Is Bolivia turning into a rightwing military dictatorship?

[Judi Lynn]

Nick Estes
Events in Bolivia – including the killing of indigenous protesters – contain echoes from Bolivia’s past dictatorships

@nick_w_estes
Tue 26 Nov 2019 06.42 ESTLast modified on Tue 26 Nov 2019 06.49 EST

Indian massacres have returned to Bolivia. There is a history — a blood feud, to be precise — behind this tragedy. The self-declared “presidency” of Jeanine Áñez has revived the old oligarchy’s race hatred and the barbaric practice of Indian killing, the collective punishment of the nation’s Indigenous majority for daring to defy a centuries-old racial order of apartheid and oppression. Since the ousting of Bolivia’s first Indigenous president Evo Morales, security forces have carried out at least two massacres of Indigenous people protesting the military coup.

Only two weeks since seizing state power, the evidence is clear: this is a rightwing, military dictatorship. The telltale sign for a country like Bolivia is the outright Indian killing.

On November 15, the army opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in Cochabamba, killing eight and wounding dozens more. On November 16, a day after the Cochabamba massacre, Áñez issued a decree exempting the police and military from criminal responsibility in operations for “the restoration of order and public stability.” A carte blanche to kill at will, security forces have obliged the directive with increasing cruelty.

Last Tuesday, teargas and bullets rained down on a blockade at the Senkata gas plant in El Alto. Eight were killed, and dozens injured. And this was just the first week of Áñez’s presidency.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/26/bolivia-rightwing-military-dictatorship

[Judi Lynn]

1. More from the article you might really want to remember:

There are also echoes from Bolivia’s past dictatorships, showing Áñez derives her authority not from popular power but at the end of a rifle barrel. In contrast to the Indigenous president she deposed, she wasn’t elected, and there was no civilian coronation for her presidency. The Plurinational Legislative Assembly, which normally appoints the president, like they did with Evo Morales thrice before, was nearly absent. Instead, a military general placed the presidential sash on Áñez.

The last time a general placed a sash on a president after a military coup was in 1980. That year, General Luis García Meza achieved a military dictatorship by assassinating the socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz and massacring dozens of Indigenous miners.

The desire to overthrow Evo Morales and the Indigenous social movements that brought him to power has existed for years. The first coup attempt happened in 2008, when the Media Luna, which is composed of the four opposition-dominated regions in the East where most of the European-descended population is concentrated, tried to secede from the country. The racist separatist movement emerged amidst the drafting of a new constitution, which recognized Bolivia as a Plurinational state with the equal status of Indigenous peoples and control over natural resources. The region erupted into open rebellion, attempting to divide the country into two states: a wealthy one dominated by descendants of Europeans home to a large oil and gas industry and agribusiness and one with a poor Indigenous majority. The rightwing protests against resource nationalism and ending apartheid took 20 Indigenous lives.

The United States’ role in fomenting the racial divisions is without question.