Bolivia Coup – Made in the USA, like the others

In his televised resignation speech, Morales said, “My sin was being indigenous, leftist and anti-imperialist.”

by Jim W. Dean, VT Managing Editor

[ Editor’s Note: The smoke, or teargas, is still rising in Bolivia. Evo Morales is alive in Mexico, where he might not be if he had stayed in La Paz. Coming up with a patsy to kill him there would have been mere child’s play for his political adversaries.

The story is off the front page now, as is Hong Kong, since we have a year-end forest fire of regime change efforts going on around the globe, with the spreader of freedom and democracy involved in many of them, featuring Bolivia as the newest notch on the belt.

The politics here are simple. You have white extremist Christians, including fascist elements, teamed up with the military, police and the best coup preparation the US machine can offer against the native Indians, who until recently held a majority in the Parliament.

How could this happen? Well, it is not an oversimplification to say, “just like all the others,” hence my title above for this all-too-familiar story of the US getting back into the plantation business down south.

There will of course be new elections, with the coupmeisters running the show. With the police and military in the bag, that will be a foregone conclusion. What is up for grabs is how much violence it will take to depress the Indian vote, and what the world reaction to that would be.

The question we should all be asking is “What country is next in line?” … JD ]

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– First published … November 23, 2019 –

It is getting close to the end of the year, not for the Deep Staters to be waiting for Santa, but to be reviewing their coup list for 2019, especially the year-end trilogy − Iraq, Hong Kong, and Bolivia. France is different. They did not want that one − wrong place, wrong time, and they don’t have control over it.

Bolivia seemed to come out of the blue, but rarely does that happen, as coups require a lot of training and staging by locals and their in-country subversives, who are willing to deliver their country over to influence of a foreign power so they can become part of its new ruling and business class.

I have 16 audio tape links below, in Spanish, some with partial translation revealing the Bolivian coup plotters at work. Hopefully we can get them all translated.

I can only describe mainstream media coverage of Bolivia as “delicate”, not wanting to offend powerful people. They should be reporting the best of what I have below, but are not. Media people know more than most the long history of the US infiltrating all the Central and South American countries to create the people resources for a change in government. Interfering in foreign elections is an American tradition.

Commenting on the Morales referendum, the Washington Post took a middle-of-the-road approach, pointing out the obvious that Evo Morales had pushed the envelope with his desire to continue his administration beyond three terms. The close vote in his referendum triggered a US coup waiting in the wings. He could have left office and then come back and run again, but he rolled the dice thinking that time was not on his side.

Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald tells us,

“If the military, which recommended Morales’ resignation to avoid further bloodshed, stays in power, it will be a coup… But if the constitution’s line of succession is respected and an interim president calls for a new election within 90 days, it will [be] a constitutional move to invalidate Morales’ illegal power grab.”

Jim Shultz, an American expert on Bolivia adds,

“Evo could have lifted up new leaders to take his place, but instead actively undermined any who might do so. He could have served out his third term, left office with a grand legacy, and even run again in five years if he wished” (the term limits only apply to consecutive terms), “instead he was willing to plow through the basic rules of democracy to hold onto power, and the people knew it and in the end they rebelled as Bolivians so often have.”

Morales is credited by the International Monetary Fund with having been successful in bringing Bolivians out of extreme poverty more than any other South American county, slashing poverty from 33 percent of the population in 2006 down to 15 percent in 2018.

Despite that success Bolivia has been in an overall decline since the natural gas bonanza that funded the successes above, but also laid the seeds for this coup. Deficit spending has burned through Bolivia’s international reserves of $15 billion in 2015 to $8 billion now.

These are the conditions that long-term coup planners, especially countries with a lot of experience at it, wait for. They already have people in place to do the job, but they also understand the timing has to be just right to ensure success.

This is not rocket science. To do coups in South America, you have to infiltrate both the military and police, and the US has long standing tools for doing that. They include the notorious School of the Americas (SOA) at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and FBI training programs.

The commander of Bolivia’s armed forces, Williams Kaliman, was the man who “suggested” president Morales step down. Kaliman was at the SOA in 2003. Five of the other plotters are also graduates. As for the police, we have the APALA police exchange program that builds “relationships” between US authorities and police officials in Latin America. Top Bolivian police commanders have passed through this exchange program.

The Bolivian coup leader is Lusis Camancho, a right-wing millionaire named in the Panama Papers, who was groomed by a fascist paramilitary known for its racist violence. The group even has its version of a Ku Klux Klan boy scouts who have a Nazi-type salute, where the forearm is held level over the chest and swung outwards and up. I have a video clip.

They are called the Union Juvenil Crucenista and have quite a social media presence. It is a Bolivian fascist youth group. Don’t take my word for it. Here is what their leader has to say. “When we have to defend our culture by force, we will,” UJC leader told Dangl. “The defense of liberty is more important than life.”

Camancho is networked with similar groups in Brazil, Columbia and Venezuela who have a shared contempt for the indigenous South Americans from having political power, preferring to rule over them in a form of eternal serfdom.

Frankly the Camancho extremists view the natives as Satanists. In the run up to the coup, Camancho had been meeting with regional right-wing government leaders. Two months ago, his twitter feed shows “Thank you Colombia”, “Thank you Venezuela”, and also to Brazil.

He is a religious zealot. On November 10, he had a photo made of himself at the abandoned presidential palace where he placed a bible over the presidential seal, fulfilling his vow to purge the indigenous heritage from government and “return God to the burned palace” and banishing the Indians’ Pachamama mother goddess. I guess the Bolivian constitution does not have a religious freedom section.

Wikileaks published US government communication showing correspondence with coup plotters to destabilize Morales, the same plan being used in countries around the world.

Surprisingly Camancho did not have a high profile, what one could call a sleeper-type agent. He did not go on Twitter until May of 2019, and when he called for a strike on July 9 viaTwitter, he got only 20 views. But after the recent election in Bolivia, the corporate media machines seemed to magically discover Camancho at the same time. His re-tweets jumped into the thousands.

I did not have to dig too far to find solid evidence of the coup in progress, a once in a lifetime opportunity. The coup leaders were taped on a number of occasions, which were compiled and released on the EN24 channel; sixteen recordings that were leaked through various social media platforms, in Spanish of course.

[ Editor’s note: If we have any Hispanic readers who could transcribe any of these tapes that would be great. Contact us via VT ]

Evo Morales revealed in a speech that the government had the recordings, wherein opposition leaders called for a general strike, to burn government structures, and to attack the Cuban Embassy.

The first tape describes how senators Marco Rubio, Bob Menendez and Ted Cruz backed the Bolivian coup plan. On audio 10 we find, “The former Bolivian colonel Teobaldo Cardoso says that everything is ready and that they are a large group of old and active military members ready to wage war.”

Audio 11 illustrates the commitment of the politician and opposition member Manfred Reyes Villa, with plans to overthrow the president. The voice of Manfred Reyes is heard in a conversation with political activist and opposition member Miriam Pereira and journalists Carlos and Chanet Blacut.

Audio 15 records a private meeting between the opponent Jaime Antonio Alarcon Daza, Ivan Arias and other members of the civic committees, in which the agreement consisted of obtaining rapid voting equipment for the next presidential elections, in order to use them to manipulate public opinion on the electoral results and declare fraud. There is a reference from the Jubilee Foundation, the European Union, the United States Embassy and the Evangelical Church.

Not surprisingly, none of the US’ well-funded media outlets have been able to locate any of this material. Image that. Are they that inept, or have they been waived off on reporting anything about this material?

So once again, we see America raising hell about Russia interfering with a US election, so our intelligence agencies tell us, when we have massive evidence historically and even contemporary examples of the US working to take over governments in peace time, with an intensity many of us only remember from the anything-goes period of the Cold War.

To have this going on continually in “peace time” and our own media pretending to know nothing about it, is a disgrace of the 4^th estate. Have we sunk this low, or have we been there since the beginning?

Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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