Bolivia November 27, 2019
With the right-wing coup in Bolivia nearly complete, the junta is hunting
down the last remaining dissidents
On the day of my scheduled interview with a leftist Bolivian journalist, I
learned that he had been disappeared. Every outspoken opponent of the
military junta is a target and subjected to charges of sedition.
By Wyatt Reed
La Paz, Bolivia A brutal military junta that seized power from Bolivias
democratically elected President Evo Morales is violently repressing a
working-class indigenous-led uprising, and the country is rapidly falling
under its control.
Soldiers in military fatigues prowl the streets, enforcing a series of choke
points around the seat of power. Anyone perceived as standing against the
status quo is now subject to being arrested on charges of sedition or
terrorism. Dissident journalists and Morales sympathizers have been forced
into hiding, leaving the house only when necessary.
Its a fascist dictatorship, theres no hiding it, says Federico Koba, a
left-wing journalist who asked that I not use his real name for fear of
arrest. There are paramilitary agents going around the city taking pictures
and pinpointing whos who. Who is a leader, who is recording the protests,
who is recording the repression.
I met with Koba, an activist and journalist with the leftist news site La
Resistencia Bolivia, on the evening of November 24th. I had initially
planned to meet with his co-worker, who asked that I refer to him by the
pseudonym of Carlos Mujica because he too feared being jailed for his
activism.
But on the day of our scheduled interview, Mujica never showed up. He was
lying low, having had his house searched and ransacked by police the night
before the coup.
Hours later, I received a brief message from him: Bro, I cant talk right
now. Im in jail.
Mujicas friends went to every prison in the city looking for him, but he
was nowhere to be found. The next day, he was released after an intense
interrogation session in an unlisted facility. He immediately went into
hiding, disconnecting himself completely from social media, which his peers
now believe has been compromised by the coup regime.
The atmosphere was grim when I met with Koba and some of his colleagues. We
know for sure were on a list weve seen it, and what they did to Carlos
confirms it, one member of La Resistencia told me.
After the interview with Koba, he waved off my suggestion that we get a
beer.
Maybe someday, after all this is over, we can do that, he said. So we
drove around under the cover of darkness instead, doubling back and making
frequent turns to make sure we werent being followed.
That truck could belong to the cops, or the paramilitaries, he remarked,
as we circled a roundabout multiple times to allow it to pass.
Not a single shot was fired
Since their country was taken over by far-right landowning elites, virtually
every leftist Bolivian with a public profile has begun to feel the heat.
Even relative newcomers to politics bear the scars of repression.
Minutes after I met another Bolivian citizen journalist, who had first
picked up a camera just weeks before, as the coup kicked off, he hiked up
his pant leg to show me the wound hed sustained the day before. He had been
shot with a rubber bullet while documenting the militarys offensive against
the residents of El Alto.
Soldiers encircle the Senkata gas plant after a violent assault on
indigenous protesters (photo by Wyatt Reed)
Days after the coup sent Morales into exile, residents of the mostly
indigenous working-class city of El Alto encircled a gas plant called
Senkata, cutting off the nearby Bolivian capital of La Paz from its main
source of cooking gas. In response, the same military and police forces that
had conspired with fascist paramilitaries to force Morales from office
unleashed a ferocious wave of violence on the largely unarmed protesters.
I arrived just after the worst of the massacre. The terrorists as the
Bolivian military junta and press have dubbed the self-organized patrols of
mainly unarmed indigenous youth and mothers were decidedly less violent
than one might expect. Instead of the guns and dynamite which
coup-supporting Bolivians insist they wield, I saw only cell phones and
polleras, the traditional dresses worn by many of Bolivias indigenous
women.
But that did little to prevent them from being mowed down over the course of
several hours. While the official death toll from the Senkata massacre now
stands at nine, a seemingly endless series of victims family members told
the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) that the real
number was most certainly higher, as many as 25 deaths.
Their harrowing testimonies painted a picture of unhinged soldiers firing at
random out of helicopters and from sniper perches. Mothers sobbed as they
held up photos of their children. Many had been gunned down as they went to
or from work; still more had simply disappeared.
Nearly a week later, their families are beginning to assume that they were
killed by soldiers, who subsequently hid the bodies in order to lower the
official number of casualties.
Survivors and witnesses of lethal junta repression testify before the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in La Paz (photo by Wyatt Reed)
But the military junta now in control begged to differ. Interior Minister
Arturo Murillo has publicly insisted that not a single shot was fired.
It was an account echoed by the head doctor of the Corazon de Jesus Trauma
Center. He allowed me inside the medical clinic only after a crew of five
nurses had scrubbed the puddles of blood from the floors. The doctor then
insisted that only two of the dead could be confirmed as gunshot victims,
and that their wounds were consistent with a .22 caliber weapon in his
words, non-military weapons.
How someone with no training as a forensic pathologist could come to such a
conclusion is confounding, but what is well known in Bolivia today is that
any medical professional who contradicts the official narrative risks
criminalization.
When a video of a crying medical professional in Senkata denouncing the
horrific violence went viral, he was arrested days later. The Bolivian junta
accused him of being a fake doctor.
A laboratory for juntas post-truth information war
The wrath of the coup regime, led by a once fringe far-right politician
named Jeanine Añez, is felt all across the Bolivian left. Virtually anyone
who represents a perceived challenge to the status quo is liable to be hit
with manufactured charges of sedition or terrorism.
Protesting the crackdown on leftist media and new sedition laws (photo by
Wyatt Reed)
As Koba explained during our clandestine nighttime drive, they are trying
to repress not only protesters that march, but anyone that says something
different from what the government says is happening. So they are repressing
any media outlet that tries to show the repression and the assassinations,
the killings, and show the evidence, and show the protests, and show the
marches. Everything thats against the coup is being harassed and is being
attacked.
He continued: A lot of small and medium-sized media outlets have been shut
down or have been forced to not show whats going on, and others have been
paid to show what they tell them to. So its a very serious situation in the
freedom of speech department, not only the human rights department, because
as I think the world has seen, these guys havent held back in using all the
force at their disposal.
Prestige and prominence is no protection under the rule of the junta. Even
five-time Emmy-winning journalist Carlos Montero and Juan Manuel Karg were
forced from the country after a fanatically right-wing senator labelled them
insufferable communists who were sticking their dirty noses in Bolivia.
Police even hit an Al Jazeera reporter transmitting from the Plaza Murillo
in La Paz in the face with tear gas as she attempted to deliver her report.
And TeleSUR, one of the last remaining news channels to give a voice to
opponents of the coup government, had numerous correspondents kicked out of
the country on accusations of sedition before the station was officially
removed from the airwaves on November 21st.
But the repression of international media has paled in comparison to the
right-wing repression of local Bolivian media. Within days of the coup, José
Aramayo, director of Radio CSUTCB an ally of Morales was chained to a
tree as paramilitary members frogmarched his staff out of their office.
As Koba explained, Bolivian media outlets now face a choice: either you take
a bribe, or your life will be made extremely difficult. In this atmosphere,
opposing viewpoints are virtually non-existent on Bolivian TV, which now
runs PSAs warning that Evo Morales is trying to starve the audience.
We are almost alone in showing whats going on, Koba said of the
threatened band of leftist reporters still active in Bolivia. The
traditional media is just showing what they cant hide. But they of course
deny the evidence. They say that these were inside jobs that cocaleros and
El Alto people are killing themselves.
Everything is upside down
In the Alice in Wonderland post-truth reality enforced by the junta, Koba
exclaimed, The progressives are the fascists. They say that we are the
fascists! They say that we are the violent ones, that we are the terrorists.
They say that we are the ones who performed the coup from a long time before
with this alleged fraud, this supposed fraud.
While a few scattered progressives in the US Congress have registered their
condemnation of the coup, the damage has been done, and the plot has been
fulfilled.
The far-right demagogues who forced out Morales have consolidated control,
and as Koba says, they tried to turn everything upside down so the
election fraud was a coup, and the coup was a return to democracy; the
paramilitary forces are pacifying forces; the fascists are the democrats.
Everything, he says, is upside down.
Bolivia has become a huge laboratory for post-truth and 21st century coups
that use everything that they have gathered from their experiences in
Nicaragua and Venezuela, onto Honduras
Brazil and Argentina, Koba
explained.
In 2008, they tried to carry out a coup here, and they were unsuccessful,
but they learned from their mistakes
This has been a laboratory to use all
of their guns the post-truth, the paramilitary, the civil movements being
financed by NGOs and by foreign fascist organizations.
Now, Koba warns, anyone who says that this isnt a transitional government
is accused of creating sedition. And everything is sedition. Posting on
social media is sedition; talking about the violent repression is sedition;
saying what you think is sedition.
According to Koba, The only thing that they havent been able to do is to
convince the international community that this is a democratic transition.
Of course, thats the only thing that we have in our favor, that the
international community has seen the repression, has seen all the human
rights violations.
As Bolivia returns to the dark days of de facto rule by a ruthless,
US-backed military junta, Kobas voice is among only a few who still dare to
speak out in protest.
After a long and sobering discussion, we returned to downtown La Paz. I
shook his hand and wished him well, unsure when, or if, I would see him
again.
A choke point in La Paz manned by soldiers (photo by Wyatt Reed)
Wyatt Reed
Wyatt Reed is a Virginia-based activist and journalist who covers climate
and racial justice movements and foreign policy issues. Follow him on
Twitter at @wyattreed13.