced by his vice president, Carlos Mesa. Shortly after Evo Morales’s victory in the December 2005 elections, the traditional winners, now losers, proposed an autonomy referendum to divide the country in two: on one side, the wealthy whites, and on the other, the poor indigenous people. To the East, the fertile Half-Moon region, the plains of the large landowners, and to the West, the mountains of the poor peasants who had voted for the indigenous Morales and his party, the Movement Toward Socialism. The problem was that, although the fossil fuel reserves were on the side of the whites, the largest mineral resources of the country remained on the side of the indigenous people, from copper and tin to 60 percent of the world’s lithium reserves in Uyuni, an essential mineral in the production of batteries for all kinds of electronic devices that drive the world in the Digital Age. The referendum was held in 2008, but it never had constitutional value.

A sin of President Evo Morales is being indigenous, speaking as an indigenous person, and having dared to open the doors to the indigenous population (historically relegated to nonexistence or a value lower than that of a cow) to take a leading role in Bolivian politics and society. For the same reason, suddenly Washington and the Creole opposition remembered the existence of indigenous people in Bolivia. In 2011, an indigenous group, the TIPNIS, organized various marches and protests against the government to prevent the construction of a highway through their territories. Although their claims were legitimate, leaked recordings revealed that the indigenous people were used and instigated by the U.S. Embassy through one of its officers and a member of USAID, Eliseo Abelo. The documents leaked by WikiLeaks in 2011 confirmed this practice by the Embassy. Abelo had coordinated the protests by phone with Aymara leader Rafael Quispe and deputy Pedro Nuni. Weeks later, in response to the protests, President Morales canceled the project, leaving the opposition without their last excuse. In 2013, USAID was expelled from Bolivia, and in 2014 from Ecuador, for the same reasons. Washington’s tactic of secretly supporting indigenous groups against disobedient governments had a precedent in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution and was repeated in Ecuador under President Rafael Correa.

Another sin of Morales is, as in the rest of the disobedient countries, having achieved enormous social and economic success throughout his tenure without resorting to selling national sovereignty to the IMF and the powerful multinational corporations that wrote the laws and history of Latin America in the last century. Quite the opposite. When Morales won the 2005 election with 54 percent of the vote, representatives from the IMF and the World Bank asked him how much money he needed, and in response, Morales told them “nothing.” He asked them to close their offices in the Central Bank of La Paz and achieved the nationalization of mineral resources, increasing the benefits for the Bolivian state from 15 percent to 85 percent. President Morales himself, at the 2014 G77 Summit, explained the logic of the clause known as “At the Wellhead” that had previously governed: the benevolent national law stated that the resources below ground belonged to Bolivians, but only while they were underground. Once extracted, 85 percent belonged to international companies. The nationalization of hydrocarbons was another sin that President Rafael Correa in Ecuador would also commit. After forty years of fiscal deficit, Bolivia began to have a surplus, that is, autonomy. Independence. Too much. Intolerable. Unacceptable.

Now, the power of votes is not enough. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote more than a century ago, “The democracy of this century needs no more justification for its existence than the simple fact that it has been organized so that the white race may keep the best lands of the New World.” Washington and the traditional Bolivian ruling class have lost patience and gotten rid of the Indian. Weeks before the elections that would serve as an excuse, various recordings had announced the plot from Florida. As always, the official documents will take years to appear, with some data covered by black rectangles. Since the seventies, as a result of multiple confessions and investigations by various committees in the U.S. Congress, the secret services and Washington’s investment in manipulating Latin American politics have become more hermetic. The documents related to this new coup will take many years to be published, if they haven’t already been burned in a burn bag. Why would they tell the whole truth to the children of those they are trying to deceive at a cost of several billion dollars?[6]

But the signs are all too familiar. For example (and though it is now almost impossible to prove), the interruption of the vote count for twenty hours, which raised suspicions about possible election manipulation by the government, bears the indelible mark of the CIA. Throughout its history, Washington’s intelligence service has almost without exception insisted on the false flag strategy, which is also an Anglo-American tradition since the 19th century. The sequence is usually the same: (1) discredit a popular and independentist government; (2) invest in propaganda in the local press, national and international institutions; (3) accuse the unwanted leader of corruption, election fraud, “power perpetuation” desires, or authoritarian tendencies in the rebellious government; (4) organize popular protests, often bloody; (5) coordinate with the local ruling class and the Latin American army of the moment “to restore order” and finally; (6) an inevitable coup d’état presented as a “liberating revolution” or something as beautiful as “restoration of democracy” or “recovery of freedom” and all that popular literature that did not emerge from the creole stages where it was repeated but from the pristine offices in Washington.

Three weeks before the media-military coup, on October 21, as in other sabotages at the southern border, the senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, had once again demonstrated a special knowledge of the situation and had hastily condemned the election results in Bolivia as obvious fraud. Had it not been for that twenty-hour interruption in the vote count during the early morning following the election, the count would have followed the predictable variations, as data were reported first in urban areas and then in rural ones, meaning indigenous votes overwhelmingly in favor of President Morales.[7]

Days earlier, 18 audios had been leaked to the press and to some personal emails, in which U.S. senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Bob Menéndez (sons of Cubans who emigrated to the United States during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista), several Bolivians belonging to the ruling class and some military officials about the plans for a possible coup d’état in Bolivia preceded by street protests and an arson attack against the Cuban embassy. Among others involved was Captain Manfred Reyes Villa, mayor of Cochabamba, repeatedly defeated in presidential elections and now a fugitive in the United States for corruption and illicit enrichment, crimes that the candidate markets as political persecution from Miami. Manfred Reyes Villa belongs to the militarist party ADN, founded by the former dictator Hugo Bánzer (later elected president in 1997). Among his political achievements is the privatization of water in Cochabamba, signed by President Bánzer in 2000 in favor of the American giants Bechtel and Edison and the Spanish company Abengoa, all under the more creole umbrella of Aguas del Tunari. As a result of this well-known IMF and Washington Consensus recipe, rates rose by 300 percent, leading to the collapse of other services and the so-called “Water War.” The agreement was suspended when the neoliberal crisis sank the Bolivian economy as it had done with other countries in the region. After hiding in Miami from his country’s justice, accused of other less legal forms of corruption, Reyes Villa will return to Bolivia and be protected by the dictatorship led by Jeanine Áñez.

Double standards in the continent are the standards that count twice. In 2003, the president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe (widely linked to paramilitary terrorism and drug trafficking by the very U.S. embassy, but nonetheless an unconditional protégé of Washington), had failed in his referendum to modify the constitution that prohibited his reelection. After granting amnesty to 850 paramilitaries accused of terrorism and increasing the government deficit in favor of military spending, in 2004 he succeeded in getting the Congress to introduce an amendment to the 1991 constitution. In 2005, several members of Colombia’s Constitutional Court accused each other of having received bribes to vote in favor of the constitutional reform, which was approved so that Uribe could run in the 2006 elections. But the economy was improving, and no one wanted to risk moral issues. Uribe was reelected with an impressive 62 percent of the votes, and his popularity grew, as always happens with winners.

Let’s look at just one more case that confirms the rule. In 2017, due to a controversial ruling by the Supreme Court of Justice of Honduras, the conservative president Juan Orlando Hernández was enabled to run in that year’s elections. During the count, in which the opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla was comfortably leading after 60 percent of the votes had been counted, a system interruption gave a magical victory (according to electoral math) to the official candidate, making Hernández the first reelected president in his country, despite the 1982 constitution. Nasralla was a conservative politician too far to the left for the taste of Washington and the Honduran oligarchy. After analyzing the data, The Economist and other liberal-conservative think tanks concluded that the sudden change in trend after the interruption was statistically impossible. For much less, in 2009, for proposing a non-binding popular referendum on a possible constitutional reform that could lead to enabling a president to be reelected, the then-Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, had been taken from his bed and flown to Costa Rica by patriotic military officials. Immediately, the coup leaders claimed it was not a coup d’état, justified by an arrest order against the president issued by the Supreme Court, which sought to protect the 1982 constitution, which prohibits any reform or reelection. Zelaya had not introduced any constitutional reform, but merely a popular consultation on the creation of a National Constituent Assembly in the November elections of that year, where he would not and could not be a reelected candidate. The proposal was supported by Article 5 of the 2006 Citizen Participation Law, which allowed for non-binding popular consultations on a policy or political proposal. But Zelaya was another conservative politician who had strayed too far, cultivating friendship and trade ties with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez from Venezuela, Rafael Correa from Ecuador, and Evo Morales from Bolivia. As became clearer sometime later, Washington supported the 2009 coup in practice and from its mega military base at Soto Cano. In the same manner and with the same double standards, it supported Hernández’s fraudulent reelection in 2017 and now backs the new coup in Bolivia—all with the help and deference of the OAS Secretary General and Washington’s proxy, Luis Almagro.

Now, the elections in Bolivia are almost as contentious as those in Honduras, but the winner is not favored by Washington or its oligarchy, the owners of the countries of the Southern Border, who decide when and how to sell their private property. After more than eighty percent of the votes were tallied, President Evo Morales holds a seven-point lead over the candidate and former president Carlos Mesa (45 to 38 percent), but a crash in the IT system interrupts the count. When it resumes, the lead widens to ten percent, the minimum required to avoid a runoff, and the OAS rushes to condemn the result as a “drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend.”

For this reason, President Morales invites the OAS to audit the disputed elections. The OEA finds irregularities and concludes that, although President Evo Morales has won the elections, he likely did not do so with the necessary ten percent margin to avoid a runoff. Based on the “technical judgment” of the OEA, Morales offers to nullify the ten percent difference and proceed to a second round. The general and commander in chief of the Armed Forces, promoted by Morales himself (a pattern too repetitive in the Wild Frontier), Williams Kaliman, rejects the president’s offer. Now, the opposition does not want a runoff. Carlos Mesa has obtained very few votes, and Morales could win again, so, without mincing words, they demand his resignation. In the streets, protests increase. Morales concedes even more and offers to nullify the elections he just won, with or without interruption, and vote the first round over from zero. The protests grow even more.

You don’t need to be a genius to realize that elections are not what truly matters. What matters is getting rid of the rebellious Indian. Washington and the creole oligarchy are interested in business and, above all, maintaining their decision-making power and the narrative monopoly of the last two hundred years. The interests of the country’s owners are driven by class. A significant portion of the white and mestizo middle class is driven, like the Miss Bolivia in 2004, Gabriela Oviedo, by endemic racism, sometimes so naïve and always so functional for those above and those outside. On October 5, 2019, the future de facto president, Jeanine Áñez Chávez, had posted a tweet with a caricature of Morales embracing a presidential chair under the announcement “Last Days”. The future president wrote: “Clutching to power the ‘poor Indian’”. Shortly after, she deleted her tweet, but WayBack Machine will preserve it for years to come. The future de facto president dyes her hair blonde, but she cannot hide her Bolivian ancestry.

The perfect moment for the next move. General Williams Kaliman has an Anglo-Saxon name and surname and sounds German, but he is Indian like most of his generals who are photographed making the symbol of white supremacy with their hands. The tradition of the German elite in Bolivia, the Nazi criminals sent by the CIA, and the dictators proud of their German lineage, such as Hugo Banzer in Bolivia or Stroessner in Paraguay, produce these curiosities. Like General Porfirio Díaz (pardoned by Lerdo de Tejada for his attempted coup against Benito Juárez and expelled from Mexico by the same general), René Barrientos (general promoted by Víctor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia), Augusto Pinochet (general promoted by Salvador Allende in Chile), Manuel Noriega (general promoted by Omar Torrijos in Panama), Rafael Videla (general promoted by Isabel Perón in Argentina), Manini Ríos (general promoted by Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay), and so many others, Williams Kaliman Romero is a general promoted by President Evo Morales in Bolivia. Like all of them, like many more throughout the continent and two hundred years of history, General Kaliman stabs his “brother president” in the back, as he had once called him while climbing the military ranks. Now, in front of the television cameras, General Williams Kaliman declares: “We suggest that the President of the State resign from his presidential mandate, allowing pacification and the maintenance of stability, all for the unity and well-being of our Bolivia.” In case the suggestion of the Armed Forces isn’t clear enough, the General Commander of the Bolivian Police, Vladimir Yuri Calderón, also suggests he resign. The words “pacification,” “stability,” and “unity” echo tragically from the long and wide history of interventions in Latin America. In the last two hundred years, no Creole general has dared to say these words publicly against their own president without first being informed, confirmed, and convinced of Washington’s support. As Senator and future President John F. Kennedy aptly summarized in 1958, “in Latin America, the armies are the most important institutions, so it is important to maintain ties with them. The money we send them is money thrown down the drain in a strictly military sense, but it is money well invested in a political sense.” This is why in Latin America, no suggestion has ever been more sacred than that of the armies. The Creole armies suggest better than the people. For this, the people pay their salaries. The protests don’t matter, the votes don’t matter. What matters is what the army suggests. Consequently, President Morales resigns. The coup d’état, as is the norm, was planned with time and care, long before the elections that served as a convenient excuse. In dozens of meetings, the military, police, and churchmen mention the collaboration of U.S. Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. History teaches that in a conspiracy of this kind, what is known is only the tip of the iceberg.

Morales goes into exile in Mexico. Immediately, attacks on the homes of his supporters, unions, and universities follow. On June 7, 2020, a new investigation by Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania will conclude that the OEA’s hasty audit and conclusion regarding possible fraud in the 2019 elections were baseless and that, on the contrary, there was never any indication of fraud on the part of the now-former President Evo Morales. Previously, in 2019, the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington had published a similar study with the same conclusion. The director of the OAS, Uruguayan Luis Almagro (a man of the left when he was a minister under President José Mujica and a man of the right now that he is the OAS secretary in Washington), with words reminiscent of President Donald Trump, even accuses The New York Times of spreading fake news. On June 7, 2020, The New York Times would accuse the OAS of fueling the fire of the coup in Bolivia with a report based on a flawed analysis of the data. Among other reasons, it would cite studies by professors Nicolás Idrobo and Dorothy Kronick (University of Pennsylvania) and Francisco Rodríguez (Tulane University), according to which “the OAS’s statistical analysis was flawed.”

Following a pattern echoing other coups, the president appointed by the coup leaders, former television presenter Jeanine Áñez, is the second vice president of the Senate and third in the line of succession. By law, Áñez requires the votes of the party of the deposed President Morales, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), to be confirmed as president. In protest, the MAS does not enter the voting chamber, and their absence is interpreted as votes in favor of the coup against their own leader. As a result, Áñez is confirmed as the new president.

On November 13, just a few meters from the Legislative Palace that consecrates her with barely a third of the votes, Áñez enters the Palacio Quemado, the government house. Ten years earlier, in 2009, the government of Bolivia had been declared secular. Now, the new president raises a Bible that appears to be a 19th-century edition and shouts: “The Bible returns to the Palace.” At least the Bible translated into Spanish and printed on paper. We don’t know if God is as well. What we do know is that, just like in Brazil with Captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro, just like the neoconservatives in the United States and their innocent missionaries sent decades ago to the Southern Border, the merchants expelled by Jesus from the temple have managed to involve the rebellious carpenter’s son with sacred international capitals, the criminalization of abortion with tax cuts for the richest, and french fries with Coca-Cola. A perfect political combo for quick consumption. Fast politics for the new fast-food consumers.

In the name of freedom and democracy, Áñez, allergic to the indigenous people of her country and her family and aligned with the interests of international capital, will dedicate herself to persecuting Morales’ followers, mostly indigenous or “impure” Christians. Only in the first days of protests following the coup, 31 Bolivians will lose their lives without the world press being moved by such an irrelevant loss. They are indigenous, they are Bolivians. In contrast, on January 11, 2015, as an expression of solidarity for the 12 victims of the attack in Paris against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, dozens of world leaders traveled to Paris to march through the streets arm in arm.[8] That same year, that same month, 86 people had died in an attack in Nigeria, ordered by Boko Haram, without the world being moved, despite it being a massacre by the same enemy. Seven years earlier, on August 22, 2008, Washington had bombed Azizabad. Those responsible for the massacre, among them Oliver North (convicted for lying to Congress in the Iran-Contras scandal and pardoned by the president of the time) reported that everything had gone perfectly, that a Taliban leader had been killed, that the village had greeted them with applause, and that the collateral damage had been minimal. It was not reported (as USA Today would acknowledge ten years later, when it no longer mattered) that dozens of people, including 60 children, had died in that attack. A detail. Neither here, in Bolivia, are there marches or international tears for people who don’t exist in countries that don’t matter, beyond the multinationals that have exploited them for centuries for the well-being of the civilized in the North.

One year later, attempts will continue to decree the illegality of President Morales’s party, the MAS. Just to be safe, they will try to judge him for some political crime. On July 6, 2020, showing a certain lack of imagination, he will be charged with “terrorism, sedition, and financing terrorism.” Not even McDonald’s offers such a simple menu to satisfy a customer so rigorously simplified. But this time propaganda won’t work. The always-despised Bolivian indigenous people, after a year of resistance, will manage to vote on October 18, 2020. To leave no room for discussion that the de facto government of Áñez and the secretary of the OAS could cling to, Evo Morales’s former minister of economy will sweep the elections without the need for a runoff, with not a ten-point but a twenty-point advantage over his rival Carlos Mesa. Luis Arce will not hide his disobedient and independentist fight for a sovereign country, and it is expected that he will not follow the path of vice presidents turned presidents, like Michel Temer in Brazil or of Lenin Morales in Ecuador.

Faced with the avalanche of rebel votes, the businessman, member of the paramilitary group of the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista and presidential candidate forCreemos, Luis Fernando Camacho Vaca, will dry his tears with a white handkerchief. Far away will be his attempt to divide the country between whites and Indians and too close will be the avalanche of festering votes. His friend Branko Marinković (a member of the fascist and ultra-Catholic Ustacha Militia sect and minister of economy of the de facto government) will remain silent. The generals, the ladies with fans, the mercenary writers, the pharisees of the hour, the professional prayer warriors, the Washington hawks, the demigods of the CIA, the all-powerful transnational corporations that know more about politics than free trade, will also remain silent.

Facing the avalanche of Bolivian votes, the Secretary of Washington and the OAS, Luis Almagro, will also remain silent. The old silence of conspiring officials who know that they have only lost a pawn, but not the queen. Two weeks later, after the presidential elections on November 3 in the United States, President Donald Trump and his supporters will allege massive fraud. The OAS, despite being a pan-American organization that has that northern country as a protected member, and its secretary, will maintain a strict, respectful, healthy, significant silence.

  ^[1] One of the secret and far-reaching operations in Europe and Latin America was Operation Bloodstone, through which the CIA worked in coordination with several high-ranking Nazi criminals to maintain their area of influence in Latin America and contain the new influence of the Soviet Union.

^[2] The first husband of Jeanine Áñez (host of Totalvisión and future de facto president following the coup d’état in 2019), Tadeo Ribera Bruckner, also has Germanic roots.

^[3] Historically, Coca Cola executives have repeatedly stated that the cocaine extracted from coca leaves in the United States is for medical use, such as the production of painkillers, data that can never be verified with precision. In August 2016, a shipment of cocaine worth $56 million was discovered at a Coca Cola plant in France. The news was quickly forgotten and did not topple any powerful executives.

^[4] According to various reports from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, declassified and published in the National Security Archive on May 26, 2018, the ties of President Uribe with Colombian drug trafficking mafias are, at the very least, recurrent.

^[5] Otto Reich was the founder and director of the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America, a news agency that diverted money from the CIA and the Pentagon to create and spread fake news in Latin America, closed by court order in 1989.

^[6] The burn bag are bags made of recycled paper marked with red and white stripes that are used in Washington (especially by the CIA, the NSA and the Department of Defense) to eliminate or burn classified documents that are too compromising.

[7] Exactly the same thing will happen in the 2020 United States elections, but in a more radical way. With 80 percent of the votes counted, states like Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania will show a clear victory for President Donald Trump, until the votes from the populous districts with Latino and African American populations begin to be counted, and 48 hours later, those states are won by the opponent, Joe Biden. President Trump will denounce the change in trend as massive fraud. The OAS will maintain a respectful silence. There will be no coup, at least not in the traditional Latin American style.

^[8] Among the solemn faces in the photographs were François Hollande (France), Mariano Rajoy (Spain), Angela Merkel (Germany), David Cameron (England), Matteo Renzi (Italy), Jean-Claude Juncker (European Union), Donald Tusk (Poland), Petro Poroshenko (Ukraine), Sergey Lavrov (Russia), Helle Thorning-Schmidt (Denmark), Charles Michel (Belgium), Mark Rutte (Netherlands), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Klaus Iohannis (Romania), Antonis Samaras (Greece), Ahmet Davutoglu (Turkey), Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Mahmoud Abbas (Palestine), Queen Rania (Jordan), Abdullah II (Morocco), Mehdi Jomaa (Tunisia), Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (Mali), Ali Bongo Ondimba (Gabon)… Meanwhile, the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Barack Obama, Putin, and Ban Ki-moon issued heartfelt statements condemning the tragic attack.