The coup-makers that violently deposed Evo Morales haven’t even tried to hide their far-right politics. Racist revanchism, backed by Christian fundamentalism, is now the order of the day in Bolivia.
Forrest Hylton
08/DEC/2019
Since coming to power on November 12, Bolivia’s right-wing coup government, led by interim president Jeanine Añez, has quickly consolidated power and achieved international legitimacy. So far, the Añez government has succeeded in calling elections for 2020; persecuting journalists, political opponents, and human rights activists; and, following two massacres of unarmed, mainly indigenous protesters that left at least nineteen dead — first on November 15 in Sacaba (near Cochabamba) and again on November 19 in El Alto (adjacent to La Paz) — negotiating a truce with the country’s trade union and social movements to remove road blockades in cities and countryside. It has also returned the armed forces to the barracks with impunity and $5 million in extra funds and equipment.
On November 21, when marchers from El Alto descended on La Paz carrying eight coffins of the victims of the November 19 massacre and demanding that Añez resign, the military and police dispersed them with tear gas to prevent them from reaching the Plaza Murillo. Several of the coffins were temporarily abandoned on the street nearby.
Later that afternoon, marchers returned to El Alto with their dead, but without a response from the government, other than repression. The following week, after negotiating with social movements and trade unions, Añez repealed Supreme Decree 4078, which was passed in secret on November 13 and overturned a 2005 law in order to protect the military and police from prosecution for the massacres they were about to commit.
Añez made no reference to the massacres, which the rapporteur of the Organization of American States’s (OAS) Inter-American Human Rights Commission labelled as such on CNN. Rather than working with the commission to investigate, Añez thanked God and the armed forces “in the name of democracy” for “pacifying” the country and helping avoid “greater levels of vandalism and confrontation.”
More:
https://thewire.in/world/bolivias-coup-government-is-a-far-right-horror-show
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