By Iroel Sánchez on October 25, 2020
Photo: Millay Poi
The history of coups d’état in Latin America is long and sobering in that, after a process of change that has affected U.S. interests in the region has been overthrown, no immediate subsequent election ever returned the government to the forces displaced from it.
Never that is until October 18, 2020, when the candidates of the Movement to Socialism (MAS), formed by Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca, obtained 55.10% of the votes, exceeding by 8% the results of a year ago, when the coup was unleashed, and leading by more than 26% the second most voted option.
The Bolivian people demonstrated with their vote, and in a convincing manner, the falsity of the accusations of fraud launched by the Organization of American States (OAS) on the results of the November 2019 elections, which created the emergence of a de facto power based on repression, the spilling of indigenous blood and a substantial economic and social setback that, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, placed that country in a dramatic situation.
Before, the process of change in Bolivia had to defeat, successively, the historic alliance with Washington of the white and racist national oligarchy, in an anti-constituent coup (2006-2007), a civic-prefectural coup (2008), a separatist coup (2009), another against social organizations (Tipnis 2011 and 2012), and a media operation known as the Zapata Case, just three weeks before the referendum on presidential reelection on February 21, 2016, when a woman, managed by the U.S. embassy, to claim to have had, with President Evo Morales, a child who would later be proven never to have existed . The message to the voters of the referendum was clear, “if Evo cannot take care of a child, how will he take care of a country?” With it, U.S.-affiliated forces achieved a narrow victory (51.30 percent No vs. 48.70 percent Yes) that would later be overturned by Bolivia’s Constitutional Court, in a decision that Washington did not object to when the same Article 23 of the American Convention on Human Rights was invoked to allow the reelection of Oscar Arias in Costa Rica and Juan Orlando Hernandez in Honduras.
Bolivia is a very particular country, with a plurinational and multicultural make up, with about 40% of the population whose native language is not Spanish, and a structuring of social movements and neighborhood councils with a long tradition of resistance and struggle, with an ancestral social organization that has resisted five centuries of violence and discrimination until one of its own became the highest political figure in the country. If the elections of this October 18 prove anything, it is that this social fabric “has said enough and has begun to walk, and will never stop…” after half a millennium of brutal exclusion.
For the right-wing media, MAS voters are “people who don’t know what a cell phone is, don’t know what the Internet is, and mentally have absolutely no idea about practically anything,” but what their vote shows in successive elections is that they are better informed and have more sense of history than European and American voters, induced into a coma by fake news and artificial intelligence to vote against their own interests.
Our America will never accommodate what Obama repeatedly called in his allusions to Cuba “universal values,” but they are nothing more than systems of domination that the United States imposes on the world. Our most lucid intellectuals, from Carpentier to Wifredo Lam, from García Márquez to Galeano, and even the first Vargas Llosa, realized this before he became the spokesman for the most fundamentalist neoliberalism. But the colonized who want to serve the colonizer never learn.
All form of racisms are similar. The Bolivian coup plotters went to Israel for advice on repression – “We have invited you to help us. They are used to dealing with terrorists. They know how to handle them,” a minister of the de facto government told the Reuters news agency, while in the private press financed for Cuba from the United States, with the vice of a certain Eurocentric academy of bending reality to fit its schemes, they were looking for cool references in Zionism, well seen by the centers of power, from the dogmas that divide Latin America into an “authoritarian right” and a “totalitarian left,” Evo was accused of being a “caudillo” affiliated with the latter.
The totalitarian “caudillo” then said a truth never spoken by a Zionist “democrat”: “There are similar practices in the de facto government of Bolivia and in the Israeli regime.” Evo said this in reference to what is happening in Palestine, such as the murder of people, repression of the population, censorship of the press and even the expulsion of journalists who try to show what is happening.
It is not surprising then that, since tropical Zionism, Evo was denounced and called a totalitarian, following the route of those who previously called him a terrorist. As I wrote then, “Evo Morales is not a traditional politician, nor is he a military man; he was forged as a leader in the unions and social movements that had to confront repression and dictatorships for a long time in the country that has perhaps suffered more coups d’état on the whole planet. Anyone who knows how unions and neighborhood councils work in Bolivia knows about their internal democracy, how they submit all matters to assembly in their long history of mobilizations, resistances and strikes where not a few of their members have lost their lives.”
Nothing differentiates the fascist view of Zionism towards the Arab people, from those who with contempt accuse the Indigenous of not knowing democracy as it is conceived by his colonial view. It is a question of the same imperialist ideology tempered to different geographies.
The MAS has obtained a historic victory, although those who only talk about what has happened in Latin America in order to dogmatically label the Cuban revolutionaries and their comrades in the region as totalitarians, have not told their readers. The reality is that the Bolivian Indians have made it possible for the first time after a coup d’état for the overthrown to return to government, something that was not achieved by the US-built “democratic transitions” in Latin America, nor in Southern Europe.
It is true that lessons will have to be drawn so that Washington and the local oligarchic forces do not once again have the army and police at their service, and it is understood that it is not enough for the economy to go well and for even the rich to benefit, for the process of change to be irreversible; but it will not be the colonial dogma of the newcomer from the North who, like all converts, seeks to deny even the extreme of his own, the right vision to analyze a reality that does not fit in the mind of the one who, in Martí’s words, lives “in the rotten lands” to which Jeanine Añez is already heading after requesting 350 visas for her ministers and family members.
Perhaps the best description of these disconcerting events for some is from an American named Hemingway, who put his skin in danger for the good causes of his time and who chose to live among us, and learn from our humble fishermen: “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated”.
Source: Granma, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau