[Rugoz]

You still haven't answered my previous question. Why did you think that the right wing forces won't conduct a fair election? Why did they conduct it?

Why do you care about what a bunch of Stalinists say? Their motivations are obvious and to them elections are only a means to an end, the end being a left-wing dictatorship.

[JohnRawls]

Why do you care about what a bunch of Stalinists say? Their motivations are obvious and to them elections are only a means to an end, the end being a left-wing dictatorship.

This is a forum, all we can do it talk. So let me use it as an opportunity to understand. If I can't convince them of anything or they won't listen is kinda irrelevant i guess.

[skinster]

[skinster]

These people are nuts.

This article from a few months ago on the white Bolivian elites illustrates the above, good gods.

A tale of two countries
The world’s image of Bolivia is of its west, around La Paz, traditional and indigenous. That’s not how the elite of wealthy Santa Cruz see themselves or their country.

Santa Cruz de la Sierra is the capital of the department of the same name on Bolivia’s eastern plains. Bigger than Germany, it covers a third of the country and has more than two million inhabitants, who mostly live in the city. With hydrocarbon deposits and a strong agroindustry sector it is Bolivia’s economic engine, accounting for more than 30% of GDP.

Arriving in Santa Cruz is disconcerting: the airport is filled with men in three-piece suits, well-to-do women who all seem to have had plastic surgery, and Mennonite families with red hair. The long, straight road to the city crosses a hot, arid plain. Roadside combine harvester dealers display the latest models like luxury cars, a reminder of the source of this region’s wealth. The desperately poor outer suburbs give way to luxury homes with rooftop pools, and then to the old city centre.

On a previous visit, in December 2018, I had met Natalia Ibañez on the plane. She told me, ‘Santa Cruz is Bolivia’s most modern city. You’ve seen all the condos [the many gated developments]. It’s only natural. In Santa Cruz, we know how to invest our money, we know how to make it grow. Not like the Indians, who bury it in the ground as an offering to their “Pachamama”.’ Her dream was to see President Evo Morales, whom she called ‘that illiterate Indian’, removed.

Looking American on trend
Late last year, we met again at Divine, a smart new nail salon. The staff wore short white overalls and blue contact lenses that made them look like the interchangeable pop singers on the wall-mounted TV screens, tuned to MTV. The customers spoke English among themselves (until they couldn’t find the right word and had to use a Spanish one). Looking American is the height of fashion here, and residents with dual US/Bolivian citizenship will wait to show their US passport at immigration rather than use their Bolivian one, even if that queue moves much faster.

Ibañez told me how happy she was that her wish to see Morales go had come true. And proud that it was her multi-millionaire lawyer cousin, Luis Fernando Camacho, who had ‘freed Bolivia from the living hell of his dictatorship’. (According to information published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists [ICIJ] in April 2016, Camacho had also formed three offshore companies registered in Panama that allowed him. with other individuals and enterprises, to launder money and set up tax evasion schemes.)

Last November Morales was ousted in a coup supported by police and army, and is now in exile (1). Before the coup, there was a 21-day general strike, called after the disputed results of the October presidential election, which Morales had won by a narrow margin in the first round. Throughout the strike, the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, led by Camacho, stirred up popular anger. According to its administrator, Diego Castel, the organisation has the ‘greatest mobilisation capability in the country’.

Camacho, who is standing in the new presidential election (scheduled for 3 May but postponed to 6 September due to the Covid-19 pandemic), had called a rally at the huge statue of Christ the Redeemer, in a committee stronghold in the city, at which he issued instructions for further mobilisations. Ibañez said that ‘in economic and logistical terms, Santa Cruz did 80% of the work of bringing down the Indian’ (Morales); Sirce Miranda, another Santa Cruz resident, said she was alarmed to see her then boyfriend and other members of the committee touring the roadblocks in the city every evening, ‘rewarding’ the demonstrators with money and rice.

The committee has its offices on the Calle Cañada Strongest, in the city centre, in a tree-filled compound where the green-and-white flag of Santa Cruz flies. Castel told me it was ‘the moral government of the people of Santa Cruz,’ its role to ‘defend the interests of Santa Cruz against the state’. It is made up of 300 civil society organisations, but since its foundation in 1950 has been an elite institution controlled by the local oligarchy. Herland Vaca Díez Busch, a doctor and former president of the committee (2011-13), told me that would-be candidates for presidency need the backing of influential businessmen, and have to run expensive election campaigns.

Castel said, ‘You also need to have been born in Santa Cruz and have lived here for more than 15 years. That’s a concession we’ve made to modern life: until recently your parents had to be from Santa Cruz, too.’ You also have to be male: this is a conservative city, and concessions to modernity have not gone so far as to allow women to be president. The committee has a ‘ladies’ section’, but it is peripheral, its role limited to social activities.

Springboard into politics
I met a member of that section at the committee offices: Carmen Morales de Prado, nicknamed Negrita, whose 60th birthday celebrations were covered in the social pages of Santa Cruz magazines. She told me the committee was ‘a springboard into politics’. Most local politicians learned their trade as members; one former president is serving his sixth term as mayor of the city, another his third term as governor of the department.

She described an intense few months spent with the committee’s youth section, the Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC), who call her Tia (auntie) and are ‘prepared to do anything to ensure the triumph of democracy’; members are often sent to prison for acts of violence.

The UJC has its own offices in the committee compound. It has around 300 members, all white and under 30, many of them students from the middle and upper classes, though the working-class membership is growing. At meetings they openly give the fascist salute. The International Federation for Human Rights classes the UCJ as a paramilitary group; it was founded in 1957 by Carlos Valverde Barbery, leader of the Bolivian Socialist Falange, dating from 1937 and modelled on the Francoist brigades in Spain.

Gary Prado Araúz, a prominent Santa Cruz lawyer, said membership of the Falange is still a condition for joining the UJC. In a film that tells its history (2), Valverde Barbery explains, ‘The UJC was formed to be the committee’s “armed wing”, responsible for street protests and popular indoctrination, and for providing military support to the committee.’ Luis Fernando Camacho started as a member of the UJC, and in 2002, at 23, became its youngest ever vice-president.

Herland Vaca Díez Busch’s office at the private clinic he runs was decorated with the green-and-white flag of Santa Cruz and a statuette of the Virgin on a shelf, next to the city coat of arms. He told me proudly that he was a co-founder and ideological leader of the Movement for the Liberation of the Camba Nation (MNC-L), which sees Bolivia as ‘a South American Tibet, made up of the wretched and backward Aymara and Quechua ethnic groups, with a pre-republican, non-liberal, syndicalist and conservative culture of conflict, whose bureaucratic centre [La Paz] practices a detestable colonial form of state centralism, exploiting its “internal colonies”, appropriating our economic surpluses and imposing on us a culture of underdevelopment, its own culture.’ The conflict is between the mainly white and ‘westernised’ camba in the east, and the colla, a pejorative term for the indigenous peoples of the Andes in the west.

‘Santa Cruz doesn’t owe Bolivia anything. When I was born in 1948, the city was just a village. None of the streets were paved and the population was barely 40,000. Now see how prosperous we are ... The government abandoned us, and gave its support to the mining departments instead. We were crying out for help, but the government wouldn’t give us any, so we had to do everything for ourselves: we built our own water, telecoms and electricity systems. And we’re proud of them. Everything that has been achieved in Santa Cruz, we did for ourselves.’ He did not mention that the government built Santa Cruz’s infrastructure, roads and gas pipelines, and has invested huge sums in developing agroindustry.

‘Money attracts money’
He invited me to spend the weekend in Concepción, a small provincial town 300km northeast of Santa Cruz. As we drove there in his BMW, Herland and his brother Tulio were excited to show me ‘their’ Santa Cruz. Herland said, ‘The colla are a curious breed, lazy and ignorant. They just hang around waiting for handouts. They’ve never been self-starters. I always tried to make sure that my children didn’t mix with poor people, so that they wouldn’t grow up to be lazy. I wanted them to be surrounded by money and acquire a taste for it. I wanted them to learn from hard-working, successful people. Money attracts money, you know. We could have taken the development of Santa Cruz much further, but the Indian [Morales] stopped us. People from the west, like him, are born hating us. That’s why they held us back. They’ve screwed up our businesses with social rights and welfare and so on. If you run a business, you only need three female workers to get pregnant at the same time and you might as well shut up shop. Do you know we have to pay them a “maternity subsidy” on top of the doble aguinaldo (3)?’

Halfway through our journey, we came to the village of San Julián, which sprang up from nothing 30 years ago. Its 48,000 inhabitants are mostly indigenous Bolivian peasants who came from the interior. The brothers want autonomy for their department. They said ‘this jungle’ was an example of the ‘colla invasion’ of which the people of Santa Cruz are ‘victims’. ‘These savages throw stones at us when we drive through the village ... We need to separate ourselves from these crazy people.’

I saw women with their hair in plaits, wearing the traditional wide skirts of the Altiplano. Tulio said, ‘They shouldn’t be here. They’re not adapted to their surroundings. Animals shed their winter coats in summer ... These people are hot and sweaty, and they stink.’ The indigenous women do not conform to the Santa Cruz aesthetic, embodied in the magnificas, slender, fair-skinned models who pose in lingerie alongside new combine harvesters and hormone-inflated cattle at the annual Santa Cruz Exhibition Fair (Fexpocruz).

We drove through vast fields of soy beans, listening to camba pop stars Aldo Peña and Gina Gil performing their greatest hits, La cruceñidad (Santa Cruz-ness), Pena cruceña and Víva Santa Cruz. I asked what cruceñidad was, which perplexed the brothers. In 2003 Bolivia’s entrant for Miss Universe, Gabriela Oviedo, also a native of Santa Cruz, said, ‘Unfortunately, people that don’t know Bolivia very much think that we are all just Indian people ... [That’s] La Paz ... poor people and very short people and Indian people ... I’m from the other side of the country, the east side, and it’s not cold, it’s very hot and we are tall and we are white people and we know English.’ Herland eventually answered me by quoting from memory a passage from Mein Kampf. ‘The book by Hitler?’ I asked. ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied. ‘It’s a classic. Have you read it?’

Meeting of ‘autonomists’
After three hours on the road, the landscape became greener and hillier. We passed through villages with low-built colonial houses on both sides of streets of beaten earth and encountered Harley-Davidsons, ridden by fat white men bursting out of cowboy shirts, overtaking muddy little bikes carrying families with darker skin. The brothers nostalgically recalled their younger days. Tulio said, ‘Do you remember when they made that Indian fall off his bicycle and beat him up in the street?’

At San Javier we were due to meet fellow ‘autonomists’ who had come together to erect a mojón (a wooden post 2.20m tall and 20cm wide) on the main square, in front of the town hall. The event’s organiser, Joe Nuñez Klinsky, a Santa Cruz entrepreneur with a red moustache, explained, ‘The purpose of this civic action is to leave markers of the autonomist movement in every town in the country, to support the campaign for a federal constitution in Bolivia as the first step towards autonomy for Santa Cruz.’

There were around 50 people, mostly men in their 60s, wearing moccasins or cowboy boots, hats, Ray-Bans, big gold watches and knives in their belts. Herland Vaca Díez Busch’s speech mentioned his uncle Germán Busch Becerra, son of a German doctor, who was famed for his exploits in the 1932-35 Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay and served as president of Bolivia from 1937 to 1939. Afterwards, he pulled away a Santa Cruz flag that was draped over the mojón to loud applause. The audience sang the departmental anthem and waved more flags. They represented the Santa Cruz elite and most owned land in the area. I remarked that nearly all had blue eyes. ‘Yes,’ I was told, ‘many people around here have German ancestry.’

We set off again for Concepción, where a third brother, a multi-millionaire (‘in US dollars’, Tulio stressed) who made his money in timber, sugarcane and cattle, like most big local landowners, has a hacienda. Concepción is a pretty colonial village mentioned in all the guidebooks. Tulio said, ‘A great man was born here’: General Hugo Banzer Suárez was president of Bolivia from 1971 to 1978, after a coup that installed a military regime with the Nazi Klaus Barbie as special advisor on repression techniques, and again from 1997 to 2001, after a democratic election. We ate at a restaurant and took away the leftovers as a present for the ‘Indian’ caretaker at the hacienda. Herland said, ‘The people who were in power in La Paz hate us, because we’ve always been able to live in harmony with our Indians.’

‘Let Morales never return’
I did not see much evidence of that next morning, when we went to Sunday mass at the Jesuit mission. On one side of the church sat the bosses with European faces, their children watching Disney cartoons on parental iPhones. On the other were the indigenous workers and their children. The priest began, ‘My dear brothers and sisters, we are gathered here, today, to pray that the savage, Evo Morales, will never return.’

Afterwards, we set off for the Berlin hacienda, an imposing colonial house surrounded by 1,200 hectares of land, owned by Oscar Mario Justiniano. Around 15 men who had been at the autonomist ceremony were there. They had all known each other since childhood, having been classmates at the La Salle school in Santa Cruz. One told me this religious private school, attended by the children of the elite, was ‘the best in the city, because it’s the most expensive.’

The atmosphere was festive; a lamb and two hogs roasted on spits. A guest told me, ‘Being a developed country means military capability.’ Another said, ‘Just imagine if we had an army like France’s: we could fight back against those Indian barbarians, and put an end to their invasion.’ After the meal, some retired to hammocks to sleep off the kilos of meat they had ingested, while others drank beer. They come together each year on 9 October to celebrate the death of Che Guevara, assassinated in the department of Santa Cruz — and to wish the same fate on all communists.

To them, communism means taxes. Pablo Mendieta Ossio of the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce’s Centre for Bolivian Economic Studies, told me that under Morales’s presidency, the people of Santa Cruz were victims of ‘extortion’: ‘The problem wasn’t so much the tax rates — our taxes are very low — as the fact that audits have become more frequent in recent years,which increases the chances of the tax authorities making mistakes, and therefore the likelihood of fines. Businesses have run up very large tax debts, and would find it difficult to pay them off.’

Since Banzer Suárez came to power, a custom of fiscal amnesty (perdonazo tributario) had become established: when a new president was elected, he cancelled the tax debts of the elite. Morales broke with this practice, and many of Bolivia’s wealthiest now have tax debts of millions of dollars. Jeanine Añez’s de facto government, installed after the 2019 coup, is determined to ‘put an end to the previous government’s extortion’; it is working on a new amnesty law, despite criticism that such legislative changes are beyond the remit of an interim government.

Back in Santa Cruz, the rows of 44s outside the Christian Family Church showed the congregation was prosperous. A trendily dressed crowd waited in a huge courtyard for the service to begin. The doors to the hall opened, and a singer, backed by drums, bass, guitars and a keyboard, warmed up the congregation. Two giant wall-mounted screens displayed the words against a background of sunrise, flames or starry skies. A technician made coloured spotlights dance to the music. As the excitement grew, the faithful sang louder, knelt, wept, closed their eyes.

Then the pastor made his entrance. In his 40s, and as trendily dressed as his flock, he read the sermon from an iPad. At the end of the service he told them, ‘We must all give, even if we don’t have much money. If we want to show God that we love him, we must make sacrifices.’ A guitar case on the edge of the stage was soon filled with large-denomination notes.

The pastor promotes his church on Facebook, with posts about the stars who are coming to give ‘amazing’ Christian rock concerts. Among photomontages of young female church members, labelled ‘This is where the pretty girls are: come and join us’, are pictures of the pastor with Luis Fernando Camacho, who ‘thanks to God’s power, has supernaturally freed us from Evil’.
https://mondediplo.com/2020/07/06bolivia

[skinster]

[QatzelOk]

skinster, it looks like a lot of Contras have fled the thread.

Let me post a "Contras" style comment here, just to push the debate along.

Let's see how much fun and games these First Nations suckers and losers will have once they lose their access to American companies and have to live through sanctions (that don't hurt anyone really) and "internal" coups (that are really internal).

I'm not sure if I would call the people who got a social leader elected "suckers and losers." The people of Bolivia actually had a choice of different political systems, and they chose the one they liked better.

A real "sucker and loser" would be presented with two copies of the same party, Contra.

[JohnRawls]

skinster, it looks like a lot of Contras have fled the thread.

Let me post a "Contras" style comment here, just to push the debate along.


I'm not sure if I would call the people who got a social leader elected "suckers and losers." The people of Bolivia actually had a choice of different political systems, and they chose the one they liked better.

A real "sucker and loser" would be presented with two copies of the same party, Contra.

What is there to post about? The fair election has been held and Morales is not in power or in charge as the rules of democracy demand. For now everything seems to be okay and even more stable compared to when the right wing forces were in charge. You and skinster seem to forget that we barely posted for like 6 to 9 months in this thread after Morales was ousted and to the election.

[skinster]

^ Actually, I kept posting here. You stopped, sure. Thanks for making my point for me.

[Patrickov]

Patrickov and JohnRawls stop trying pretend to know why socialism is so attractive in Latin America. Study it.

Sorry I didn't pretend and I frankly have no time to -- it takes about two weeks for me to reply this.

Even if I understand what's happening there doesn't mean I am wrong -- what I concern is it should NOT be applied at MY place, and I am confident that they won't do YOU any good. But if it's what you are after, so be it. Let's see what happens afterwards.

[Tainari88]

Look @Patrikov I only want one man and one woman and one vote for every nation. If the majority of a nation want some right wing elitist in charge? So be it. But the vast majority of the nations of Latin America, Africa, and many nations all over Asia are not rich or elitist. If they are not rich elitists? In a democracy they need to be the ones with power. That is if you believe in majority rule. If you don't? Just say to hell with democracy. I love plutocracy and a few with money call the shots. Stop filling your mouth with democracy. You can't criticize nations who want majority democratic votes. If it doesn't go along with some Imperialistic violent horrific government like the USA's govt is about? Then get the hell out. You have no right to be dictating to other nations.

Bolivia is a majority Indian nation. If you don't like Indians and live in Bolivia? FUCK YOU. That is my message. Lol. To the Bolivian assholes like Janine pendeja.

[QatzelOk]

The fair election has been held and Morales is not in power or in charge as the rules of democracy demand.

So you're saying that "the evil one" was removed, and "ye olde constitution" was saved?

And the recent assasination attempt at the new MAS leader is - what - just a healthy attempted witch-burning? Nothing to see here, OAS and commercial media have done their magic to another corner of their backyard.

[wat0n]

I wonder if there will be a reaction among the opposition and the military in particular. I'm guessing not, but she hasn't been found guilty just yet.

[Heisenberg]

So let me see here, there was a coup against Morales for trying to become a ruler for life/dictator lithium basically, the military killed lot of people and she gave them immunity from prosecution,and then after repeatedly postponing the promised elections, mass protests and general strikes made her position untenable. She conducted was eventually forced to conduct a free election, so the left is going to put her in jail for 30 years for organising a coup and allowing security forces to massacre people with impunity.

There, fixed that for you. Don't worry though, she'll get a trial, unlike the indigenous Bolivian protesters she had shot in the streets.

Hmmmm. I think that my statement in Venezuela thread is true that the left in South America are dictators who are just power hungry while the right are more democratic and just in general.

Absolutely comical.

I wonder if there will be a reaction among the opposition and the military in particular.

I seriously doubt it. The impression I get is that the military eventually realised she and her entourage were complete fucking lunatics and couldn't wait to wash their hands of them.

[wat0n]

I seriously doubt it. The impression I get is that the military eventually realised she and her entourage were complete fucking lunatics and couldn't wait to wash their hands of them.

That depends on whether they'll crack down on them over what you mentioned above or if they haven't fired the chiefs of staff who were in their posts in 2019.

[Rugoz]

There, fixed that for you.

You mean replaced it with dumb left-wing shit.

Morales ignored a binding referendum result that denied him more terms. Then there were serious and suspicious technical issues with the electronic voting system such that the OAS refused to verify the result. Anez fell upwards, if anything she was just a pawn. Elections were scheduled for May, but were delayed due to Covid.

[noemon]

Admin Notes: Any post with more than 1 tweet will be deleted immediately as will any post containing anything but a tweet

[JohnRawls]

There, fixed that for you. Don't worry though, she'll get a trial, unlike the indigenous Bolivian protesters she had shot in the streets.


Absolutely comical.


I seriously doubt it. The impression I get is that the military eventually realised she and her entourage were complete fucking lunatics and couldn't wait to wash their hands of them.

Sadly my post was deleted because it contained Skinsterinas tweets.

Reality check Heisenberg. It is the leftist regime that is imprisoning people and the right side that conducted a free election. Also you are blaming the right side for some kind of resource imperialism that didn't even happen. Not to mention that although you might not like it, resource extraction is a lucrative business and some people support it because it brings in money and work. You might not like fracking in the US but people support it and so on.

So lets summarise, left imprisons their opposition, blames them for resource imperialism that didn't happen and that resource imperialism or lithium extraction in this case might be actually supported by the locals because it can bring money and work.... Yeah, uhhh, let us see how this will play out long term.

[Heisenberg]

Morales ignored a binding referendum result that denied him more terms.

His party appealed it to the constitutional court and it was overturned. You know, like how the remainers tried to overturn the UK Brexit referendum.

Now, onto the stuff that actually matters (I'm sure you'll admit you don't care about the technicalities of the Bolivian constitution any more than I do, given you are making excuses for a military coup):

Then there were serious and suspicious technical issues with the electronic voting system such that the OAS refused to verify the result.

The "serious and suspicious technical issues" were a result of serious flaws in the OAS's own analysis, as even the New York Times admitted (as usual, long after the damage was already done and far too late to do any good).

It was something as basic as the OAS formatting the "time" column in a spreadsheet alphabetically, meaning that 10pm came immediately after 1pm when they sorted it - leading to their "suspicious spikes in votes for Morales".

Anez fell upwards, if anything she was just a pawn.

For a "pawn" and a mere "interim" leader, her government was very keen to throw its weight around and try to cement its hold on power. Hence the whole "giving the police and military immunity for killing protesters" thing, pursuing MAS members for "corruption", muzzling journalists, detaining opponents, and so on.

Elections were scheduled for May, but were delayed due to Covid.

The coup government delayed the elections on three separate occasions, leading to mass protests and general strikes throughout August and September.

Reality check Heisenberg. It is the leftist regime that is imprisoning people and the right side that conducted a free election.

It's abundantly clear that you either didn't follow any of the events in Bolivia between October 2019 and October 2020, or you are deliberately ignoring them. The coup government massacred people. It imprisoned Morales supporters and journalists, and tried to muzzle journalists. It only caved to a free election after months of mass protests. Your characterisation is utterly divorced from reality.

Not to mention that although you might not like it, resource extraction is a lucrative business and some people support it because it brings in money and work.

I have no problem with resource extraction and neither did the MAS government. The problem they had was with resource extraction for the benefit of foreign companies, which is why Morales terminated Bolivia's contract with ACI Systems following protests against it.

[Tainari88]

Janine is a racist pig person who is and has Indian blood. But since there it is about cultural identification and MONEY and land and status she considers herself a modern, elitist type and hates Indians who still cling to Indian tradition. They are responsible for killing workers and some of them confessed that they are apolitical people and were not pro anyone. But they all look the same to the racists.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... th-protest

[Heisenberg]

Janine is a racist pig person who is and has Indian blood. But since there it is about cultural identification and MONEY and land and status she considers herself a modern, elitist type and hates Indians who still cling to Indian tradition. They are responsible for killing workers and some of them confessed that they are apolitical people and were not pro anyone. But they all look the same to the racists.

I can't believe MAS stopped this girlboss kween from achieving her dream of cleansing Bolivia of Satanic indigenous rites