What the Right Wing in Latin America Means by Democracy is Violence
By Vijay Prashad – Jan 23, 2020
It was a curious exchange. Frustrated by the attacks on his partyâthe Movement for Socialism (MAS)âformer president of Bolivia Evo Morales made an audio recording in which he called upon his supporters to form militias. Maximilian Heath of Reuters went to Argentina to speak with Morales about this leaked recording; Morales said,
In Bolivia, if the armed forces are shooting the people, killing the people, the people have the right to organize their security.
Moralesâ anxiousness is rooted in fact. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rightsâa body of the pro-U.S. Organization of American Statesâreported in December 2019 that there have been a series of massacres conducted by the armed forces of the current interim government in Bolivia. The use of the word âmassacreâ in this report is significant; these were not clashes or conflicts, but the targeted murder of civilians who supported MAS and Morales.
The interim president of Bolivia, Jeanine Ăñez ChĂĄvez, has made inflammatory statements about the indigenous support base of MAS and Morales. She has frequently spoken of them with derision, even saying that she dreams of a Bolivia without âsatanic indigenous ritesâ and that âthe city is not for the Indians.â Ăñez signed Supreme Decree no. 4078 that exempted the military from any criminal responsibility for its use of force; she wants to ban MAS, and her interior minister has filed a warrant for the arrest of Morales. This is a rapid and disturbing attack on the political fabric of Bolivia.
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Apology
Moralesâ statement about militias came merely as a way to say that he worried about the repression and violence occasioned by the interim government and the military, now immune from prosecution. U.S. President Donald Trumpâs main envoy to Latin AmericaâMauricio Claver-Carone (who organized the bankrupting $57 billion loan to Argentina when he was the U.S. director at the International Monetary Fund)âwent to Bolivia and attacked Morales. Morales, Claver-Carone said, is fomenting insurrection from Argentina. This is a bizarre statement.
Morales was re-elected in 2014. There was not a whiff of impropriety in that election. He had a mandate to remain in office until January 2020. Even if there was a problem in the 2019 election, he should have remained in office until this month. But he was removed by a U.S.-backed military coup. That coup is not the insurrection that worries Claver-Carone. What worries him is that Morales is concerned about his supporters who are being intimidated and killed. It was not the coup, but Moralesâ statement of anguish that became the scandal. Morales then apologized for his statement.
Elections
Bolivia will face an election on May 3. The Movement for Socialism Party nominated Luis Arce Catacora, Boliviaâs former minister for the economy, as its presidential candidate, and David Choquehuanca, Boliviaâs former foreign minister, as its vice-presidential candidate. MAS has been deeply bruised. More than 100 government officials from the MAS party are either in detention or face criminal charges, while a handful are in the Mexican embassy in La Paz (they have been denied safe passage to the airport).
The anti-coup uprising in Chapare province led the interior minister Arturo Murillo to make a statement that he would perhaps disenfranchise the entire province if the rebellion continues (the rebels burned down a hotel that he owns). Supporters of MAS and its party workers are afraid to leave their homes, let alone campaign in the election. Moralesâ statement came as a mirror of their own anxiousness.
No one imagines that there is going to be a âfair election.â The Trump administration has said it will send a USAID team to Bolivia to monitor the situation, and then to resume U.S. aid to the country; the U.S. will also monitor the elections. Between the U.S. monitors and Supreme Decree no. 4078, the conditions for a fair election simply do not apply.
And not many outside the region seem to have any problem with this attack against democracy.
âStaggering Numberâ
On January 14, the UNâs human rights body released a brief statement on the killings of human rights activists in Colombia. The UN said that a âstaggering number of human rights defendersâ were killed last year in Colombia; by the UNâs count, between 107 and 120 activists were murdered. In 2018, 115 human rights defenders were killed, and in the first two weeks of January of this year, 10 human rights defenders have already been murdered. Most of them are from left-wing peopleâs organizations.
The UN numbers are conservative. For 2018, the Center for Research and Popular Education Peace Program, based in Colombia, documented 1,151 death threats, 648 assassinations, and 304 cases of physical injuries. But the UNâs trendline is correct. Of the murders last year, 98 percent took place in very poor rural areas. The killers, the UN suggests, are âcriminal groups and armed groups linked to illicit economies in areas vacated by the FARC-EP.â In other words, right-wing paramilitary groups and their affiliated drug gangs have taken advantage of the peace treaty signed by the Left to terrorize the countryside.
In the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier on Colombia (December 2019), the argument is made that the Colombian oligarchy does not want to move toward peace because this would shift the needle of Colombian politics toward the peopleâs movements and the Left. The continuation of the warânow as assassination and intimidationâfavors the oligarchy. They prefer this violence to democratic politics.
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These targeted murders and this targeted intimidation is only one part of the problem in Latin America. The other is that this regionâwith its outrageous social inequalityâexperiences violence at extreme levels. While Latin America is home to only 8 percent of the worldâs population, 33 percent of all homicides occur in the region. This includes high violence against young men, and it includes the highest rates of femicide in the world. None of the right-wing governments are interested in addressing this fundamental problem for the hemisphere.
What the government of IvĂĄn Duque is doing in Colombia is what the interim government of Jeanine Ăñez is doing in Boliviaâboth are using extreme state violence against trade unionists and peasant organizers, against socialist leaders and indigenous leaders. This extreme violence undermines the possibility of democracy and allows the oligarchy to be re-elected in polling booths where the Left not dare enter.
HĂ©roes del ĂancahuazĂș
In 2016, Evo Morales inaugurated the General Juan JosĂ© Torres Anti-Imperialist Command School in the town of Warnes. General Juan JosĂ© Torres was the socialist president of Bolivia in 1970-71. He was overthrown in a coup by the Bolivian general favored by the CIA, Hugo BĂĄnzer. BĂĄnzer had closely worked with the Nazi leader Klaus Barbie to set up the CIA-run Operation Condor to search out and kill any and every communist in the hemisphere. They killed Torres in 1976. The combination of the CIA, Nazis, and the oligarchies of the region is not something from the past: Brazilâs culture secretaryâRoberto Alvimârecently plagiarized a speech from the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.
The interim governmentâs interim Defense Minister Luis Fernando LĂłpez said that his government has renamed the Anti-Imperialist school. âWe are not anti-anything,â he said, as if his government is not anti-Morales, anti-MAS, and anti-communist. The school has been renamed HĂ©roes del ĂancahuazĂș.
In 1967, Che Guevara and his National Liberation Army of Bolivia operated near the ĂancahuazĂș River in Boliviaâs southeast. The government of General RenĂ© Barrientos Ortuño, the CIA agent FĂ©lix RodrĂguez, and the Nazi Klaus Barbie ran the operation to destroy Guevaraâs campaign. They named their operation the ĂancahuazĂș Campaign. The Anti-Imperialist School in Bolivia now honors the menâled by a CIA agent and a Naziâwho killed Che Guevara. It sends a message to the Che Guevaras of today:
We will get you. This is the democracy of the oligarchy in Latin America today.’
Vijay Prashad
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Booksand the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A Peopleâs History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution(University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGĂŒn.
