[rad-green] To read the mainstream press on what just happened to Evo Morales is to enter a hall of mirrors.

*https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/25/patrick-lawrence-now-the-interim-of-us-self-deception-over-bolivia/
<https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/25/patrick-lawrence-now-the-interim-of-us-self-deception-over-bolivia/>*

*Consortium News          November 25, 2019*

Now the Interim of US Self-Deception Over Bolivia

*To read the mainstream press on Bolivia is to enter a hall of mirrors. The
violent overthrow of an elected president struck a blow for the restoration
of order and the rule of law. Christian fundamentalists of European
descent, racist to the core and explicitly contemptuous of Bolivia’s
indigenous majority, are “democrats” worthy of our support. Bolivia’s first
indigenous president, highly popular for lifting an impressive percentage
of Bolivians out of poverty, was a hated, “tyrannical dictator.”*

*By Patrick Lawrence* <https://consortiumnews.com/tag/patrick-lawrence/>
*Special to Consortium News*


*Years from now, maybe a generation from now, it will be permissible to
describe Evo Morales’s resignation-at-gunpoint two weeks ago as what it
was: a coup the U.S. cultivated just as it has dozens of others since it
emerged as a superpower in 1945. The acknowledgement will not matter then.
The events in question will be comfortably distant in time. Those
responsible for deposing the Bolivian president will be either retired or
deceased. Americans will not have fooled any Bolivians, for this autumn
will be etched in their memories, but Americans will have once again fooled
themselves.*

This is how it often goes when Washington crushes the democratic
aspirations of others by toppling legitimately elected leaders and
replacing them with figures — usually corrupt, often dictatorial, by
definition undemocratic — to its liking. It took decades for the U.S. to
acknowledge the C.I.A.–directed coup in 1953 against the Mossadegh
government in Iran: President Barack Obama did so
<https://www.smh.com.au/world/obama-admits-us-involvement-in-iran-coup-20090605-bxf5.html>
(without
apologizing) in 2009. Forty-five years after the fact, Bill Clinton spent
half a day in Guatemala expressing regret
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/mar/12/jeremylennard.martinkettle> for
the coup that brought down President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.

This is what awaits us now in the case of Bolivia — a long interim of
self-deception, ending only when the truth makes little difference and
responsibility can no longer be assigned.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2008. (Joel Alvarez, Wikimedia Commons)

Here is some of what Bill Clinton, president at the time, said in Guatemala
City in March 1999. He spoke shortly after Guatemala’s Historical
Clarification Commission — a name one has to love — concluded that in
deposing Árbenz the U.S. was responsible for the blood-soaked human rights
abuses that followed during 36 years of civil war:

“It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or
intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of
the kind described in the report was wrong. And the United States must not
repeat that mistake. We must and we will instead continue to support the
peace and reconciliation process in Guatemala.”

*Dishonesty & Consequences*

This is a complacently dishonest statement, and it is essential to
recognize not only Clinton’s dishonesty but also its consequences. These
bear directly on the Bolivia question now.

Clinton was explicit in asserting that the Árbenz coup was an injustice
that will not happen again. The past was evil, but evil has passed: This is
a sound summation of his message. Having followed Clinton’s Central
American tour at the time, I remain convinced that he addressed Americans
at least as much Guatemalans when he made the just-quoted remarks. Some of
us intervened violently in another country and caused much suffering, he
told us *norteamericanos*, but we are not those people. They are gone now
and we are better than they were.

<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Clinton-in-Guatemala.png>

Former President Bill in Guatemala expressing regret for the coup that
brought down President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. (YouTube still)

This is the message implicit in all of the apologies U.S. officials
occasionally make for misdeeds safely packed away in history’s deep freeze.
In it we find the grand illusion of America’s present-day innocence. And it
is by this illusion that the U.S. regularly repeats the mistake Clinton
mentions, always certain that its injustices lie in a past for which
Americans alive in the present bear no burden of guilt.

What are we to make of America’s apologies to others in view of the record
before and after one or another of these expressions of regret? In Latin
America alone, the Guatemalan “mistake” in 1954 was repeated, successfully
or otherwise, in Cuba (1961, Bay of Pigs), Chile (1973), Nicaragua
(1981–90, the Contra insurgency), and Honduras (2009). Washington has been
trying for years to repeat its mistake in Venezuela and is currently trying
again in Nicaragua. In the Venezuela case, sanctions have already succeeded
in destabilizing the nation’s economy.

We have just watched it make this mistake in Bolivia. John Bolton, in his
noted “troika of tyranny” speech
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/bolton-promises-to-confront-latin-americas-troika-of-tyranny/2018/11/01/df57d3d2-ddf5-11e8-85df-7a6b4d25cfbb_story.html>
a
year ago, lumped Cuba with Venezuela and Nicaragua. Trump’s now-departed
national security adviser unabashedly promised coups in all three nations.

The past is evil, all right, but evil has not passed.

*Fighting for Plain Speech*

Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz. (Wikimedia
Commons)

Language is the battleground in the Bolivian case, as in all others like it
in the past. This is as it should be. The fight for plain, spade-a-spade
language is one worth fighting. It is by naming things and events honestly
that we shed our illusions of innocence. This is the essential first step
if America is to alter its ruinous conduct abroad. To fail in this is to
protect the illegal practices of a disorderly hegemonic power from scrutiny.

Our corporate media have treated us to a remarkable display of
hand-wringing and verbal contortions to avoid using the term “coup” in
describing the events in La Paz from Oct. 20, when Morales was elected to a
fourth term, and Nov. 10, when his high command forced him into exile. “Was
there a coup in Bolivia?” *The Economist *asked
<https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/16/was-there-a-coup-in-bolivia>
after Morales sought asylum in Mexico. “Coup isn’t the right word,” the
reliably neoliberal  *Foreign Policy *protested
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/11/evo-morales-resigns-president-bolivia/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=18159&utm_term=Editor#39;s%20Picks%20OC>
as
if in response. This is the same journal that published a piece in mid–2018
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/05/its-time-for-a-coup-in-venezuela-trump/>
headlined,
“It’s Time for a Coup in Venezuela.”

To read the mainstream press on Bolivia is to enter a hall of mirrors. The
violent overthrow of an elected president struck a blow for the restoration
of order and the rule of law. Christian fundamentalists of European
descent, racist to the core and explicitly contemptuous of Bolivia’s
indigenous majority, are “democrats” worthy of our support. Bolivia’s first
indigenous president, highly popular for lifting an impressive percentage
of Bolivians out of poverty, was a hated, “tyrannical dictator.”

This, the Orwellian touch, is routine — and is routinely reported in the
American press. When the murderous General Abdul–Fattah al–Sisi took power
in Egypt in a coup six years ago, John Kerry, as U.S. secretary of state,
applauded
<https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/world/middleeast/egypt-warns-morsi-supporters-to-end-protests.html>
him for “restoring democracy.” For good measure the secretary of state
added, “The military did not take over.”

*Islands of Responsible Coverage*

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera in
2006 shining the shoes of shoeshine boys. (Wikimedia Commons)

Accurate, responsible accounts of the events surrounding Morales’s ouster
are perfectly available, even if they appear amid a sea of mis– and
disinformation. *The Grayzone’s  *reporting on Bolivia
<https://thegrayzone.com/category/bolivia/> this autumn is second to no
one’s. Last week *Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting*, *FAIR*, carried a highly
informed and informative interview
<https://fair.org/home/years-from-now-itll-be-clear-to-everyone-there-was-a-coup-in-bolivia/>
 with Alex Main of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in
Washington.

These publications make the truth of events in Bolivia easily legible.
There was no “drastic change” in the vote count late in the polling
process, as the U.S.–controlled Organization of American States alleged.
Neither was there a suspicious interruption in official reports of the
final results, as also alleged. Many of the key figures in the coup have
dense ties to Washington; some, including Williams Kalimán Romero, the
since-replaced commander of the armed forces at the time of the coup, were
trained at WHINSEC, the military training base in the U.S. state of Georgia
previously (and infamously) known as the School of the Americas.

Just as it has elsewhere — Venezuela and Ukraine are recent examples —
Washington was supporting right-wing political parties and opposition
“civil society” groups even before Morales first won office in 2006. The
first U.S.–cultivated coup attempt against him came two years later.

Do we have *prima facie* proof of Washington’s involvement in the coup
against Morales? This is rarely available in such circumstances as these.
As in many other cases, we may have to wait for the historians and the
declassification of foreign-relations records. The closest we come so far
in the Bolivia case is a set of 16 audio recordings released Nov. 10 by *El
Periódico*, an independent publication in Costa Rica. These appear to
record top coup plotters as they plan actions against the Morales
government and, in one, discuss the support they receive from Senators
Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Bob Menendez — all of whom have taken a hand in
previous Latin American interventions.

The recordings are here
<https://www.en24.news/news/2019/11/10/bolivia-audios-leaked-from-opposition-leaders-calling-for-a-coup-against-evo-morales.html>
with
English-language summaries of each recording, and here
<https://elperiodicocr.com/bolivia-filtran-audios-de-lideres-opositores-llamando-a-un-golpe-de-estado-contra-evo-morales/>
in
the original *El Periódico *version. Provenance, chain of custody, the
identities of those who made the recordings and those whose voices are
recorded: None of this is clear. *El Periódico *did not reply to queries
sent by email. But given how closely these audios align with established
procedures in U.S.–cultivated coups (such as a leaked audio
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k> regarding the coup in
Ukraine), and the formidable accumulation of compelling circumstantial
evidence, they cannot be dismissed pending needed verifications.

What just happened in Bolivia happened in Guatemala 65 years ago, 66 in
Iran, and so on. Coups were conducted in more or less the same fashion,
without so much as a procedural update. Now as on previous occasions, most
Americans are kept ignorant of what has been done in their name — and, atop
this, remain indifferent to their ignorance. This is a media failure as
much as a moral failure. When Bolton openly promises coups across Latin
America, and liberal magazines such as *FP *cheer on such plans in banner
headlines, we must conclude that in our late-imperial phase we are a numbed
nation.

Washington has just degraded Bolivia’s long effort to climb out of poverty,
to take control of its resources and its destiny, and to escape from
centuries of exploitation at the hands of Westerners. This is shameful. The
silent consent of most Americans after many decades of unlearned lessons is
equally so.

*Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for
the*  *International
Herald Tribune**, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most
recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century”
(Yale). Follow him on Twitter **@thefloutist*
<https://twitter.com/thefloutist>*. **His web site is  **Patrick Lawrence*
<http://www.patricklawrence.us/>*. Support his work via **his Patreon site*
<http://www.patreon.com/thefloutist>*.*

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