Bolivia: Down With U.S.-Backed Right-Wing Coup!

For an Indigenous-Centered Workers and Peasants Government!

NOVEMBER 25—The U.S.-backed coup that forced bourgeois-populist president Evo Morales to flee and installed an anti-indigenous regime of Catholic extremists has plunged Bolivia into chaos. Insurgent protesters and supporters of Morales have been met with brutal repression—many have been arrested or disappeared, dozens massacred and hundreds wounded, with the toll climbing. Demonstrators waving the multicolor native Andean Wiphala flag have bravely confronted military and police shock troops in the streets of La Paz and elsewhere, demanding that Morales be allowed to return from exile in Mexico and finish his term. In a sinister act last week, the interim government accused Morales of sedition and terrorism for supposedly fomenting the unrest.

Self-appointed president Jeanine Áñez, notorious for branding indigenous religious practices as “satanic,” rejoiced that “God has allowed the Bible to come back” to Bolivia. Áñez granted the armed forces immunity to carry out more bloodshed, targeting the heavily indigenous working and peasant population, trade unionists and leftists. With cities facing shortages of food and fuel as a result of protest blockades, the situation remains unstable. In an attempt to defuse the crisis, Congress approved new elections open to candidates from Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism—MAS) but excluding Morales himself.

The U.S. bourgeois establishment disingenuously denies that there was any coup, with its media steadfast behind the narrative that the Bolivian president “resigned.” On November 10, the military abandoned Morales and demanded that he step down amid a growing mutiny by police, who joined anti-government protests spearheaded by far-right opposition forces in the Bolivian oligarchy. The police/military coup was the culmination of weeks of mobilizations that accused Morales of stealing the October 20 election. The fact that he was able to win, not to mention run for, a fourth consecutive term, incited his hard-line opponents, who cried “fraud.” Racist mobs and fascistic gangs went on a rampage, ransacking and burning the homes of MAS politicians, torturing women and peasants’ leaders and burning the Wiphala. (read on)