To label political action a coup d’état is also to assign roles to actors, as “enemies” and “defenders” of democracy. It is the language of war.
The Meaning of a Coup
Language is a reserve of historical memory. Since Evo Morales’ resignation Sunday, November 10th from the presidency the international left has been preoccupied with denunciations of a “military coup” in Bolivia. Commentators have been busy sharing images and memories of 20th century US sponsored military coups against socialist leaders in Latin America. Bolivia in particular struggled to recover from Operation Condor and the 1971 coup of General Hugo Banzer, only holding free and credible elections beginning in 1982. Facing massive protests and accusations of widespread fraud in his re-election October 20, Morales has intentionally used that memory to portray himself as victim of a rightwing coup plot.
The international left responded quickly to reiterate his words. Democracy Now! featured Mark Weisbrot Monday morning emphatically stating that Morales was removed from office by a military coup, pointing to the suggestion made Sunday by head of the military, Williams Kaliman, that Morales resign for the sake of peace in the country. Democratic congressional representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders reiterated a denunciation via twitter. President Andes Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico expressed his full support for the beleaguered ex-president, where Morales has currently fled to seek political asylum.
But historical memory is also deceiving, and our memory of past events is not the same as how current events reflect the past. The military coups of the 20th century were accompanied by swift and violent persecution of leftist leaders and activists. The bloody 1980 “Cocaine Coup” saw the Bolivian socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz disappeared along with many others. His body has yet to be recovered.
At the present moment, the only arrests carried out have been against members of the electoral tribunal on suspicion of fraud. Morales was free following his resignation to take his presidential airplane and fly to the center of his supporters among coca growers unions in the tropical Chapare region.
Following his resignation, the majority of the immediate acts of violence were committed by Morales’ supporters, organized in vigilante gangs that targeted opposition leaders and terrorized neighborhoods across the country that night. The home of Waldo Albarracin, dean of La Paz’s public university and head of the Committee to Defend Democracy, was burned. The same mobs additionally sacked homes at random in working class and indigenous neighborhoods of traditional support for Morales, like El Alto in La Paz and Los Lotes in Santa Cruz.
While coups typically see a swift seizer of power and liquidation of the constitutional order by the military or rightwing leaders, in Bolivia an official transfer and succession of presidential power took two days of legislative process. The Plurinational Assembly, where Morales’ party holds a two-thirds majority, waited to arrive at a quorum to select opposition senator Jeanine Añez as interim president, in line with constitutional succession following the additional resignation of senate president Adriena Salvatierra, a member of Morales’ party (Movement towards Socialism, MAS). Following the continued boycott by MAS representatives, the remaining representatives declared Añez interim president Tuesday. The constitutional tribunal subsequently certified the action’s legality as the Bolivian constitution, like the US, does not specify legislative quorum as necessary for succession.
Historical memory is also not universal. While the international left has fixated on a military coup, many Bolivians find more similarities in Morales’ resignation and flight to asylum with the resignation and flight of former neoliberal president Ganzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada in 2003, following mass protests and unrest. To this day, Goni claims to have been the victim of a coup organized by then opposition leader Evo Morales, who subsequently won presidential elections in a landslide in 2005. Days prior to their resignations both politicians made the same ironic declaration, “I will not resign”.
The Violence Behind the “Coup”
Our memory of political violence is central to how we understand a “coup d’état”. In the weeks of protest and national strike between the disputed election and Morales’ resignation, his government labeled protesters “fascists” and “racists” in an attempt to liken current events to the rightwing coup attempt against him in 2008. In 2008, strikes led by rightwing and elite business interests in the tropical city of Santa Cruz ended in explicit racist assaults on indigenous people and the massacre of peasant union supporters of Morales.
However, while contemporary protests have prominently included rightwing leaders, explicit racist sympathies have been absent in the tone and conduct of protests. A fact that was embarrassingly put on display by Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera during a press conference when he attempted to demonstrate the racist violence of protesters with the image of a bloodied indigenous school teacher assaulted in Santa Cruz. A reporter responded, “I only want to note that this video of the chuquitano is from 2008”. The author of the documentary subsequently issued a denunciation of the misrepresentation of her work by the government as a corrupt instigation to violence.
Prior to the election and during the disputed aftermath, members of Morales’ government and their supporters made repeated public threats of violence against the opposition and protesters. Presidential Minister, Juan Ramon Quintana, a military graduate of the School of the Americas, warned that if protests continued Bolivia would turn into a “modern Vietnam”. Gustavo Torrico, MAS assembly representative in La Paz, openly threatened protesters on state television, “Don’t think we will sit with our arms crossed. We are going to defend our revolution against whomever,” continuing, “if mothers, fathers are ready to send their children into the street confrontations, I don’t know how many are ready to sacrifice their children”. For many in Bolivia, these threats recalled memories of military dictatorship during the Cocaine Coup when minister Luis Arce Gomez warned that Bolivians should carry their last will with them in the street.
Morales’ supporters, in fact, made good on these threats. On October 30th, two protesters blockading roads, part of nationwide strikes, were shot dead in clashes with Morale’s supporters in the town of Montero outside of Santa Cruz. Local MAS candidate, Deysi Judith Choque, is under official investigation as the intellectual author of the crime, being head of the pro-government militia group found responsible for the murders. On the 6th of November, bloody clashes between blockaders and peasant unions loyal to Morales outside Cochabamba left a student, Limbert Guzman, killed and 90 others injured. Enraged by the murder, protesters assaulted the local MAS mayor, Patricia Arce Guzman, whom they blamed for instigating the violence, covering her in red paint to symbolize the bloodshed.
Morales’ supporters immediately labelled her a victim of opposition “racism” and the story circulated widely, even to CNN. However, denunciations of “racism” that spread internationally on the left did not express similar outrage for the 20-year-old protester bludgeoned to death by Morales’ supporters. His murder was treated as collateral.
The inflection point of political violence for Morales’ resignation came on the morning of November 10th when reports confirmed that a caravan of miners, belonging to collective miners’ federation of Potosi that had joined calls for Morales’ resignation, had come under assault by sniper fire on their way to join protests in La Paz. The day prior, a caravan of students from Chuquisaca was halted by armed assault from Morales’ supporters.
Resignations by MAS party officials, governors, mayors, congresspersons, and ambassadors that had started the day prior became a flood across the country, often accompanied by a plea for Morales to additionally resign. By mid-day, the head of the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), a staunch ally of Morales, called for his resignation. The last call for resignation that day came from Kaliman, the head of the military, who hours previously had ordered soldiers to the area around the caravan to halt the threat of gun fire. Kaliman’s suggestion came to the surprise of many, as only months prior he had broken military protocol by publically declaring his political allegiance to Morales, describing himself a “soldier of the process of change”.
Chronicle of a Fraud Foretold
Language shapes the way we see the world. Media reports on the protests movement against Morales have focused on the hot headed and charismatic Luis Fernando Camacho, president of the civic committee in Santa Cruz. His background in the far-rightwing Santa Cruz Youth Union and his evangelical rhetoric, promising to bring the “Bible back to the Presidential Palace”, makes him the obvious antagonistic villain for any observer to cast in a coup narrative. However, focus on Camacho obscures the reality of the diversity of actors behind mass protests, that comprised elements from every segment of Bolivian society, and the depth of frustration with Morales’ ambitions to obtain a fourth consecutive presidential term, in violation of constitutional term limits.
Morales sought to overcome constitutional term limits through a referendum in 2016 that would have amended the constitution. The problem is that he lost. It took him three days to publically recognize the results. With the only clear legal avenue now shut, Morales and his party began looking for alternatives. They found their solution in an appeal to the constitutional tribunal which subsequently made the unprecedented decision in 2017 that Bolivia’s constitution was unconstitutional. The judges agreed with Morales’ petition that term limits violate his “human right” to political participation. Several of the judges who handed Morales his favorable decision were coincidentally awarded comfortable ambassador positions the subsequent year.
Morales’ disregard for the results of the referendum vote and the letter of the constitution seeded deep mistrust among the general populace in the credibility of the 2019 presidential elections. Public perception was not helped by the resignation of the respected president and vice-president of the election tribunal prior to its decision to abide with the constitutional tribunal’s reelection ruling. As Morales’ former Lands Minister turned dissident Alejando Almaraz declared in an interview in May, “of course the government will pre-determine the results of the reelection.”
The October 20th election largely boiled down to a contest between Morales and Carlos Mesa, the former Vice-President and successor to Goni. Lacking an established party structure and enthusiastic support, Mesa’s candidacy depended on discontent with Morales’ unconstitutional fourth term. What many termed a “voto util” (useful vote). Polling prior to the vote predicted a run off between the two candidates.
The initial vote count disseminated by the electoral tribunal, via its rapid count (TREP), seemed to confirm these predictions. However, later that night, at 83% reporting Morales with 45% and Mesa 38%, the election tribunal cut transmission of the TREP without explanation. For 24 hours officials were silent, until at 6pm on the 21st the TREP updated its count at 94% reporting, awarding Morales victory in the first round with just above the 10% advantage needed. The computing company hired to administer the TREP later confirmed that the order to cut transmission came directly from top election officials.
Anxious anticipation and fear that had built up during official silence boiled over in response to the sudden and dramatic change in the count. International election observers from the Organization of American States (OAS) and European Union issued statements of concern over the “unexplainable” shift in tendencies. Protesters marched into the street shouting “fraud”, with angry youth attacking and burning several local election tribunals later that night.
The following day, popular assemblies organized by local civic committees across the country announced a national strike demanding a second runoff election. As the days passed on, reports by private citizens of irregularities circulated, especially concerning massive discrepancies in local electoral board reporting, publically accessible on the electoral tribunal’s official website. The Vice-President of the election tribunal resigned, declaring the election discredited. Confirmed reports emerged of marked paper ballots being found in private residences and dumped in the trash, while the election tribunal finalized the count awarding Morales victory.
The demand for Morales’ resignation did not originate with Camacho or opposition political parties. The radicalization of demands, for Morales’ resignation and new elections, were first declared in the popular assembly of Chuquisaca, led by the local civic committee president Rodrigo Echalar. Echalar is a self-described Trotskyite and affiliated with Bolivia’s oldest Marxist party, the Workers Revolutionary Party (POR). The declaration denounced Morales for being a tool of imperialism and “vendepatria” (selling out the country), in addition to the reelection “mega fraud”. Authorities from the Andean Qhara-Qhara indigenous nation joined the call. Indigenous authorities from the tropical and Amazonian lowlands later made separate declarations.
The resignation demand grew as the “civicos del sur” (Chuquisaca, Potosi, Tarija, Oruro) joined in alliance, explicitly repudiating alignment with any political party which led to the effective sidelining of Carlos Mesa during the rest of the conflict. Camacho in Santa Cruz was the last of the civic leaders to join the call, but he made a media spectacle by personally challenging Morales to resign and by travelling to La Paz, under threat of assault by Morales’ supporters, to hand deliver a resignation letter.
It was only after protest demands radicalized across the country that Morales’ softened his hardline stance against questioning the victory results and invited the OAS to conduct an audit of the election results. The government promised that they would respect the conclusions of the audit as binding. While the OAS report would later find damning irregularities, protesters, civic leaders, and opposition politicians rejected the audit as a cynical bid to buy time and wear out protests. They also did not trust the OAS after it had previously agreed to certify Morales reelection, ignoring results of the 2016 referendum.
Stalemate during the ongoing OAS audit turned against Morales on Friday the 8th when the police, who had been battling protesters in the streets of La Paz, mutinied and joined calls for his resignation. The police mutiny was peaceful. They simply refused to continue repressing protesters and stayed put in their barracks. Morales responded to the mutiny by calling for dialogue with the leaders of the opposition parties, excluding the civic leaders, who by this time were the driving force behind protests.
The findings of the OAS audit report were released Sunday morning alongside news of the armed attack on the miners’ caravan. The report found serious irregularities which invalidated the results and recommended new elections with a new electoral tribunal. The report found glaring irregularities, such as more votes counted in the exterior vote in Argentina than voters registered. Hours after the release of the report, Morales promised to hold new elections but the tide of public opinion had already turned against him. Civic leaders agreed with new elections, but without Morales. Under Bolivian law, candidates that commit electoral fraud are barred from participating in new elections.
Knotting Shoe-strings and Power
Language is also a creative site of resistance. Over the past 14 years of government under Morales, Bolivians have developed a new and creative political vocabulary to express their frustrations with Morales’ increasingly authoritarian politics under the banner of “socialism” and “indigenous” identity. A language not shared with the international left.
One such phrase is particularly creative and instructive for the moment. “Amarra huato” literally means shoe-string knotter. It popularized as a political insult after wide spread circulation of a video showing Morales before an event ordering with his finger to his bodyguard to tie and clean his shoe. The man immediately drops to the floor and performs his duty with all the servile diligence of peon bowed before his master.
The phrase is not just used to describe those prone to follow servile orders, but is reserved more specifically for those who engage in servile ways of thinking. Intellectuals who engage in simplistic explanation that uncritically reiterates the official party line. Amarra huato is especially used to describe international observers on the left who express solidarity with the “socialist” government of Morales without investigating beneath the surface. Amarra huato is someone who values discourse over substance, aesthetics over content. Ideological loyalty over justice.
The uncritical reiteration by many in the international left, including Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, of claims of a rightwing military coup in Bolivia conform to an amarra huato. In the case of Prashad, such unqualified denunciations are particularly disappointing given his scholarship on 20th century Third World national liberation movements. He is well aware that projects of decolonization can transform into brutal authoritarianism and dictatorship.
To label political action a coup d’état is also to assign roles to actors, as “enemies” and “defenders” of democracy. It is the language of war. To accept the language of war as a matter of fact is also to accept the legitimacy of violence. To assign enemies for destruction. Many on the international left may not realize it, but to uncritically reiterate Morales’ claims of a “military coup” is to also justify violence against his political opponents.
Fear exists that Morales’ supporters may seek to justify a violent “counter-coup” with continuing deadly clashes between the police and Morales’ supporters. These fears have grown since a wanted member of the FARC paramilitary was captured in clashes with the police in Yapacani, Santa Cruz.
Bolivia does not need political violence. If a peaceful constitutional transfer of power followed by new legitimate elections are to be achieved, the confrontational and sectarian language of war must to be abandoned. These feats can only be achieved through calls for dialogue that include all sectors of Bolivian society.
Another problem with the narrative of a rightwing military coup is the way it victimizes Morales. What does the international left expect to learn from Morales’ decade plus tenure in power if they can only imagine him as a victim of others’ designs? Allende barely had time to propose an agenda before Pinochet seized power. Morales implemented policy.
If, as it appears at the moment, that the rightwing will manage to politically capitalize on popular discontent following the election fraud, the person who is at most to blame is Morales himself. Following the 2008 coup attempt, Morales’ response was to make alliances with elite sectors behind the rightwing. Rather than use disposable state power to limit their economic base he made larger concessions each passing year. At the same time, he turned the repressive power of the state against his own base, the indigenous organization that stood in the way of extractivist industries, and even fellow coca growers unions in the Yungas. Following years of cooptation and persecution, Bolivia’s social movements are divided and in shambles. Like Bolsanaro in Brazil, he gave cattle and industrial agriculture sectors carte blanche for the destruction of the Amazon, resulting in over five million hectares destroyed in fires this past year.
The internal hallowing out of leftist credibility under Morales has been so thorough that the word “progre”, short for progressive, has become a pejorative in Bolivia, even within leftist circles. As the Uruguayan intellectual Raul Zibechi commented after Morales’ resignation, “If there is anything left of ethics and dignity in the Latin American left, we should be reflecting on power, and the abuses committed in its exercise. As feminists and Indigenous people have taught us, power is always oppressive, colonial and patriarchal. That is why they reject leaders (caudillos), and why communities rotate their leaders so that they don’t accumulate power.”
One of the most cynical ways in which Morales has sought to accumulate power is through the appropriation of the symbols of indigenous resistance and the victimization of indigenous identity. Upon arrival in Mexico, Morales repeated a phrase that he has made in past years when faced with criticism, “My only crime is being indigenous”.
Under Morales, the millennial symbol of native Andean rebellion, the Wiphala flag has become a state symbol and closely associated with the MAS party. In the past years, even some Aymara and cocalero groups stopped using the flag in their political activity because of its close association with MAS. Closely associating the Wiphala and MAS, a group of protesters celebrated Morales’ resignation in Cochabamba by burning the flag, while police in La Paz lowered the flag from the central plaza.
The acts were quickly denounced across civil society for their racist content, mimicking centuries of exclusion and repression of indigenous people in Bolivia. Marches and rallies were organized in El Alto in defense of the Wiphala. The police subsequently apologized and Añez reaffirmed the Wiphala as a national symbol, reversing her previous opposition expressed during the Constituent Assembly in 2006. This quick reversal is testament to the achievements of indigenous struggles for equality in past decades despite recent attempts by the MAS party to appropriate their symbolism.
With Morales’ departure, we will most likely see a long and painful debate in the coming months and years about the meaning and form of inclusion of indigenous people in Bolivia. Such discussion is best served by dialogue and attention to history, rather than politicized accusations and appropriation.
Language matters. It moves people and historical fates. It also obscures. Politicians literally live off of rhetoric. They peddle in their ability to turn a phrase in a complex moment in order swing political sentiment towards their interests. Pundits and “experts”, as well as increasingly journalists and academics in their ever more precarious and politicized jobs, make a living crafting narratives of events to fit within the preexisting ideological desires of their audience. But reality always escapes our desires. Learning to live with that complexity is the foundation of political maturity.
Devin Beaulieu is an anthropologist and lives in Bolivia.
