Morales's Coup Fits a Long Pattern in Bolivian History [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Bolivia's exiled ex-President Evo Morales gestures as he delivers a speech at the Mexican Journalists Club, in Mexico City, on November 27, 2019.
CLAUDIO CRUZ / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY
Ted Snider, Truthout
PUBLISHED
December 11, 2019

Bolivia’s democratically elected president, Evo Morales, became the most recent victim of a U.S.-approved Latin American coup when, at the “suggestion” of the chief commander of the Bolivian armed forces, Williams Kaliman, Morales fled for his life to asylum in Mexico.

General Kaliman’s ties to the U.S. are not thin. Though seldom glanced at in the U.S. press, Kaliman was Bolivia’s military attaché to Washington from 2013 to 2016, during which time he may have developed deep ties to both the U.S. military and intelligence communities. And his ties to the U.S. go back even earlier than that: In 2004, Kaliman studied at the infamous School of the Americas (now rebranded as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), the military school notorious in Latin America for graduating coup leaders and dictators. After that, he attended again and took a course in 2013. Several other key players in the coup were also graduates of the School of the Americas.

As in other Latin American coups and attempted coups, the U.S. was quick to recognize and legitimize the coup government. The Trump White House applauded the coup as “a significant moment in democracy.”

U.S. Involvement in Bolivian Coups
The 2019 Bolivian coup cannot be properly understood ripped from its context. It is not the first Bolivian coup, and it is not the first U.S.-supported Bolivian coup. Since independence from Spain, Bolivia has had approximately 185 changes in government, and most of those changes — according to William Blum’s book, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II — were coups.

More:
https://truthout.org/articles/moraless-coup-fits-a-long-pattern-in-bolivian-history/