MAS Supporters are Being Massacred by Golpistas in Bolivia

Submitted by wendy davis on Thu, 10/15/2020 - 5:19pm

Jeanine Áñez speaks at the anniversary of the Bolivian Air Force, October 12, 2020

First: ‘Civil war elections in Bolivia’, Tomas Castanheira, 13 October 2020, wsws.org (w/ permission)

“Next Sunday, the first general elections will be held in Bolivia since elected president Evo Morales was overthrown in a US-backed military coup, placing in power Jeanine Áñez’s self-proclaimed government.

The coup regime, which took power promising to call new elections within 90 days, has postponed the date of the vote three times. Today, less than half of Bolivians, just 43 percent, believe that their vote on Sunday will be respected, according to a survey by Tu Voto Cuenta .

The broad popular rejection of the Áñez government has been expressed over the past year in continuous demonstrations by masses of workers and peasants throughout the country.

In November, tens of thousands took to the streets of the capital La Paz and other Bolivian cities to resist the coup. They were violently repressed by military forces joined by fascist gangs like the Cochala Youth Resistance (RJC) and the Crucenista Youth Union (UJC), linked to the ultra-right presidential candidate, Luis Fernando Camacho. In two brutal episodes, the military massacred at least 23 people and left another 230 wounded, subsequently receiving legal protection from the government.

The protests resumed this year in opposition to the regime’s incompetent and violent response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its successive election postponements. In August, a wave of strikes and roadblocks rocked the country for 10 days, with the masses demanding the immediate fall of the Áñez government.

On both occasions, Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) played the essential role in disarming the revolt in the streets, maneuvering with the promoters of the coup behind the backs of the workers and peasants. Morales harshly opposed the popular demand for the overthrow of the regime, arguing that holding new elections was the only way to reestablish democracy in Bolivia.

The electoral agreement engineered by the MAS, however, is proving a farce, providing no guarantee that democratic forms of rule will be reestablished by the ruling class.

On September 18, self-proclaimed President Jeanine Áñez withdrew her bankrupt presidential candidacy, which received little more than 10 percent of support among potential voters, throwing her support to right-wing presidential candidate Carlos Mesa of Comunidad Ciudadana (CC), who was defeated in last year’s elections by Morales.


When Áñez dropped her candidacy, Mesa was in second place in the polls, with 26.2 percent, more than 10 points behind Luís Arce of the MAS, with 40.3 percent, which indicated a victory in the first round for the MAS candidate.

But the political calculations of Áñez and her allies, even as they try to support a stronger contender to MAS, are not guided by an electoral strategy. When she withdrew from the presidential race, Áñez called for unity among the right-wing parties, crying out: “If we do not unite, Morales returns, the dictatorship returns.” This statement, whose essential content has been systematically repeated by the coup leaders, implies that even a MAS victory at the polls will be considered illegitimate and is likely to be overthrown by the military.

This is exactly the path being paved by Áñez behind the backdrop of the elections. She and Government Minister Arturo Murillo are using their grip over the state machine to drive a campaign to outlaw the MAS and mobilize fascistic forces among the military to serve as the pillars of a terror regime against the working and popular masses.

Last Friday, the de facto government celebrated the 53rd anniversary of Ernesto Che Guevara’s summary execution at the hands of the Bolivian military and its CIA “advisers,” paying a sordid tribute to his assassins. Áñez declared that the lesson of Guevara’s death “is that communist dictatorship has no place here.” And she warned that any foreigner, “whether Cuban, Venezuelan or Argentine,” who comes to Bolivia to “cause problems, will meet his death.”

The fascistic agitation continued in the following days. On Saturday, in an official event broadcast on national TV, Áñez violated Bolivia’s election laws by calling upon the population to vote for those who would assure that “Morales and the MAS won’t govern us again.” She also said of the MAS: “They are violent, they despise democracy, they want to subject the whole people and design a way of life.”

On the same day, Government Minister Murillo participated in a police event in Santa Cruz, where he glorified the role played by police officers in the November coup, and appealed to them: “We, I say we because I feel as one of you, have a double task; one with democracy to go and vote to make sure that the dictatorship does not return, that the pedophile does not return, and the other, we have the obligation to take care of the people’s vote.”

On Monday, in an event celebrating the anniversary of the Bolivian Air Force, Áñez followed the same script. She declared: “Last year, in November, the Armed Forces, together with the Bolivian people, said no to the dictatorship, and that was the end of a long and terrible period of populist authoritarianism.”

Murillo made clear the “double task” that he reserves for the military in the elections as he demanded an extension of the “good government act,” which prohibits the gathering of people in public places, for two days after the elections. A joint operation of the armed forces and the police will be mobilized throughout the country, ready to violently repress any popular demonstration against a new election coup.

These efforts are being coordinated almost openly with US imperialism. On September 28, Murillo embarked on an official trip to the United States, allegedly “to fulfill a work agenda with the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Department of State of that North-American country.”

Readers will need to decide for themselves on the veracity and tone of the following paragraphs:

“Even as the MAS representatives denounced a series of violations that put the legitimacy of the entire electoral process in question, their response to these events exposes the cowardice of this party of the Bolivian bourgeoisie, as well as its hostility to any independent mobilization of the working class.”

The MAS campaign activities have suffered repeated violent attacks, like the use of tear gas to disrupt a recent youth meeting in El Alto. On the other hand, other attacks have been attributed, without proof, to MAS militants by the press and right-wing parties, which, together with the government, seek to label it a terrorist organization.

Only 10 days before the elections, the MAS presidential candidate, Luis Arce, was accused of illicit enrichment while he was Minister of Economy in Morales’ government. The MAS responded by declaring the accusation part of a “dirty war” against them. Arce faces four criminal charges, including one of “terrorism,” all concocted by Áñez’s coup regime.

This week, the MAS warned that a “second coup” was underway in the country, pointing to a series of irregularities and lack of transparency in the procedures adopted for Sunday’s elections.

Nevertheless, in an interview this Monday with La Razón, MAS spokesperson Sebastián Michel stated that the problems of the population will end next Sunday, as soon as the elections are held!”

He’s written more in the same vein. There are surprisingly only three comments, one strongly pushing back, and good on him or her:

HiddenPalm • 2 days ago

“The party’s defense of capitalism“?  This article makes allot of assertions without anything to back up those statements really.

MAS is just really confident it won’t lose the election. And they know the US puppet coup regime will kill people on a massive scale if they revolt. That’s not cowardice, that’s being responsible to the people you represent. The workers in Bolivia are not a guerilla army. They are civilians.

This argument made here could of been used better in Colombia where the disarment of LaFarc has lead to the daily assassinations of activists, teachers and now massacres of students. But in Bolivia we are talking about unarmed civilians where one day of brutal repression forced civilians on a funeral March to abondon their loved one’s corpse (a victim of the violent coup) in a coffin in the middle of the street for an entire day and night. That’s how brutal this coup regime is.

MAS isn’t cowardice. Nor is it capitalist. Only divisive north American leftists would try to spread its disunited poison down south like this. Am I right? We are awful up here.

That being said not a single Leftist from the North or South has ever reported on the fate of the soldiers who studied and trained at the School of Anti-Imperialism. Where are they?”

You may remember that Áñez had claimed that Evo and MAS worshiped snakes, and so on.  In photos, the golpistas are far more pale-skinned than average Bolivians.  I’ll turn it over to Ollie Vargas and Kawsachun News on Twitter:

@OVargas52 5h ‘Bolivia's director of migration says that leftists who are electioral observers could face 'consequences'. Interior Minister Murillo threatened to jail critical observers this morning.’

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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hell for MAS ahead of elections
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Submitted by wendy davis on Thu, 10/15/2020 - 5:29pm
wendy davis's picture

things are at sixes and sevens here. our rural water's been off all day due to a break in the water line east of town, and you know what a hassle that can be, especially if drags on over-night. ; )

our internet's been blinking on and off lately, but finally...off. so a good guy from Quest came and installed a new modem i'd bought for backup. it didn't work, so he finally downloaded update firmware for it (as if i know WTH that means)...and we're live again. at faster speeds to boot.

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Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 10/16/2020 - 6:51am
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we hope the vote is true, just, and legal, and that the police, golpista vigilante groups, and military stay home.

For posterity: the Cochababma Accords: 'World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth , April 24, 2010

It opens:

Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.

If global warming increases by more than 2 degrees Celsius, a situation that the “Copenhagen Accord” could lead to, there is a 50% probability that the damages caused to our Mother Earth will be completely irreversible. Between 20% and 30% of species would be in danger of disappearing. Large extensions of forest would be affected, droughts and floods would affect different regions of the planet, deserts would expand, and the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas would worsen. Many island states would disappear, and Africa would suffer an increase in temperature of more than 3 degrees Celsius. Likewise, the production of food would diminish in the world, causing catastrophic impact on the survival of inhabitants from vast regions in the planet, and the number of people in the world suffering from hunger would increase dramatically, a figure that already exceeds 1.02 billion people.The corporations and governments of the so-called “developed” countries, in complicity with a segment of the scientific community, have led us to discuss climate change as a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system.

We confront the terminal crisis of a civilizing model that is patriarchal and based on the submission and destruction of human beings and nature that accelerated since the industrial revolution.

The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.

Under capitalism, Mother Earth is converted into a source of raw materials, and human beings into consumers and a means of production, into people that are seen as valuable only for what they own, and not for what they are.

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