Bolivia: The Naive Mistakes of Evo Morales

By Vicky Peláez – December 9, 2019

Evo Morales, who managed to lift his country out of extreme poverty and turn it into an example of economic and social development in the region, must recognize that his sin of naivete was in believing that his code of ethics and his love for Pachamama would be understood by the majority of his countrymen and respected by foreigners who aspired to all his resources.

If one has a good knowledge of the means available to the enemy, the losses could be minor (Victor Serge, 1890-1947).

Evo Morales, the great leader who managed to lift his country out of extreme poverty and turn it into an example of economic and social development in Latin America, must recognize that his sin was in naively believing that his code of ethics and his love for Pachamama would be understood by the majority of his countrymen and respected by foreigners who desired all his resources.

He did not calculate well the destructive capacity of his enemies and did not worry about preparing his people to defend his revolution. [Instead, he focused] all his energy and organizational capacity on the growth of the economy and the well-being of his people. Both he and his second, Alvaro Garcia Linera, underestimated the danger signs and did not prepare for the coup that was being prepared and had been practically announced for years.

Now, North American power – and especially the CIA and the DIA – must be celebrating by finally overthrowing that Indian Evo Morales who dared for 13 years to build a proud and sovereign pluri-national state in defiance of Washington and, in particular, the transnationals, by cutting off almost free access to deposits of gas, uranium and strategic metals such as lithium, indium, gallium.

Since the arrival in power of Evo Morales on January 22, 2006, the United States conspiracy began with its servile OAS, the US intelligence services, the Jubilee Foundation, NGOs such as Standing Rivers, the national and international Evangelical Church, the Bolivian Civic Committees, the US Embassy in La Paz and the high command of the Armed Forces and the Police.

All of the coups require a great deal of preparation and training to set in motion well-organized actions by both the local civil groups and the paramilitaries. In the case of Bolivia, they wanted to hand over their country to the United States in exchange for access to power and business.

Evo Morales’ government was well aware of this process in Bolivia after the Police Crisis Resolution Tactical Unit shot down a paramilitary cell composed of Bolivian-Hungarian Eduardo Rozsa Flores and European mercenaries Michael Dwyer (Irish) and Árpád Magyaros (Romanian-Hungarian) on 16 April 2009. These terrorists were hired by Croatian-Bolivian businessman and landowner Branco Marincovik for the purpose of assassinating Evo Morales and provoking a coup d’état and the secession of the departments of the so-called Media Luna (Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni) forming a new country.

In 2008 the intelligence services of Cuba and Venezuela warned Evo Morales that he should not rely on most of the high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces because of their pro-American indoctrination at the School of the Americas (SOA). Precisely that year, Evo Morales made the decision to no longer send the Bolivian military to the SOA. But he did not dare to reform the military institutions by instilling in them pluri-national values.

It was not until 2016 that the General Juan José Torres Gonzales Anti-Imperialist Command School was created, where the geopolitical theme of imperialism was designated as an obligatory course. On August 9, 2019, already informed about certain suspicious movements in the Armed Forces, Evo Morales proposed to create an Anti-imperialist Southern Command along with the participation of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.

However, the coup d’état had already been going on for several months. The Chargé d’Affaires of the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, Bruce Williamson, coordinated the final details of the dismissal of Evo Morales with the commander in chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces, General Williams Kaliman. (TV Mundus, Argentina, November 14, 2019). Washington strategists designated the Bolivian army as the central knot of the coup, with the Civic Committees organizing and executing acts of protest, violence, looting and all kinds of actions to destabilize the Morales government, head off the process of change from its officials to the political leaders and not allow their re-election. It was even planned that Bolivia’s first indigenous president would repeat the fate of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. (CounterPunch, November 2019).

When in August 2018 the Mexican journalist Luis Hernández Navarro asked Evo Morales in Cochabamba about the possibility of a coup d’état, the president replied: “I don’t think there will be a military coup, but they will try a national upheaval… The U.S. embassy is looking for a way to [promote] upheaval the country. But they have failed, failed and failed because we are with the truth. It’s the great advantage we have. (La Jornada, Mexico, 12-11-2019).

Morales was mistaken, because his truth and his code of ethics, based on the principles of equality, of patriotism, of always telling the truth, or of not stealing and protecting Pachamama were drastically opposed to the truth of the opposition. They were desirous of preserving and increasing their economic and social privileges although at the expense of national sovereignty.

Apparently, neither the Bolivian president nor his second, Álvaro García Linera, has read the essay by the Russian revolutionary Víctor Serge What Every Revolutionary Must Know about Repression (1921). Then they would have known that, from the moment a revolution is prepared, the counterrevolution looks for ways not to allow it to begin. Neither Evo nor Alvaro studied well the historical proclivity of the military of his country to betrayal and military coups. The fifteenth president of Bolivia, General Mariano Melgarejo, came to power through a coup, and handed over the Bolivian coastline with all its riches to Chileans and Englishmen, finally escaping to Chile.

The other military coup plotter, Hilarión Daza Groselle – the 19th president – betrayed his mentor Mariano Melgarejo for 10,000 pesos and offered Chileans a pretext for the Pacific War (1879-1884). He also betrayed the Peruvians and eventually deserted and escaped to Paris. The thirty-sixth president, German Busch Becerra, also military, participated in three coups and finally betrayed the homeland. President General Rene Barrientos immediately called his CIA chiefs when Che Guevara was captured in October 1967 to receive orders regarding what to do with the prisoner.

No wonder, then, that with so many sinister antecedents throughout the history of the Bolivian military, the now former commander in chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces, General Williams Kaliman – a graduate of the School of the Americas in 2003 and ex-military attaché in the U.S. – betrayed Evo Morales. It turns out that by August 7, when Kaliman declared himself anti-imperialist and a supporter of the changes the president was implementing, he was already engaged with the U.S. embassy to carry out a coup d’état. Police general and former president of Latin American police attachés in Washington, Vladimir Yuri Calderón, was also involved in the betrayal.

Analyst Sullkata M. Quilla, of the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE), revealed that Kaliman and other generals participating in the coup received one million dollars each and police chiefs $500,000. The payment was made by Williamson, and was made in Argentina in the province of Jujuy under the auspices of its governor, Geraldo Morales. 72 hours after the coup, Kaliman and other military and police chiefs moved to the U.S. safe from any national or international investigation. (TV Mundus, Argentina, November 14, 2019).

The Bolivian people are paying with their blood for Evo’s sin of innocence by not taking into account the experience of Hugo Chávez, who from the beginning of the process of change managed to form a solid civil-military alliance and also create the Committees for the Defense of the Bolivarian Revolution. He indoctrinated them in Simón Bolívar’s postulates and armed them with 100,000 Kalashnikov machine guns acquired in Russia. His successor, current president Nicolás Maduro, strengthened and trained these committees militarily. They already have more than 2,000,000 militants.

Since Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) was reformed and educated in patriotism as was their intelligence service. In spite of all these measures, in 2019 alone there were 47 attempts by the CIA, the DIA and the Colombian intelligence services to recruit officers of the Armed Forces, as President Maduro recently revealed.

Televen de Venezuela reported that attempts have been made to steal missiles and dismantle the system of mobile and fixed radars. Thanks to the actions of patriotic military, these attempts were discovered and those involved were arrested. According to Nicolás Maduro, his “military institutions are doing permanent intelligence work. (Televen-Tv, November 12, 2019).

This permanent intelligence work was ignored or not supervised by the government of Evo Morales and almost certainly its intelligence services – the SIE and the DIE – were already infiltrated by the U.S. CIA and DIA. The government of Evo Morales also neglected the role played by most NGOs in destabilizing MAS and its government. According to Resumen Latinoamericano (20 November 2019), in 2007 there were 1,800 NGOs in the country, of which only about 640 were registered in 2018. Many of them were financed by the US government through USAID, an organization that has spent more than $97,000,000 dollars since 2002 on promoting separatism in Bolivia and financing the opposition. So much spending by the Americans has now been recovered.

The entire effort of Morales’ pluri-national government was dedicated to the economic growth and social welfare of his people. He neglected the security of his State and forgot that the enemy, both internal and external, never sleeps, waiting for his moment. Finally it came in the form of a coup d’état and with the self-proclamation of Jeanine Áñez as president of Bolivia. This president has already received from the United States what most of the opponents so longed for: a Green Card, sent by the same Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo (Aporrea, José Sant Roz, 24-11-2019). It was also discovered that Jeanine is the perfect Bolivian birlocha (someone who hates her race).

From birth until the age of 19, she was called Anahí Ayelén Áñez. She was someone of the purest indigenous origin. In school called her Chola, chula, cholita. With time and thanks to the USAID scholarship and her identification with the evangelical religion, she tried to drive out of her body and mind everything indigenous by coloring her hair and changing the color of her eyes with contact lenses. She earned her law degree by correspondence and by the age of 38 she was director of Total Visión.

To better understand where this president and the opposition around her could take Bolivia, it is worth reproducing the de facto president’s response to a foreign journalist who asked her, after being sworn in, if she was racist. Jeanine said that “I never wanted to be president of anything, much less of this country. On the other hand, as far as I know, since the world is world supremacy has been and will have to be white. I have never seen a Supreme who is black or Indian, not even brown. The same Lord Jesus Christ is white.”

With a government of this type, the only thing that can be expected is Bolivia’s economic, social, political and cultural retreat into the past, where inequality, racism and injustice imposed their rules. The National Legislative Assembly, whose president and two-thirds of whose representatives are members of the MAS, did not dare to follow the constitution and deal with the resignation of Evo Morales. Its president, Monica Eva Copa, achieved consensus for the law enabling new elections.

The Confederación Obrera Boliviana (COB), the Mesa de Unidad and other organizations signed an agreement with the transitional government. According to the president of the Legislative Assembly, Monica Eva Copa, “if I made a decision with my heart, we would still be at war. But we have to use our heads so that this will be pacified and there will be no more death. (Pagina 12, 27-11-2019)

In the meantime, repression continues and the Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo, has published a list of senators and deputies who, in his opinion, promote destabilization of the country. He also announced the creation of a special apparatus of the Attorney General’s Office to arrest deputies and senators. At the same time, Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba, the city of El Alto, Yapacaní and the North of Potosí continue with the blockade of highways demanding an end to repression.

Unfortunately, Evo Morales, Álvaro García Linera and the MAS leaders did not do in time what Monica Eva Copa calls “use your head” to prevent this sinister coup d’état and to protect both national security and the excellent economic and social achievements that Bolivia achieved in these 13 years of Evo Morales’ government. They forgot that “the enemy never sleeps” and, especially, the class enemy.

Source URL: Walter Lippmann Blog