Spanish – In Bolivia, there was no “coup d’etat,” nor is it true that the resignation of Evo Morales is a consequence of “pressure from the Armed Forces,” as almost all the media publications have irresponsibly said so far. This is simply the discourse (recurrent, worn out, overdone) with which the left defends the tyrants in its own ranks who face a popular rebellion. Because what has happened in Bolivia is nothing less than a popular rebellion. And it did not begin yesterday, nor was it a military or police conspiracy: it started the day after the last elections on 20th October when the electoral fraud was evident to everyone.
Let us remember, or instead let us say (since little to nothing has been said by the press) when about 83% of the votes were counted in Bolivia, the results suggested that the country would go in for a second round of elections. But all of a sudden, the counting stopped for more than 20 hours. Then the final results appeared “magically,” once again enshrining Evo Morales as President, by a margin of 0.14%. The fraud was so evident that the OAS described the process as “null and void.”
But that was just the last straw. Because once again, we have to remember that there have been many irregularities, frauds, and anti-democratic tactics in Bolivia for years.
Without going too far back, in 2016, Evo was constitutionally prevented from running again and called for a referendum asking the people to allow him to be a candidate once again. Participation stood at 84.47%; Bolivians said no. However, the defeated did not acknowledge the result and appealed to his friends in the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which at the end of 2018 authorized (against the Constitution and against the popular will expressed in the referendum) the nomination of Evo Morales for the October 2019 elections.
Morales had governed Bolivia since 2006. All these years in power allowed him to make the State his property and, in one way or another, to obtain a certain legitimacy thanks to the rhetoric that the left serves him on a plate, where democracy is vindicated, but alternatives are detested, and where one always speaks in the name of the people, but when the people say something else, their voice is replaced by that of the elite conveniently disguised as popular.
It is challenging to interpret reality when one has at hand a language conveniently designed to benefit the left (and how could it be otherwise, if the left is precisely the “word makers,” as Robert Nozick used to say?). Words, in effect, are our “social glasses”; social, because they form a common heritage, but also social, because through them, we evaluate what happens in our environment. And what happens, for example, in Chile, is a “rebellion of the exploited people against the savage neoliberalism of Sebastian Piñera,” but what happens in Bolivia is “a coup d’état against a legitimate representative of the people,” although the former has been elected in clean elections. The latter has committed the most evident electoral fraud of the 21st century in Latin America. Or can we not summarize in this way the media’s treatment of the two episodes?
It works more or less like this: when a center-right government falls, it is due to a “people’s liberating rebellion.” When a left-wing government falls, it is due to a “coup d’etat.” When there is repressive state action against demonstrators under a right-wing government, we have “human rights violations,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocide.” When the same happens under a left-wing government, we have… silence. The norm is practically infallible.
That is why no one has shown the dead in Bolivia. No one has talked about them. It is not appropriate. Because the left does not kill: it liberates. The left does not violate human rights: it defends them. The left does not steal, it does not kidnap, it does not torture, it does not violate, it does not take away liberties: the left loves and, loving, it merely struggles for “a better world.”
Does that sound exaggerated? That is how the collective subconscious works, which, according to several decades of media, school, and university propaganda, prevails everywhere today. That is why nobody has shown the dead of the Morales regime, and nobody has talked about them. That is why nobody shows or talks about the hundreds who were wounded and mutilated, which was the outcome of the rebellion.
We’re talking about civilians and not military or police. Because Evo’s resignation was the consequence of the popular uprising, which lasted from 21st October until recently, and not of any military coup. What happened with the Armed and Security Forces is simple to understand: they just refused to repress the people in the way that Evo Morales had commanded (the Central Obrera Boliviana itself asserted that the government’s plan was massive bloodshed). And it is almost a law of political science that an illegitimate government can only be sustained through force. So what happens when the institutions that concentrate the repressive power of the state decide not to use it against the people who have risen up against the illegitimate government? The regime will inevitably fall, sooner or later.
Evo Morales did not fall because of the work of the Armed Forces, but precisely because of their inaction.