In July 2020, following the Bolivian coup d’etat, Elon Musk tweeted to his more than 40 million followers, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” He made this threat in response to a Twitter user’s accusation that the tech billionaire collaborated with the U.S. government to orchestrate a coup against then-Bolivian president Evo Morales as a means to gain greater access to the country’s lithium supply after he canceled a contract to privatize Bolivia’s lithium mines.
The interaction has its roots in the 2019 Bolivian political crisis. Leading up to the election, Morales sparked controversy in his decision to pursue a fourth term as he had held office continuously since 2006, leading to accusations of rising authoritarianism from the right-leaning opposition. After the first round of voting, the Plurinational Electoral Organ reported an incomplete count with Morales well over the ten percent threshold to avoid a runoff election, suggesting that he would remain in power for his fourth term. This, along with alleged irregularities, led to the Bolivian opposition and various international observers to call for an audit of the results, to which Morales agreed.
On 10 November 2019, amid widespread protests and following the release of a report by the opposition that accused Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) of fraud, the Organization of American States (OAS) released a preliminary report claiming that they had discovered sufficient evidence of fraud to warrant new elections, later supported by the United States and the European Union. Morales declared the evolving situation a coup.
It was around this time that Morales began losing essential organs of the Bolivian state and society. Two days earlier, the Police Operations Tactical Unit abandoned their posts against protestors nationwide. Demonstrators began to overrun government offices, news media sympathetic to Morales, and even attacked the homes of his relatives. Following the release of the OAS audi, the Bolivian Workers’ Center (Bolivia’s largest trade union) and Single Trade Union Confederation of Workers (an indigenous trade union) called for his resignation in order to stop the escalating violence in the country. This left the military as the last institution standing between Morales and the protesters. But not for long.
After senior officers urged Morales loyalist General Williams Kaliman, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to abandon him, Kaliman announced that the military suggested Morales resign to “help restore peace and stability.” Following this, Morales took the presidential plane from El Alto International Airport to an undisclosed location, where he announced his immediate resignation on television in order to protect MAS party members and their families. The rest of his government and senior MAS party members in the Legislative Assembly resigned shortly after this, following Morales to Mexico City for political asylum.
The power vacuum created by this event led to the self-declaration of Jeanine Añez, second vice president of the Senate, and conservative Roman Catholic, as interim president of Bolivia. Entering government headquarters with a bible in her hands, Añez declared, “Thank God, the bible has returned to the palace.” A pastor accompanying the illegitimate president made a similar statement: “The Pachamama will never return to the palace” (Pachamama is a goddess revered by indigenous peoples in the Andes). The foreign-backed, anti-indigenous, right-wing coup against the duly-elected government of Bolivia was complete. But the conspirators would enjoy only a limited victory.
Following her seizure of power, Añez and her government began a campaign of political repression against their MAS opponents. She waived criminal liability for the police and military when handling anti-government protesters, leading to the deaths and injuries of many unarmed demonstrators, and considered banning MAS from contesting future elections. The state-sanctioned violence of the Añez regime was met with silence from their supporters in the United States, to no one’s surprise.
While the Trump administration plotted coups in Venezuela and escalated tensions with Cuba, the Añez regime’s deeds went unnoticed and unpunished. However, President Trump was simply following the lead of his predecessors, perpetuating the suffering that centuries of U.S. imperialism in Latin America has caused. While the United States, namely the CIA, spent much of the latter half of the twentieth century installing far-right dictatorships in Latin American countries, much to the detriment of the people living there, left-wing Latin American leaders found themselves navigating devastating sanctions, dozens of regime-change attempts, and even outright invasions--all in the name of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy.’ The reality is that the U.S. uses the narrative of human rights and democracy to advance its political and economic goals centered around aggression against primarily socialist countries in the global south while ignoring or even abetting the crimes of their right-wing allies within the same region. One should expect this conduct from right-wing U.S. politicians, but the silence of the nominal American left is much more deafening. The only high-profile politician to condemn the coup against Morales was U.S. senator Bernie Sanders. Since being sworn in, the fiercely anti-socialist Áñez has presided over the detention of hundreds of opponents, the silencing of the press, and a “national pacification” campaign that has left at least 31 people dead.
The Movimiento al Socialismo–Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos, or MAS, evolved out of a movement to defend the interests of cocoa farmers. Following the closures of the Bolivian Mining Corporation in the 1980s, many former miners became cocoa farmers, prompting the formation of several trade unions. These unions formed alliances with the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia and mobilized protests, launching a 1992 campaign that marked the emergence of a peasant-indigenous movement.
MAS in its current form was consolidated by Evo Morales between 1998-99, solidifying its grassroots base of peasants in the years that followed. The party condemned neoliberalism, advocated for national sovereignty, and denounced U.S. intervention in Bolivian affairs. Despite the aggression from the U.S. that these three positions provoked, MAS governed Bolivia continuously from 2006 to the 2019 coup, making Morales the longest-serving Latin American head of state in recent memory.
It is MAS’s status as a coalition of peasants, workers, and indigenous Bolivians that makes its betrayal by an organization like the Socialist International so appalling, though again, not surprising. The Socialist International, based in London, is a worldwide organization of political parties which seek to establish democratic socialism. In the 1990s, the SI partnered with non-socialist parties, some of which were right-wing and instituted dictatorships in their countries, such as the Colombian Liberal Party, the regime of which oversaw the extermination of the left-wing Patriotic Union. As a result of their historical imperialist tendencies, left-wing parties that came to power in Latin America over the last couple of decades have held the SI at arm’s length--rightfully so. It was during the 2019 coup that the SI once again revealed its true nature when it declared that Morales was not the victim of a coup.
The SI should be ashamed of its role in the forcible downfall of a duly-elected left-wing government.
The events of November 2019 were triggered by the report by the OAS, which alleged widespread fraud. The opposition capitalized on these claims to escalate protests, sanction foreign interference (the most significant of which came from the United States), and force Morales from power.
Independent researchers have claimed that the OAS relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques. When these techniques were corrected, no statistical evidence of fraud was present. While these researchers acknowledged that there were irregularities, they took issue with the OAS report as it was quickly thrown together and used to shape the narrative of an election before the data could be properly analyzed.
Coup-plotters, both foreign and domestic, were ultimately unsuccessful with the election of Luis Arce of MAS emerging as the victor in the 2020 Bolivian presidential election. His landslide victory was largely attributed to strong support in rural areas, the general weakness of the opposition’s campaign, and MAS’s continuing status as the best organized political force in the country. Indigenous Bolivians, workers, and peasants organized in the year following the coup to ensure that this failed right-wing seizure of power was just that. Shortly after President Arce took office, the government arrested Añez and charged her with terrorism, conspiracy, and sedition for her role in the coup.
The Bolivian people should be proud of themselves for rejecting the long reach of the U.S. empire and asserting their sovereignty.