Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia coup led by Christian fascist paramilitary leader and millionaire – with foreign support
Bolivian coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho is a far-right multi-millionaire who arose from fascist movements in the Santa Cruz region, where the US has encouraged separatism. He has courted support from Colombia, Brazil, and the Venezuelan opposition.
By Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton
When Luis Fernando Camacho stormed into Bolivia’s abandoned presidential palace in the hours after President Evo Morales’s sudden November 10 resignation, he revealed to the world a side of the country that stood at stark odds with the plurinational spirit its deposed socialist and Indigenous leader had put forward.
With a Bible in one hand and a national flag in the other, Camacho bowed his head in prayer above the presidential seal, fulfilling his vow to purge his country’s Native heritage from government and “return God to the burned palace.”
“Pachamama will never return to the palace,” he said, referring to the Andean Mother Earth spirit. “Bolivia belongs to Christ.”
Far-right Bolivian opposition leader Luis Fernando Camacho in Bolivia’s presidential palace with a Bible, after the coup
Bolivia’s extreme right-wing opposition had overthrown leftist President Evo Morales that day, following demands by the country’s military leadership that he step down.
Virtually unknown outside his country, where he had never won a democratic election, Camacho stepped into the void. He is a powerful multi-millionaire named in the Panama Papers, and an ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist groomed by a fascist paramilitary notorious for its racist violence, with a base in Bolivia’s wealthy separatist region of Santa Cruz.
Camacho hails from a family of corporate elites who have long profited from Bolivia’s plentiful natural gas reserves. And his family lost part of its wealth when Morales nationalized the country’s resources, in order to fund his vast social programs — which cut poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent.
In the lead-up to the coup, Camacho met with leaders from right-wing governments in the region to discuss their plans to destabilize Morales. Two months before the putsch, he tweeted gratitude: “Thank you Colombia! Thank you Venezuela!” he exclaimed, tipping his hat to Juan Guaido’s coup operation. He also recognized the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, declaring, “Thank you Brazil!”
Camacho had spent years leading an overtly fascist separatist organization called the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista. The Grayzone edited the following clips from a promotional historical documentary that the group posted on its own social media accounts:
The Grayzone
@GrayzoneProject
Replying to @GrayzoneProject and 2 others
The rich oligarch leader of Bolivia's right-wing coup, Luis Fernando Camacho, was the leader of an explicitly fascist paramilitary group.
Here are some clips from a promotional historical documentary it published:https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/boli ... o-camacho/ …
Embedded video
1,581
1:02 AM - Nov 12, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,704 people are talking about this
While Camacho and his far-right forces served as the muscle behind the coup, their political allies waited to reap the benefits.
The presidential candidate Bolivia’s opposition had fielded in the October election, Carlos Mesa, is a “pro-business” privatizer with extensive ties to Washington. US government cables published by WikiLeaks reveal that he regularly corresponded with American officials in their efforts to destabilize Morales.
Mesa is currently listed as an expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, a DC-based think tank funded by the US government’s soft-power arm USAID, various oil giants, and a host of multi-national corporations active in Latin America.
Evo Morales, a former farmer who rose to prominence in social movements before becoming the leader of the powerful grassroots political party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), was Bolivia’s first Indigenous leader. Wildly popular in the country’s substantial Native and peasant communities, he won numerous elections and democratic referenda over a 13-year period, often in landslides.
On October 20, Morales won re-election by more than 600,000 votes, giving him just above the 10 percent margin needed to defeat opposition presidential candidate Mesa in the first round.
Experts who did a statistical analysis of Bolivia’s publicly available voting data found no evidence of irregularities or fraud. But the opposition claimed otherwise, and took to the streets in weeks of protests and riots.
The events that precipitated the resignation of Morales were indisputably violent. Right-wing opposition gangs attacked numerous elected politicians from the ruling leftist MAS party. They then ransacked the home of President Morales, while burning down the houses of several other top officials. The family members of some politicians were kidnapped and held hostage until they resigned. A female socialist mayor was publicly tortured by a mob.
Max Blumenthal
✔
@MaxBlumenthal
The squalid US-backed fanatics of the Bolivian right ransack the house of the country’s elected president, Evo Morales. And the havoc is just beginning. Let no one call them “pro-democracy.”
Embedded video
3,074
8:08 PM - Nov 10, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
2,168 people are talking about this
Following the forced departure of Morales, coup leaders arrested the president and vice president of the government’s electoral body, and forced the organization’s other officials to resign. Camacho’s followers proceeded to burn Wiphala flags that symbolized the country’s Indigenous population and the plurinational vision of Morales.
The Organization of American States, a pro-US organization founded by Washington during the Cold War as an alliance of right-wing anti-communist countries in Latin America, helped rubber stamp the Bolivian coup. It called for new elections, claiming there were numerous irregularities in the October 20 vote, without citing any evidence. Then the OAS remained silent as Morales was overthrown by his military and his party’s officials were attacked and violently forced to resign.
The day after, the Donald Trump White House enthusiastically praised the coup, trumpeting it as a “significant moment for democracy,” and a “strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”
Emerging from the shadows to lead a violent far-right putsch
While Carlos Mesa timidly condemned the opposition’s violence, Camacho egged it on, ignoring calls for an international audit of the election and emphasizing his maximalist demand to purge all supporters of Morales from government. He was the true face of the opposition, concealed for months behind the moderate figure of Mesa.
A 40-year-old multi-millionaire businessman from the separatist stronghold of Santa Cruz, Camacho has never run for office. Like Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó, whom more than 80 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of until the US government anointed him as supposed “president,” Camacho was an obscure figure until the coup attempt in Bolivia hit its stride.
He first created his Twitter account on May 27, 2019. For months, his tweets went ignored, generating no more than three or four retweets and likes. Before the election, Camacho did not have a Wikipedia article, and there were few media profiles on him in Spanish- or English-language media.
Camacho issued a call for a strike on July 9, posting videos on Twitter that got just over 20 views. The goal of the strike was to try to force the resignation of Bolivian government’s electoral organ the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE). In other words, Camacho was pressuring the government’s electoral authorities to step down more than three months before the presidential election.
It was not until after the election that Camacho was thrust into the limelight and transformed into a celebrity by corporate media conglomerates like the local right-wing network Unitel, Telemundo, and CNN en Español.
All of a sudden, Camacho’s tweets calling for Morales to resign were lighting up with thousands of retweets. The coup machinery had been activated.
Mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Reuters followed by anointing the unelected Camacho as the “leader” of Bolivia’s opposition. But even as he lapped up international attention, key portions of the far-right activist’s background were omitted.
Left unmentioned were Camacho’s deep and well-established connections to Christian extremist paramilitaries notorious for racist violence and local business cartels, as well as the right-wing governments across the region.
It was in the fascist paramilitaries and separatist atmosphere of Santa Cruz where Camacho’s politics were formed, and where the ideological contours of the coup had been defined.
UJC Union Juvenil Cruceñista Bolivia
Cadres from the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC), the Bolivian fascist youth group that Luis Fernando Camacho got his start in
Cadre of a Francoist-style fascist paramilitary
Luis Fernando Camacho was groomed by the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista, or Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC), a fascist paramilitary organization that has been linked to assassination plots against Morales. The group is notorious for assaulting leftists, Indigenous peasants, and journalists, all while espousing a deeply racist, homophobic ideology.
Since Morales entered office in 2006, the UJC has campaigned to separate from a country its members believed had been overtaken by a Satanic Indigenous mass.
The UJC is the Bolivian equivalent of Spain’s Falange, India’s Hindu supremacist RSS, and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov battalion. Its symbol is a green cross that bears strong similarities to logos of fascist movements across the West.
And its members are known to launch into Nazi-style sieg heil salutes.
The Grayzone
@GrayzoneProject
Replying to @GrayzoneProject and 2 others
Here is another video posted by Bolivia's fascist opposition Santa Cruz Youth Union.
Coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho @LuisFerCamachoV previously helped lead this sieg-heiling group.
These are the people who overthrew elected President Evo Morales. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/boli ... o-camacho/ …
Embedded video
1,014
1:18 AM - Nov 12, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,131 people are talking about this
Even the US embassy in Bolivia has described UJC members as “racist” and “militant,” noting that they “have frequently attacked pro-MAS/government people and installations.”
After journalist Benjamin Dangl visited with UJC members in 2007, he described them as the “brass knuckles” of the Santa Cruz separatist movement. “The Unión Juvenil has been known to beat and whip campesinos marching for gas nationalization, throw rocks at students organizing against autonomy, toss molotov cocktails at the state television station, and brutally assault members of the landless movement struggling against land monopolies,” Dangl wrote.
“When we have to defend our culture by force, we will,” a UJC leader told Dangl. “The defense of liberty is more important than life.”
Armed members of the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista
Camacho was elected as vice president of the UJC in 2002, when he was just 23 years old. He left the organization two years later to build his family’s business empire and rise through the ranks of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee. It was in that organization that he was taken under the wing of one of the separatist movement’s most powerful figures, a Bolivian-Croatian oligarch named Branko Marinkovic.
In August, Camacho tweeted a photo with his “great friend,” Marinkovic. This friendship was crucial to establishing the rightist activist’s credentials and forging the basis of the coup that would take form three months later.
Luis Fernando Camacho
@LuisFerCamachoV
Hoy cumple años un gran líder cruceño y expresidente del Comité pro Santa Cruz pero todo un gran amigo, Branko Marinkovic, quien entregó todo, su libertad y su vida, por su pueblo.
View image on Twitter
48
2:12 PM - Aug 21, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
16 people are talking about this
Camacho’s Croatian godfather and separatist powerbroker
Branko Marinkovic is a major landowner who ramped up his support for the right-wing opposition after some of his land was nationalized by the Evo Morales government. As chairman of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, he oversaw the operations of the main engine of separatism in Bolivia.
In a 2008 letter to Marinkovic, the International Federation for Human Rights denounced the committee as an “actor and promoter of racism and violence in Bolivia.”
The human rights group added that it “condemn[ed] the attitude and secessionist, unionist and racist discourses as well as the calls for military disobedience of which the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee for is one of the main promoters.”
In 2013, journalist Matt Kennard reported that the US government was working closely with the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee to encourage the balkanization of Bolivia and to undermine Morales. “What they [the US] put across was how they could strengthen channels of communication,” the vice president of the committee told Kennard. “The embassy said that they would help us in our communication work and they have a series of publications where they were putting forward their ideas.”
In a 2008 profile on Marinkovic, the New York Times acknowledged the extremist undercurrents of the Santa Cruz separatist movement the oligarch presided over. It described the area as “a bastion of openly xenophobic groups like the Bolivian Socialist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspiration from the fascist Falange of the former Spanish dictator Franco.”
The Bolivian Socialist Falange was a fascist group that provided safe haven to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie during the Cold War. A former Gestapo torture expert, Barbie was repurposed by the CIA through its Operation Condor program to help exterminate communism across the continent. (Despite its antiquated name, like the German National Socialists, this far-right extremist group was violently anti-leftist, committed to killing socialists.)
The Bolivian Falange came into power in 1971 when its leader, Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez, ousted the leftist government of Gen. Juan Jose Torres Gonzales. The government of Gonzales had infuriated business leaders by nationalizing industries and antagonized Washington by ousting the Peace Corps, which it viewed as an instrument of CIA penetration. The Nixon administration immediately welcomed Banzer with open arms and courted him as a key bulwark against the spread of socialism in the region. (An especially ironic 1973 dispatch appears on Wikileaks showing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger thanking Banzer for congratulating him on his Nobel Peace Prize).
The movement’s putschist legacy persevered during the Morales era through organizations like the UJC and figures such as Marinkovic and Camacho.
The Times noted that Marinkovic also supported the activities of the UJC, describing the fascist group as “a quasi-independent arm of the committee led by Mr. Marinkovic.” A member of the UJC board told the US newspaper of record in an interview, “We will protect Branko with our own lives.”
Marinkovic has espoused the kind of Christian nationalist rhetoric familiar to the far-right organizations of Santa Cruz, calling, for instance, for a “crusade for the truth” and insisting that God is on his side.
The oligarch’s family hails from Croatia, where he has dual citizenship. Marinkovic has long been dogged by rumors that his family members were involved in the country’s powerful fascist Ustashe movement.
The Ustashe collaborated openly with Nazi German occupiers during World War Two. Their successors returned to power after Croatia declared independence from the former Yugoslavia – a former socialist country that was intentionally balkanized in a NATO war, much in the same way that Marinkovic hoped Bolivia would be.
German Fuhrer Adolph Hitler meets Ustashe founder Ante Pavelić in 1941
Marinkovic denies that his family was part of the Ustashe. He claimed in an interview with the New York Times that his father fought against the Nazis.
But even some of his sympathizers are skeptical. A Balkan analyst from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, which works closely with the US government and is popularly known as the “shadow CIA,” produced a rough background profile on Marinkovic, speculating, “Still don’t know his full story, but I would bet a lot of $$$ that this dude’s parents are 1st gen (his name is too Slavic) and that they were Ustashe (read: Nazi) sympathizers fleeing Tito’s Communists after WWI.”
The Stratfor analyst excerpted a 2006 article by journalist Christian Parenti, who had visited Marinkovic at his ranch in Santa Cruz. Evo Morales’ “land reform could lead to civil war,” Marinkovic warned Parenti in the Texas-accented English he picked up while studying at the University of Texas.
Today, Marinkovic is an ardent supporter of Brazil’s far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, whose only complaint about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was that he “didn’t kill enough.”
Marinkovic is also a public admirer of Venezuela’s far-right opposition. “Todos somos Leopoldo” — “we are all Leopoldo,” he tweeted in support of Leopoldo López, who has been involved in numerous coup attempts against Venezuela’s elected leftist government.
While Marinkovic denied any role in armed militant activity in his interview with Parenti, he was accused in 2008 of playing a central role in an attempt to assassinate Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism party allies.
He told the New York Times less than two years before the plot developed, “If there is no legitimate international mediation in our crisis, there is going to be confrontation. And unfortunately, it is going to be bloody and painful for all Bolivians.”
An assassination plot links Bolivia’s right to international fascists
In April 2009, a special unit of the Bolivian security services barged into a luxury hotel room and cut down three men who were said to be involved in a plot to kill Evo Morales. Two others remained on the loose. Four of the alleged conspirators had Hungarian or Croatian roots and ties to rightist politics in eastern Europe, while another was a right-wing Irishman, Michael Dwyer, who had only arrived in Santa Cruz six months before.
Alleged assassination plotter Michael Dwyer with his weapons
The ringleader of the group was said to be a former leftist journalist named Eduardo Rosza-Flores who had turned to fascism and belonged to Opus Dei, the traditionalist Catholic cult that emerged under the dictatorship of Spain’s Francisco Franco. In fact, the codename Rosza-Flores assumed in the assassination plot was “Franco,” after the late Generalissimo.
During the 1990s, Rosza fought on behalf of the Croatian First International Platoon, or the PIV, in the war to separate from Yugoslavia. A Croatian journalist told Time that the “PIV was a notorious group: 95% of them had criminal histories, many were part of Nazi and fascist groups, from Germany to Ireland.”
By 2009, Rosza returned home to Bolivia to crusade on behalf of another separatist movement in Santa Cruz. And it was there that he was killed in a luxury hotel with no apparent source of income and a massive stockpile of guns.
The government later released photos of Rosza and a co-conspirator posing with their weapons. Publication of emails between the ringleader and Istvan Belovai, a former Hungarian military intelligence officer who served as a double agent for the CIA, cemented the perception that Washington had a hand in the operation.
Rosza and Dwyer with their arms cache in Bolivia
Marinkovic was subsequently charged with providing $200,000 to the plotters. The Bolivian-Croatian oligarch initially fled to the United States, where he was given asylum, then relocated to Brazil, where he lives today. He denied any involvement in the plan to kill Morales.
As journalist Matt Kennard reported, there was another thread that tied the plot to the US: the alleged participation of an NGO leader named Hugo Achá Melgar.
“Rozsa didn’t come here by himself, they brought him,” the Bolivian government’s lead investigator told Kennard. “Hugo Achá Melgar brought him.”
The Human Rights Foundation destabilizes Bolivia
Achá was not just the head of any run-of-the-mill NGO. He had founded the Bolivian subsidiary of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an international right-wing outfit that is known for hosting a “school for revolution” for activists seeking regime change in states targeted by the US government.
HRF is run by Thor Halvorssen Jr., the son of the late Venezuelan oligarch and CIA asset Thor Halvorssen Hellum. The first cousin of the veteran Venezuelan coup plotter Leopoldo Lopez, Halvorssen was a former college Republican activist who crusaded against political correctness and other familiar right-wing hobgoblins.
After a brief career as a firebrand right-wing film producer, in which he oversaw a scandalous “anti-environmentalist” documentary financed by a mining corporation, Halvorssen rebranded as a promoter of liberalism and the enemy of global authoritarianism. He launched the HRF with grants from right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel, conservative foundations, and NGOs including Amnesty International. The group has since been at the forefront of training activists for insurrectionary activity from Hong Kong to the Middle East to Latin America.
Though Achá was granted asylum in the US, the HRF has continued pushing regime change in Bolivia. As Wyatt Reed reported for The Grayzone, HRF “freedom fellow” Jhanisse Vaca Daza helped trigger the initial stage of the coup by blaming Morales for the Amazon fires that consumed parts of Bolivia in August, mobilizing international protests against him.
At the time, Daza posed as an “environmental activist” and student of non-violence who articulated her concerns in moderate-seeming calls for more international aid to Bolivia. Through her NGO, Rios de Pie, she helped launch the #SOSBolivia hashtag, which signaled the imminent foreign-backed regime-change operation.
Courting the regional right, prepping the coup
While HRF’s Daza rallied protests outside Bolivian embassies in Europe and the US, Fernando Camacho remained behind the scenes, lobbying right-wing governments in the region to bless the coming coup.
In May, Camacho met with Colombia’s far-right President Ivan Duque. Camacho was helping to spearhead regional efforts at undermining the legitimacy of Evo Morales’ presidency at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, seeking to block his candidacy in the October election.
Camacho with Colombian President Ivan Duque in May
That same month, the rightist Bolivian agitator also met with Ernesto Araújo, the chancellor of Jair Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservative administration in Brazil. Through the meeting, Camacho successfully secured Bolsonaro’s backing for regime change in Bolivia.
This November 10, Araújo enthusiastically endorsed the ouster of Morales, declaring that “Brazil will support the democratic and constitutional transition” in the country.
Then in August, two months before Bolivia’s presidential election, Camacho held court with officials from Venezuela’s US-appointed coup regime. These included Gustavo Tarre, Guaido’s faux Venezuelan OAS ambassador, who formerly worked at the right-wing Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington.
After the meeting, Camacho tweeted gratitude to the Venezuelan coup-mongers, as well as to Colombia and Brazil.
Luis Fernando Camacho
@LuisFerCamachoV
No vamos a parar hasta tener una democracia real! Seguimos avanzando!
Vamos sumando apoyo... ahora lo hace Venezuela...Gracias a Dios.. hay esperanza!
Gracias Colombia!
Gracias Venezuela!
Gracias Brasil!
View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter
46
7:00 AM - Aug 27, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
39 people are talking about this
Mesa and Camacho: a marriage of capitalist convenience
Back in Bolivia, Carlos Mesa occupied the spotlight as the opposition’s presidential candidate.
His erudite image and centrist policy proposals put him in a seemingly alternate political universe from fire-breathing rightists like Camacho and Marinkovic. For them, he was a convenient front man and acceptable candidate who promised to defend their economic interests.
“It might be that he is not my favorite, but I’m going to vote for him, because I don’t want Evo,” Marinkovic told a right-wing Argentine newspaper five days before the election.
Indeed, it was Camacho’s practical financial interests that appeared to have necessitated his support for Mesa.
The Camacho family has formed a natural gas cartel in Santa Cruz. As the Bolivian outlet Primera Linea reported, Luis Fernando Camacho’s father, Jose Luis, was the owner of a company called Sergas that distributed gas in the city; his uncle, Enrique, controlled Socre, the company that ran the local gas production facilities; and his cousin, Cristian, controls another local gas distributor called Controgas.
According to Primera Linea, the Camacho family was using the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee as a political weapon to install Carlos Mesa into power and ensure the restoration of their business empire.
Mesa has a well-documented history of advancing the goals of transnational companies at the expense of his own country’s population. The neoliberal politician and media personality served as vice president when the US-backed President Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada provoked mass protests with his 2003 plan to allow a consortium of multinational corporations to export the country’s natural gas to the US through a Chilean port.
Bolivia’s US-trained security forces met the ferocious protests with brutal repression. After presiding over the killing of 70 unarmed protesters, Sanchez de Lozada fled to Miami and was succeeded by Mesa.
By 2005, Mesa was also ousted by huge demonstrations spurred by his protection of privatized natural gas companies. With his demise, the election of Morales and the rise of the socialist and rural Indigenous movements behind him were just beyond the horizon.
US government cables released by WikiLeaks show that, after his ouster, Mesa continued regular correspondence with American officials. A 2008 memo from the US embassy in Bolivia revealed that Washington was conspiring with opposition politicians in the lead-up to the 2009 presidential election, hoping to undermine and ultimately unseat Morales.
The memo noted that Mesa had met with the chargé d’affaires of the US embassy, and had privately told them he planned to run for president. The cable recalled: “Mesa told us his party will be ideologically similar to a social democratic party and that he hoped to strengthen ties with the Democratic party. ‘We have nothing against the Republican party, and have in fact gotten support from IRI (International Republican Institute) in the past, but we think we share more ideology with the Democrats,’ he added.”
Today, Mesa serves as an in-house “expert” at the Inter-American Dialogue, a neoliberal Washington-based think tank focused on Latin America. One of the Dialogue’s top donors is the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department subsidiary that was exposed in classified diplomatic cables published on Wikileaks for strategically directing millions of dollars to opposition groups including those “opposed to Evo Morales’ vision for indigenous communities.”
Other top funders of the Dialogue include oil titans like Chevron and ExxonMobil; Bechtel, which inspired the initial protests against the administration in which Mesa served; the Inter-American Development Bank, which has forcefully opposed Morales’ socialist-oriented policies; and the Organization of American States (OAS), which helped delegitimize the Morales’s re-election victory with dubious claims of irregular vote counts.
Finishing the job
When Carlos Mesa touched off nationwide protests in October by accusing the Evo Morales government of committing electoral fraud, the right-wing firebrand hailed by his followers as “Macho Camacho” emerged from the shadows. Behind him was the hardcore separatist shock force that he led in Santa Cruz.
Mesa faded into the distance as Camacho emerged as the authentic face of the coup, rallying his forces with the uncompromising rhetoric and fascist symbology that defined the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista paramilitary.
As he declared victory over Morales, Camacho exhorted his followers to “finish the job, let’s get the elections going, let’s start judging the government criminals, let’s put them in jail.”
Back in Washington, meanwhile, the Trump administration released an official statement celebrating Bolivia’s coup, declaring that “Morales’s departure preserves democracy.”
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/boli ... o-camacho/
Bolivian coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho is a far-right multi-millionaire who arose from fascist movements in the Santa Cruz region, where the US has encouraged separatism. He has courted support from Colombia, Brazil, and the Venezuelan opposition.
By Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton
When Luis Fernando Camacho stormed into Bolivia’s abandoned presidential palace in the hours after President Evo Morales’s sudden November 10 resignation, he revealed to the world a side of the country that stood at stark odds with the plurinational spirit its deposed socialist and Indigenous leader had put forward.
With a Bible in one hand and a national flag in the other, Camacho bowed his head in prayer above the presidential seal, fulfilling his vow to purge his country’s Native heritage from government and “return God to the burned palace.”
“Pachamama will never return to the palace,” he said, referring to the Andean Mother Earth spirit. “Bolivia belongs to Christ.”
Far-right Bolivian opposition leader Luis Fernando Camacho in Bolivia’s presidential palace with a Bible, after the coup
Bolivia’s extreme right-wing opposition had overthrown leftist President Evo Morales that day, following demands by the country’s military leadership that he step down.
Virtually unknown outside his country, where he had never won a democratic election, Camacho stepped into the void. He is a powerful multi-millionaire named in the Panama Papers, and an ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist groomed by a fascist paramilitary notorious for its racist violence, with a base in Bolivia’s wealthy separatist region of Santa Cruz.
Camacho hails from a family of corporate elites who have long profited from Bolivia’s plentiful natural gas reserves. And his family lost part of its wealth when Morales nationalized the country’s resources, in order to fund his vast social programs — which cut poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent.
In the lead-up to the coup, Camacho met with leaders from right-wing governments in the region to discuss their plans to destabilize Morales. Two months before the putsch, he tweeted gratitude: “Thank you Colombia! Thank you Venezuela!” he exclaimed, tipping his hat to Juan Guaido’s coup operation. He also recognized the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, declaring, “Thank you Brazil!”
Camacho had spent years leading an overtly fascist separatist organization called the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista. The Grayzone edited the following clips from a promotional historical documentary that the group posted on its own social media accounts:
The Grayzone
@GrayzoneProject
Replying to @GrayzoneProject and 2 others
The rich oligarch leader of Bolivia's right-wing coup, Luis Fernando Camacho, was the leader of an explicitly fascist paramilitary group.
Here are some clips from a promotional historical documentary it published:https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/boli ... o-camacho/ …
Embedded video
1,581
1:02 AM - Nov 12, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,704 people are talking about this
While Camacho and his far-right forces served as the muscle behind the coup, their political allies waited to reap the benefits.
The presidential candidate Bolivia’s opposition had fielded in the October election, Carlos Mesa, is a “pro-business” privatizer with extensive ties to Washington. US government cables published by WikiLeaks reveal that he regularly corresponded with American officials in their efforts to destabilize Morales.
Mesa is currently listed as an expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, a DC-based think tank funded by the US government’s soft-power arm USAID, various oil giants, and a host of multi-national corporations active in Latin America.
Evo Morales, a former farmer who rose to prominence in social movements before becoming the leader of the powerful grassroots political party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), was Bolivia’s first Indigenous leader. Wildly popular in the country’s substantial Native and peasant communities, he won numerous elections and democratic referenda over a 13-year period, often in landslides.
On October 20, Morales won re-election by more than 600,000 votes, giving him just above the 10 percent margin needed to defeat opposition presidential candidate Mesa in the first round.
Experts who did a statistical analysis of Bolivia’s publicly available voting data found no evidence of irregularities or fraud. But the opposition claimed otherwise, and took to the streets in weeks of protests and riots.
The events that precipitated the resignation of Morales were indisputably violent. Right-wing opposition gangs attacked numerous elected politicians from the ruling leftist MAS party. They then ransacked the home of President Morales, while burning down the houses of several other top officials. The family members of some politicians were kidnapped and held hostage until they resigned. A female socialist mayor was publicly tortured by a mob.
Max Blumenthal
✔
@MaxBlumenthal
The squalid US-backed fanatics of the Bolivian right ransack the house of the country’s elected president, Evo Morales. And the havoc is just beginning. Let no one call them “pro-democracy.”
Embedded video
3,074
8:08 PM - Nov 10, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
2,168 people are talking about this
Following the forced departure of Morales, coup leaders arrested the president and vice president of the government’s electoral body, and forced the organization’s other officials to resign. Camacho’s followers proceeded to burn Wiphala flags that symbolized the country’s Indigenous population and the plurinational vision of Morales.
The Organization of American States, a pro-US organization founded by Washington during the Cold War as an alliance of right-wing anti-communist countries in Latin America, helped rubber stamp the Bolivian coup. It called for new elections, claiming there were numerous irregularities in the October 20 vote, without citing any evidence. Then the OAS remained silent as Morales was overthrown by his military and his party’s officials were attacked and violently forced to resign.
The day after, the Donald Trump White House enthusiastically praised the coup, trumpeting it as a “significant moment for democracy,” and a “strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”
Emerging from the shadows to lead a violent far-right putsch
While Carlos Mesa timidly condemned the opposition’s violence, Camacho egged it on, ignoring calls for an international audit of the election and emphasizing his maximalist demand to purge all supporters of Morales from government. He was the true face of the opposition, concealed for months behind the moderate figure of Mesa.
A 40-year-old multi-millionaire businessman from the separatist stronghold of Santa Cruz, Camacho has never run for office. Like Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó, whom more than 80 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of until the US government anointed him as supposed “president,” Camacho was an obscure figure until the coup attempt in Bolivia hit its stride.
He first created his Twitter account on May 27, 2019. For months, his tweets went ignored, generating no more than three or four retweets and likes. Before the election, Camacho did not have a Wikipedia article, and there were few media profiles on him in Spanish- or English-language media.
Camacho issued a call for a strike on July 9, posting videos on Twitter that got just over 20 views. The goal of the strike was to try to force the resignation of Bolivian government’s electoral organ the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE). In other words, Camacho was pressuring the government’s electoral authorities to step down more than three months before the presidential election.
It was not until after the election that Camacho was thrust into the limelight and transformed into a celebrity by corporate media conglomerates like the local right-wing network Unitel, Telemundo, and CNN en Español.
All of a sudden, Camacho’s tweets calling for Morales to resign were lighting up with thousands of retweets. The coup machinery had been activated.
Mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Reuters followed by anointing the unelected Camacho as the “leader” of Bolivia’s opposition. But even as he lapped up international attention, key portions of the far-right activist’s background were omitted.
Left unmentioned were Camacho’s deep and well-established connections to Christian extremist paramilitaries notorious for racist violence and local business cartels, as well as the right-wing governments across the region.
It was in the fascist paramilitaries and separatist atmosphere of Santa Cruz where Camacho’s politics were formed, and where the ideological contours of the coup had been defined.
UJC Union Juvenil Cruceñista Bolivia
Cadres from the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC), the Bolivian fascist youth group that Luis Fernando Camacho got his start in
Cadre of a Francoist-style fascist paramilitary
Luis Fernando Camacho was groomed by the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista, or Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC), a fascist paramilitary organization that has been linked to assassination plots against Morales. The group is notorious for assaulting leftists, Indigenous peasants, and journalists, all while espousing a deeply racist, homophobic ideology.
Since Morales entered office in 2006, the UJC has campaigned to separate from a country its members believed had been overtaken by a Satanic Indigenous mass.
The UJC is the Bolivian equivalent of Spain’s Falange, India’s Hindu supremacist RSS, and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov battalion. Its symbol is a green cross that bears strong similarities to logos of fascist movements across the West.
And its members are known to launch into Nazi-style sieg heil salutes.
The Grayzone
@GrayzoneProject
Replying to @GrayzoneProject and 2 others
Here is another video posted by Bolivia's fascist opposition Santa Cruz Youth Union.
Coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho @LuisFerCamachoV previously helped lead this sieg-heiling group.
These are the people who overthrew elected President Evo Morales. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/boli ... o-camacho/ …
Embedded video
1,014
1:18 AM - Nov 12, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,131 people are talking about this
Even the US embassy in Bolivia has described UJC members as “racist” and “militant,” noting that they “have frequently attacked pro-MAS/government people and installations.”
After journalist Benjamin Dangl visited with UJC members in 2007, he described them as the “brass knuckles” of the Santa Cruz separatist movement. “The Unión Juvenil has been known to beat and whip campesinos marching for gas nationalization, throw rocks at students organizing against autonomy, toss molotov cocktails at the state television station, and brutally assault members of the landless movement struggling against land monopolies,” Dangl wrote.
“When we have to defend our culture by force, we will,” a UJC leader told Dangl. “The defense of liberty is more important than life.”
Armed members of the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista
Camacho was elected as vice president of the UJC in 2002, when he was just 23 years old. He left the organization two years later to build his family’s business empire and rise through the ranks of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee. It was in that organization that he was taken under the wing of one of the separatist movement’s most powerful figures, a Bolivian-Croatian oligarch named Branko Marinkovic.
In August, Camacho tweeted a photo with his “great friend,” Marinkovic. This friendship was crucial to establishing the rightist activist’s credentials and forging the basis of the coup that would take form three months later.
Luis Fernando Camacho
@LuisFerCamachoV
Hoy cumple años un gran líder cruceño y expresidente del Comité pro Santa Cruz pero todo un gran amigo, Branko Marinkovic, quien entregó todo, su libertad y su vida, por su pueblo.
View image on Twitter
48
2:12 PM - Aug 21, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
16 people are talking about this
Camacho’s Croatian godfather and separatist powerbroker
Branko Marinkovic is a major landowner who ramped up his support for the right-wing opposition after some of his land was nationalized by the Evo Morales government. As chairman of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, he oversaw the operations of the main engine of separatism in Bolivia.
In a 2008 letter to Marinkovic, the International Federation for Human Rights denounced the committee as an “actor and promoter of racism and violence in Bolivia.”
The human rights group added that it “condemn[ed] the attitude and secessionist, unionist and racist discourses as well as the calls for military disobedience of which the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee for is one of the main promoters.”
In 2013, journalist Matt Kennard reported that the US government was working closely with the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee to encourage the balkanization of Bolivia and to undermine Morales. “What they [the US] put across was how they could strengthen channels of communication,” the vice president of the committee told Kennard. “The embassy said that they would help us in our communication work and they have a series of publications where they were putting forward their ideas.”
In a 2008 profile on Marinkovic, the New York Times acknowledged the extremist undercurrents of the Santa Cruz separatist movement the oligarch presided over. It described the area as “a bastion of openly xenophobic groups like the Bolivian Socialist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspiration from the fascist Falange of the former Spanish dictator Franco.”
The Bolivian Socialist Falange was a fascist group that provided safe haven to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie during the Cold War. A former Gestapo torture expert, Barbie was repurposed by the CIA through its Operation Condor program to help exterminate communism across the continent. (Despite its antiquated name, like the German National Socialists, this far-right extremist group was violently anti-leftist, committed to killing socialists.)
The Bolivian Falange came into power in 1971 when its leader, Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez, ousted the leftist government of Gen. Juan Jose Torres Gonzales. The government of Gonzales had infuriated business leaders by nationalizing industries and antagonized Washington by ousting the Peace Corps, which it viewed as an instrument of CIA penetration. The Nixon administration immediately welcomed Banzer with open arms and courted him as a key bulwark against the spread of socialism in the region. (An especially ironic 1973 dispatch appears on Wikileaks showing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger thanking Banzer for congratulating him on his Nobel Peace Prize).
The movement’s putschist legacy persevered during the Morales era through organizations like the UJC and figures such as Marinkovic and Camacho.
The Times noted that Marinkovic also supported the activities of the UJC, describing the fascist group as “a quasi-independent arm of the committee led by Mr. Marinkovic.” A member of the UJC board told the US newspaper of record in an interview, “We will protect Branko with our own lives.”
Marinkovic has espoused the kind of Christian nationalist rhetoric familiar to the far-right organizations of Santa Cruz, calling, for instance, for a “crusade for the truth” and insisting that God is on his side.
The oligarch’s family hails from Croatia, where he has dual citizenship. Marinkovic has long been dogged by rumors that his family members were involved in the country’s powerful fascist Ustashe movement.
The Ustashe collaborated openly with Nazi German occupiers during World War Two. Their successors returned to power after Croatia declared independence from the former Yugoslavia – a former socialist country that was intentionally balkanized in a NATO war, much in the same way that Marinkovic hoped Bolivia would be.
German Fuhrer Adolph Hitler meets Ustashe founder Ante Pavelić in 1941
Marinkovic denies that his family was part of the Ustashe. He claimed in an interview with the New York Times that his father fought against the Nazis.
But even some of his sympathizers are skeptical. A Balkan analyst from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, which works closely with the US government and is popularly known as the “shadow CIA,” produced a rough background profile on Marinkovic, speculating, “Still don’t know his full story, but I would bet a lot of $$$ that this dude’s parents are 1st gen (his name is too Slavic) and that they were Ustashe (read: Nazi) sympathizers fleeing Tito’s Communists after WWI.”
The Stratfor analyst excerpted a 2006 article by journalist Christian Parenti, who had visited Marinkovic at his ranch in Santa Cruz. Evo Morales’ “land reform could lead to civil war,” Marinkovic warned Parenti in the Texas-accented English he picked up while studying at the University of Texas.
Today, Marinkovic is an ardent supporter of Brazil’s far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, whose only complaint about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was that he “didn’t kill enough.”
Marinkovic is also a public admirer of Venezuela’s far-right opposition. “Todos somos Leopoldo” — “we are all Leopoldo,” he tweeted in support of Leopoldo López, who has been involved in numerous coup attempts against Venezuela’s elected leftist government.
While Marinkovic denied any role in armed militant activity in his interview with Parenti, he was accused in 2008 of playing a central role in an attempt to assassinate Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism party allies.
He told the New York Times less than two years before the plot developed, “If there is no legitimate international mediation in our crisis, there is going to be confrontation. And unfortunately, it is going to be bloody and painful for all Bolivians.”
An assassination plot links Bolivia’s right to international fascists
In April 2009, a special unit of the Bolivian security services barged into a luxury hotel room and cut down three men who were said to be involved in a plot to kill Evo Morales. Two others remained on the loose. Four of the alleged conspirators had Hungarian or Croatian roots and ties to rightist politics in eastern Europe, while another was a right-wing Irishman, Michael Dwyer, who had only arrived in Santa Cruz six months before.
Alleged assassination plotter Michael Dwyer with his weapons
The ringleader of the group was said to be a former leftist journalist named Eduardo Rosza-Flores who had turned to fascism and belonged to Opus Dei, the traditionalist Catholic cult that emerged under the dictatorship of Spain’s Francisco Franco. In fact, the codename Rosza-Flores assumed in the assassination plot was “Franco,” after the late Generalissimo.
During the 1990s, Rosza fought on behalf of the Croatian First International Platoon, or the PIV, in the war to separate from Yugoslavia. A Croatian journalist told Time that the “PIV was a notorious group: 95% of them had criminal histories, many were part of Nazi and fascist groups, from Germany to Ireland.”
By 2009, Rosza returned home to Bolivia to crusade on behalf of another separatist movement in Santa Cruz. And it was there that he was killed in a luxury hotel with no apparent source of income and a massive stockpile of guns.
The government later released photos of Rosza and a co-conspirator posing with their weapons. Publication of emails between the ringleader and Istvan Belovai, a former Hungarian military intelligence officer who served as a double agent for the CIA, cemented the perception that Washington had a hand in the operation.
Rosza and Dwyer with their arms cache in Bolivia
Marinkovic was subsequently charged with providing $200,000 to the plotters. The Bolivian-Croatian oligarch initially fled to the United States, where he was given asylum, then relocated to Brazil, where he lives today. He denied any involvement in the plan to kill Morales.
As journalist Matt Kennard reported, there was another thread that tied the plot to the US: the alleged participation of an NGO leader named Hugo Achá Melgar.
“Rozsa didn’t come here by himself, they brought him,” the Bolivian government’s lead investigator told Kennard. “Hugo Achá Melgar brought him.”
The Human Rights Foundation destabilizes Bolivia
Achá was not just the head of any run-of-the-mill NGO. He had founded the Bolivian subsidiary of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an international right-wing outfit that is known for hosting a “school for revolution” for activists seeking regime change in states targeted by the US government.
HRF is run by Thor Halvorssen Jr., the son of the late Venezuelan oligarch and CIA asset Thor Halvorssen Hellum. The first cousin of the veteran Venezuelan coup plotter Leopoldo Lopez, Halvorssen was a former college Republican activist who crusaded against political correctness and other familiar right-wing hobgoblins.
After a brief career as a firebrand right-wing film producer, in which he oversaw a scandalous “anti-environmentalist” documentary financed by a mining corporation, Halvorssen rebranded as a promoter of liberalism and the enemy of global authoritarianism. He launched the HRF with grants from right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel, conservative foundations, and NGOs including Amnesty International. The group has since been at the forefront of training activists for insurrectionary activity from Hong Kong to the Middle East to Latin America.
Though Achá was granted asylum in the US, the HRF has continued pushing regime change in Bolivia. As Wyatt Reed reported for The Grayzone, HRF “freedom fellow” Jhanisse Vaca Daza helped trigger the initial stage of the coup by blaming Morales for the Amazon fires that consumed parts of Bolivia in August, mobilizing international protests against him.
At the time, Daza posed as an “environmental activist” and student of non-violence who articulated her concerns in moderate-seeming calls for more international aid to Bolivia. Through her NGO, Rios de Pie, she helped launch the #SOSBolivia hashtag, which signaled the imminent foreign-backed regime-change operation.
Courting the regional right, prepping the coup
While HRF’s Daza rallied protests outside Bolivian embassies in Europe and the US, Fernando Camacho remained behind the scenes, lobbying right-wing governments in the region to bless the coming coup.
In May, Camacho met with Colombia’s far-right President Ivan Duque. Camacho was helping to spearhead regional efforts at undermining the legitimacy of Evo Morales’ presidency at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, seeking to block his candidacy in the October election.
Camacho with Colombian President Ivan Duque in May
That same month, the rightist Bolivian agitator also met with Ernesto Araújo, the chancellor of Jair Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservative administration in Brazil. Through the meeting, Camacho successfully secured Bolsonaro’s backing for regime change in Bolivia.
This November 10, Araújo enthusiastically endorsed the ouster of Morales, declaring that “Brazil will support the democratic and constitutional transition” in the country.
Then in August, two months before Bolivia’s presidential election, Camacho held court with officials from Venezuela’s US-appointed coup regime. These included Gustavo Tarre, Guaido’s faux Venezuelan OAS ambassador, who formerly worked at the right-wing Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington.
After the meeting, Camacho tweeted gratitude to the Venezuelan coup-mongers, as well as to Colombia and Brazil.
Luis Fernando Camacho
@LuisFerCamachoV
No vamos a parar hasta tener una democracia real! Seguimos avanzando!
Vamos sumando apoyo... ahora lo hace Venezuela...Gracias a Dios.. hay esperanza!
Gracias Colombia!
Gracias Venezuela!
Gracias Brasil!
View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter
46
7:00 AM - Aug 27, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
39 people are talking about this
Mesa and Camacho: a marriage of capitalist convenience
Back in Bolivia, Carlos Mesa occupied the spotlight as the opposition’s presidential candidate.
His erudite image and centrist policy proposals put him in a seemingly alternate political universe from fire-breathing rightists like Camacho and Marinkovic. For them, he was a convenient front man and acceptable candidate who promised to defend their economic interests.
“It might be that he is not my favorite, but I’m going to vote for him, because I don’t want Evo,” Marinkovic told a right-wing Argentine newspaper five days before the election.
Indeed, it was Camacho’s practical financial interests that appeared to have necessitated his support for Mesa.
The Camacho family has formed a natural gas cartel in Santa Cruz. As the Bolivian outlet Primera Linea reported, Luis Fernando Camacho’s father, Jose Luis, was the owner of a company called Sergas that distributed gas in the city; his uncle, Enrique, controlled Socre, the company that ran the local gas production facilities; and his cousin, Cristian, controls another local gas distributor called Controgas.
According to Primera Linea, the Camacho family was using the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee as a political weapon to install Carlos Mesa into power and ensure the restoration of their business empire.
Mesa has a well-documented history of advancing the goals of transnational companies at the expense of his own country’s population. The neoliberal politician and media personality served as vice president when the US-backed President Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada provoked mass protests with his 2003 plan to allow a consortium of multinational corporations to export the country’s natural gas to the US through a Chilean port.
Bolivia’s US-trained security forces met the ferocious protests with brutal repression. After presiding over the killing of 70 unarmed protesters, Sanchez de Lozada fled to Miami and was succeeded by Mesa.
By 2005, Mesa was also ousted by huge demonstrations spurred by his protection of privatized natural gas companies. With his demise, the election of Morales and the rise of the socialist and rural Indigenous movements behind him were just beyond the horizon.
US government cables released by WikiLeaks show that, after his ouster, Mesa continued regular correspondence with American officials. A 2008 memo from the US embassy in Bolivia revealed that Washington was conspiring with opposition politicians in the lead-up to the 2009 presidential election, hoping to undermine and ultimately unseat Morales.
The memo noted that Mesa had met with the chargé d’affaires of the US embassy, and had privately told them he planned to run for president. The cable recalled: “Mesa told us his party will be ideologically similar to a social democratic party and that he hoped to strengthen ties with the Democratic party. ‘We have nothing against the Republican party, and have in fact gotten support from IRI (International Republican Institute) in the past, but we think we share more ideology with the Democrats,’ he added.”
Today, Mesa serves as an in-house “expert” at the Inter-American Dialogue, a neoliberal Washington-based think tank focused on Latin America. One of the Dialogue’s top donors is the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department subsidiary that was exposed in classified diplomatic cables published on Wikileaks for strategically directing millions of dollars to opposition groups including those “opposed to Evo Morales’ vision for indigenous communities.”
Other top funders of the Dialogue include oil titans like Chevron and ExxonMobil; Bechtel, which inspired the initial protests against the administration in which Mesa served; the Inter-American Development Bank, which has forcefully opposed Morales’ socialist-oriented policies; and the Organization of American States (OAS), which helped delegitimize the Morales’s re-election victory with dubious claims of irregular vote counts.
Finishing the job
When Carlos Mesa touched off nationwide protests in October by accusing the Evo Morales government of committing electoral fraud, the right-wing firebrand hailed by his followers as “Macho Camacho” emerged from the shadows. Behind him was the hardcore separatist shock force that he led in Santa Cruz.
Mesa faded into the distance as Camacho emerged as the authentic face of the coup, rallying his forces with the uncompromising rhetoric and fascist symbology that defined the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista paramilitary.
As he declared victory over Morales, Camacho exhorted his followers to “finish the job, let’s get the elections going, let’s start judging the government criminals, let’s put them in jail.”
Back in Washington, meanwhile, the Trump administration released an official statement celebrating Bolivia’s coup, declaring that “Morales’s departure preserves democracy.”
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/boli ... o-camacho/
Re: Bolivia
Bolivia: General coup fled to the United States with the payment of 1 million dollars
21 hours ago admin1
The coup general who demanded the resignation of President Evo Morales went to live in the United States.
Just 72 hours after the coup Williams Kaliman went to live in the United States without knowing exactly what state he will hide after having collected a million dollars.
Bruce Williamson, in charge of Business at the US Embassy in La Paz was responsible for giving one million dollars to each military chief and five hundred thousand of the same currency to each police chief.
Between the mutiny of the police that allowed vengeful chaos against the socialists and indigenous people and the inaction of the Army, the coup was implemented.
Bruce Williamson would have contacted and coordinated everything since months in the Argentine province of Jujuy under the protection of its Governor Gerardo Morales, one of the closest to President Mauricio Macri.
Kaliman was immediately replaced by self-proclaimed President Janine Áñez and that way along with the other military chiefs they went to the United States to protect from any immediate investigation of the local and international community.
http://laestrellaroja.net/actualidad/bo ... e-dolares/
Google Translator
21 hours ago admin1
The coup general who demanded the resignation of President Evo Morales went to live in the United States.
Just 72 hours after the coup Williams Kaliman went to live in the United States without knowing exactly what state he will hide after having collected a million dollars.
Bruce Williamson, in charge of Business at the US Embassy in La Paz was responsible for giving one million dollars to each military chief and five hundred thousand of the same currency to each police chief.
Between the mutiny of the police that allowed vengeful chaos against the socialists and indigenous people and the inaction of the Army, the coup was implemented.
Bruce Williamson would have contacted and coordinated everything since months in the Argentine province of Jujuy under the protection of its Governor Gerardo Morales, one of the closest to President Mauricio Macri.
Kaliman was immediately replaced by self-proclaimed President Janine Áñez and that way along with the other military chiefs they went to the United States to protect from any immediate investigation of the local and international community.
http://laestrellaroja.net/actualidad/bo ... e-dolares/
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Bolivia
tweet courtesy @redfishstream
The resistance against the right-wing military coup in Bolivia is growing. Bolivian soldiers of the infantry division have reportedly abandoned their posts and joined Indigenous anti-coup protesters marching to La Paz.
#NoAlGolpeEnBolivia #ElGolpeDeEstadoEnBolivia #ThisIsaCoup
No confirmation but sounds right, it is usually the 'elite' military units, better payed(bribed) &'perks' for the class traitors.
The resistance against the right-wing military coup in Bolivia is growing. Bolivian soldiers of the infantry division have reportedly abandoned their posts and joined Indigenous anti-coup protesters marching to La Paz.
#NoAlGolpeEnBolivia #ElGolpeDeEstadoEnBolivia #ThisIsaCoup
No confirmation but sounds right, it is usually the 'elite' military units, better payed(bribed) &'perks' for the class traitors.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Bolivia
Senator Jeanine Áñez, an ally of Luis Fernando Camacho, proclaimed herself president with a huge bible in hand (Photo: EFE)
THE BACKLASH FROM EL ALTO FORCED THE SELF-PROCLAMATION OF JEANINE ÁÑEZ
15 Nov 2019 , 11:27 am .
During the colonial era, Cerro Rico de Potosí in Bolivia was the focus of the looting of gigantic quantities of silver ore by Europe. At the beginning of this century, specifically in Cochabamba, the transnational water privatization plan was woven , with the authorship of the Bretton Woods institutions and the faithful accompaniment of the then President Hugo Banzer.
Following that line, the Bolivian State, under the presidency of Evo Morales, was immersed in a series of global corporate pressures and aggressions. From an attempt to balkanize the Bolivian territory in 2008, to the recent cycle of armed violence that the coup d'etat consumed with police and military support.
However, before each elite offensive, the Bolivian people have responded with gigantic street demonstrations. And perhaps the social and class conflict that developed in the Bolivian territory in 2003 serves as a good example: the "Gas War".
The alteños were protagonists in the "Gas War", a significant social and political conflict for the contemporary history of Bolivia
The times
The plan of privatization and sale of gas to the United States undertaken by the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (of which Carlos Mesa was the vice president), found the strongest resistance in the municipality of El Alto, where the Dantesque "October Massacre" would occur .
Both in the era of privatizations and in current events, El Alto has been a bastion of struggle and resistance in the anti-democratic, commotion and fascist attacks.
EL ALTO: "OCTOBER IS NOT FORGOTTEN"
In the contemporary history of Bolivia, El Alto has been characterized by having a powerful organization among its inhabitants.
When the transnational drinking water services "Suez", in alliance with the company Aguas del Illimani, refused to make investments to expand the service in El Alto, the service rates increased considerably. Therefore, the alterations, joined an indefinite strike that forced the government of Carlos Mesa to terminate the contract with the transnational.
The strike had a great economic impact, so much so that the French-based water company withdrew from Bolivia. It put pressure on the Bolivian state to obtain soft loans with a view to expanding its concessions and thereby its profits.
Part of the arguments of the aliens before this situation was that these credits had to go to a national public company and not to a transnational one that centralized the profits.
Likewise, in full growth of energy demand with the use of oil and gas, Bolivia was not far behind in corporate plans for the management of these energy sources.
In 2003, after several decades of exploitation of their strategic resources, the Bolivians in El Alto joined together to stop the unfair management of those resources, making multiple demonstrations to demand that the gas be directed to national development.
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, popularly known as "Goni", ordered the Armed Forces to fight the protests. By October 13 of that year, the intense repression had taken the lives of more than 60 aliens leaving more than 500 injured.
The Armed Forces repressed alterations during the "Gas War" using tanks and other heavy armaments
Archive
It should be noted that during this political crisis, on the international front, the Organization of American States
(OAS) gave its support to "Goni", completely ignoring the human rights violations of his government. In El Alto, protests in defense of natural resources continued, popular organizations established a scheme of self-defense groups, blockades and permanent mobilization.
Days after these events, specifically on October 17, "Goni" resigned and fled the country with the help of the United States. This is how the population of El Alto demonstrated their strong organization and forcefulness against the imposition of corporate measures. It is the epicenter of a series of historical claims of the Bolivian people.
Currently, before the coup offensive, El Alto has done the same.
Since the beginning of the regime change, El Alto has spoken out against the actions of Luis Fernando Camacho and in support of Evo, setting up a backlash situation that has been forcefully repressed by the military and police.
On November 5, at the International Airport, the alterations forced Camacho's return to Santa Cruz, blocking his intention to approach the Burned Palace to take a letter of resignation to Evo.
In sync with these events, the anti-coup mobilizations gained greater force due to the initiative of the Federation of Neighborhood Boards of El Alto (FEJUVE), which allowed 48 hours for Camacho to leave his spaces, showing a rejection of destabilization and violence perpetrated by armed fascist groups.
supporters_of_ex_president_of_bolivia_evo_moral_se_manifiestan_hoy_martes_in_la_paz_bolivia_portando_la_whipala_una_bandera_que_representa_a_los_indigenas_del_pais._efe_martin_alipaz.jpg
The population of El Alto came out in support of President Evo Morales and against the self-proclamation of Áñez
Reuters
The police who turned their backs on President Morales, continued to riot and repress the supportive alterations of the MAS. Given that, the FEJUVE said they would build a Civil Union Police to protect citizens against the waves of violence led by security agencies.
As for the Bolivian Armed Forces, which give the final thrust to Evo, they begin a wave of repression to the population that goes out to the streets to denounce and reject the coup d'etat and violence. The thousands of farmers in El Alto, armed with sticks, and carrying the Wiphala, shouted the slogan "now, civil war".
The anti-coup protests have persisted to date, despite attacks by security forces against the indigenous people, and with the Armed Forces airplanes flying over the municipality, replicating the modus operandi of "Goni" in full "War of Gas".
EL ALTO DEMONSTRATIONS AGAINST THE SELF-SWEARING IN ÁÑEZ
With an empty Plurinational Legislative Assembly, without quorum, the opposition senator, Jeanine Áñez, proclaimed herself President of Bolivia and made symbolic use of the Bible in the process of breaking the constitutional order.
With bible in hand and violating the Constitution from end to end, Senator Jeanine Áñez declared herself president
Courtesy
In addition to that, neighborhood leaders from the city of El Alto and the other provinces announced mobilizations towards the city of La Paz. During Wednesday, Áñez appointed a new military high command that was sworn in front of an altar of crosses, in the midst of repression of protests in La Paz.
In parallel, the MAS bench tried to enter the Assembly, but the police prevented the passage, making barriers, using force and even using chemical agents. Even the president of the Senate, Adriana Salvatierra, of the MAS party, had her access blocked to prevent Jeanine Áñez's self-proclamation from losing effect.
The conscious destruction of the line of presidential succession that led to the self-proclamation of Áñez is explained by the backlash in El Alto, a situation that has been repressed to sustain the coup and undermine the mobilization that, as in 2003, threatens the crystallization of a new offensive of the elites.
http://misionverdad.com/trama-global/un ... de-el-alto
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Bolivia
Bolivia’s coup: Morales toppled not due to his failures, but due to his success
15 Nov, 2019 14:30 / Updated 3 days ago
Bolivia’s coup: Morales toppled not due to his failures, but due to his success
© Global Look Press / Jair Cabrera Torres
Questions remain about the circumstances that led to Morales’ ouster, and whether foreign governments played a role in it. But recent history provides reason to suspect that Bolivia’s rich natural resources are part of the answer.
In a near empty room, a Bolivian military official placed the presidential sash over Jeanine Anez Chavez, a senator from the Beni region who didn’t run the country’s recent election. The ardently Christian politician carried a Bible with her into the ceremony, which consolidated the coup d’etat in the Andean country.
Meanwhile, the victor of the October 20 vote, Evo Morales, was just arriving in Mexico where he has been exiled by the very same actors who claim that no coup has taken place. After calling for new elections in an attempt to quell unrest over election fraud allegations, Morales resigned when military and police heads ‘suggested’ he step down, though only after failing to protect activists and election officials from Morales’ left-wing Movement For Socialism (MAS) party.
Though there is still certainly a lot of questions around the circumstances that led to the ouster of Morales, how it happened and why it did are clearer.
The first thing to look at is how he was forced from the presidency and, then, from the country.
Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno continues to occupy the Carondelet Palace despite a brief relocation to Guayaquil as he faced mass protests over an austerity package, while Chilean President Sebastian Pinera is hanging onto power despite over three weeks of massive, daily protests that have pushed his approval rating to nine percent.
The recent examples of Chile and Ecuador show that a government isn’t necessarily toppled by large numbers on the street, and whereas US allies Moreno and Pinera have the backing of their respective militaries, Morales did not.
The reasons why Morales’ government was toppled are not due to some failures, but rather due to its success.
Morales’ Bolivia had been hailed by numerous observers and organizations for its impressive gains in practically every social indicator, including reducing inequality, making significant gains for women, and many others.
Under the former coca farmer’s leadership, Bolivia had finally managed to reach a level of political stability that evaded it for decades. Nonetheless, Morales was forced out of the country in a matter of days.
The strength of Bolivia’s economy has precisely been driven by its left-wing and nationalist inclinations.
Early into his first term, Evo nationalized the country’s natural gas – the second-largest reserves in South America after Venezuela. This allowed the government to start spending on its people as well as its infrastructure.
The socialist government got into numerous battles with companies over the control of the country’s resources, often having to issue some form of compensation for affected firms, but obviously not detrimentally impacting Bolivia’s economy.
Though Morales’ government still owed much of its success to its natural gas (which again, it controlled), they had also been looking to diversify the economy and had been eyeing its lithium as a key to the country’s economic future. The mineral is essential for electric vehicles, and Bolivia has tons of it – upwards of three-quarters of the world’s total reserves (according to Bolivians).
Despite the value of the mineral, conditions placed on investors led to challenges in securing capital, though Germany’s ACISA and Chinese firms such as TBEA Group and China Machinery Engineering eventually came to terms with Bolivia’s national lithium company, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB).
However, just a week before his forced resignation, Morales canceled the ACI deal in Uyuni salt flat due to protests. In a letter to Germany’s economy minister on November 6, ACISA’s president said he was surprised, but also “sure that our lithium project will resume.”
For some, Evo’s positioning on lithium, including his opening up to Chinese capital, is the reason he was ousted.
While there can be little more than speculation at this point, others point to a long trail of shadowy interventions for control of resources in the region.
“Bolivia is very rich, it is said that it has 70 percent of the essential material to make the new batteries. We all know that there is a change in energy taking place in the world,” former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica said.
“I am not accusing anyone, because I have no proof, but I distrust because of history.”
The not-too-distant history clearly supports Mujica’s grounds for suspicion.
The US Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has long thrown millions of dollars at Bolivian opposition groups and NGOs precisely as part of destabilization efforts including violent, anti-government protests in Santa Cruz, which just happens to be where Civic Committee leader and Christian zealot Luis Fernando Camacho is based.
The two Bolivian security forces heads who ‘suggested’ Morales resign – police chief Vladimir Calderon and Commander of the Bolivian Armed Forces Williams Kaliman – were also graduates of the infamous School of the Americas and served as police and military attaches in the US in recent years. The US has made no secret of securing military and police officials in Latin America as assets.
Right now, the exact role that foreign governments and international capital played in the moves to oust Morales is moot, given the positive response from the hemisphere’s most reactionary leader, as well as from the markets.
Bolivia’s socialist leader earned the ire of the economic and political interests that he refused to subject his country to, and now he is being made an example of for it.
By Pablo Vivanco
Pablo Vivanco is a journalist and analyst specializing in politics and history in the Americas, and served as the Director of teleSUR English. Recent bylines include The Jacobin, Asia Times, The Progressive and Truthout. Follow him on Twitter@pvivancoguzman
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/473560-bolivia ... resources/
15 Nov, 2019 14:30 / Updated 3 days ago
Bolivia’s coup: Morales toppled not due to his failures, but due to his success
© Global Look Press / Jair Cabrera Torres
Questions remain about the circumstances that led to Morales’ ouster, and whether foreign governments played a role in it. But recent history provides reason to suspect that Bolivia’s rich natural resources are part of the answer.
In a near empty room, a Bolivian military official placed the presidential sash over Jeanine Anez Chavez, a senator from the Beni region who didn’t run the country’s recent election. The ardently Christian politician carried a Bible with her into the ceremony, which consolidated the coup d’etat in the Andean country.
Meanwhile, the victor of the October 20 vote, Evo Morales, was just arriving in Mexico where he has been exiled by the very same actors who claim that no coup has taken place. After calling for new elections in an attempt to quell unrest over election fraud allegations, Morales resigned when military and police heads ‘suggested’ he step down, though only after failing to protect activists and election officials from Morales’ left-wing Movement For Socialism (MAS) party.
Though there is still certainly a lot of questions around the circumstances that led to the ouster of Morales, how it happened and why it did are clearer.
The first thing to look at is how he was forced from the presidency and, then, from the country.
Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno continues to occupy the Carondelet Palace despite a brief relocation to Guayaquil as he faced mass protests over an austerity package, while Chilean President Sebastian Pinera is hanging onto power despite over three weeks of massive, daily protests that have pushed his approval rating to nine percent.
The recent examples of Chile and Ecuador show that a government isn’t necessarily toppled by large numbers on the street, and whereas US allies Moreno and Pinera have the backing of their respective militaries, Morales did not.
The reasons why Morales’ government was toppled are not due to some failures, but rather due to its success.
Morales’ Bolivia had been hailed by numerous observers and organizations for its impressive gains in practically every social indicator, including reducing inequality, making significant gains for women, and many others.
Under the former coca farmer’s leadership, Bolivia had finally managed to reach a level of political stability that evaded it for decades. Nonetheless, Morales was forced out of the country in a matter of days.
The strength of Bolivia’s economy has precisely been driven by its left-wing and nationalist inclinations.
Early into his first term, Evo nationalized the country’s natural gas – the second-largest reserves in South America after Venezuela. This allowed the government to start spending on its people as well as its infrastructure.
The socialist government got into numerous battles with companies over the control of the country’s resources, often having to issue some form of compensation for affected firms, but obviously not detrimentally impacting Bolivia’s economy.
Though Morales’ government still owed much of its success to its natural gas (which again, it controlled), they had also been looking to diversify the economy and had been eyeing its lithium as a key to the country’s economic future. The mineral is essential for electric vehicles, and Bolivia has tons of it – upwards of three-quarters of the world’s total reserves (according to Bolivians).
Despite the value of the mineral, conditions placed on investors led to challenges in securing capital, though Germany’s ACISA and Chinese firms such as TBEA Group and China Machinery Engineering eventually came to terms with Bolivia’s national lithium company, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB).
However, just a week before his forced resignation, Morales canceled the ACI deal in Uyuni salt flat due to protests. In a letter to Germany’s economy minister on November 6, ACISA’s president said he was surprised, but also “sure that our lithium project will resume.”
For some, Evo’s positioning on lithium, including his opening up to Chinese capital, is the reason he was ousted.
While there can be little more than speculation at this point, others point to a long trail of shadowy interventions for control of resources in the region.
“Bolivia is very rich, it is said that it has 70 percent of the essential material to make the new batteries. We all know that there is a change in energy taking place in the world,” former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica said.
“I am not accusing anyone, because I have no proof, but I distrust because of history.”
The not-too-distant history clearly supports Mujica’s grounds for suspicion.
The US Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has long thrown millions of dollars at Bolivian opposition groups and NGOs precisely as part of destabilization efforts including violent, anti-government protests in Santa Cruz, which just happens to be where Civic Committee leader and Christian zealot Luis Fernando Camacho is based.
The two Bolivian security forces heads who ‘suggested’ Morales resign – police chief Vladimir Calderon and Commander of the Bolivian Armed Forces Williams Kaliman – were also graduates of the infamous School of the Americas and served as police and military attaches in the US in recent years. The US has made no secret of securing military and police officials in Latin America as assets.
Right now, the exact role that foreign governments and international capital played in the moves to oust Morales is moot, given the positive response from the hemisphere’s most reactionary leader, as well as from the markets.
Bolivia’s socialist leader earned the ire of the economic and political interests that he refused to subject his country to, and now he is being made an example of for it.
By Pablo Vivanco
Pablo Vivanco is a journalist and analyst specializing in politics and history in the Americas, and served as the Director of teleSUR English. Recent bylines include The Jacobin, Asia Times, The Progressive and Truthout. Follow him on Twitter@pvivancoguzman
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/473560-bolivia ... resources/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Bolivia
Inferno and the Plan of the Coup d’Etat in Bolivia
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 16, 2019
Marco Teruggi
Those who lead the coup d’état made a mistake so profound that there is no longer anything that can stop the escalation that pushes towards the city of La Paz.
Each night there are vigils, fires, an unwavering decision: the historic, Aymara, ancient, and more recent memory of the 2003 uprising where sixty people were killed.
“You are leaving, I am staying in this hell,” was the phrase that the taxi driver said when he dropped me off at the El Alto airport in the early hours of freezing rain, after wandering through the labyrinths of a city that was rising. This is not a metaphor: Monday, the first day, was apocalyptic.
There were dozens of blocks with barbed wire, groups with sticks at each corner, columns coming from different districts, multitudes with sticks, stones, slingshots, hats, police stations burning, fury, as I have rarely encountered in my life. And blood, a lot of blood on the ground, in videos, in words.
Since Monday there are Whipalas flags in all the streets of El Alto and they come down day after day. Every night there are vigils, fires, an unbreakable decision: they activated the historical memory, the ancient Aymara, and the more recent one, of the uprising of 2003 where sixty people were murdered. “Mesa, October is not forgotten”, is the memory of El Alto against the bullets and the resignation of a government.
Those who lead the coup d’état made a mistake so profound that there is no longer a conciliatory stage that can stop the escalation that pushes from different corners of the country to the city of La Paz, center of political power. There have been several demands that converge towards a common enemy synthesized in four components: Fernando Camacho, Carlos Mesa, Jeanine Añez and the Bolivian National Police.
The principal demand is the resignation of the self-proclaimed Añez, and the radicalization stems from the exclusionary, anti-indigenous character of the coup d’état that was condemned for the disrespect of the Whipalas and the aggressions against women for wearing polleras, in other words, being Indigenous.
These are the slogans that accompany each mobilization that enters La Paz from El Alto, from the inhabitants of that city, from the highlands, tropics, mines, and yungas. They enter through El Prado Avenue up to Murillo Square, the place where the coup d’état materialized in terms of facts and symbols.
Those who carried out the coup made a mistake and unleashed a reaction that was not included in their variables in such magnitude. The first response to the escalation was from the Bolivian Armed Force (FAB) that took to the streets in a de facto state of siege. Military planes, helicopters, now with Whipala, began to circulate in La Paz, El Alto, the country’s highways.
What is the plan of those who led the overthrow? That is the central question. The steps would be three-fold. The first, achieved, was to overthrow the government headed by Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera. The second, partly consummated, was to build an institutional fiction that materialized in Añez’s self-proclamation, the appointment of ministers and high military and police command.
This second step has yet to be resolved: the bicameral legislative power in the hands of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), holding a two-thirds majority and which elected new presidencies. The coup architecture must resolve how to move in the face of this scenario: undo the legislative power in an act of coup consummation, or seek a point of agreement with the MAS.
That agreement has to do with the third step, the call for elections. The coup strategy seems to have contemplated this exit from its genesis: it is not a coup that proclaims a general commander or a junta for an indeterminate time, but rather it seeks to present itself as constitutional and promising an election in a short time.
That then means opening the electoral channel having generated the necessary conditions for that date. These are the conditions that began before Morales was overthrown, namely persecution, assassinations, massacres, to which are now added detentions within the framework of a rupture of the rule of law and absolute impunity. The government minister designated by the self-proclaimed has said so, the “hunt” has begun.
The evolution will depend, among other factors, on the pressure on the streets, as well as on the political/parliamentary strategy of the MAS. One of the points is whether the coup plan – heterogeneous and in dispute within – will seek to proscribe the MAS or allow it to stand in a situation of persecution of its cadres and leaders.
The other central question is: what is the strategy of resistance to the coup? Some answers are contained in the manner in which the confrontation with the coup escalation unfolded: without clarity of command that could order an articulated scheme, particularly in the last few days. The massive mobilizations, in the escalation phase, postponed the outcome without being able to stop it, while inside pillars of support were detached until they reached the FAB.
This has three central aspects. First, that the figure of Evo Morales, his defense and return, is not a unifying demand, at least for the moment. Secondly, that the leaders in the movements are, in many cases, going through scenarios of attrition and divisions. The translation in El Alto is a great power and radicalism with no leadership capacity.
Third, building a strategy that articulates movements -such as those that are part of the National Coordinator for Change- to the Bolivian Central Workers’ Union, to the parliamentary space, within a joint plan, is a task as essential as it is complex.
Many questions at this hour can only remain unanswered. The scenario is of an offensive coup that needs to be consolidated, that measures the responses to the repression and militarization of the country, and that has the central support of the great majority of the country’s media.
The information lockdown inside Bolivia is extensive, each person interviewed thanks the international press for being there. Bolivian journalists who do not align themselves with the coup narrative are threatened in their homes, on the phone, at work. The de facto minister of communication affirmed that she will persecute “journalists and pseudo-journalists” for “sedition”. Every dictatorship needs media that reproduce the narrative and a cone of silence.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2019/11/ ... n-bolivia/
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 16, 2019
Marco Teruggi
Those who lead the coup d’état made a mistake so profound that there is no longer anything that can stop the escalation that pushes towards the city of La Paz.
Each night there are vigils, fires, an unwavering decision: the historic, Aymara, ancient, and more recent memory of the 2003 uprising where sixty people were killed.
“You are leaving, I am staying in this hell,” was the phrase that the taxi driver said when he dropped me off at the El Alto airport in the early hours of freezing rain, after wandering through the labyrinths of a city that was rising. This is not a metaphor: Monday, the first day, was apocalyptic.
There were dozens of blocks with barbed wire, groups with sticks at each corner, columns coming from different districts, multitudes with sticks, stones, slingshots, hats, police stations burning, fury, as I have rarely encountered in my life. And blood, a lot of blood on the ground, in videos, in words.
Since Monday there are Whipalas flags in all the streets of El Alto and they come down day after day. Every night there are vigils, fires, an unbreakable decision: they activated the historical memory, the ancient Aymara, and the more recent one, of the uprising of 2003 where sixty people were murdered. “Mesa, October is not forgotten”, is the memory of El Alto against the bullets and the resignation of a government.
Those who lead the coup d’état made a mistake so profound that there is no longer a conciliatory stage that can stop the escalation that pushes from different corners of the country to the city of La Paz, center of political power. There have been several demands that converge towards a common enemy synthesized in four components: Fernando Camacho, Carlos Mesa, Jeanine Añez and the Bolivian National Police.
The principal demand is the resignation of the self-proclaimed Añez, and the radicalization stems from the exclusionary, anti-indigenous character of the coup d’état that was condemned for the disrespect of the Whipalas and the aggressions against women for wearing polleras, in other words, being Indigenous.
These are the slogans that accompany each mobilization that enters La Paz from El Alto, from the inhabitants of that city, from the highlands, tropics, mines, and yungas. They enter through El Prado Avenue up to Murillo Square, the place where the coup d’état materialized in terms of facts and symbols.
Those who carried out the coup made a mistake and unleashed a reaction that was not included in their variables in such magnitude. The first response to the escalation was from the Bolivian Armed Force (FAB) that took to the streets in a de facto state of siege. Military planes, helicopters, now with Whipala, began to circulate in La Paz, El Alto, the country’s highways.
What is the plan of those who led the overthrow? That is the central question. The steps would be three-fold. The first, achieved, was to overthrow the government headed by Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera. The second, partly consummated, was to build an institutional fiction that materialized in Añez’s self-proclamation, the appointment of ministers and high military and police command.
This second step has yet to be resolved: the bicameral legislative power in the hands of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), holding a two-thirds majority and which elected new presidencies. The coup architecture must resolve how to move in the face of this scenario: undo the legislative power in an act of coup consummation, or seek a point of agreement with the MAS.
That agreement has to do with the third step, the call for elections. The coup strategy seems to have contemplated this exit from its genesis: it is not a coup that proclaims a general commander or a junta for an indeterminate time, but rather it seeks to present itself as constitutional and promising an election in a short time.
That then means opening the electoral channel having generated the necessary conditions for that date. These are the conditions that began before Morales was overthrown, namely persecution, assassinations, massacres, to which are now added detentions within the framework of a rupture of the rule of law and absolute impunity. The government minister designated by the self-proclaimed has said so, the “hunt” has begun.
The evolution will depend, among other factors, on the pressure on the streets, as well as on the political/parliamentary strategy of the MAS. One of the points is whether the coup plan – heterogeneous and in dispute within – will seek to proscribe the MAS or allow it to stand in a situation of persecution of its cadres and leaders.
The other central question is: what is the strategy of resistance to the coup? Some answers are contained in the manner in which the confrontation with the coup escalation unfolded: without clarity of command that could order an articulated scheme, particularly in the last few days. The massive mobilizations, in the escalation phase, postponed the outcome without being able to stop it, while inside pillars of support were detached until they reached the FAB.
This has three central aspects. First, that the figure of Evo Morales, his defense and return, is not a unifying demand, at least for the moment. Secondly, that the leaders in the movements are, in many cases, going through scenarios of attrition and divisions. The translation in El Alto is a great power and radicalism with no leadership capacity.
Third, building a strategy that articulates movements -such as those that are part of the National Coordinator for Change- to the Bolivian Central Workers’ Union, to the parliamentary space, within a joint plan, is a task as essential as it is complex.
Many questions at this hour can only remain unanswered. The scenario is of an offensive coup that needs to be consolidated, that measures the responses to the repression and militarization of the country, and that has the central support of the great majority of the country’s media.
The information lockdown inside Bolivia is extensive, each person interviewed thanks the international press for being there. Bolivian journalists who do not align themselves with the coup narrative are threatened in their homes, on the phone, at work. The de facto minister of communication affirmed that she will persecute “journalists and pseudo-journalists” for “sedition”. Every dictatorship needs media that reproduce the narrative and a cone of silence.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2019/11/ ... n-bolivia/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Bolivia
Bolivia's de facto government increases resources for repression
MAS parliamentarians reported that session scheduled in the Chamber of Deputies for next Tuesday is postponed, due to lack of agreement with opponents. | Photo: Reuters
Posted 18 November 2019 (13 hours 44 minutes ago)
The de facto president, Jeanine Áñez, allocated 5 million 038 thousand 126 dollars to the Armed Forces to suppress massive protests that demand her resignation and reestablishment of the Constitutional thread.
The de facto president of Bolivia, Jeanine Áñez , on Monday decreed a budget increase of approximately 5 million 038 thousand 126 dollars, for the Armed Forces (FF.AA.) to repressively protest against protesters demanding General elections and reestablishing the thread Constitutional.
"The Ministry of Economy and Public Finance is authorized through the General Treasury of the Nation -TGN-, to carry out the budget allocation of additional resources for an amount of Bs. 34,796,098 , in favor of the Ministry of Defense, destined to the equipment of the Armed Forces ", indicates the decree of Áñez .
The announcement is published, after the massive demonstrations of indigenous organizations that demand the resignation of Áñez and call for new general elections, also, contingents arrived at the Plaza Murillo (La Paz), where they expressed their outrage at the fascist wave that burned residence of leaders of the Movement To Socialism (MAS) and the Whipala flag that represents the ancestral struggle of the peoples.
The contingents who arrived in La Paz , gathered in the Murillo square, also expressed their outrage over the burning of whipalas, the flag of the original peoples, and the repression exerted by law enforcement in various parts of the country that has left more than 20 dead and hundreds injured.
MAS parliamentarians reported that a session scheduled in the Chamber of Deputies for next Tuesday is postponed, due to lack of agreement with opponents on the advancement of general elections. However, the Senate will have a plenary to discuss social policy issues.
Since the coup d'etat was perpetrated against President Evo Morales, the country suffers from institutional destabilization and military repression against hundreds of indigenous people; According to the Ombudsman's Office, 23 people were killed and 105 seriously injured.
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/bolivia- ... -0029.html
Google Translator
MAS parliamentarians reported that session scheduled in the Chamber of Deputies for next Tuesday is postponed, due to lack of agreement with opponents. | Photo: Reuters
Posted 18 November 2019 (13 hours 44 minutes ago)
The de facto president, Jeanine Áñez, allocated 5 million 038 thousand 126 dollars to the Armed Forces to suppress massive protests that demand her resignation and reestablishment of the Constitutional thread.
The de facto president of Bolivia, Jeanine Áñez , on Monday decreed a budget increase of approximately 5 million 038 thousand 126 dollars, for the Armed Forces (FF.AA.) to repressively protest against protesters demanding General elections and reestablishing the thread Constitutional.
"The Ministry of Economy and Public Finance is authorized through the General Treasury of the Nation -TGN-, to carry out the budget allocation of additional resources for an amount of Bs. 34,796,098 , in favor of the Ministry of Defense, destined to the equipment of the Armed Forces ", indicates the decree of Áñez .
The announcement is published, after the massive demonstrations of indigenous organizations that demand the resignation of Áñez and call for new general elections, also, contingents arrived at the Plaza Murillo (La Paz), where they expressed their outrage at the fascist wave that burned residence of leaders of the Movement To Socialism (MAS) and the Whipala flag that represents the ancestral struggle of the peoples.
The contingents who arrived in La Paz , gathered in the Murillo square, also expressed their outrage over the burning of whipalas, the flag of the original peoples, and the repression exerted by law enforcement in various parts of the country that has left more than 20 dead and hundreds injured.
MAS parliamentarians reported that a session scheduled in the Chamber of Deputies for next Tuesday is postponed, due to lack of agreement with opponents on the advancement of general elections. However, the Senate will have a plenary to discuss social policy issues.
Since the coup d'etat was perpetrated against President Evo Morales, the country suffers from institutional destabilization and military repression against hundreds of indigenous people; According to the Ombudsman's Office, 23 people were killed and 105 seriously injured.
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/bolivia- ... -0029.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Bolivia
TENSIONS BETWEEN THE TWO SECURITY FORCES REPRESENT A RISK FOR THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE COUP
FIRST: MILITARY SOURCE WARNS THAT DIVISIONS BETWEEN POLICE AND ARMED FORCES IN BOLIVIA ARE GROWING
November 19, 2019 , 11:39 a.m. .
"At this time (the night of November 17), three repressive operations are taking place in the country," he said. The first in Senkata, in El Alto; the second in the southern part of the city of Cochabamba, "in a place called Sebastián Pagador (a town in the city's 14th district), which is an area of mining migrants where more than four or five injured have already been registered; and the third in the town of Achocaya, between the city of La Paz and El Alto, in an intermediate municipality. " He denounced that in the latter, by that time, there were five injured, and the probability of a deceased person.
Senkata, of the three repressive theaters, has received the most coverage. It is in El Alto (there are possibilities of a little more coverage), and there are critical gasoline and diesel deposits for the supply of the cities of El Alto and La Paz, at a time when it begins to dramatically run out, and The coup government imports fuels from Chile and Peru, and according to the newspaper Los Tiempos de Cochabamba, an air bridge is being built to "distribute" food in La Paz and El Alto.
But what happens in the town of Sebastián Pagador and especially Achocaya do not enjoy the same coverage (in itself scarce). But that did not prevent confirming what a source, belonging to the military world that contacted Mision Truth (and that, for security reasons, his name is kept in reserve), which, like many, reject the coup and the performance they have had the Armed Forces (FFAA) of Bolivia in the overthrow of the government and the days of installation of the coup, now represented by the self-proclaimed Jeanine Áñez.
"The scenario in which these repressive operations are taking place today is very confusing, but everything indicates that the government has decided to radicalize its repressive behavior, in an absolutely arbitrary behavior, in violation of human rights and that it will unleash in the next hours a great operation of political persecution against ministers, deputy ministers or high-level public officials, "he warned, in line with the alert tone that the new Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo, has deployed since he assumed the portfolio in the de facto cabinet.
On November 14, Murillo talked about going to the hunt for senior leaders, and on November 18, emphasizing the detentions and the search and capture of social leaders or government figures of Evo Morales. "There may be 100 detainees this afternoon also because there are people who are harassing, and we will continue to detain people who are harassing, then don't come and tell me I wasn't doing anything," the newspaper Página Siete collected .
"They are looking for leaders, ministers, directors of companies, to stop them and of course accuse them of a set of crimes that are part of the political staging to justify the conditions in which we find ourselves" reveals the source in another daily contact next, confirming that "there are already processes that have been opened for sedition, for attacks on state security, for other crimes."
Apparently, the person in charge of this facet of dirty work corresponds, among others, to the deputy Rafael Quispe, of the Democratic Union (UD), the same party of Áñez and Murillo. Quispe has already filed a complaint with the Bolivian prosecutor accusing Evo Morales of terrorism , among another series of complaints, files and accusations against MAS figures in the alleged sponsorship of "seditious" activities. And, according to the source, there are several compelling reasons for the coup administration to accelerate the pace and manage to convey the idea that the rush with arrests and another series of recent political actions, hardly correspond to a government that will only be responsible for "the transition" is not due to the urgency to control the situation or, eventually, get out of hand.
Because, according to what True Mission could know thanks to the source, contrary to the (unsuccessful) attempt to cover the coup d'etat of legitimacy that it still does not achieve, the repressive machinery responsible for annihilating the kickback begins to crack. What before the public "good" seems like a new government that presumably has them all with it, behind the cameras the signs of discomfort and disapproval with the latest events is a common sign of both the armed forces and the police, in a tangle of internal conflicts, intrigues, and dislocations in which the historical differences of both bodies intersect and the questions of repressive overflow.
Nine days (today November 19) of the coup d'etat in Bolivia, more and more is known about what was not said or covered up, once the destabilization operation and, especially when the regime changed, started. The window that opens the fountain describes a much more complicated scenario, especially for those who today claim to hold political power in the plurinational state.
DISCOMFORT, REJECTION AND DEFECTIONS IN THE ARMED FORCES
"This is the first time that joint operations of a repressive nature have been carried out between the Armed Forces (FFAA) and the Police in the last 20 years. Normally, political decisions for the use of both repressive acts used to be made in an independent way; this is the first time that joint repressive operations are being carried out, "something that" has caused both an institution and an unease due to a long interinstitutional conflict that has been going on for a century or so " .
The beginning of this joint operation, we know, was when the 11 and 12 November police officers in La Paz and Cochabamba themselves made public requests to the army to be incorporated into repressive tasks, since the police forces were being exceeded by the mobilizations of social movements and people in the street in rejection of the coup.
"Through General [Williams] Kaliman, the Armed Forces have been incorporated into repressive control throughout the country, but in particular in the city of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. In general, middle managers have assumed this decision of Kalimán quite reluctantly for several reasons: The first, because they feel that they entered at a time when the police were experiencing a crisis of operational capacity and therefore they were to save them from the critical situation. In this conflict, the armed forces have been forced to resolve the incapacity of the police that during all these years has been involved in mafia practices, generalized corruption and human rights violations;the police is one of the most discredited and discredited institutions by which unfortunately they had to go out to support within the framework of this coup regime, "the source said.
The attitude of the armed forces in the repression is "very little compromised" and is generating "internal fissures". "Desertions of soldiers are taking place, particularly in the city of Cochabamba and in the Department of La Paz. In the case of Cochabamba they are soldiers who come from the Tropic (the hot and jungle areas of the Department), and in the case of La Paz they come from El Alto: soldiers who are deserting so as not to shoot at their own brothers, "he says.
"On the other hand, the officers who are in command of the troop have arranged for the soldiers to remove the firing needles from their rifles because they do not feel confident that the soldiers can intervene according to the orders of their commanders, but that this sensation of insecurity and distrust of the soldiers has made them only go out to show their weapons in a more dissuasive attitude. "
In social networks they have begun to emerge to the surface how in other sectors of the country, such as Oruro, military units with preparation have joined the marches and mobilizations of peasants and indigenous people, at least in the Andean Departments, which in itself It represented the first sign that not everything was under control within the Armed Forces.
Another vein of the internal conflict is also represented by the control of the institutions in the troubled river. Apparently, one of the factors of immediate discomfort in this plane was expressed with the displacement of the Presidential Security Unit (USP), responsible for the security of the Casa Grande del Pueblo (the presidential palace), composed of army officers. "When the police intervened in the coup d'etat, this bill was practically collected," producing "a very acute feeling of dissatisfaction and discomfort."
But the patron of the police at the expense of the institutions that passed into the hands of the Armed Forces or civilians does not stop at who controls the security of the Big House, "at the same time that the military went to save the police from their crisis of operational capacity, the police were recovering some institutions that went to civilians, such as the National Identification Service, "says the source.
Not only the accumulation of politicians who found a sense of opportunity to leave their name signed on this unfortunate page of Bolivian history: just as above the state levers (and their budgets) are distributed, below, the police reproduce the same scheme of scramble Clients by doing what they can, so it goes to the detriment of perhaps the most sensitive institution of the entire state concert. "The police were in charge of recovering the lost spaces that the Evo Morales government had virtually taken away from it due to widespread corruption," the source rounds.
But another ghost of greater weight and draft crosses the mood of the ranks of the troops: "These days the population is calling them 'military killers.' This is a derogatory category that they are receiving in much of the country, something that President Evo had resolved after the bloody massacre of October 2003. Evo Morales reconciled the Armed Forces with society, and particularly with the city of El Alto, after they were used by Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada "in the repression that produced more than 70 dead and more than 500 wounded, in the so-called " gas war ".
They are trying to assassinate you in the streets and this is leading to questioning the decision of General Kaliman to have asked President Evo for his resignation, sums up the source.
JEALOUSY, INTRIGUES AND FEAR IN THE NATIONAL POLICE
"The issue of the police is not minor," says the source. "They are depleting their reserves of chemical agents; they are depleting anti-riot ammunition and are reaching the limit of exhaustion in the police, particularly in the departments of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz on days of intensive use of staff, but also without relief".
A police document that came to the writing of Mision Verdad , dated November 14, confirms what the source affirms. This is a memorandum (number 02467/2019) that the General Command of the Bolivian Police sends to the office of Colonel Franklin Hernán Prado Alconz, National Director of Instruction and Teaching of the entity.
"Due to the social situation that crosses our national territory and with the purpose of having human resources to restore public order , its authority, within the framework of its powers, must make a report on the feasibility for the students of the Centers Police Training Pre and Post Degree of the Police University 'Mcal. (sic) Antonio José de Sucre', leave as soon as possible, to reinforce to join the police services, "says the document (the underline is MV) .
Somehow a little forced, this request resonates with the deployment of minors and rookies of the German army when the Nazi government, close to the collapse by the advance of the Red Army, launched children and minors to the Berlin defense, even more than in This opportunity is about police officers in the process of specialization.
It is not the fall of Berlin in 45, but everything seems to be pointing to the beginning of an even less predictable and volatile cycle. Because the problems of the police don't stop here, aka the most discredited institution in the country. Fear, insecurity and fear of reprisals on the street in police barracks. Many have become aware of what it meant to attack the whiphala (the emblematic flag of the indigenous peoples of America and what is officially the other flag of the Bolivian nation).
The source emphasizes that "they are being exposed, they are over-exposing themselves during these more than 20 days [of mutiny and repression], there is also a general malaise due to this overexposure." Lowering the wiphala of the General Command in La Paz "generated a great reaction against the police that has become a true flag of struggle of the population living in the western part of the country," the Andean region, also generating "conflicts and controversies within the police command and the staff of noncommissioned officers, sergeants and police troops. "
It is already public, notorious and communicational that after 23 dead and hundreds of detainees, the Áñez regime signed a Supreme Decree (DS 2082) authorizing the transfer of 34.7 million Bolivians (approximately 4 million dollars), indicating In a concise manner, they are being "destined to the equipment of the Armed Forces", excluding the scope that this petty phrase contains. The source says that the essential function of the decree is "to pay the costs of mobilization, logistics and, what the police suspect, are expenses in what they call 'loyalty bonds.' That is, the police are accusing the FFAA that the government would be paying him a loyalty bonus to stay in this repressive deployment. "
The police see this decree as confirmation that the armed component of the state receives preferential treatment that police forces do not receive (let alone the fact that to keep the soldiers on the street requires an incentive of millions of Bolivians ). But, in addition, along with DS 2082, the government of Áñez issued another decree, four days before, in which it acquits the military of "any criminal responsibility", as reflected in DS 4078.
"The police today are tremendously concerned about the results of the repressive deployment. Fundamentally about the number of deaths, injuries and detainees that are being carried out by the intelligence and security agencies of the police themselves. This is generating a fear in the police that people return to set fire to the police units, to persecute police officers who live in the city of El Alto or in urban areas. It is creating enormous fear and reasonable doubts are being felt within the police to go out to repress every day " , says the source, without showing off clear knowledge of the military and security world in his country.
And in this last statement, it is essential to retain a crucial fact for later in this note: it is the intelligence agencies, not the regular troop of the police, that is carrying out the majority of arrests, forcing the rest of the body to feeling committed to the actions of their services, without the need for the specific performance of one group to absolve the other.
So much darkness contrasts with the supposed " conciliatory " tone with which the new head of the National Police, colonel (ex.) Rodolfo Antonio Montero Torricos tries to address the social movements and members of the MAS throughout the country. "If I have to bend to anyone from my beloved Bolivia and ask for forgiveness if we have offended someone, they have nothing else to call me and I will be there. I want peace, we want peace of mind, I don't want any more offenses," or "if we have done something, if we have offended the city of El Alto, excuse us," as if it were a community fight, and not the "state policy" of the Áñez regime.
These statements are given on the same day that the former general commander, Yuri Calderón, was relieved of his duties (November 14): on the same day of Decree 4078 and the Commando circular requesting that students go to the streets from the police academy. All this one day after the de facto regime relieved military commanders, all students of the School of the Americas, as well as police commanders, with proven ties to the FBI and other US federal agencies, as revealed by the investigator. Jeb Sprague in The Grayzone .
To aggravate the layers of internal conflict, "there is a dispute between police and military regarding who is responsible for the more than 20 deaths that have occurred to this day. The police accuse the armed forces of using their lethal weapons, the The armed forces accuse the police of using them and therefore there is a crossfire of accusations between both institutions, "the source warns.
THE DEA, NARCO-LAWYERS, PARACOS AND NARCODELATORES: THE ARTERY OF THE COUP?
Let us return to the fact that a few paragraphs above were recorded: the (very conflicted) police executes repression, excesses and avoids probable responsibilities in the count of mowed lives since the installed regime freed all its load against the population mobilized against the coup. But the arrests, where there has been evidence of nocturnality, assaults on homes, rows of detainees and a large accumulation of photographic and audiovisual record that rhymes what happens now with the terrible years of military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s of the last century, which , according to the source, have been actions of the police intelligence services.
This seems to suggest an operational structure parallel to the formal chain of command.
"The police operations are carried out by the intelligence agencies, in some cases they are accompanied by unofficial bodies, unofficial teams, that is, they are not part of the organic structure of the police. And, therefore, this gives us it makes us presume that a whole strategy of work with paramilitarism is under development, "says the informant voice.
And given the above, it makes sense that in order to prevent the contradictions and fissures of the police force from impacting their effectiveness, or even, given the circumstances of a political turnaround that is detrimental to the regime, the coup forces need an organ in service. exclusive of the coupist razzia that guarantees favorable results (due to myopia and lack of political talent, Áñez is clearly one of the façade figures, probably lacking concrete and real impact on the situation).
But which actors suggest being part of this (possibly) undeclared line of action?
"Fundamentally in the eastern part, and specifically in the case of the city of Santa Cruz, we have been informed that there are clash groups of the Cruceñista Youth Union and others come from sectors that work on illegality. They are accompanying the work of the police". Affirmation of the source that seems to be in line with the images that were seen during the days in which the overthrow of Morales is consummated, when on social networks they began to publish videos in which police, military and armed people were seen and with diversity of uniforms, or civilians but with military preparations (bulletproof vests, assault rifles), after the army responded to the call for police assistance to contain the protests: the "jijadistas" Cochabambinos shouted "No fear!" among other matonic slogans, a probable public lapse that highlights the fear they felt when the backlash began on the street and did not have the poise to face it on their own. The sheaf is a sign of neoliberal blows.
If everything affirmed by the source is confirmed, the speculation about an organization chart and an even darker ploy that the process that initiated the change of regime in Bolivia begins to become apparent, one that advances and acts behind the operation of relations public with which the facade of "government" is armed, a combination of opportunistic or inoperative figures (¿Áñez itself?) with others who, in strategic areas, are effectively responsible for leading the agenda until its completion, apparently , whatever the cost.
But what has been described so far, after an attempt at homogeneity tried to transmit, acrobatically embedded in Bolivian and international media, is actually a faction that tries to react quickly against general fissures, which, of course, are not only attested to. in what has been told so far by the source to Mision Truth , but to other miscalculations that only for that reason seem to accentuate even more the role of the United States in the process before, during and after the coup.
For example, "the Minister of the Presidency (Xerxes Justinian) has developed intense activity in his buffet defending drug traffickers, and is one of the strongest men, politically speaking, of Luis Fernando Camacho." Drug trafficking and secessionism ultra cruño, something that already traces both a sign of the composition of the regime's cabinet and one of the "superior" forces to the governing structure that drives it.
On the other hand, it is clear that the sudden decrease in focus on Luis Fernando Camacho does not take him away or exempt him from this phase of the coup. "There is a penetration of informal, illegal teams that are operating in the intelligence services politically supported by both Luis Fernando Camacho, as well as by the Minister of the Presidency."
The Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo has arranged a "special apparatus of the Prosecutor's Office" to detain the senators of the MAS. In statements given on November 18, Murillo develops that to capture the political figures of the MAS (label that will be used against all forms that the regime considers opposition to the coup) are being used in addition to the services of the police and the army, "emergency systems that we have armed the previous days, private that are working with me and intelligence systems in the area", so that the feasibility of a parallel structure, or parastatal, executes, supplies and collaborates with very specific actions within the coup .
"We must not forget that the current Minister of Government is a snitch of the DEA. In fact, his heritage has been built on the basis of transferring information on drug trafficking activities in Chapare, and the DEA made him one of the snitches. most important in the region. Consequently, he financed it in his private activities, which were basically facade activities, "said the source. "That explains the ferocity, the brutality with which it refers to public officials, the language it uses to utter threats and insults, and the adjectives it uses as if this guy was on a safari in Africa."
It is not surprising then that it is in Murillo's voice that the most violent face of the coup is revealed from the institutions. The language he uses, his profile, the eagerness with which he emphasizes the "role" that Venezuela, Cuba, Russia and even the FARC are playing in "sedition" against the coup. Murillo has arrested Cuban doctors, Venezuelan citizens who are accused of having uniforms of the Venezuelan police and PSUV cards, as well as it is difficult to divorce him from the actions that the communication minister executes in parallel, harassing and accusing international coverage ( and not precisely by Castrotrovis media) also of sedition, an accusation that of course reaches Russian media within the "macabre plan" that inserts the fight against the coup within the "Bolivarian breezes"
"That is the nature [of Murillo], he is trained by the DEA, just to do the role he is doing at the moment, and this is a guy who has no qualms to participate with extra-legal teams. Of course, he is opening the Doors wide open for the informal incursion of the DEA At this time and in the future, its role will be to legitimize the presence of the DEA in a scenario of apparent overflow of drug trafficking, terrorism, of the violent forces of the FARC ', etc. etc. This is a character who will surely build the narrative to facilitate the re-entry of the DEA, the CIA or other US agencies "into the country.
Being a narcodelator at the service of the DEA (expelled from Bolivia by President Evo Morales in 2008) may grant Murillo several direct-line privileges with that agency (or the CIA, since in these matters there is, in fact, no clear limit on where one begins operating and where the other ends), but also, given on the ground he plays, the gringos themselves may have files and records that make these persons vulnerable or even extraditable from turning the tortilla against them. The same can be said of the connections that also reach Áñez and his family environment, so far from God and so close to Uribismo in Colombia. This, too, seems to highlight the common pattern of judicially vulnerable leadersThey reach power. Confirming another element that has become habit in the power groups that interest the United States to reach the various governments of the region. People with criminal water around their neck.
The days pass and each step seems to be more agonizing for the regime of Áñez in his journey to consolidate a government that is already granted more attributes than one of transition. Naturally, all that game with the legal and political forms is the attempt of public facade that manipulates on the emptiness of political substance of the regulations that govern the state that hardly conquer. Another element that indirectly certifies the presence of the United States is the mediocrity of calculation with which it was taken into account to evict Evo and the "after we see" with the rest of the state, the society that opposes the coup or silently does not endorses, the country in particular and the region in general that was seen throughout 2019 with the Venezuelan case:
More bloody and less tragicomic is the Bolivian case, where the MAS continues to control two thirds of the two chambers of the legislative branch, the power in charge of appointing the new Electoral Tribunal to call elections (by law, the presidency cannot do so), so there are already requests that "the living forces" of the coup arm some last-minute platypus platypus that baipase the Senate and Congress, since the regime needs the exclusion and proscription of the MAS, forcing the two armed institutions to work and security of the country while trying to omit the conflicting context that has long been present between both forces,the same that dismissing the street force is now forced to use irregular bodies and rides on the highway of impunity the performance of repressive operations (at least of the military institution), and now, despite the immense national and international support of means to normalize the story for the public, information about the internal conflict of the coup regime itself begins to seep, such as the information that came to the writing of this medium.
What has been revealed so far to Mision Truth should not be taken as a hopeful sign that automatically inserts itself into the celebratory tone with which (naturally) any signal of progress of the backlash on the lines already known in Venezuela is expected in 2002; the story is opaque, and obeys the contextual channel where it develops.
All this seems, on the other hand, to certify that the story of the coup is not closed, that the situation remains open and that the brand new (narco?) Regime represented by Janine Áñez does not have it all. This other version shows that the fissures within the Armed Forces and the police are capitalized and are at the center of the operation of repressive operations. And it confirms even more dramatically that the biggest battle that is taking place is for Bolivia's own soul.
http://misionverdad.com/TRAMA-GLOBAL/pr ... -y-fuerzas
FIRST: MILITARY SOURCE WARNS THAT DIVISIONS BETWEEN POLICE AND ARMED FORCES IN BOLIVIA ARE GROWING
November 19, 2019 , 11:39 a.m. .
"At this time (the night of November 17), three repressive operations are taking place in the country," he said. The first in Senkata, in El Alto; the second in the southern part of the city of Cochabamba, "in a place called Sebastián Pagador (a town in the city's 14th district), which is an area of mining migrants where more than four or five injured have already been registered; and the third in the town of Achocaya, between the city of La Paz and El Alto, in an intermediate municipality. " He denounced that in the latter, by that time, there were five injured, and the probability of a deceased person.
Senkata, of the three repressive theaters, has received the most coverage. It is in El Alto (there are possibilities of a little more coverage), and there are critical gasoline and diesel deposits for the supply of the cities of El Alto and La Paz, at a time when it begins to dramatically run out, and The coup government imports fuels from Chile and Peru, and according to the newspaper Los Tiempos de Cochabamba, an air bridge is being built to "distribute" food in La Paz and El Alto.
But what happens in the town of Sebastián Pagador and especially Achocaya do not enjoy the same coverage (in itself scarce). But that did not prevent confirming what a source, belonging to the military world that contacted Mision Truth (and that, for security reasons, his name is kept in reserve), which, like many, reject the coup and the performance they have had the Armed Forces (FFAA) of Bolivia in the overthrow of the government and the days of installation of the coup, now represented by the self-proclaimed Jeanine Áñez.
"The scenario in which these repressive operations are taking place today is very confusing, but everything indicates that the government has decided to radicalize its repressive behavior, in an absolutely arbitrary behavior, in violation of human rights and that it will unleash in the next hours a great operation of political persecution against ministers, deputy ministers or high-level public officials, "he warned, in line with the alert tone that the new Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo, has deployed since he assumed the portfolio in the de facto cabinet.
On November 14, Murillo talked about going to the hunt for senior leaders, and on November 18, emphasizing the detentions and the search and capture of social leaders or government figures of Evo Morales. "There may be 100 detainees this afternoon also because there are people who are harassing, and we will continue to detain people who are harassing, then don't come and tell me I wasn't doing anything," the newspaper Página Siete collected .
"They are looking for leaders, ministers, directors of companies, to stop them and of course accuse them of a set of crimes that are part of the political staging to justify the conditions in which we find ourselves" reveals the source in another daily contact next, confirming that "there are already processes that have been opened for sedition, for attacks on state security, for other crimes."
Apparently, the person in charge of this facet of dirty work corresponds, among others, to the deputy Rafael Quispe, of the Democratic Union (UD), the same party of Áñez and Murillo. Quispe has already filed a complaint with the Bolivian prosecutor accusing Evo Morales of terrorism , among another series of complaints, files and accusations against MAS figures in the alleged sponsorship of "seditious" activities. And, according to the source, there are several compelling reasons for the coup administration to accelerate the pace and manage to convey the idea that the rush with arrests and another series of recent political actions, hardly correspond to a government that will only be responsible for "the transition" is not due to the urgency to control the situation or, eventually, get out of hand.
Because, according to what True Mission could know thanks to the source, contrary to the (unsuccessful) attempt to cover the coup d'etat of legitimacy that it still does not achieve, the repressive machinery responsible for annihilating the kickback begins to crack. What before the public "good" seems like a new government that presumably has them all with it, behind the cameras the signs of discomfort and disapproval with the latest events is a common sign of both the armed forces and the police, in a tangle of internal conflicts, intrigues, and dislocations in which the historical differences of both bodies intersect and the questions of repressive overflow.
Nine days (today November 19) of the coup d'etat in Bolivia, more and more is known about what was not said or covered up, once the destabilization operation and, especially when the regime changed, started. The window that opens the fountain describes a much more complicated scenario, especially for those who today claim to hold political power in the plurinational state.
DISCOMFORT, REJECTION AND DEFECTIONS IN THE ARMED FORCES
"This is the first time that joint operations of a repressive nature have been carried out between the Armed Forces (FFAA) and the Police in the last 20 years. Normally, political decisions for the use of both repressive acts used to be made in an independent way; this is the first time that joint repressive operations are being carried out, "something that" has caused both an institution and an unease due to a long interinstitutional conflict that has been going on for a century or so " .
The beginning of this joint operation, we know, was when the 11 and 12 November police officers in La Paz and Cochabamba themselves made public requests to the army to be incorporated into repressive tasks, since the police forces were being exceeded by the mobilizations of social movements and people in the street in rejection of the coup.
"Through General [Williams] Kaliman, the Armed Forces have been incorporated into repressive control throughout the country, but in particular in the city of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. In general, middle managers have assumed this decision of Kalimán quite reluctantly for several reasons: The first, because they feel that they entered at a time when the police were experiencing a crisis of operational capacity and therefore they were to save them from the critical situation. In this conflict, the armed forces have been forced to resolve the incapacity of the police that during all these years has been involved in mafia practices, generalized corruption and human rights violations;the police is one of the most discredited and discredited institutions by which unfortunately they had to go out to support within the framework of this coup regime, "the source said.
The attitude of the armed forces in the repression is "very little compromised" and is generating "internal fissures". "Desertions of soldiers are taking place, particularly in the city of Cochabamba and in the Department of La Paz. In the case of Cochabamba they are soldiers who come from the Tropic (the hot and jungle areas of the Department), and in the case of La Paz they come from El Alto: soldiers who are deserting so as not to shoot at their own brothers, "he says.
"On the other hand, the officers who are in command of the troop have arranged for the soldiers to remove the firing needles from their rifles because they do not feel confident that the soldiers can intervene according to the orders of their commanders, but that this sensation of insecurity and distrust of the soldiers has made them only go out to show their weapons in a more dissuasive attitude. "
In social networks they have begun to emerge to the surface how in other sectors of the country, such as Oruro, military units with preparation have joined the marches and mobilizations of peasants and indigenous people, at least in the Andean Departments, which in itself It represented the first sign that not everything was under control within the Armed Forces.
Another vein of the internal conflict is also represented by the control of the institutions in the troubled river. Apparently, one of the factors of immediate discomfort in this plane was expressed with the displacement of the Presidential Security Unit (USP), responsible for the security of the Casa Grande del Pueblo (the presidential palace), composed of army officers. "When the police intervened in the coup d'etat, this bill was practically collected," producing "a very acute feeling of dissatisfaction and discomfort."
But the patron of the police at the expense of the institutions that passed into the hands of the Armed Forces or civilians does not stop at who controls the security of the Big House, "at the same time that the military went to save the police from their crisis of operational capacity, the police were recovering some institutions that went to civilians, such as the National Identification Service, "says the source.
Not only the accumulation of politicians who found a sense of opportunity to leave their name signed on this unfortunate page of Bolivian history: just as above the state levers (and their budgets) are distributed, below, the police reproduce the same scheme of scramble Clients by doing what they can, so it goes to the detriment of perhaps the most sensitive institution of the entire state concert. "The police were in charge of recovering the lost spaces that the Evo Morales government had virtually taken away from it due to widespread corruption," the source rounds.
But another ghost of greater weight and draft crosses the mood of the ranks of the troops: "These days the population is calling them 'military killers.' This is a derogatory category that they are receiving in much of the country, something that President Evo had resolved after the bloody massacre of October 2003. Evo Morales reconciled the Armed Forces with society, and particularly with the city of El Alto, after they were used by Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada "in the repression that produced more than 70 dead and more than 500 wounded, in the so-called " gas war ".
They are trying to assassinate you in the streets and this is leading to questioning the decision of General Kaliman to have asked President Evo for his resignation, sums up the source.
JEALOUSY, INTRIGUES AND FEAR IN THE NATIONAL POLICE
"The issue of the police is not minor," says the source. "They are depleting their reserves of chemical agents; they are depleting anti-riot ammunition and are reaching the limit of exhaustion in the police, particularly in the departments of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz on days of intensive use of staff, but also without relief".
A police document that came to the writing of Mision Verdad , dated November 14, confirms what the source affirms. This is a memorandum (number 02467/2019) that the General Command of the Bolivian Police sends to the office of Colonel Franklin Hernán Prado Alconz, National Director of Instruction and Teaching of the entity.
"Due to the social situation that crosses our national territory and with the purpose of having human resources to restore public order , its authority, within the framework of its powers, must make a report on the feasibility for the students of the Centers Police Training Pre and Post Degree of the Police University 'Mcal. (sic) Antonio José de Sucre', leave as soon as possible, to reinforce to join the police services, "says the document (the underline is MV) .
Somehow a little forced, this request resonates with the deployment of minors and rookies of the German army when the Nazi government, close to the collapse by the advance of the Red Army, launched children and minors to the Berlin defense, even more than in This opportunity is about police officers in the process of specialization.
It is not the fall of Berlin in 45, but everything seems to be pointing to the beginning of an even less predictable and volatile cycle. Because the problems of the police don't stop here, aka the most discredited institution in the country. Fear, insecurity and fear of reprisals on the street in police barracks. Many have become aware of what it meant to attack the whiphala (the emblematic flag of the indigenous peoples of America and what is officially the other flag of the Bolivian nation).
The source emphasizes that "they are being exposed, they are over-exposing themselves during these more than 20 days [of mutiny and repression], there is also a general malaise due to this overexposure." Lowering the wiphala of the General Command in La Paz "generated a great reaction against the police that has become a true flag of struggle of the population living in the western part of the country," the Andean region, also generating "conflicts and controversies within the police command and the staff of noncommissioned officers, sergeants and police troops. "
It is already public, notorious and communicational that after 23 dead and hundreds of detainees, the Áñez regime signed a Supreme Decree (DS 2082) authorizing the transfer of 34.7 million Bolivians (approximately 4 million dollars), indicating In a concise manner, they are being "destined to the equipment of the Armed Forces", excluding the scope that this petty phrase contains. The source says that the essential function of the decree is "to pay the costs of mobilization, logistics and, what the police suspect, are expenses in what they call 'loyalty bonds.' That is, the police are accusing the FFAA that the government would be paying him a loyalty bonus to stay in this repressive deployment. "
The police see this decree as confirmation that the armed component of the state receives preferential treatment that police forces do not receive (let alone the fact that to keep the soldiers on the street requires an incentive of millions of Bolivians ). But, in addition, along with DS 2082, the government of Áñez issued another decree, four days before, in which it acquits the military of "any criminal responsibility", as reflected in DS 4078.
"The police today are tremendously concerned about the results of the repressive deployment. Fundamentally about the number of deaths, injuries and detainees that are being carried out by the intelligence and security agencies of the police themselves. This is generating a fear in the police that people return to set fire to the police units, to persecute police officers who live in the city of El Alto or in urban areas. It is creating enormous fear and reasonable doubts are being felt within the police to go out to repress every day " , says the source, without showing off clear knowledge of the military and security world in his country.
And in this last statement, it is essential to retain a crucial fact for later in this note: it is the intelligence agencies, not the regular troop of the police, that is carrying out the majority of arrests, forcing the rest of the body to feeling committed to the actions of their services, without the need for the specific performance of one group to absolve the other.
So much darkness contrasts with the supposed " conciliatory " tone with which the new head of the National Police, colonel (ex.) Rodolfo Antonio Montero Torricos tries to address the social movements and members of the MAS throughout the country. "If I have to bend to anyone from my beloved Bolivia and ask for forgiveness if we have offended someone, they have nothing else to call me and I will be there. I want peace, we want peace of mind, I don't want any more offenses," or "if we have done something, if we have offended the city of El Alto, excuse us," as if it were a community fight, and not the "state policy" of the Áñez regime.
These statements are given on the same day that the former general commander, Yuri Calderón, was relieved of his duties (November 14): on the same day of Decree 4078 and the Commando circular requesting that students go to the streets from the police academy. All this one day after the de facto regime relieved military commanders, all students of the School of the Americas, as well as police commanders, with proven ties to the FBI and other US federal agencies, as revealed by the investigator. Jeb Sprague in The Grayzone .
To aggravate the layers of internal conflict, "there is a dispute between police and military regarding who is responsible for the more than 20 deaths that have occurred to this day. The police accuse the armed forces of using their lethal weapons, the The armed forces accuse the police of using them and therefore there is a crossfire of accusations between both institutions, "the source warns.
THE DEA, NARCO-LAWYERS, PARACOS AND NARCODELATORES: THE ARTERY OF THE COUP?
Let us return to the fact that a few paragraphs above were recorded: the (very conflicted) police executes repression, excesses and avoids probable responsibilities in the count of mowed lives since the installed regime freed all its load against the population mobilized against the coup. But the arrests, where there has been evidence of nocturnality, assaults on homes, rows of detainees and a large accumulation of photographic and audiovisual record that rhymes what happens now with the terrible years of military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s of the last century, which , according to the source, have been actions of the police intelligence services.
This seems to suggest an operational structure parallel to the formal chain of command.
"The police operations are carried out by the intelligence agencies, in some cases they are accompanied by unofficial bodies, unofficial teams, that is, they are not part of the organic structure of the police. And, therefore, this gives us it makes us presume that a whole strategy of work with paramilitarism is under development, "says the informant voice.
And given the above, it makes sense that in order to prevent the contradictions and fissures of the police force from impacting their effectiveness, or even, given the circumstances of a political turnaround that is detrimental to the regime, the coup forces need an organ in service. exclusive of the coupist razzia that guarantees favorable results (due to myopia and lack of political talent, Áñez is clearly one of the façade figures, probably lacking concrete and real impact on the situation).
But which actors suggest being part of this (possibly) undeclared line of action?
"Fundamentally in the eastern part, and specifically in the case of the city of Santa Cruz, we have been informed that there are clash groups of the Cruceñista Youth Union and others come from sectors that work on illegality. They are accompanying the work of the police". Affirmation of the source that seems to be in line with the images that were seen during the days in which the overthrow of Morales is consummated, when on social networks they began to publish videos in which police, military and armed people were seen and with diversity of uniforms, or civilians but with military preparations (bulletproof vests, assault rifles), after the army responded to the call for police assistance to contain the protests: the "jijadistas" Cochabambinos shouted "No fear!" among other matonic slogans, a probable public lapse that highlights the fear they felt when the backlash began on the street and did not have the poise to face it on their own. The sheaf is a sign of neoliberal blows.
If everything affirmed by the source is confirmed, the speculation about an organization chart and an even darker ploy that the process that initiated the change of regime in Bolivia begins to become apparent, one that advances and acts behind the operation of relations public with which the facade of "government" is armed, a combination of opportunistic or inoperative figures (¿Áñez itself?) with others who, in strategic areas, are effectively responsible for leading the agenda until its completion, apparently , whatever the cost.
But what has been described so far, after an attempt at homogeneity tried to transmit, acrobatically embedded in Bolivian and international media, is actually a faction that tries to react quickly against general fissures, which, of course, are not only attested to. in what has been told so far by the source to Mision Truth , but to other miscalculations that only for that reason seem to accentuate even more the role of the United States in the process before, during and after the coup.
For example, "the Minister of the Presidency (Xerxes Justinian) has developed intense activity in his buffet defending drug traffickers, and is one of the strongest men, politically speaking, of Luis Fernando Camacho." Drug trafficking and secessionism ultra cruño, something that already traces both a sign of the composition of the regime's cabinet and one of the "superior" forces to the governing structure that drives it.
On the other hand, it is clear that the sudden decrease in focus on Luis Fernando Camacho does not take him away or exempt him from this phase of the coup. "There is a penetration of informal, illegal teams that are operating in the intelligence services politically supported by both Luis Fernando Camacho, as well as by the Minister of the Presidency."
The Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo has arranged a "special apparatus of the Prosecutor's Office" to detain the senators of the MAS. In statements given on November 18, Murillo develops that to capture the political figures of the MAS (label that will be used against all forms that the regime considers opposition to the coup) are being used in addition to the services of the police and the army, "emergency systems that we have armed the previous days, private that are working with me and intelligence systems in the area", so that the feasibility of a parallel structure, or parastatal, executes, supplies and collaborates with very specific actions within the coup .
"We must not forget that the current Minister of Government is a snitch of the DEA. In fact, his heritage has been built on the basis of transferring information on drug trafficking activities in Chapare, and the DEA made him one of the snitches. most important in the region. Consequently, he financed it in his private activities, which were basically facade activities, "said the source. "That explains the ferocity, the brutality with which it refers to public officials, the language it uses to utter threats and insults, and the adjectives it uses as if this guy was on a safari in Africa."
It is not surprising then that it is in Murillo's voice that the most violent face of the coup is revealed from the institutions. The language he uses, his profile, the eagerness with which he emphasizes the "role" that Venezuela, Cuba, Russia and even the FARC are playing in "sedition" against the coup. Murillo has arrested Cuban doctors, Venezuelan citizens who are accused of having uniforms of the Venezuelan police and PSUV cards, as well as it is difficult to divorce him from the actions that the communication minister executes in parallel, harassing and accusing international coverage ( and not precisely by Castrotrovis media) also of sedition, an accusation that of course reaches Russian media within the "macabre plan" that inserts the fight against the coup within the "Bolivarian breezes"
"That is the nature [of Murillo], he is trained by the DEA, just to do the role he is doing at the moment, and this is a guy who has no qualms to participate with extra-legal teams. Of course, he is opening the Doors wide open for the informal incursion of the DEA At this time and in the future, its role will be to legitimize the presence of the DEA in a scenario of apparent overflow of drug trafficking, terrorism, of the violent forces of the FARC ', etc. etc. This is a character who will surely build the narrative to facilitate the re-entry of the DEA, the CIA or other US agencies "into the country.
Being a narcodelator at the service of the DEA (expelled from Bolivia by President Evo Morales in 2008) may grant Murillo several direct-line privileges with that agency (or the CIA, since in these matters there is, in fact, no clear limit on where one begins operating and where the other ends), but also, given on the ground he plays, the gringos themselves may have files and records that make these persons vulnerable or even extraditable from turning the tortilla against them. The same can be said of the connections that also reach Áñez and his family environment, so far from God and so close to Uribismo in Colombia. This, too, seems to highlight the common pattern of judicially vulnerable leadersThey reach power. Confirming another element that has become habit in the power groups that interest the United States to reach the various governments of the region. People with criminal water around their neck.
The days pass and each step seems to be more agonizing for the regime of Áñez in his journey to consolidate a government that is already granted more attributes than one of transition. Naturally, all that game with the legal and political forms is the attempt of public facade that manipulates on the emptiness of political substance of the regulations that govern the state that hardly conquer. Another element that indirectly certifies the presence of the United States is the mediocrity of calculation with which it was taken into account to evict Evo and the "after we see" with the rest of the state, the society that opposes the coup or silently does not endorses, the country in particular and the region in general that was seen throughout 2019 with the Venezuelan case:
More bloody and less tragicomic is the Bolivian case, where the MAS continues to control two thirds of the two chambers of the legislative branch, the power in charge of appointing the new Electoral Tribunal to call elections (by law, the presidency cannot do so), so there are already requests that "the living forces" of the coup arm some last-minute platypus platypus that baipase the Senate and Congress, since the regime needs the exclusion and proscription of the MAS, forcing the two armed institutions to work and security of the country while trying to omit the conflicting context that has long been present between both forces,the same that dismissing the street force is now forced to use irregular bodies and rides on the highway of impunity the performance of repressive operations (at least of the military institution), and now, despite the immense national and international support of means to normalize the story for the public, information about the internal conflict of the coup regime itself begins to seep, such as the information that came to the writing of this medium.
What has been revealed so far to Mision Truth should not be taken as a hopeful sign that automatically inserts itself into the celebratory tone with which (naturally) any signal of progress of the backlash on the lines already known in Venezuela is expected in 2002; the story is opaque, and obeys the contextual channel where it develops.
All this seems, on the other hand, to certify that the story of the coup is not closed, that the situation remains open and that the brand new (narco?) Regime represented by Janine Áñez does not have it all. This other version shows that the fissures within the Armed Forces and the police are capitalized and are at the center of the operation of repressive operations. And it confirms even more dramatically that the biggest battle that is taking place is for Bolivia's own soul.
http://misionverdad.com/TRAMA-GLOBAL/pr ... -y-fuerzas
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Bolivia
NOVEMBER 20, 2019
The Coup in Bolivia Has Everything to Do With the Screen You’re Using to Read This
by VIJAY PRASHAD
When you look at your computer screen, or the screen on your smartphone or the screen of your television set, it is a liquid crystal display (LCD). An important component of the LCD screen is indium, a rare metallic element that is processed out of zinc concentrate.
The two largest sources of indium can be found in eastern Canada (Mount Pleasant) and in Bolivia (Malku Khota). Canada’s deposits have the potential to produce 38.5 tons of indium per year, while Bolivia’s considerable mines would be able to produce 80 tons per year.
Canada’s South American Silver Corporation—now TriMetals Mining—had signed a concession to explore and eventually mine Malku Khota. Work began in 2003, two years before Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism (MAS) won their first presidential election in Bolivia. South American Silver conducted several studies of the region, all of which found substantial deposits that were poised to make this Canadian firm one of the major players in the mining industry.
A study done by Allan Armitage and others for South American Silver, and delivered to the company in 2011, showed that the Malku Khota mine would produce substantial amounts of silver, indium, lead, zinc, copper, and gallium. “The indium and gallium,” the study noted, “are regarded as strategic metals that give the project future upside potential.” Gallium is used for thermometers and barometers, as well as in the testing side of the pharmaceutical industry. There is Fort Knox level treasure to be made from these minerals.
Resource Nationalism
Evo Morales rode to victory in 2006 with the promise of a new day for Bolivia. Key to his agenda was to take control of the country’s resources and use them to improve the quality of life of Bolivia’s deprived populations. One of the great tragedies of Bolivia has been that since the mid-16th century, the indigenous populations have had to work to remove precious wealth from underneath their lands and send that wealth to enrich the people of Europe and later North America. They did not benefit from those riches.
Millions died in the mines of Potosí to bring the silver, and later tin, out of the ground. For the indigenous people who live near and on the hill, everything is upside down—one of the most lucrative hills is known as Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), while in Spanish there is a phrase that toys with the idea that wealth is equivalent to Potosí (vale un Potosí). Morales’ message during his campaign was framed around the concept of resource nationalism—use our resources to better the lives of those who live in deprivation and indignity.
Morales first went after the oil and gas industry. It is important to recall that his opponent in this year’s election—Carlos Mesa—was the president right before Morales won the election in December 2005. Mesa had come to power when his predecessor Sánchez de Lozada resigned in disgrace over the mass demonstrations in 2003 when Bolivians demanded more control over their gas reserves (the state repression was severe, with at least 70 people killed in the demonstrations). In May 2006—just over three months after being sworn in as president—Morales announced that the oil and gas industry had been nationalized. It is important to recall that his approval rating was well above 80 percent.
Nationalization was not easy, since the Bolivian government could not expropriate assets but only raise taxes and renegotiate contracts. Even here, the government faced problems since it lacked enough technical skills to understand the opaque energy sector. Furthermore, the problem with the energy sector is that even nationalized oil and gas must be sold to the transnational firms that then process them and market them; they remain in control of the value chain. What Morales’ government was able to do was to ensure that the State controlled 51 percent of all private energy firms that operated in Bolivia, which allowed the State’s coffers to fill rapidly. It was this money that was invested to go after poverty, hunger, and illiteracy.
Revenge of the Mining Companies
Canada’s Fraser Institute—a libertarian think tank that is heavily funded by the energy and mining sector—publishes an annual survey of mining companies. This survey is conducted by asking mining executives their opinions on a range of issues. The 2007–08 survey said that Bolivia is the second-worst country for investment; the worst was Ecuador. In 2010, the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index rated Bolivia at 161 of 183 countries. Heads of mining firms—from Barrick’s Peter Munk to Repsol’s Antonio Brufau—made disparaging comments about the nationalization program. “If Bolivia keeps on this path,” a Wall Street banker told me at that time, “these companies will make sure that Bolivian natural gas remains underground.” Bolivia might be embargoed; Morales might be assassinated.
Pressure mounted daily on the MAS government, which began a process to write a new Constitution that would both protect nature and insist on resource wealth being used for the people. There was an immediate contradiction here: if the MAS government was going to undo centuries of deprivation, it would have to mine the earth to bring out the wealth. A tragic choice befell the government—it could not both conserve nature and transform the wretched conditions of everyday life at the same level of caution. At the same time, to get its minerals and energy to market, it had to continue to negotiate with these transnational firms; no immediate alternative was present.
Nationalization
Despite the constraints on it, the MAS government continued to nationalize resources, and insist on State firms being partners in resource extraction. Transnational firms immediately took Bolivia to the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a part of the World Bank system. The ICSID—formed in 1966—is based in Washington, D.C., and shares an outlook toward business that mirrors that of the U.S. Treasury Department.
On April 29, 2007, the leaders of Bolivia (Evo Morales), Cuba (Carlos Lage), Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega), and Venezuela (Hugo Chávez) signed a declaration to create an alternative to the investor-government system institutionalized in the ICSID. Bolivia and Ecuador formally withdrew from this U.S.-dominated system, while Venezuela’s Supreme Court declared that it did not have the power to intervene in Venezuelan sovereign affairs.
On July 10, 2012, Morales’ government nationalized the Malku Khota property of South American Silver. Company CEO Greg Johnson saidhe was “really shocked” at the decision. South American Silver’s shares dropped immediately; it had been trading at $1.02 on July 6, and it fell to $0.37 on July 11.
The immediate spur for the nationalization was the protest around the mine by indigenous artisanal miners who did not want this mega-project to undermine their livelihood. South American Silver had spent a great deal of money to convince 43 of the 46 neighboring communities to accept the mine; but they could not convince the artisanal miners. “Nationalization is our obligation,” said Morales.
All that indium would not make its way in significant quantities to the factories to produce LCDs for television sets, computer monitors, and cell phones.
South American Silver took the Bolivian government to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. In November last year, the Court ordered Bolivia to pay South American Silver $27.7 million rather than the $385.7 million that TriMetals (the new name for South American Silver) had demanded.
Coup
In July 2007, U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg sent a cable to Washington in which he pointed out that U.S. mining firms had approached his embassy to ask about the investment climate in Bolivia. Goldberg felt that the situation for mining firms was not good. When asked if he could organize a meeting with Vice President Álvaro García Linera, he said, “Sadly, without dynamite in the streets, it is uncertain whether the Embassy or the international mining companies will be able to attain even this minimal goal.”
“Without dynamite in the streets” is a phrase worth dwelling upon. A year later, Morales expelled Goldberg from Bolivia, accusing him of aiding the protests in the town of Santa Cruz. Just over a decade later, it was the “dynamite” that removed Morales from power.
Resource nationalism is no longer on the agenda in Bolivia. The fate of Malku Khota is unknown. The fate of your screen is guaranteed—it will be replaced with indium from the Potosí deposits. And the benefits of that sale will not go to improving the well-being of Bolivia’s indigenous population; they will enrich the transnational firms and the old oligarchy of Bolivia.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/20 ... read-this/
The Coup in Bolivia Has Everything to Do With the Screen You’re Using to Read This
by VIJAY PRASHAD
When you look at your computer screen, or the screen on your smartphone or the screen of your television set, it is a liquid crystal display (LCD). An important component of the LCD screen is indium, a rare metallic element that is processed out of zinc concentrate.
The two largest sources of indium can be found in eastern Canada (Mount Pleasant) and in Bolivia (Malku Khota). Canada’s deposits have the potential to produce 38.5 tons of indium per year, while Bolivia’s considerable mines would be able to produce 80 tons per year.
Canada’s South American Silver Corporation—now TriMetals Mining—had signed a concession to explore and eventually mine Malku Khota. Work began in 2003, two years before Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism (MAS) won their first presidential election in Bolivia. South American Silver conducted several studies of the region, all of which found substantial deposits that were poised to make this Canadian firm one of the major players in the mining industry.
A study done by Allan Armitage and others for South American Silver, and delivered to the company in 2011, showed that the Malku Khota mine would produce substantial amounts of silver, indium, lead, zinc, copper, and gallium. “The indium and gallium,” the study noted, “are regarded as strategic metals that give the project future upside potential.” Gallium is used for thermometers and barometers, as well as in the testing side of the pharmaceutical industry. There is Fort Knox level treasure to be made from these minerals.
Resource Nationalism
Evo Morales rode to victory in 2006 with the promise of a new day for Bolivia. Key to his agenda was to take control of the country’s resources and use them to improve the quality of life of Bolivia’s deprived populations. One of the great tragedies of Bolivia has been that since the mid-16th century, the indigenous populations have had to work to remove precious wealth from underneath their lands and send that wealth to enrich the people of Europe and later North America. They did not benefit from those riches.
Millions died in the mines of Potosí to bring the silver, and later tin, out of the ground. For the indigenous people who live near and on the hill, everything is upside down—one of the most lucrative hills is known as Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), while in Spanish there is a phrase that toys with the idea that wealth is equivalent to Potosí (vale un Potosí). Morales’ message during his campaign was framed around the concept of resource nationalism—use our resources to better the lives of those who live in deprivation and indignity.
Morales first went after the oil and gas industry. It is important to recall that his opponent in this year’s election—Carlos Mesa—was the president right before Morales won the election in December 2005. Mesa had come to power when his predecessor Sánchez de Lozada resigned in disgrace over the mass demonstrations in 2003 when Bolivians demanded more control over their gas reserves (the state repression was severe, with at least 70 people killed in the demonstrations). In May 2006—just over three months after being sworn in as president—Morales announced that the oil and gas industry had been nationalized. It is important to recall that his approval rating was well above 80 percent.
Nationalization was not easy, since the Bolivian government could not expropriate assets but only raise taxes and renegotiate contracts. Even here, the government faced problems since it lacked enough technical skills to understand the opaque energy sector. Furthermore, the problem with the energy sector is that even nationalized oil and gas must be sold to the transnational firms that then process them and market them; they remain in control of the value chain. What Morales’ government was able to do was to ensure that the State controlled 51 percent of all private energy firms that operated in Bolivia, which allowed the State’s coffers to fill rapidly. It was this money that was invested to go after poverty, hunger, and illiteracy.
Revenge of the Mining Companies
Canada’s Fraser Institute—a libertarian think tank that is heavily funded by the energy and mining sector—publishes an annual survey of mining companies. This survey is conducted by asking mining executives their opinions on a range of issues. The 2007–08 survey said that Bolivia is the second-worst country for investment; the worst was Ecuador. In 2010, the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index rated Bolivia at 161 of 183 countries. Heads of mining firms—from Barrick’s Peter Munk to Repsol’s Antonio Brufau—made disparaging comments about the nationalization program. “If Bolivia keeps on this path,” a Wall Street banker told me at that time, “these companies will make sure that Bolivian natural gas remains underground.” Bolivia might be embargoed; Morales might be assassinated.
Pressure mounted daily on the MAS government, which began a process to write a new Constitution that would both protect nature and insist on resource wealth being used for the people. There was an immediate contradiction here: if the MAS government was going to undo centuries of deprivation, it would have to mine the earth to bring out the wealth. A tragic choice befell the government—it could not both conserve nature and transform the wretched conditions of everyday life at the same level of caution. At the same time, to get its minerals and energy to market, it had to continue to negotiate with these transnational firms; no immediate alternative was present.
Nationalization
Despite the constraints on it, the MAS government continued to nationalize resources, and insist on State firms being partners in resource extraction. Transnational firms immediately took Bolivia to the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a part of the World Bank system. The ICSID—formed in 1966—is based in Washington, D.C., and shares an outlook toward business that mirrors that of the U.S. Treasury Department.
On April 29, 2007, the leaders of Bolivia (Evo Morales), Cuba (Carlos Lage), Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega), and Venezuela (Hugo Chávez) signed a declaration to create an alternative to the investor-government system institutionalized in the ICSID. Bolivia and Ecuador formally withdrew from this U.S.-dominated system, while Venezuela’s Supreme Court declared that it did not have the power to intervene in Venezuelan sovereign affairs.
On July 10, 2012, Morales’ government nationalized the Malku Khota property of South American Silver. Company CEO Greg Johnson saidhe was “really shocked” at the decision. South American Silver’s shares dropped immediately; it had been trading at $1.02 on July 6, and it fell to $0.37 on July 11.
The immediate spur for the nationalization was the protest around the mine by indigenous artisanal miners who did not want this mega-project to undermine their livelihood. South American Silver had spent a great deal of money to convince 43 of the 46 neighboring communities to accept the mine; but they could not convince the artisanal miners. “Nationalization is our obligation,” said Morales.
All that indium would not make its way in significant quantities to the factories to produce LCDs for television sets, computer monitors, and cell phones.
South American Silver took the Bolivian government to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. In November last year, the Court ordered Bolivia to pay South American Silver $27.7 million rather than the $385.7 million that TriMetals (the new name for South American Silver) had demanded.
Coup
In July 2007, U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg sent a cable to Washington in which he pointed out that U.S. mining firms had approached his embassy to ask about the investment climate in Bolivia. Goldberg felt that the situation for mining firms was not good. When asked if he could organize a meeting with Vice President Álvaro García Linera, he said, “Sadly, without dynamite in the streets, it is uncertain whether the Embassy or the international mining companies will be able to attain even this minimal goal.”
“Without dynamite in the streets” is a phrase worth dwelling upon. A year later, Morales expelled Goldberg from Bolivia, accusing him of aiding the protests in the town of Santa Cruz. Just over a decade later, it was the “dynamite” that removed Morales from power.
Resource nationalism is no longer on the agenda in Bolivia. The fate of Malku Khota is unknown. The fate of your screen is guaranteed—it will be replaced with indium from the Potosí deposits. And the benefits of that sale will not go to improving the well-being of Bolivia’s indigenous population; they will enrich the transnational firms and the old oligarchy of Bolivia.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/20 ... read-this/
Re: Bolivia
Indigenous women respond to Rita Segato
november 20, 2019by matria, posted in uncategorized
Before feminist powerful women of the rainbow
The warmis, zomo, women of the South, women of the ancestral territories deliver our florid word in support of President Evo Morales Ayma, who by the popular vote continues to be president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
We understand that Rita Segato has an echo in feminism (white?) In which we do not recognize ourselves, so we express our deep disagreement with the position you have taken regarding the coup neo-liberal restoration in Bolivia.
When he says "We should start to generate a rhetoric of value to another form of value that is very different from the management of the chieftains." Sounds very beautiful. We ask: Has this management of the caciques happened in the body? We have seen, we have felt the bitter taste of that sequel to the conquest. Our men have taken the worst of colonial machismo. We have built not only rhetoric, but resistance, re-existence of male domination in pre-existing nations and in each of the spaces that the spoil placed us. But locating Evo as the symbol of patriarchy is too chabacán.
We do not celebrate the sayings about the quinceañera of Evo, because we have felt in our bodies all what the objectification of our bodies means. The ancestral body, the mental body, the physical body and the emotional body. Even so, we affirm that what happened in Bolivia was a coup d'etat.
It is much easier to analyze Bolivia than you think. His intellectual gloating clouded her. Who carried it out and for what purpose to the coup? These are two questions that order our sentipensar. You will realize that the coup did not prosper for the Indians of the Chiquitanía, or the feminists of Bolivia, or even the “broadest sectors of the population” that he mentions as unbelief of the Evo government.
The Trump administration and its hegemonic device intends to recover Latin America with the messianic evangelical arm, with the media powers that build liars and clearly with the police and military repressive forces that were prayed by force of injection of few sanctions in the murky souls of the Indianity They are coming to light, every day, the evidence that arises regarding the extreme planning that had this blow.
Your voice is not any voice. It presents the vanguard in the discussion in the intellectual and feminist circles in Argentina. That is why in this case Rita, we bitterly disagree and we must do it publicly.
We have built a sentipensar the political ethics of our peoples that we are not going to silence, nor abdicate to the locus of privileges of white women. Geolocated in the sures, in the subalternities, in the othernesses that suppose us inferior, we tell you that your voice hurts. We will feel a great emptiness by not referencing it more in our sentipensares.
We could not romanticize the role of women in the coup in Bolivia. It was not a citizen, feminist, or original, or even democratic rebellion.
The dangerous thing about “non-binary” speeches, as he puts it, is that they end up assimilating to two opposite positions as if they were equivalent. For an indigenous woman who lives machismo and violence in her daily life, it is not the same to find a lay health service and respect for ancestral health than to meet with anti-right doctors, who subjugate. That was Plurinational Bolivia. We would not have to explain that the redistribution of wealth generates another scenario for the struggle and the liberation of gender. That was not achieved by any depoliticized or neutral indigenous movement in Latin America. It was achieved by the neo-constitutionalism that Evo engendered by re-founding the Colonial State into a Plurinational State.
We are concerned that the arguments you put forward to raise "new rhetoric" provide a beautiful camouflage, a euphemism for racist discourse that persists in the sectors that listen to it. Suddenly, many people who do not know “with the body” the reality of an original woman, deny the coup d'etat, pose it as an announced fatality and place Evo as the patriarch. It will not be much?
The asymmetry of “objective” or non-objective reasoning is typical of the Colony and that is why we name it. We felt with the bodies all in the territory. We are not and do not want to be objective.
Heart orders thought in our south. It always was and will continue to be. We reject his claim that "Evo fell by its own weight" by fallacy, more than 45% of the votes is not having weight? Breaking the rules of constitutionalism has more weight than sustaining a democratic regime? Did you weigh the bullets that are slaughtering our brothers?
We weigh the deaths of our people.
We speak from our own languages and now we write with the language of the conqueror for you to read us. If you want we can tell you in Mapuzungun, in Chané, in chorote, in Wichí, in Pilagá, in Guaraní, in Quechua, in Aymara, in Qom, in Mocoy and we will also tell you in our dreams.
Before feminists, powerful women of the rainbow, complementary to our feminist men who give the good fight.
#EvoEnVosVenceremos
#EvoNoEstaSolo
JALLALA- MARICHIWEW PLURINATION
PROCESSES IN LATIN AMERICA
https://quevivalamatria.com/2019/11/20/ ... ta-segato/
Google Translator
november 20, 2019by matria, posted in uncategorized
Before feminist powerful women of the rainbow
The warmis, zomo, women of the South, women of the ancestral territories deliver our florid word in support of President Evo Morales Ayma, who by the popular vote continues to be president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
We understand that Rita Segato has an echo in feminism (white?) In which we do not recognize ourselves, so we express our deep disagreement with the position you have taken regarding the coup neo-liberal restoration in Bolivia.
When he says "We should start to generate a rhetoric of value to another form of value that is very different from the management of the chieftains." Sounds very beautiful. We ask: Has this management of the caciques happened in the body? We have seen, we have felt the bitter taste of that sequel to the conquest. Our men have taken the worst of colonial machismo. We have built not only rhetoric, but resistance, re-existence of male domination in pre-existing nations and in each of the spaces that the spoil placed us. But locating Evo as the symbol of patriarchy is too chabacán.
We do not celebrate the sayings about the quinceañera of Evo, because we have felt in our bodies all what the objectification of our bodies means. The ancestral body, the mental body, the physical body and the emotional body. Even so, we affirm that what happened in Bolivia was a coup d'etat.
It is much easier to analyze Bolivia than you think. His intellectual gloating clouded her. Who carried it out and for what purpose to the coup? These are two questions that order our sentipensar. You will realize that the coup did not prosper for the Indians of the Chiquitanía, or the feminists of Bolivia, or even the “broadest sectors of the population” that he mentions as unbelief of the Evo government.
The Trump administration and its hegemonic device intends to recover Latin America with the messianic evangelical arm, with the media powers that build liars and clearly with the police and military repressive forces that were prayed by force of injection of few sanctions in the murky souls of the Indianity They are coming to light, every day, the evidence that arises regarding the extreme planning that had this blow.
Your voice is not any voice. It presents the vanguard in the discussion in the intellectual and feminist circles in Argentina. That is why in this case Rita, we bitterly disagree and we must do it publicly.
We have built a sentipensar the political ethics of our peoples that we are not going to silence, nor abdicate to the locus of privileges of white women. Geolocated in the sures, in the subalternities, in the othernesses that suppose us inferior, we tell you that your voice hurts. We will feel a great emptiness by not referencing it more in our sentipensares.
We could not romanticize the role of women in the coup in Bolivia. It was not a citizen, feminist, or original, or even democratic rebellion.
The dangerous thing about “non-binary” speeches, as he puts it, is that they end up assimilating to two opposite positions as if they were equivalent. For an indigenous woman who lives machismo and violence in her daily life, it is not the same to find a lay health service and respect for ancestral health than to meet with anti-right doctors, who subjugate. That was Plurinational Bolivia. We would not have to explain that the redistribution of wealth generates another scenario for the struggle and the liberation of gender. That was not achieved by any depoliticized or neutral indigenous movement in Latin America. It was achieved by the neo-constitutionalism that Evo engendered by re-founding the Colonial State into a Plurinational State.
We are concerned that the arguments you put forward to raise "new rhetoric" provide a beautiful camouflage, a euphemism for racist discourse that persists in the sectors that listen to it. Suddenly, many people who do not know “with the body” the reality of an original woman, deny the coup d'etat, pose it as an announced fatality and place Evo as the patriarch. It will not be much?
The asymmetry of “objective” or non-objective reasoning is typical of the Colony and that is why we name it. We felt with the bodies all in the territory. We are not and do not want to be objective.
Heart orders thought in our south. It always was and will continue to be. We reject his claim that "Evo fell by its own weight" by fallacy, more than 45% of the votes is not having weight? Breaking the rules of constitutionalism has more weight than sustaining a democratic regime? Did you weigh the bullets that are slaughtering our brothers?
We weigh the deaths of our people.
We speak from our own languages and now we write with the language of the conqueror for you to read us. If you want we can tell you in Mapuzungun, in Chané, in chorote, in Wichí, in Pilagá, in Guaraní, in Quechua, in Aymara, in Qom, in Mocoy and we will also tell you in our dreams.
Before feminists, powerful women of the rainbow, complementary to our feminist men who give the good fight.
#EvoEnVosVenceremos
#EvoNoEstaSolo
JALLALA- MARICHIWEW PLURINATION
PROCESSES IN LATIN AMERICA
https://quevivalamatria.com/2019/11/20/ ... ta-segato/
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."