Bolivia: the fall, the people, the blood and the fog

Since the forced resignation of President Evo Morales, Bolivia, under the dim national and international spotlight, has been plunged into a violent conflict^{1< /up>. On November 21, the deputy of the MAS [}Movimiento al Socialismo, party of Evo Morales] Sonia Brito draws up the tragic toll of 34 dead, 800 prisoners and more than 1,000 injured. , recalling the notable fact of staged acts of placing dynamite in inmates' belongings and then charging them with sedition². Armed with the same word, Communication Minister Roxana Lizárraga announced last November 14 that the “seditious” acts of the national and foreign press would be harshly reprimanded³. Under this same watchword, the government now provides a freephone number and encourages the denunciation of opposition leaders supposed to pay people to demonstrate, broadcasting on social networks boxes worthy of the best westerns. In addition, many witnesses assure that videos posted online are mysteriously removed by Facebook, an indication of more than worrying interference⁴... A look back at the last few weeks which have upset the political situation, and on the root causes of these conflicts. Article co-authored by Baptiste Mongis and Shezenia Hannover Valda.

On November 15, when Supreme Decree 4078 was issued granting the military the possibility of repression by all means at their disposal without risking legal proceedings⁵, a press release appeared of the "People of Abya Yala" to alert the international community^6; a petition from scientists around the world has been circulating since November 17⁷ and a press release from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights appeared on November 19⁸, the same day that in Senkata, El Alto, at least 9 people were killed. As early as November 23, delegations from the UN and the IACHR traveled to La Paz, El Alto and Cochabamba to collect testimonies⁹, as well as, more recently, an Argentinian delegation¹⁰.

The “coup or democratic revolt” debate to qualify the events preceding November 10 has at best caused a lot of ink to flow, when among some the hypothesis of an orchestrated overthrow of the former president native did not arouse even a suspicion¹¹.

The homogamy between the "civic movement" of the time, which led to the flight of President Morales to Mexico, and the style of the current transitional government to which he gave birth, now leaves less room for the benefit doubt and a little more macabre predictions. State of the current situation, listening to the voices and bodies that punctuate the territory in struggle, both urban and rural.

Crisis, paranoia and militarization

The MAS and Evo Morales, in 14 years of exercise, have made strategic mistakes and persisted in some, persisting in some unorthodox practices and having suffered the defection of several allies in recent years: this is what we are trying to describe, and with the support of well-founded arguments (although it would be a question of making an in-depth criticism) , a number of recently published communications¹². From there to justify, by explaining its supposed nature, the "civic" movement which led to the resignation of the president on November 10, there is only one step, more or less taken by certain authors^{13< /up>.}

However, it is legitimate to wonder, in a country that has come a long way and whose social and economic meters are green (Bolivia was the poorest country in Latin America, along with Haiti, on the eve of the investiture of Evo Morales; having halved his poverty rate, he is now one of the most dynamic in the region), how "the people" managed to dismiss him in such a short time, with high point the support of the police and the army, a government which recorded, still in 2014, 61% of the votes in the first round, and this while behind the border the government of Sebastian Piñera in Chile, largely unpopular by his neoliberal policies, takes more than a month of historic mobilizations without flinching, having his demonstrators massacred by the army, or that in Ecuador, Lenín Moreno, author of equally neoliberal policies absolutely contrary to his campaign slogans , remained despite the magnitude of the movement (particularly indigenous) which repudiated it.

On the one hand, some will say, the resignation of Evo Morales was basically expected, even desirable: three terms and a fourth unconstitutional, including the referendum to endorse his candidacy on February 21, 2016 was lost, all crowned with a “fraud”! It does not matter if so many others before him asked to modify their Constitutions or wished to perpetuate themselves in power (in countries where this is possible, such as Germany), that the referendum was lost by only 1% in a context cleverly engineered media scandal or that the said fraud, detected by the not very impartial Organization of American States, was denounced according to a protocol and a more than suspicious rhetoric which to this day still prevent it from being noticed (does it really took place?) or to determine its nature (if so, what was its real extent, who fomented it and in what way)¹⁴: the storytelling had already taken place and the President was withdrawn from the game. On the other hand, the same people will perhaps say, if it was a coup d'etat, "it would be seen". We must then open our minds, grasp the mechanism at work in this specific case¹⁵ and update our images of Épinal to understand that the nature of the latter has indeed changed ¹⁶. Because who is still unaware that neoliberalism does not learn from its mistakes to perfect itself in its art of usurping, precisely, the sovereignty of peoples – the very sovereignty that some claim by producing the return of the worst of usurpation? It's that shooting a left-wing president with a tank like in Pinochet's Chile or making 30,000 opponents disappear like in Videla's Argentina, "that doesn't happen anymore". What is always done, on the other hand, is to interfere for political and economic reasons in the affairs of others; and in this sense, we do not change the voracity of the old empires, and especially not of the United States; simply the varnish of their finery takes on other reflections (let’s reread the Raven and the Fox…). The sociologist Franck Poupeau casts a welcome suspicion in Le Monde with his questioning headline: “In Bolivia, there was a forced dismissal which strangely resembles a coup d’etat”¹⁷. The former director of Le Monde Diplomatique Maurice Lemoine, for his part, decides more frankly in favor of this second hypothesis^18a just like Renaud Lambert in this month's edition^18b . During the November 12 deliberation at the headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS), Mexico, Uruguay and, of course, Bolivia held a discourse radically opposed to that of the United States, considering that the holding new elections, advocated by the famous report produced by this same organization to assess the suspicion of electoral "fraud" (a report much less sharp than the interpretation that was made of it by the opposition to Morales), was indeed battered and interrupted by a coup¹⁹; coup d'etat recognized as such by the Mexico of López Obrador, the Uruguay of Tabaré Vazquez and the Argentina of the future president Alberto Fernández, without counting the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro, when Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump from the United States- United hailed a victorious and exemplary citizens' movement which the European Union, from the depths of its prudish neutrality, contented itself with calling for calm.

It is perhaps one of the first times in history that in a conjuncture where a system benefits relatively everyone²⁰ there has been such a violent and unexpected destitution: the worst presidents always managed to perpetuate themselves or, when they were forced to give up their current mandates (like Fernando de la Rúa in 2001 in Argentina or Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 in Bolivia), it is not when they commit a fraud - which they have always done, in one way or another - but when the successive measures taken are of an extremely anti-popular character and are crowned by bloody repressions against the lower classes. most disadvantaged (31 deaths in 2001 in Argentina; 69 deaths in 2003 in Bolivia). So what happened in 2019 in Bolivia?

Seeing whether or not an unprecedented political event corresponds to a prefabricated definition based on historical antecedents makes little sense: what takes place takes the form it must take and should be analyzed for itself , in the merely indicative light of the past. The fact is that a president forced to resign by defection from his police and army (whose worries have never had anything to do with a holy constitutional concern, no matter how their sociology evolves^{21< /sup>, rather responding to fractures and corporate interests22) ultimately achieves the same result as any “traditional” coup d'etat and suitably responds to the interests of those who want this to happen.}

It is that “complicating the understanding of popular political processes” is not supposed to “imply depriving us of assuming clear ethical and political decisions”, as María Pia López rightly reminded us for Página 12²³. Knowing how to position oneself: perhaps this would be the best way to confront a Bolivian press sold on the impeachment process in progress, and which believes it is good to place on the MAS the entire responsibility for the violence of current events by pretending to dig up old files from the bottom of the drawers of the vice-presidency of Álvaro García Linera, when the remarks quoted in support are nothing other than historically argued political speeches²⁴. The subject is then not to enter or not in the game of victimizing Evo Morales and his entourage, but to call a spade a spade, or a chameleon a chameleon.

Coups have always been given good reasons, and winning the support of part of the population has always been the challenge of their architects. We know that the ambition to overthrow Morales had been brewing for a long time²⁵; with or without a mistake by the president, one can suppose that the plan would have been implemented one day or another, because such is the specter which hangs over these more or less socialist governments whose ideas are too opposed to the interests of the world oligarchy (and whatever the pacts made with them), especially when they (still) conceal highly coveted natural resources, such as lithium for Bolivia²⁶. Strangling or ousting them is an old obsession of capitalist heavyweights. The irresistible rise of a reversal in Bolivia would therefore be consummated, in the name of the pursuit of the same interests as always, blind to other languages ​​and obsessed with the neoliberal homogenization of the world.

Because really, when did we see in history that an honest citizen movement claiming to be "democracy" against "dictatorship" (it's because binary and irreproachable oppositions are on the rise ), whose protagonists do not suffer from social, economic or identity restrictions, could overthrow in two weeks, suffering a few tear gas shots (and sporadic collateral victims), a government still largely legitimate (and legitimized again to the tune of 47 % of the votes in the ballot last October, or even a little less, depending on the extent of the said and very little circumscribed "fraud") under the pretext of a suspicion of electoral irregularity, in a context where the accused president, a priori winning in the first round or in any case largely in the lead – and in addition to its short and medium term tactical errors – had ended up calling for new elections under the aegis of a new tribunal? Everyone remains a prisoner of what their social environment allows them to perceive and think. But the enormous analytical bias is revealed by the deadly nature of recent events. No offense to this category of the mobilized population, often young, who play the rebels without moving their historical memory: all governments are and have always been corrupt in their own way, and this on all continents; this does not, in itself, make it a criterion of illegitimacy.

It is that a violent person, beyond his sincere desire to change, is often violent by inheritance because his parents or grandparents were violent, within their historical moment. In the same way, political representatives, beyond their sometimes sincere desire to transform models and practices, nevertheless remain prisoners of the structures and behaviors that preceded them. Transformations take time, provided they are sincere. Moreover, like any organization, subject to the greed of some and the tactical choices, sometimes questionable or even deplorable, of others, temporary governments are more than imperfect and irresistibly try to maintain themselves by all means to protect their supporters, satisfy their small interests or, in a more ethical way, not to let their adversaries undo the work done when it was worthy. Does that make all governments in the world dictatorships? Dictatorships which, for those who lived through them in Latin America, meant in their time the suspension of elections, the suppression of contradictory press and the systematic assassination of opponents. Is a "left-wing" government that has won parliamentary majorities on several occasions and through the ballot box more dictatorial than another "right-wing" government which, through its age-old complicity with the local oligarchs, owns all the media when he disposes of both the state apparatus and private companies?

We could multiply the sets of inverted mirrors; the argument of "verticalism", "fraud" or "corruption" is hollow to justify such a rout, all the weaker since this movement which challenged Morales was not based on any serious political argument²⁷ nor any proposal for an alternative (for example, we would have liked them to exhibit in their cabildos [large gatherings] the denunciation of the pro-agribusiness logic of the MAS which fanned the fires in the Chiquitania forest, but that would have been too much to ask). Their enraged workhorse obeyed only the whip of this single word, “democracy”, therefore. Repeated with shouts and the crash of saucepans used for their sound quality (while they were the symbol of scarcity during historic demonstrations where citizens, deprived of resources and work, died of hunger for real), this concept has never been heard in the anti-Evo mobilizations for the political challenge it represents (no one has mentioned the idea of ​​inventing new institutions, rethinking direct democracy, the dismissal of elected officials, the drawing lots, writing and voting of laws directly by citizens, etc.). On the contrary, it has activated the most contradictory acts with the democratic idea, starting with the increment of a reactionary paranoia in the neighborhoods of La Paz that motivated night guards worthy of the war of fire.

Street blockades swarmed in every corner, and it was impossible to cross the barbed wire without being suspected of wanting to rob the neighbour's house or wanting to blow up the nearby gas station. Each passage, like a toll, was rewarded by the mobilized inhabitants with sidelong glances, muscular approaches armed with sticks in order to open the trunks of cars or lower the cameras of the most daring. The Bolivian capital has turned into a city besieged by hypothetical waves of vandals; a sensation fueled by a few unwelcome acts of profiteering, but above all by the media insinuating that the now famous “mas hordes” would strike anywhere for their thirst for revenge. Once Evo was thrown out of power, these movements of "self-convoked" inhabitants redoubled their vigilance, until finally the capital emptied itself of its self-organized watchtowers which had nothing inherently political about it: it only acted to defend the respectable neighborhoods against these alteños (inhabitant of El Alto, mostly working-class outskirts located on the heights of La Paz) quick to ransack the habitats of the brave citizens, blindly following the orders of their late deposed leader who pays them copiously to carry out the dirty work (at a time when many protagonists have indeed been paid, them, by mysterious principals to sow disorder).

A generalized fear which, fueled by centuries of prejudice, reinforces a climate of adulterated civil war where part of the urban population suddenly demands what the transitional government offers them without complaining: the support of an omnipresent police force and the army in the streets; a police force which, in reality faithful to its methods and hated by another part of the population less screwed to its anxiety-provoking big screen, sometimes acts in a surprising way. In Ciudad Satelite, yet the most "middle-class" district of El Alto, an old lady tells us how her little nephew, also suffering from a recent skull operation, was taken away in a completely arbitrary way without having committed any malicious act; the ransom to be able to get him out is more than 7,000 bolivianos (930 euros): "Now I know", she confides, "I see how corrupt they are, how they pay them to arrest anyone without care about the facts! It is deplorable”.

A young German student on a mission in Bolivia tells us about a similar treatment that must have had the misfortune to be commonplace. As he marched peacefully with his Bolivian partner and other demonstrators, a few days after the resignation of Evo Morales, carrying aloft the colors of the Wiphala (the indigenous flag) after the humiliating episode of his cremation by forces of order, a platoon of policemen on motorcycles falls on them with great reinforcements of tear gas. Without warning, the small troop is embarked in a van; some, unaccustomed to being abused in this way, cry with fear; in response, agents call them names and gasse them in the face. Once at the UTOP (Unidad Táctica de Operaciones Especiales), they are rewarded with a rush of blows. Being a foreigner is not necessarily an asset: despite his almost perfect Spanish, we believe our suspect, because of his accent, a Cuban or Venezuelan spy. He owes his release to his companion who, having been able to discuss with a policewoman, obtains to be released with his friend. The others, on the other hand, are transferred to the prison of San Pedro, like several people who, sometimes, "passed by chance in the street near a zone in tension and found themselves embarked for nothing", says the young man. For him, there is no doubt: structurally, “they take anyone on board to fill the prisons and thus prove that there are indeed troublemakers and that the police are doing their job well”; psychologically, “they let off steam on you, gratuitously, violently, out of sight”.

If the status of interim president does not differ constitutionally, in terms of responsibilities, from that of elected president, the transitional president Jeanine Áñez is aware that she is not the depositary of any mandate of the people . This lack of legitimacy should lead it to act as neutrally as possible, in other words, to ensure the administrative management of the State and organize new elections as soon as possible. However, many acts of his government are of a fundamentally political nature and throw enough oil on the fire by seriously questioning the expressed wish to guarantee peace.

The main instigator of the fall of Evo Morales, the sulphurous far-right multimillionaire entrepreneur Luis Fernando Camacho²⁸ (now a candidate for the new presidential election²⁹) , also quoted in the Panama Papers affair, is none other than the current president of the Civic Committee of Santa Cruz and the former vice-president of the Union of Crucenic Youth (which is one of them). branches), described by the International Federation for Human Rights as a racist paramilitary organization targeting the Aymara Indians, who are strongly suspected of being involved in the murder of some thirty peasants in the Beni department in 2008 and in the subsequent attempt coup d'etat and then assassination against Evo Morales. Convinced of being (or seeking to persuade that he is) in charge of a divine mission³⁰, he entered the evacuated presidential palace on November 10, placing the Bible there on the tiled floor. while in the street mutinous police burned the Wiphala. Jeanine Áñez found nothing incongruous in declaring, posing at her side with the sacred book in her arms, that "The Bible has returned to the palace", and taking the oath before a Christian cross when the Plurinational State of Bolivia is a secular state (which she does not hesitate to tell the BBC that this characteristic is the result of a "manipulation of the MAS"³¹) and that the indigenous peoples, if many are Christians by the result of colonization, are more willing to practice syncretism and venerate the Pachamama. Moreover, the decision to allow many characters who have harmed national interests, and who were dismissed by Evo Morales, to return to the country, outrages a large part of the population formerly wronged by these actors^32. The president also withdrew from ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, once created by Hugo Chávez; but also, as Amanda Chaparro wrote in Le Monde on November 15, "Venezuelan embassy staff have been asked to leave the country in the coming days as the interim government has severed diplomatic relations with Nicolas Maduro , recognizing opponent Juan Guaido, who declared himself interim president in January '³³.

Jeanine Áñez is part of the Social Democratic Movement (Movimiento Democrata Social), of Catholic obedience, led by Ruben Costas, current governor of the department of Santa Cruz (where Luis Fernando Camacho is active), and of which party Oscar Ortiz, opponent of Morales in the last election and which it is suspected that he was originally presumed to be the political instrument of the coup; this movement is affiliated with the International Democratic Union (IDU) founded in 1983 under the leadership of Jacques Chirac, Georges Bush (father), Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl.

Wouldn't being legitimately elected be the sine qua non for deciding such matters? The publication of Supreme Decree 4078 [since withdrawn, editor’s note] finished cooling the spines of the most vulnerable and raising indignation. The fatal toll that resulted is 34 dead and more than 1,000 injured in ten days. When the army had worthily invoked, to justify its mutiny against Evo Morales on November 10, that it would refuse to repress the people, we can only see that the excuse falls within the scope of double standards. When it comes to indigenous peasants, and under the false pretext that some are armed, it is permissible to open fire without too many scruples, since "some are terrorists", and those who are not but are in the middle “didn't have to be there”; in these terms we will have exposed their point of view several people questioned in the streets of La Paz.

Terrible campaign; unseemly peasants

When a terrible repression had just taken place on November 15 in Sacaba, near Cochabamba, common sense urged us to move away from the city to go and listen to other voices. It's that these "people" who cut off the streets to force Morales to give up, and who no one fired live ammunition at, are mainly urban and middle-class, although sometimes rallied by a few working-class sectors and unions (some of which, realizing the fatal error that was theirs in being in the wrong ally, quickly, but too late, changed tack again, such as the COB, the Central Obrera Boliviana)^{34< /up>. It is because this people is not all the people, far from it; it is above all the one who has the means to act, which in the case of some of its protagonists can do without a few days of work, and which has been coordinated – except in La Paz, or indirectly – by Civic Committees linked to the entrepreneurial sectors (whose resources and repertoires of action should be analyzed from a greater distance) having benefited from substantial national and international support; a part of the people, therefore, of which several hypotheses lead to believe that he was indeed the useful idiot – and whatever were his sincere motivations – of a skilfully orchestrated coup d'etat35 . A people, therefore, to which the police and the army have sworn allegiance, surely forgetting the other half that they repress today without worrying about reviving their so noble spirit of sedition. Today, the “seditious” are the others, the bad ones. And we speak a little less of “democracy” than of “pacification”, another positive word which it is worth observing how it applies in reality. It is that the other people, the one that must be pacified, that is to say above all that of the countryside (and whose votes mainly in favor of the MAS arrived last in the count, increasing without surprise the advantage of 'Evo Morales in the home stretch), is mobilizing especially on his land. The battle is therefore well and truly underway, superbly ignored by the media or subjected to sensationalist distortion when the spectacular nature of the clashes does not allow them to be evaded.}

Near Mallasa, in the southeast of La Paz, on the outskirts of Rio Abajo where we went, the community of Taypichullu presents us with another face and shares with us new discourses. From the crossroads where a vehicle dropped us off, refusing to take the risk of going any further, we walked for two hours in a guerrilla landscape on a road strewn with stones, piles of earth, tree trunks and signs. claims. The inhabitants stare at us with suspicion, but without any aggression. The first greetings are exchanged with smiles. After passing a first sparsely guarded dam and crossing the Lipari bridge, we climb the mountain to cross the bends formed by the road and arrive on the plateau at the level of a second dam. A huge tree trunk has been thrown across the path: seated on it, and installed all around, hundreds of locals are looking at us, and in particular on the two whites of the gang. Immediately resounds one, then several "Camacho!" Camacho! ". But the smile is on our lips: the pole is stretched, and like a password, our gestures of denial and our “Never! » answer them as a sign of confidence. Then follow the: “Mesa? Jeanine? » ; you have to show your credentials and get into the game: “Months more! Surely not ! ". “And the Wiphala, where is it? », throws us a woman. “We left him there, for fear that the soldiers would manhandle us! Next time we bring it! ". The blackmail will have been very kind and short-lived. They are more than 300, "and this is only a small part of the community: we take turns", they explain to us.

We continue our way to the community where one of the inhabitants was killed near Mallasa on Monday, November 11, in clashes between the inhabitants and the police supported by the army. As we meet a leader and offer our condolences to the family in front of the coffin, a woman with a paler complexion than the others steps forward and insists that “this man died by accident! You have to be very clear. Because very often the press comes and distorts reality! He wasn't shot! What media are you from? ". During the interview she grants us with her darker-skinned brother, the exchange is polarized to say the least: one seeks to defend, with superb calm, the reason why his colleague, who had more seventy years old, fell into the void: "It's the fault of the police and the army! They suppressed us! “, but the woman cuts him off: “No, no, it was an accident, we must not say that, we want peace, now the community is looking for peace! ". The discussion becomes clearer: “I am a Christian, I say it bluntly, and here we are all trying to make sure that everything goes for the best from now on! We don't want any more victims! ". The objective of calming the deal, coated in a quite audible fear, seems to want to cover both the truth of the facts and the nature of the conflict. If his neighbor does not call for more violence, it still seems necessary to him to clarify what happened, and to recall the reason for the fight: "None of this would have happened if they had let us lead our peaceful march, and if they let us lead our own struggle, as legitimate as theirs”.

We then speak with the brother of the victim who, moved and in a few words, tells us what the community has experienced. According to him, the misinformation operated by the media and social networks leads to the worst situations. On November 10, opposition presidential candidate Carlos Mesa posted a tweet saying that he had been told that groups of criminals were preparing to burn down his house near Mallasa. The brother of the deceased is disconcerted: “We? Burn down this gentleman's house? Never ! Who would have done that around here? For what ? And then we don't even know where she is, her house! ".

A little later, on the way back, the same counter-scenario is presented by another resident about the fire – well and truly consumed, this one – at the town hall of Mallasa, the previous week , of which the local residents were accused³⁶. A man, in his fifties, is formal: “The Mallasa town hall was vandalism! Nothing to do with us, the community! And yet they accused us! ".

A little further on, in Jupapina, halfway between Mallasa and Taypichullu, a suspicious woman told us to turn off our cameras as we were taking pictures: “Who are you? What are you filming? Where are you going to broadcast this, and say what? We don't want pictures! ". We explain to him that we are independent and will make good use of these clichés, and that we support the fight. The tone softens, and the subject of the burned town hall returns to the carpet: “They say it’s us! They call us names! But it's not us, and above all, it was organized! They had time to take most of their equipment, and to justify that, they said that we had stolen everything before setting fire! Liars…”, she laments. She catches her breath, overwhelmed by the emotion that rises as the word unfolds, and continues: “We are not masistas [du MAS, parti d’Evo Morales]. Here we do the olla común [sharing a soup cooked in community]. There are no parties! The police and the military land here and shout at us: “The Indians go home!“ But this is our home! And then they tell us: “We are going to kill you all”. The soldiers beat us as they wanted, with their weapons in their hands. They make us empty our aguayos [traditional colorful fabric tied to the backs of women to carry goods… or babies]. They grabbed neighbors by the hair and made them fuck their boots! Nobody did anything! And no one shows anything! This portal which carries our claims, no one ever shows it! They just show the stones on the ground, and comment on top of what they want! ". Rage disputes him with tears. A sidekick takes over and summarizes: “We are calling for the resignation of the president, we are fighting against discrimination, and we will not let them in, the soldiers, we want justice, and for that we are blocking, and we are doing peaceful marches : we have no weapons! ". When we walk away, they greet us and thank us for having taken their word.

Our bad faith would lead us to believe that all these people are obeying obscure instructions from the MAS and are hiding the truth from us, but then what actors! To do battle with all these liars, we decide to sit a little further in the middle of the barricades. Several of the mobilized inhabitants come to gather around us, out of curiosity, and perhaps out of a desire to express themselves; proof in any case that it is not every day that foreigners – and even less white people – come to cram into their community and worry about their fate. However, no one dares to speak: we are told to refer to the leaders. Political control, some would say, which would not be wrong; we prefer to see in it the concern to keep a coherent and centralized discourse in the face of the risks of usurpation by unscrupulous journalists. But since there is no leader nearby and we kindly decide to buy a few pouches of coca leaves, the discussion begins on our proposal: “What do you have to say? What do you want people to know? ". The first answer, again, is that they are not masistas: “We are Indigenous people in struggle, that’s all! “says one of them. Then the word emerges, or rather begins to flow in torrents of words imbued with anger and sadness, fear and resignation. Everyone wants to express themselves, but respects the time of the other: “We are not paid to be there! We are here by conviction! ". We look back on the events of Monday: “We marched to Mallasa, where they violently repressed and gassed us. This is where our compañero fell into the ravine. They repressed us with gas, then by firing real ammunition. Soldiers in civilian clothes also beat women. »

A detonation of dynamite makes us jump: the community members blow one up from time to time to show their presence, their eyes on the watch on the road below. Dynamite, tool of the miner and which makes them, according to the media, dangerous assassins.

An old woman, hesitant at first, finally approaches our recorder: “The Wiphala! If she studied [interim president Jeanine Añez], and Evo didn't, then she should know better than him! But she knows nothing! Each color of the Wiphala has a meaning. She doesn't know, but we do, we know! Each of us is there for the conscience, for the proceso de cambio [“process of change”, political line established by the MAS] that there has been, and we will make ourselves heard until they respect us. Before they didn't respect us, and we didn't really know, we allowed ourselves to be humiliated, but thanks to Evo now we know who we are, we know our rights. They believe they have come to power? We're not going to let them. "Vandals", they tell us. But they walked on us! And we remained with our arms crossed, we supported, supported, we endured because Evo told us patience, patience. For almost 20 days with their paros cívicos [civic roadblocks] they did what they wanted in town, and we watched. And now that this president has arrived... sorry, but for me she's nobody, she's nobody, compared to Evo, and she thinks she can do anything! Until the last we will fight here. What do they believe? That there are no deaths here? How many dead, injured? Who will count them? We will continue to die! Soldiers, police, to my brothers in the east, in Chasquipampa, they beat them too! And I also have family in Santa Cruz. They do not come out of their houses, out of fear. Yesterday, planes passed over us. And tonight, a drone. »

She then speaks to us of political exiles about to return to their country or of prisoners soon to be released: “Are they going to get them out, those who killed us? Everything we fought for, in the blood! ". She protests, values ​​the strength to come from peasant mobilizations: "If all the departments came out, the 20 departments, I don't know what would happen, my God, things would happen, and we don't want get there! But as she steps aside, steps back. Everything is very pretty inside, from the city, but outside, what happens? ". A crucial point of the strategy is looming: “Those in the city, who feeds them? To the rich, I say to them: their money will no longer be of any use to them! We're not going to send any more food to the city. What are they going to eat? »

A woman, in her fifties, perhaps an activist, makes a well-rehearsed and breathless speech: “Here the first objective we have, with all my brothers and sisters, is the resignation of the president. We disagree with her. He has 60 days left. But in 2 days, how many deaths already? “I am the people“, she says. For us it is not the people. She called herself ³⁷. We who suffer are the people. They talk about fraud, theft! We governed for 14 years, and them, how long did they fly? Santa Cruz, Tarija, everyone validated it [to the interim president]! But they are landowners! Who are we here? I don't understand. They, these politicians of ADN [Acción Democratica Nacionalista, a right-wing party founded by dictator Hugo Banzer in 1979] and of the MNR [Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario, long led by Victor Paz, instigator of the 1952 revolution, having experienced following a neoliberal turn to which ex-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and his then vice-president Carlos Mesa - the main opponent of Evo Morales in the 2019 presidential election - both responsible for the 69 killed by the armed forces in October 2003 belong], how much do they have in their pockets? And we, who have barely started to have something, are we going to have to give up the little we have obtained? DOCTOR: Camacho: he burned down the whole country! And he doesn't get a single day in jail? But for our brothers, who fight and who militate, yes, there is prison! For that policeman who tore up and burned the Wiphala, and humiliated us, from prison? Neither ! And we are going to be satisfied with that? Is this dignity? We are going to lead this fight to the last consequences. The southern zone [well-to-do neighborhoods of La Paz, very mobilized against Evo Morales]: they started, very well, now that they come to see here, because they are going to starve, really I am outraged by these young people, we work so that they can live! But they will survive, they have everything: they will start eating these transgenic products, imported from China or Peru, and they will inflate like balloons! And in the end, they will be sick! I am a producer, I know what I am talking about, they are going to have illnesses! What we produce here is good, it's fresh, it's healthy. »

When asked why these famous young people from the southern zone mobilized, she remains perplexed, and seeks an answer: "Surely because Evo should not have given them what they wanted".

We then hear injunctions and whistles: “To your posts! ". A car looms in the distance on the road, but it is alone, and finally turns around. False alarm. The community, however, was on the alert, ready to intervene.

A woman, at least 70 years old, recounts the struggle: "We haven't eaten since yesterday, us, our children, our animals, because we don't stop walking: and during this time we are losing crops... I I'm not going to complain about my products, but I want my kids to have what they need for life. But let them cry all their life, no! »

The assessment of Evo Morales is considered very positive here: “Now thanks to Evo we have colleges, in Palomar, in Huajchilla, in Mecapaca! “says a resident. “Evo was a peasant, he protected us, brought us justice”. The luxury that this “peasant” sometimes offered himself – his plane, his helicopter, his suite in his high tower in Plaza Murillo in La Paz, presented by the press as the standard of his lack of credibility (without worrying about the historical wealth accumulated by the opposition), and whose display we can indeed regret if we compare this lifestyle to that, more rudimentary, of the ex-president of Uruguay Pepe Mujica – this luxury, therefore, does not concern not so much the local population: for them, this is not the problem³⁸. Another resident is indignant at the media treatment having exhibited the personal belongings of Evo Morales on television after people entered the famous tower serving as the presidential palace: “They show all his clothes! But what are these people doing? They burned them, they dyed the mayor's hair [de Vinto, MAS activist, humiliated in a public place]! If we were like them, sorry for the word, but it's the truth: drugged! If we were drugged like them, we could do things too, we could go to his hotel [of Carlos Mesa], he is right there. If she doesn't change lines, the revenge will be double! We will get there! But we don't want to, we are educated! But they are the ones who started it! ". She adds a demand to the list: “Let them stop persecuting our leaders! They follow them, threaten them by telephone! They are racists! They burn their houses, without caring if there are children inside or not! And this woman [Jeanine Añez] who is supposed to be more educated than us, how does she insult her, at Evo? And they're giving him a gold medal for that? The grace she received! These words she uses, we don't use them! They call us vandals! But we are not armed, unlike them! And they are paid! We don't, but they say yes! We are here for our conscience as human beings, and it is priceless! Nobody buys us here. What did we do to get them to send us the soldiers? ".

Another woman, of the same age and just as reckless, adds: “They hunt us as if we were animals! We have wounded, dead! This is the dictatorship! "I'm going to kill you, you fucking bitch!", like that they talk to us, the soldiers! We are Aymaras [main indigenous community in Bolivia – with the Quechuas – from which Evo Morales comes]! Me it hurts me, everything she does this woman, we do not recognize her. She hates the Natives. From now on no vegetable will come out of here. We are the canasta familiar [the “food resource”] of La Paz. She humbles us so much. How they burned the Wiphala. How are we going to forget that? Now there is no more discrimination, she says! Our president [Evo Morales] made us respect. Now you can enter anywhere, and that bothered them at the k’ara [Whites, in Aymara]. But we will always fight! Let her give up! She's an assassin, for real! With a coup d'etat she entered! Is this unity? Until the last we will fight. But the brothers, the poor, they will suffer! But it won't last..."

Then comes the subject of fraud, on which hypotheses are rife; we can then question what is the part of belief and the part of relevant intuition in the remarks made: "Someone has put money so that there is this break in the count [of the TREP, counting system rapid of the Supreme Electoral Court], so that the people of the city say that there was fraud! ". Then the theme of the next elections supposed to be held in January, or perhaps in March, looms: "I don't know who this Camacho is, I don't know what to call him, I don't know what blood he has, he must not be Bolivian. We're not going to accept that, if it comes up. We want somebody of our race, a Native, somebody from here, not somebody from outside. Let a new leader come, someone who does not have dirty hands, who has not made any mistakes, to him, yes, we will support him! We will pass over the reverse racism at work here: in a country where a large majority of inhabitants are indigenous or mestizo, where almost all the presidents before Evo Morales were white, where former president Sánchez de Lozada spoke with a English accent and where we strongly suspect that Luis Fernando Camacho receives financial support from the United States, outrageously depositing the Bible on the floor of the presidential palace to fire his Indian tenant, we can understand what drives the reaction of this interlocutor.

As we leave, we meet a mother with her young daughter, a teenager, dressed in jeans: “We are from La Paz, we came to help our parents who live here, to bring them food”.

At the exit of the city, we always cherish the hope, if not to hear at least a criticism of the MAS, at least to obtain another version of the events in order to invalidate the previous ones. But nothing helps, the inhabitants persist in their consistency, giving us other small details. A very dynamic old woman still says, about this Monday, November 11: “They gasified us! They came straight in, with gas and machine guns, and this guy died in the ensuing panic.”

Her friend, who watches over the roadblock with her, continues: "This president is very racist, she hates us, the mujeres de pollera [literally, "women with skirts", designating the traditional rural Bolivian dress, apron , thick skirts with several ruffles, bowler hats and braids tied at the bottom of the back]. There is no justice for us, but for the rich, yes! When there was mobilization in town, nothing was happening here. Before there was no police or military here. And since then, they haven't stopped! When Evo retired on Sunday, there were no fatalities. This woman arrived and she immediately sent us the soldiers! How many dead, how many wounded, since? The bourgeois in town, now everything is normal they say, but no! For them it's good, but for us not at all! ".

We learn that that morning, while we were at the wake a little further downstream, military vehicles entered the city, explaining the disorder of the installations which had moved since the morning: "They were there , again with their weapons, they smashed our roadblocks, but not quite fortunately, and I cried, my God, there could have been so many more deaths if they had managed to get all the way there [until 'at Taypichullu] but luckily they didn't insist. They also grabbed two young people and beat them, hard, so hard, and stripped them of all their clothes! Then they took away eight people including two women to beat them, then they released them and left them there! They were at least 60 soldiers, there were 11 trucks, including 3 tanks. We have the videos of them entering the city. And they were shouting at us: “Go home, you filthy shits!” We didn’t come back, we escaped. We just want them to stop hurting us. »

The other woman says, “They are threatening us. The journalists, they don't see us, they don't pay attention to us. They call us criminals, thieves [maleantes, rateros], they accuse us of blocking the road without trying to understand… And then there are those who take advantage of it, of course, who vandalize…”.

A man on a motorcycle has approached the roadblock, the woman is initially repulsive to him: “We are not going through! ". The other replies, with a smile, that it is for the community. “Good, but pass to the side then, do not undo the barrier! ".

His sidekick explains: “They started them, with their Civic Committee strikes, and then the Camacho arrived, the city was quiet, but he was already killing people over there, in Santa Cruz. They're the ones who started it, that's why people react here... but we don't have any weapons! We produce vegetables! What are we going to defend ourselves with, our carrots? With what ? ".

We walk away, pensive, sincerely interested in the art of wielding the zucchini against the machine gun. On the bridge, in the opposite direction, a tag with a dubious spelling gives us a last smile: “Camacho, facho, te vamos a hacer piquemacho“ [“Camacho, fascist, we are going to cook you in piquemacho“ – the piquemacho is a relatively heavy dish consisting of portions of fries, pepper, tomato, sausage and egg].

Return to town: the emergence of communities

In this indigenous community as in others, many, if not most, care little about knowing at the end of account whether there was fraud or not: this does not call into question their vote in favor of the MAS and their support for its project. The perpetuation of this leader in power, he who brought them so much materially and symbolically, whether with or against certain democratic principles, did not worry them. Their concern lies, on the one hand, in maintaining their living conditions, or survival, always suspended and precarious for a long time before the arrival of the MAS and, on the other hand, in the recognition of their identity ( and, although too little respected in practice, of their autonomy). The feeling of losing both, moreover in such incongruous conditions and of incredible symbolic violence, risks mobilizing them for a long time. Their calculation is simple, and not without foundation: “They fired Evo, we will fire Jeanine”.

The standoff between the countryside and the city is effective: the peasant blockade works on the depletion of supplies and consequently generates sudden inflation. In Sopocachi, a cultured middle-class district of La Paz, from 12 bolivianos, a kilo of chicken has gone up to 30 bolivianos (4 euros), and the delicious orange cheese that we cut into slices for breakfast is no longer available. . A street vendor on the street in El Alto sighs: her supplier has raised the price of the chocolate bags she sells on the sidewalk. Around the corner, at 9 p.m., a line formed in front of a shopping cart to buy bread. But the hardest part is gasoline: the stations are no longer refueled. Several vehicles are on their reserve or can already no longer drive. This is the case of the garbage trucks in El Alto: the garbage piles up in improbable mounds that delight stray dogs. It wouldn't occur to the inhabitants, asks a neighbor, to organize themselves to pick them up themselves: here, in Ciudad Satelite, the only part of El Alto anti-Evo, people believe they have paid for a service that is not rendered to them and most of them disapprove of this behavior of peasant communities: “They may have the right to demonstrate, but we have the right to eat! “, indignantly a resident.

On the Prado, the main avenue of La Paz, a father quietly seated with his son on a public bench is a little more direct: "There are people who are currently committing acts of sedition, who are preventing us from live. In addition, Venezuelans and Cubans are getting involved, it is an act of war against Bolivia. We have to do something, repress them, put bullets in the heads of all of them! ". A taxi, on the contrary in solidarity with the movement, shares its fears with us: "In El Alto we won't be able to hold out for long like that... our stocks will run out". Others, on the other hand, believe that the periphery can continue for a long time because its mobilization only started late, while the cuts of the previous civic movement in La Paz have exhausted the city for a few weeks: "El Alto can besiege La Paz , since it is above, all around, and the main access roads to the capital pass through it; but La Paz cannot besiege El Alto”, comments a cultural activist from the Wayna Tambo association, which has been working for almost 30 years for the Villa Dolores neighborhood in El Alto.

The other people, after watching the movement of "civics" in the city from afar and with a worried eye, then having consulted for a long time in their communities to decide on the way forward, have suddenly come to appear in broad daylight, endowed with a remarkable female protagonism. Since Monday, November 18, they have trod the cobblestones of the capital in a surge of Wiphalas. We heard in these marches "Áñez, asesina, los muertos no se olvidan" ("Áñez, assassin, the dead are not forgotten"), "La muerte no es transitoria" ("death is not transitional"; ironic reference to the current "transitional" government), accompanied on the sidewalks by much welcome applause. Several indigenous communities from different provinces gathered in the square in front of the San Francisco³⁹ church to a background of chanting and shouting: “We are the people! "The Wiphala respects itself!" ". We collect some testimonies on the spot:

A woman in her sixties: "I'm not a political figure, I came from my town on foot, I'm a craftswoman, I don't receive a salary, I'm a tenant, I don't have a house, when they don't come to tell me that I have money! No ! I come by my own will! This government, that one yes, it is a dictatorship! What right is she going to keep killing us like this? »

From a gathering of communities in the department of Oruro, with loud cries of “Oruro está presente!” “, stands out the statement of a leader:” I have lived in Santa Cruz since I was 3 years old, never in my life have I seen such atrocities committed by a self-proclaimed government! For them, democracy was to tear and burn our Wiphala, this symbol that represents the 36 indigenous nations of Bolivia recognized by the Political Constitution of the State (CPE). We saw how they humiliated the mujeres de pollera, it is unacceptable! We urge the 9 departments to unite to defend true democracy! Let's appeal to the international community to see what is really happening in Bolivia! Today, these people are the real people, and not the ones who came out the first 21 days to block us, to claim their supposed democracy, which for them is the violation of our constitutional rights, which is pure discrimination and racism. This woman, Jeanine Áñez, removed the Wiphala from her own presidential scarf, she does not represent us! We demand that in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly be created a commission of inquiry which judges and punishes all the intellectual and material authors of this civic, police and military coup d'etat which until now has only humiliated the Bolivian people! »

A woman, in her fifties: “Friends of the southern zone [well-to-do middle class], get involved too! I have friends there, mobilize, for all those who die! We are all Bolivian citizens! Let's fight together for our country, we don't need to be militants, let's defend our democracy! Cochabamba, Potosi, Tarija, Beni, Pando! I have just arrived from Beni: they do not inform anything! Friends of the press: inform! I prefer to give up my job rather than say the opposite of what is happening in my country. There are roads, schools, hospitals: this government has achieved so much, and I feel happy because I see young people playing in their football stadium, going to school, very poor people in houses! Before there was no violence in La Paz, and these civicos from Santa Cruz arrived, and look! The end of his words drown in tears.

Another, in her sixties: “I am from Oruro, I have six children, one is with me, the others stayed there. Here the Bolivian brothers and sisters are united! We have no police defense or media coverage! We need international support, they are killing us! We have no protection, they burned the houses of our leaders! They don't let us leave our provinces! We have no weapons! Them, these young people from Santa Cruz, yes they have them! The media are laughing at us! Let them leave the country if they don't want to work for Bolivia! »

A 23-year-old girl: “We are from Cosmos 79 [El Alto neighborhood], I am a student at the public university of El Alto. I am here for my neighborhood, for my parents, for my brothers and sisters. We are all here and we want the president to resign, to leave Bolivia, to release our imprisoned friends, and for the decrees to be canceled, and also to cancel the authorization given to the exiles to return. How can Goni [Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada] come back to Bolivia after all the harm he has done to us? Let the young people mobilize and let nothing leave the country! The lithium is ours! [reference to Bolivia's abundant untapped lithium reserves in the Uyuni region, which fueled predation by foreign forces and supposedly motivated the coup]"

But it was in Senkata, south of El Alto, that the real and tragic action took place on Tuesday, October 19. The entry of petrol tankers has been interrupted for several days because local residents have dug trenches which they guard day and night to block any passage. The army is then "sent to negotiate peacefully, and without using firearms", as the government will relate that evening. The reality on the spot is significantly different: that day there were at least six dead shot dead, and many injured. The images of the evacuated bodies are shocking. A nurse in tears testifies to the disaster⁴⁰ in a video, saying he is overwhelmed and scared by this violence; he would later be the victim of a defamation campaign accusing him of being an undercover MAS militant disguised as a doctor (despite the evidence provided by his function badge), and finally arrested by the police. Several films clearly show the use that was made of firearms, and even bullet holes on the ground from shots from the helicopter which flew over the area all afternoon⁴¹.

The next day, a funeral wake of several hundred of people is organized in memory of the victims, the list of these having lengthened to nine, but there would be more: the current scandal is that the soldiers would refuse to return certain bodies, feeding on the part of the families the suspicion that they want to make them disappear. It is also rumored that journalists Fernando Ortega Zabala (Argentinian) and Fernando Ortiz (Mexican), pursued by the military and after hiding while delivering a few desperate tweets, disappeared in El Alto following the repression⁴² .

The battle of Wednesday, November 20 is then media. Social networks are clogged with false communications: among others, that of the fake doctor who also sometimes disguises himself as a policeman⁴³; or that concerning the cultural association Wayna Tambo, respected by all, and which precisely, because it is one of the only ones to go on the ground during mobilizations and to report the facts, would be "illegal and seditious" and would spread "false and alarming" information about the situation in Senkata while harboring "Cubans and Venezuelans to sell them drugs".

These defamations of Internet users, supported by the tone of the main official media, then enter into synergy with the official announcements of a government that surpasses itself in communicating the worst aberrations. The latest, and most insane, is the statement that MAS militants, with the help of foreign financial resources, are threatening to blow up the gas reserve of the Planta YPFB in Senkanta with dynamite, thereby running the risk of razing half of the city of El Alto and justifying, with the support of the gullible part of the population, the worst of the military intervention (which the government will continue to deny that it used its weapons fire).

On Thursday 21, a gigantic march is organized and thousands of demonstrators, including many elderly people and several families, will walk the 12 kilometers that separate Senkata from La Paz, carrying the coffins of the victims on the roof of vehicles⁴⁴. The parade is peaceful, and the accusations are leveled against this government which hides the struggles like the disastrous results of its repressive operations. Once the head of the march reached the obelisk, in the heart of the capital, and while the crowd demanded justice without clashes, the police fired before our eyes, in a totally arbitrary way, their first shots of tear gas. Panic seizes the crowd, taken aback, who flee in a disorderly fashion. Coffins are abandoned on the spot, elderly people faint under the amount of gas and children are lost in the stampede; seated on the sidewalks a little further on, people are crying with dismay and rage: “They don't even respect our dead! » ⁴⁵. While some demonstrators protested the situation or tried to film the events independently, they were carried away by the police, sometimes even denounced by the local press and accused of sedition⁴⁶ . Dozens of people wearing the Wiphala are embarked without warning. Testimonies, collected the same day, complete the speech: at the Holandés hospital in Ciudad Satelite, where 19 wounded were received on the evening of November 19, 10 were supposedly released, according to information provided to the reception, given the superficial nature of their injuries. After investigation, it turns out that they were on the contrary expelled from the premises, gaping wounds, under the pretext that their families had not presented themselves; a witness assures us that in reality these wounded were extremely badly treated, recounting the distressing words of a doctor to his patient testifying to the effectiveness of media misinformation and hysteria escalated in recent weeks: " Why should I treat you, hope you dirty terrorist? ".

Conclusion. Two peoples, one country

What is democracy if not the equitable and real power of all the people, including that immense part which has historically been excluded from the capacity to exercise power and express his identity, and to whom Evo Morales has been able to return his fair share of protagonism? Was it not, from this point of view, the great democratic moment in Bolivia, beyond its incompleteness and its inconsistencies; his true political sequence? Because as Jacques Rancière writes, “politics begins when there is a break in the distribution of spaces and skills – and incompetences. It begins when beings destined to remain in the invisible space of work, which leaves no time to do anything else, take this time they do not have to affirm themselves as co-sharers in a common world, to make visible what could not be seen, or to hear as speech discussing on the common what was heard only as the noise of bodies⁴⁷". An opposition which, believing and wanting to be the distant echo of Europe and the United States, continues to draw opportunistic parallels when it comes to comparing its Bolivia with the arbitrary vision it has of “ Castro-Chavist countries” – Cuba and Venezuela – while taking great care to ignore the disaster of long-standing neoliberalism in Chile and Colombia or more recently in Argentina or Ecuador. An opposition in which many continue to believe that the previous government was foolish enough to place ignorant Indigenous people in key positions in the state, for the simple reason that they were Indigenous and did not have control of this bureaucratic discourse so excluding of which the worst technocrats have the secret.

The irony is that the authors of the speeches who have criticized this power for its tendentious corruption are only thinking of their own interests (their family, their livelihood, their business), and everything suggests that When they came to power, they would have done at least as much. No community, collectivist dimension, except that of arming oneself against the “rascals” – like the classic fascistic movements – surfaced on the corners of the blocked streets of the first weeks. It is that uniting with other individuals has never been synonymous with fighting for the common good and forming society. Criticizing the MAS for its corporatist and coercive tendencies was paradoxically a pretext to imitate it from afar and, in record time, bring about the worst: to be violent, but with the right words from "good practices", and to take revenge on those lifelong repudiates who have gained too much power over the past decade.

Surely the MAS, sometimes more concerned with maintaining itself in power than with the real emancipation of all the people, has played too much on the dependence of vulnerable populations on it, having created among them a panic fear of not being more defended in his absence, exaggeratedly fueling clientelist relations. Surely he also did not worry enough about this very real and perilous racist contention that simmered under his process of change. But no doubt and above all, in the sordid bastions of the latter, no one ever wanted to reflect on the question of real equality in a formerly colonized and so mixed country in which the parody of a Malcolm X native (fortunately fictitious, although certain speeches of the Katarist⁴⁸ movement could have come close to it) could just as well have declared: more, and we will be quits”.

The central question then is to realize which part of the people – from the rural world and the urban world, from the whites or from the natives and mestizos, from the working classes or from the middle and well-to-do classes – is inconceivably more vulnerable than the other, especially in such a situation.

As Claude le Gouill remarked very well during his investigation in North Potosi, "the mobilization is not done in the name of Evo Morales but mainly for the defense of the Plurinational State and Wiphala , due to the presence of the anti-evista sector which was not ready to mobilize to defend Evo Morales but is for the achievements of the process of change and against the far right”⁴⁹ . A situation which was lacking for the former president and his proteges, but attesting to a perhaps desirable "return to the local and to community forms of mobilization (cabildos, blocos) [revealing] the distances that have been created between the increased verticality of the MAS and grassroots organisations”, given that “the 'government of social movements' promised by the former president [has in fine] reinforced the corporatist struggles of each sector”. As the same author writes, “one of the paradoxes of Evo Morales is to have romanticized an Indianness that he himself dissolved through his actions. It will undoubtedly remain alive, but no longer with the same aspirations or the same representations”.

On Friday, November 22, the MAS is officially allowed to run for new elections. The primary political concern is to reconstitute a progressive force with indigenous representation capable of pursuing the important lines of the “process of change” and winning at the polls in 2020, or even finding the best possible candidate for the MAS. In this sense, the current President of the Senate Monica Eva Copa Murga, whose portrait feminist activist Maria Galindo drew ⁵⁰, could be a strategic choice as the sincerity of her word was able to denounce the current climate of persecution and to outline a democratic horizon thanks to an attitude denoting with the classic repertoire of his party. There is no guarantee, however, that the mobilizations will decrease given the statements made by a government which, under the pretext of seeking peace, is stubborn in its murderous methods derogating from the most elementary principles of Human Rights.

Discussion between the interim president and representatives of social movements resulted on November 23 in a series of agreements that, on paper, seem promising⁵¹. It remains curious, however, that that same day Cochabamba suffered a new bloody repression and that in La Paz witnesses of the Senkata massacre came to confide, fear in their stomachs, to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, gratified on the way with lying jokes of a pro-government group having broadcast on social networks that "masistas had again come to denounce a fake coup to international bodies".

The people who mobilized against Evo Morales and for democracy: would they be able, beyond their agreed war cries, to organize themselves to truly reinvent this audacious and never accomplished form of government of the people? by the people and for the people? Or was he finally calling for the removal of an Indian and his colleagues from power and returning to a good old neoliberal, racist and exclusionary state apparatus? Will these people be willing to really carry out the political struggle they have claimed, starting by recognizing the other people of Bolivia, the people who have only had 14 years of the government of Evo Morales? to enjoy a little recognition after 500 years of humiliation? The one who, in addition to the lack of being the majority, indigenous and mixed race, only has food cuts to make himself heard, for lack of weapons or cultural, economic and symbolic capital? The government of Jeanine Áñez has so far taken the worst paths to prove this challenge right. Clumsiness of a precipitous and unexpected seizure of power, or a deliberate choice that is an integral part of a (partly) planned coup? The fact is that the country is on edge, and bleeding. While waiting for the next elections, where a candidacy of the MAS or of a new equivalent political force will be essential to guarantee representativeness, the international community cannot defect: it is a question, in the name of Human Rights, of taking care to guarantee real democratic conditions for these decisive elections (that voters in rural areas, in particular, can again register on time and in good and due form and go to the polls without risk). It is also about lobbying for the current barely legal and deeply illegitimate government to drastically change course or hand over to another team uninvolved in the succession of these anti-democratic maneuvers sincerely concerned about the fate of all Bolivians.

1See BOUGON François, “The hard right in power plunges Bolivia into violence”, Médiapart, November 18, 2019, https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/181119/la-droite- tough-au-pouvoir-plonge-la-bolivie-dans-la-violence?page_article=1 and for a video summary of recent events (in Spanish), see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =_iHA1JXThwA

2“SE REGISTRARON 34 MUERTES EN LOS CONFLICTOS DEL PAÍS”. See :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_N7HX1pyak

3“Roxana Lizárraga amenazó a periodistas por cometer presunta “sedición””. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asoxDcZ9eQM

4For a cocktail of reactions from the press and the transitional government, see: https://twitter.com/fkrakowiak/status/1194837155056500738?s=08

5 See: https://www.bolpress.com/2019/11/16/anez-firma-decreto-que-ofrece-impunidad-a-los-militares/

6 See: https://comunicares.org/2019/11/15/comunicado-continental-bolivia/?fbclid=IwAR2r2XZRXRI7BSodxxARqN2fiw3QJVdL_XnKHwP8BPOiQLq4FL6_qppSDcQ

7See: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKcoeZxHn-c18HHKRALNwhH-c_Qk5fWKZVufOHjbDR41HYjw/viewform

8See: http://www.oas.org/es/cidh/prensa/comunicados/2019/296.asp

9The IACHR meeting in Senkata (El Alto) on November 24: https://www.facebook.com/lid.bolivia/videos/2881420668559377/

10See: https://www.eldetapeweb.com/nota/golpe-en-bolivia-denuncian-que-los-militares-violan-mujeres-muertas-2019113010160?fbclid=IwAR1mlHesblzVymjpbnmfGGezH_7egQ1Rmv8_Nolf-1m5mOtDLux7MXsrLbo

11Concerning French media bias, see our pages: https://lvsl.fr/le-coup-detat-na-pas-eu-lieu-la-bolivie-vue-par-la-presse-francaise/

12See, among other things, these various texts and interventions: http://www.rfi.fr/es/americas/20191114-caida-de-un-tirano-golpe-de-estado-fraude-que-paso- en-bolivia; https://desinformemonos.org/bolivia-un-levantamiento-popular-aprovechado-por-la-ultraderecha/?fbclid=IwAR1iRgXy44GoWocCD7vPL_mCZ7flYpMLWYgwIqft0TS4bYaTpi5O9edbMbQ; http://www.rfi.fr/ameriques/20191111-bolivie-soutiens-gauche-morales-denoncent-coup-etat; https://www.opendemocracy.net/es/democraciaabierta-es/bolivia-en-la-incertidumbre/; https://www.franceinter.fr/personnes/hugo-jose-suarez; http://www.cides.edu.bo/webcides2/index.php/interaccion/noticias-f/264-crisis-politica-en-bolivia-la-coyuntura-de-disolucion-de-la-dominacion-masista

13See, among other things, this article on the vulnerability of cholitas in the current context https://www.elciudadanoweb.com/revolucion-de-las-cholas-abusos-sexuales-miedo-y-desinformacion-en-bolivia / as well as reactions to the statements of Bolivian feminists and intellectuals Maria Galindo and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, or the brawl between Argentinian feminist Rita Segato https://www.infobae.com/america/america-latina/2019/11 /20/Rita-Segato-Durisima-Con-Ev-Moral-Dijo-Qu-No-Fue-Victima-a-Golpe-Y-Recordo-Su-Machismo-Y-Autoritarismo/? FBCLID = IWAR3_PMOFJRESXFMT_BK5ZKOTAKXDHIZNNWUC brought to her by a group of indigenous feminists: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1081483085576807&id=971373796587737

14See: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/evo-morales-bolivia-coup-election-fraud-organization-of-american-states as well as the report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/evo-morales-bolivia-coup-election-fraud-organization-of-american-states

15See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h0Hf0VkHRo

16LEMOINE Maurice, “In Latin America, the era of quiet coups”, Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2014, See: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2014/08/LEMOINE/ 50711

17See: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/11/18/en-bolivie-il-y-a-eu-une-destitution-forcee-qui-resemble-etrangement-a -a-coup-d'etat_6019616_3232.html

18a"Maurice Lemoine is not sure that"the resignation of Evo Morales avoids a bloodbath"in Bolivia". See: https://el-siglo.blogspot.com/2019/11/maurice-lemoine-nest-pas-sur-que-la.html

18bLAMBERT Renaud, “In Bolivia, too easy a coup”, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2019. https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2019/12/LAMBERT/61150

19« ¿Golpe o triunfo democrático? The OAS divides itself ante the crisis boliviana”. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eySaOmb8A7U

20MARIETTE Maëlle, “Has the Bolivian left given birth to its gravediggers? Merits and limits of a pragmatic “revolution”, Le Monde diplomatique, September 2019. See: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2019/09/MARIETTE/60321

21See: https://www.paginasiete.bo/nacional/2019/11/13/ex-embajador-de-bolivia-en-francia-el-golpe-de-estado-ya-no-existe-en -nuestras-cabezas-237282.html

22See: https://actualidad.rt.com/opinion/eva_golinger/334782-mensaje-perseguido-gobierno-facto-bolivia

23See: https://www.pagina12.com.ar/232141-los-intelectuales-el-feminismo-y-el-golpe-en-bolivia

24See: https://www.facebook.com/414264572346875/posts/855813211525340/

25CALVO OSPINA Hernando, “Rumours, lies and exaggerations. A brief summary of destabilization in Bolivia”, Le Monde diplomatique, June 2010. See: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2010/06/CALVO_OSPINA/19232

26See: https://www.jornada.com.mx/ultimas/mundo/2019/11/23/decision-de-bolivia-sobre-el-litio-apresuro-golpe-de-estado-de-eu -1131.html

27A young girl, during a march against Evo Morales, told us that she wanted to "return to capitalism", which "was better than this socialism", without really knowing how to explain this assertion (nor analyze everything what was perfectly capitalist in the Morales government). A resident mobilized on a street cut below her home in the pretty district of Sopocachi in La Paz evoked for her part the classic “mass of civil servants, expensive and paid to do nothing, and subjected to the electoral orders of the MAS”, of "appalling debt contracted with China" (as if contracting a debt was in itself harmful, and obviously easily avoidable, or that the Argentine debt, contracted by the very liberal Mauricio Macri with the IMF, would have been better), or more "lucky for Evo Morales to have seen the prices of raw materials play in his favor during his mandates", which is true, like all the progressive governments of the last decade which obviously have not never made the effort to redistribute the profits from this chance to as many people as possible. See these same links that she sent to us: https://www.paginasiete.bo/economia/2019/11/4/las-reservas-internacionales-netas-caen-su-nivel-mas-bajo-en-11 -anos-236337.html; https://www.paginasiete.bo/economia/2019/10/9/deuda-externa-la-mas-alta-en-13-anos-apuntan-al-gasto-corriente-233622.html; https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.paginasiete.bo/economia/2018/12/9/en-12-anos- funcionarios-del-nivel-central-aumentaron-en-un-916-202566.html&ved=2ahUKEwjQys7IstDlAhULxVkKHe2JB2IQFjAAegQICBAC&usg=AOvVaw0nZ9qcDYsqjrWKAJIYPer-

28For a description of the career of this character and his organization, see in particular: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/carlos-schmerkin/blog/301119/les-nouveaux-croises-de-la-bolivie; but also http://misionverdad.com/TRAMA-GLOBAL/comite-pro-santa-cruz and https://mundo.sputniknews.com/amp/america-latina/201911141089312682-la-enigmatica-orden-a-la- que-pertenece-camacho-en-bolivia/ and https://elcomercio.pe/mundo/latinoamerica/evo-morales-quien-es-luis-fernando-camacho-el-lider-del-comite-civico-de-santa -cruz-que-dio-un-ultimatum-al-presidente-de-bolivia-para-que-renuncie-fotos-videos-noticia/?ref=ecr

29See: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/11/30/en-bolivie-l-ultrareligieux-camacho-entre-officiellement-dans-la-course-a-la-presidence_6021188_3210 .html

30See: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2989465047764548&id=196353043742443

31 « Jeanine Áñez, presidenta interina de Bolivia: “Evo quería imponerse por la fuerza” | BBC Mundo”, November 15, 2019, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0x5b8nOcc

32 See: https://www.paginasiete.bo/nacional/2019/11/15/refugiados-del-caso-porvenir-otros-exiliados-vuelven-al- pais-237454.html and http://eju.tv/2019/11/cuatro-bolivianos-exiliados-anuncian-su-retorno -luego-de-la-caida-de-evo/?fbclid=IwAR0udZv9IL056rjrSW-_HcpfTyn0RrRi5bVK6UEQ3M39Nm7p_nnChCcgRno

33 CHAPARRO Amanda, “Bolivia: five dead during clashes in the center of the country”, Le Monde, November 15, 2019. See: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/11 /15/bolivia-interim-government-warns-morales-and-expels-venezuelan-diplomats_6019368_3210.html

34See, November 10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOBa0RnMRnA; then, on November 12, two days after the resignation of Evo Morales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWMMa0R2-g4, and finally on November 19, when negotiations with the new government failed. unsuccessful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1eQurYyPiQ. On the tottering position of trade union and leftist forces in the current Bolivian context, see: https://www.revolutionpermanente.fr/C-est-un-coup-d-Etat-qui-a-lieu-en-ce- moment-in-bolivia

35In this regard, and although it is still necessary to carry out an in-depth investigation into these revelations and their sources, see the striking document published on October 8 in Behind Back Doors providing for the future course of events: https://bbackdoors .wordpress.com/2019/10/08/us-hands-against-bolivia-part-i/, based on these recordings: https://erbol.com.bo/nacional/surgen-16-audios-que-vinculan -cívicos-exmilitares-y-eeuu-en-planes-de-agitación, and translated here into Spanish: http://kontrainfo.com/revelan-el-plan-de-eeuu-para-el-golpe-en-bolivia -nombres-y-apellidos-rol-de-la-embajada-y-paises-vecinos/?fbclid=IwAR0_NR_eGa3fH7PDbfp4lPiq9G_x91KMLGB_FTH42Ffbk0C6efV6_GSzGsQ

36Videos of the Mallasa town hall fire (November 11), unfortunately of poor quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8JsO0Ezxu4 and https://eju.tv/2019/11 /turba-quemo-la-subalcaldia-de-mallasa/

37The context of the appointment of Jeanine Áñez is very controversial: after the successive resignations of the incumbents responsible for taking over the reins of the State in the event of the resignation of the president, all of them from the MAS, the appointment of the interim president, to which returned the charge after defection of the first, took place without quorum because it lacked in the Assembly a consequent number of deputies of the MAS. The government in place stipulates that the latter, despite repeated calls, did not show up. The other camp specifies that given the persecution of which the members of the MAS were and are still the object, the practical conditions (road cuts) and security were not met for them to be able to present themselves. Furthermore, the absence of an official letter endorsing in writing the resignation of Adriana Salvatierra (announced orally in the media), ex-president of the Senate and member of the MAS to whom the presidency of the State fell in the event of the resignation of the president and the Vice-President, is still the subject of bitter discussion.

38 For a critical reading of the media context of the mobilizations and a parody of this skilfully orchestrated exhibition of Evo Morales' property, see: https://www.facebook.com/groups/inmobiliariatarija/permalink/2861376640579042/?sfnsn =mo&d=n&vh=e

39See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lObNhZGonoc&feature=youtu.be

40See: https://video.flpb2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t42.9040-2/78330342_603991303473170_6880237381388075008_n.mp4?_nc_cat=108&efg=eyJ2ZW5jb2RlX3RhZ yI6InN2ZV9zZCJ9&_nc_ohc=LROb1JGwJygAQmEByk-lj3kq2mBjBu7Gyx0o8AZnWWtSF6kKiuvEH6qiA&_nc_ht=video .flpb2-1.fna&oh=cabd2643d7e773edd4b36c922fe45a3d&oe=5DD99056

41For an analysis of the events perpetuated that day, see: https://chaskiclandestina.org/2019/11/29/bolivia-en-estado-de-shock/

42See: https://www.rosario3.com/informaciongeneral/Periodista-argentino-en-Bolivia-Los-militares-estan-sacados-tiraban-a-lo-que-se-movia-20191120-0029.html

and the announcement: https://revolucion.news/periodistas-de-mexico-y-argentina-desaparecen-en-bolivia-los-perseguia-la-policia/?fbclid=IwAR2XIh4V78aUexmUWvxOcSTuJaRD-tH7yuH-DADX4vY07pKG4HwAYk85ylk

43See: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3186328641394213&id=100000513261734

44See the many videos relating to this very little publicized march. Departure from Cruze Viacha: https://www.facebook.com/CVCBolivia/videos/2628597187229394/ Walk on the way of the coffins in El Alto towards La Paz: https://www.facebook.com/CVCBolivia/videos/466010350694354/ Walk view from the bridge: https://www.facebook.com/CVCBolivia/videos/596113027798040/ March in progress (at 3.50 minutes, the “No somos masistas carajo” [“We are not MAS supporters, you fool” ] is clearly audible): https://www.facebook.com/LaResistenciaBo/videos/597531951020928/

45Some images of the results of the repression. Victims suffering from gas: https://www.facebook.com/1050643185/posts/10218264312653149/ Other victims and gassing (at the end): https://www.facebook.com/CVCBolivia/videos/506536993274730/ In the streets next (“the press does not tell the truth” is audible): https://www.facebook.com/CVCBolivia/videos/506536993274730/

46

47RANCIERE Jacques, The emancipated spectator, op. cit., p.67

48 POUPEAU Franck and DO ALTO Hervé, “Is Indianism on the left? » Civilizations, 2009. See: https://journals.openedition.org/civilizations/1971

49LE GOUILL Claude, “The Bolivian political crisis seen “from below””, Monday Morning, November 25, 2019. See: https://lundi.am/La-crise-politique-bolivienne-vue-depuis-le -down

50See: https://www.lavaca.org/notas/eva-por-maria-galindo/

51See: https://www.exitonoticias.com.bo/articulo/nacional/gobierno-movilizados-llegan-acuerdos-levantar-medidas-presion/20191123163812043455.html and https://video.flpb2-2.fna .fbcdn.net/v/t42.26565-2/10000000_128814898542631_3527730701946642927_n.mp4?_nc_cat=101&efg=eyJ2ZW5jb2RlX3RhZyI6Im9lcF9zZCJ9&_nc _ohc=UTM9rrLc848AQnDC9xBpDHTy_XFtjaEdgMEhttJ4hA6RQ43nfCr32o3DA&_nc_ht=video.flpb2-2.fna&oh=22918568670126e87c38218a7acc774a&oe=5DDA280B