Warwick Fry, December 3rd 2019
So Evo Morales resigned. While the Australian news columns were loaded (rightfully) with the apocalyptic bushfire reports an old fashioned military coup in Bolivia went by almost without comment.
At last debate and discourse is being opened, unpacked, in Australian media over the disastrous consequences of climate change denial. Some of the media are at last questioning the rhetoric (or the failure thereof) of our national leaders’ responses to the newly categorised as ‘catastrophic’ bushfires plaguing not only Australia, but also the Amazon Basin, Canada, California, the sub-Arctic tundra of Northern Europe and several Caribbean islands. Moronic remarks like ‘this is not the time to apportion political blame let us focus on the victims of tragedy’ no longer pass the media gatekeepers without notice, but is at last being compared with the USA’s NRA (National Rifle Association) responses to the now monthly reports of mass shootings by gun crazies over there in the US of bloody A.
And speaking of the haemorrhoidal A of the US, one of the few leaders in the international community who was actually doing something about climate change, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, was forced to resign and seek political asylum in Mexico shortly after recorded conversations of the US Ambassador and opposition leaders planning the coup were leaked. Six of those involved in the coup were trainees of the School of Americas and had been employed by the FBI.
The Bolivia of Evo Morales was the centre for world wide efforts to stem the causes of climate change; the source of four UN resolutions that were adopted unanimously (and a fifth passed unopposed) for indigenous rights and environmental rights.
As Andre Corrado wrote in Medium:
“Any government that seriously proposes to close all city-centres to car traffic, to repeal all plastics and to take away many of the wasteful comforts we are used to, is bound to be lynched. Very few dare, if any.
Try to think about the last time a government was elected on account of its environmental proposals. Which country’s pre-election political debate has focused on the future of the planet”?
Well, one such government was the government of Evo Morales that successfully guided Bolivia through 13 years of stable government with a sustained 5% growth rate each year, elimination of illiteracy, 65% reduction of poverty (by IMF standards) 35% reduction of extreme poverty; the most successful economy in the region.
Evo Morales was an indigenous campesino whose MAS party evolved out of his leadership as a unionist of a mass movement against the privatisation of the water resources of Cochabamba. These resources had been sold to a California based company who raised water prices to the point where people were paying more for their water than they were for rent or mortgages. (There is a similar movement against the privatisation of water developing in El Salvador today against the Presidency of Nayib Bukele).
He has been replaced by a woman, who has declared openly that she represented the people who were “sick of being told what to do by brown skinned people ”. Guardian writer Nick Estes reports:
Jeanine Añez Chávez, [stated]. “I dream of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rites,” the opposition senator tweeted in 2013, “the city is not for the Indians who should stay in the highlands or the Chaco!!!” After Evo’s departure, Chavez declared herself interim president while holding up a large bible, though she failed to get the required quorum in the senate to do so.
There have been over 180 casualties of indigenous people (who make up over 70% of Bolivia’s population) in protest marches in the last couple of weeks. Evo’s attempts to promote the indigenous languages and culture (Aymara and Quechua) are being dismantled. Neo-Nazi paramilitaries are targeting the peaceful marches and ripping down the flags and signs of the strong indigenous culture and the lives and houses of Morales’ family and supporters threatened, his own home looted. The concept of the Pachamama (Earth Mother) is being scorned.
The links between racism and disrespect for the planet, and the role of US plutocrats has never been more demonstrably acted out, than it is being now in Bolivia.