Trump inspired coup in Bolivia

Sankar Ray

Political asylum of the President of Bolivia Juan Evo Morales Ayma in Mexico, after being forced out of power, despite being elected fourth time in a row, by the USA, ascendancy of neo-chauvinism and Trumponomics. Continuance of the rule of Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) with Morales 13 years made the neo-liberal too unnerved to brook the steady empowerment of the Bolivian 'wretched of the earth'. Thousands of indigenous people and others, economically crippled sections were rid of 'chill penury' and move a huge number of them socio-economically upward. The right-wing opposition's frustration and desperation rose after the fourth consecutive victory of Morales, his running mate Alvaro Garcia Linera, Vice-President of Bolivia. Carlos Mesa was defeated by Morales in the presidential poll on October 20. Luis Fernando Camacho leads the Committee Pro-Santa Cruz, which coalesced and 'conspired' with Organisation of American States (OAS) to concoct an allegation that there was a 'fraud' in the vote count during the first round of elections in order to force Morales and his team to resign and call for fresh election. Over 60 percent of funds of OAS is provided by the USA. Camacho heads the Committee Pro-Santa Cruz, under the same pretence of "defending" the country .and serves the business entities of workers from one of the richest areas in Bolivia. Which was why the coup was engineered by the oligarchy in collusion with the US embassy's Center of Operations in La Pax. Little wonder, the US President Donald Trump hailed Morales's departure as good for democracy. A US official ensured that the Trump administration had no objection to Mexico granting asylum to Morales.

"I decided to resign from my position so that Carlos Mesa and Luis Camacho stop abusing and harming thousands of brother", stated Morales while stepping down, "I have the obligation to seek peace and it hurts a lot that we face Bolivians, for this reason, so I will send my letter of resignation to the Plurinational Assembly of Bolivia," He tweeted, "Mesa and Camacho, discriminators and conspirators, will go down in history as racists and coup plotters."

The falsity of allegation about electoral fraud is now an open secret. A survey, 'What Happened in Bolivia's 2019 Vote Count?', undertaken by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy, found no evidence of irregularities or fraud to have affected the official result that gave President Evo Morales a first-round victory in the October 20 election. Pravda political commentator Lyubov Stepushova was the first to have termed the resignation as an act, inspired by the USA. This was clear when "The decisive factor for Morales was the "request" of the army leadership to resign. This was done after a statement by the OAS about "fraud in the vote count in the first round of elections".

Valery Garbuzov, director of the US and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Pravda that the events in Bolivia are 'logical, opposition forces have been opposing the government for a longtime, accusing it of not solving the accumulated social problems and 'the continent is shocked by discontent both by the left (Venezuela, Nicaragua) and the neoliberals (Ecuador, Chile), because neither of them is able to solve complex social problems.

The orchestrated pattern of the coup was evident in the widespread chaos and violence with a considerable section of armed forces in uniform as catalysts to rioting. All this is to prevent some deep-going economic changes for 13 years in the egalitarian and anti-imperialist direction. Three million people were freed from living below the poverty line. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) went up from  $11 billion to $43 billion. The annual economic averaged at 4.4 p.c. against less than 2 p.c. on an average in Latin America. Inflation rate was a little more than 2 p.c., the lowest in the region.

Alongside were decisive actions like agrarian reform to acquire lands from absentee land owners and redistribute them to the poor, liquidation of IMF loans and exit of the Bretton Woods institution and abolition of US military bases in Bolivia as also threatening to close the US embassy in Bolivia. Last but not the least was his plan to nationalise Lithium mines, Bolivia possessing the world's second largest Lithium reserves. Lithium-ion batteries can easily be regarded as the batteries that could potentially change the world. These have become the batteries of choice today in countless consumer electronics and the electric vehicles.

Linda Farthing, encapsulating a narrative, 'The Competing Visions Behind Bolivia's Conflict', inferred, "The viewpoint personified by Morales is built on an essentialised, largely highland indigenous vision of people who have been mistreated for five centuries by colonial invaders and their naturalised descendants. The governing project that embodies this view began when militant social movement thrust Morales into office 14 years ago. His government subsequently has accomplished impressive levels of poverty reduction and improvements in women's and indigenous rights. It has strengthened the role of the state in the economy, raising incomes and contributing to stability in the process".

Truth remains that official Marxist parties the world over and their theologians underestimated the success story of Morales as 'pink tide' (marea rosa, a Spanish term in original), a term coined by Larry Rohter in New York Times in 2005 when Uruguay tilted leftward.

The erstwhile Bolivian Vice-President in an a yet-to-be published interview with Dr Marcello Musto, Associate Professor of Sociological Theory at York University, Toronto, and one of the topmost Marx scholar the world over, stated significantly. 'The problem for the traditional Left is that it confused the concept of "the proletarian condition" with a specific historical form of wage labour. The former has spread everywhere and become a worldwide material condition. It is not true the world of labour is disappearing - there have never been as many workers in the world, in every country. But this huge growth of the global workforce has happened at a time when all the existing trade union and political structures have been breaking up. More than at any time since the early nineteenth century, the working-class condition is once again a condition of and for capital. But now in such a way that the world of workers has become more complex, hybridised, nomadic and deterritorialised. Paradoxically, in an age when every aspect of human life has been commodified, everything seems to happen as if there were no longer any workers".

Morales began as an activist among Cocaloras (Coca leaf growers of Bolivia and Peru) indigenous people and brought in also, mine workers and peasants to form MAS, a political conglomeration, but hyphenated them from 'official Marxism' (Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist strain), different from the Trotskyist schema too. Needless to state, MAS's linkage with the indigenous people was deep, but for which the Morales government could not sustain.

sankar.2010@hotmail.com

Back to Home Page

Frontier
Vol. 52, No. 27, Jan 5 - 11, 2020