‘Bravo Bolivia,’ Washington says, but violence persists amid election worries
Asked about the first, hardline steps Bolivia’s interim President Jeanine Añez has taken since assuming office, Washington’s highest-ranking diplomat was unequivocal with his praise: “Bravo Bolivia.” But it’s clear there are reasons to worry for the South American nation that has been gripped by political deadlock and violent protests ever since President Evo Morales resigned on Nov. 10 and fled to Mexico.
Struggling for legitimacy amid a growing body count, Añez has reassured the nation that elections will be held as soon as possible. But she’s facing headwinds.
Morales’ party, Movimiento al Socialismo, which controls two-thirds of the legislature, is trying to obstruct a transition by denying Añez a legislative quorum. And Morales himself has been driving uncertainty by threatening to return to Bolivia “any time now” and complete his mandate, even after he resigned.
The impasse has raised alarms in the region, and Organization of American States General Secretary Luis Almagro said he is sending a delegation to Bolivia this week to “guarantee that there are free, fair and transparent elections in the short term with effective guarantees,” according to a letter obtained by the Miami Herald. The OAS is also holding an emergency meeting on Wednesday to address the Bolivian crisis.
“Bolivians should be working towards free, fair, transparent, inclusive, and peaceful elections as soon as possible to ensure democracy endures,” a State Department spokesperson for the Western Hemisphere Affairs bureau told the Miami Herald on Tuesday.
New elections, as soon as possible, are a national imperative, said Jorge Quiroga, who was Bolivia’s president from 2001-02 and is an ardent Morales opponent. Quiroga has drafted models of executive decrees calling for new elections, and he’s urging Añez to adopt them in order to keep the MAS from “sabotaging the transition” in congress.
Quiroga said there is precedent for the action. Elections in 2005 were held by decree and Morales set the stage for the move by end-running congress to appoint judges, prosecutors and other officials.
“If he did it, why can’t this government, which is facing a true emergency?” he asked.
Quiroga said OAS and European Union election experts should create an election calendar “that will be as fast as possible but also guarantee clean elections — not like the fraudulent ones we just had,” he said. “We have to find the balance between speed and transparency.”
Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, has been pulled into a broader struggle over the fate of democracy in the region. When Morales came to power in 2006, he aligned the landlocked nation with ideological allies, and the country became an active member of the ALBA bloc of nations, spearheaded by Venezuela and Cuba.
Within days of assuming the presidency last week, Añez began unraveling those relationships, ejecting hundreds of Cuban doctors and Venezuelans that her administration accuses of being pro-Morales agitators and fanning the flames of violence.
In a press conference this week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo praised the move.
“Cuba wasn’t sending doctors and officials to Bolivia to help the Bolivian people but rather to prop up a pro-Cuba regime headed by Evo Morales who sought to maintain his grip on power through electoral fraud,” Pompeo said. “Bolivia now joins Brazil and Ecuador in recognizing the Cuban threat to freedom. In each case, these governments, free of outside interference, have acted to protect their own sovereignty and to defend their own citizens’ interest. Bravo Bolivia.”
Morales has said the United States is behind the “coup that has led to the death of my brothers,” and he said he wants to return to “pacify” the country. He’s also suggested that he or one of his allies should be in any new presidential election.
That seems to be a non-starter. Añez, among others, has said that Morales belongs in jail, not the presidential palace. Senior State Department officials have also said that “people who were directly implicated in trying to distort the outcome of the elections should not participate in the follow-on election.”
The international community is hoping that speedy elections might help quell the violence. At least 12 people have died in clashes with security forces in recent days as Morales’ supporters clamor for his return. On Tuesday, local media reported that at least three people had died and dozens were injured as security forces attacked protesters who had blocked roads leading to La Paz, depriving the city of gas and food.
“The United States calls on all Bolivians to refrain from violence,” the State Department spokesperson for the Western Hemisphere Affairs bureau said. “We regret the loss of life in Bolivia in relation to protests and we are concerned by the level of violence. ”
While the government has been asking for calm, some of Añez’s cabinet have exacerbated tensions with incendiary language.
Earlier this week, newly appointed Interior Minister Arturo Murillo blamed Morales’ chief of staff, Juan Ramón Quintana, for the violence and said he should be “hunted down” because “he’s an animal who is killing people and we won’t permit that in our country.”
On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch said Añez had “adopted and announced alarming measures that run counter to fundamental human rights standards,” including a decree that absolves the military from being held responsible for violence against protesters.
“We are extremely concerned by measures taken by Bolivian authorities that appear to prioritize brutally cracking down on opponents and critics and give the armed forces a blank check to commit abuses instead of working to restore the rule of law in the country,” José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “The priority should be to ensure that the fundamental rights of Bolivians, including to peaceful protest and other peaceful assembly, are upheld.”
The State Department Western Hemisphere spokesperson said the interim authorities in Bolivia “must ensure security services respect the rights of peaceful protesters, including by ensuring accountability for any violations of those rights.”
Quiroga said it was important to keep the protests and violence in perspective.
Bolivia held presidential elections on Oct. 20 that Morales claimed had given him an unprecedented fourth term, even as the opposition and observers said the vote was riddled with irregularities and fraud and that, at a minimum, made a run-off election necessary. In response, there were large scale anti-Morales marches that were often met with violence.
By comparison, the pro-Morales demonstrations have been smaller and confined to his strongholds, Quiroga said.
“Now you’re seeing the counterattack, which is much smaller and focused on El Alto [outside of La Paz] and Cochabamba where Evo Morales’ few supporters are,” he said.
“Nobody wants this violence,” he added, “But much of the conflict isn’t spontaneous, it’s being induced,” by agents for Morales.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said Morales has no one to blame but himself.
“After failing to manipulate the election to his preferred outcome, Morales predictably has whined that he’s the victim of a coup. It’s the same, textbook strategy used by the regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to excuse their own electoral and political failures,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Miami Herald. “But the facts leave no ambiguity about the real story: Morales tried — and failed — to overturn a democratic electoral process, and the Bolivian people rightly are defending their democracy.”
After the Miami Herald asked the senator’s office if he was concerned with the violence in Cochabamba, Rubio tweeted that Morales was working from Mexico “to undermine peaceful democratic transition in Bolivia” and had gotten “Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to arm protesters in Cochabamba.”
Rubio, who sits in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, did not elaborate on the claims. While the Bolivian government has accused Cuban, Venezuelan and Colombian nationals of being pro-Morales agitators, it has made no such claims about Nicaraguans.
“Facts leave no ambiguity about the real story: Morales tried — and failed — to overturn a democratic electoral process,” Rubio wrote, “and the Bolivian people rightly are defending their democracy.”
This story was originally published November 20, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
