The US Wanted a Coup in Bolivia: Like Magic, It Got One
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales was ousted in a coup. What happened?
Military Coup
The US wanted Leftist President Evo Morales gone.
Guess what? He’s gone.
The Guardian reports Many Wanted Morales Out. But What Happened in Bolivia was a Military Coup.
On Sunday the head of Bolivia’s military called on Evo Morales to resign from the presidency. Minutes later Morales was on a plane to Cochabamba where he did just that. These facts leave little doubt that what happened in Bolivia this weekend was a military coup, the first such event in Latin America since the 2009 military coup against Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya. (The 2012 and 2016 impeachments of Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff are widely viewed as “parliamentary coups.”)
The mainstream press has bent over backwards, and tied itself in more than a few tangled knots, to avoid drawing this conclusion. The Wall Street Journal celebrates Morales’ ouster as a “democratic breakout.” The New York Times is characteristically more circumspect, hemming and hawing about how “the forced ouster of an elected leader is by definition a setback for democracy” but might also “help Bolivia restore its wounded democracy.” This head-spinning rhetoric does not prevent the Times from swiftly dismissing left-of-center politicians’ “predictable” claims that what happened was a coup.
It is hardly surprising that conservative governments and powerful media outlets applaud Morales’ ouster and dismiss the claim it constitutes a coup. More surprising is that leftist commentators, including Raquel Gutiérrez and Raul Zibechi, have taken a similar stance. Zibechi attributes Morales’ fall to a “popular uprising.”
Morales’ Illegitimacy
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