Speaking for Wall Street and the intelligence community, as it always does, the Washington Post editorial board March 19 warned that should the current sovereign government of Bolivia continue its current “lawless” behavior in arresting and prosecuting those who plotted the November, 2019 coup against Evo Morales—former coup President Jeanine Áñez and former cabinet members are now in jail on charges of sedition and terrorism—the result will be “further chaos, if not civil war and outright dictatorship.” Such behavior should cease, the Post sermonized, because Bolivia “should be fighting the pandemic” instead of making accusations about non-existent “coups.” Then it demanded, “The Biden administration should lead a regional effort to preserve democratic stability in this long-suffering country lest crisis turn into catastrophe.”
The financial oligarchs and Silicon Valley speculators that stand behind the Post, who hailed the 2019 fascist coup that ousted Morales, don’t much like governments that fight to defend their own sovereignty, or don’t embrace the West’s “rules-based international order,” as Bolivia’s President Luis Arce is doing. Since taking power five months ago, Arce has reestablished ties with Russia and China that Áñez had severed, as well as with Mexico and Argentina in Ibero-America, and is working to rebuild the economy that Áñez’s government looted, while tackling the COVID pandemic as aggressively as possible—with aid from Russia, China and the UN’s COVAX mechanism.
Particularly distasteful to the Post's backers are the increasing, almost-daily public revelations in the Bolivian media about how an international apparatus, and its local fascist operatives, illegally installed Áñez in power by forcing the resignations—on pain of death—of the parliamentary leaders who by law should have succeeded Morales once he was forced to resign over the Organization of American States (OAS) unsubstantiated claim of vote fraud. The top leadership of the Catholic Church, representatives of the EU, the OAS, the Brazilian government, someone representing U.S. interests (there is no ambassador) as well as the local fascist/Project Democracy leaders were all involved in these meetings and arranged for Áñez to take over. This is the crowd now mobilized in Áñez’s defense, claiming her human rights are being violated, that she’s being denied medical care and that the government isn’t respecting “due process"—all blatant fabrications. Predictably, the Post asserted that “the accusations at the core of her arrest now—that she plotted with the Bolivian military and others to overthrow Mr. Morales—is at odds with historical reality.” And of course, it insisted on the vote fraud lie: “Mr. Morales lost power because of his own attempt to subvert the 2019 election.”
