The First Coup Against Evo Morales is Planned for Wednesday October 11

Heinz Dieterich, October 8, 2006

Reliable sources from high up in the Bolivian government, who asked to remain anonymous, have revealed that the first attempt at a coup against Evo Morales is planned for this Wednesday, October 11. The use of snipers in the Huanuni massacre, that caused 7 deaths, indicates the participation of coup plotters in the miner’s dispute. Chilean military figures will be involved in the conspiracy.

Looking for killer Generals

A few weeks ago, officials from the Bolivian police approached generals from the Armed Forces of Bolivia (FAB), investigating their willingness to carry out a coup together. Just as it happened in the Chilean case with the constitutionalist General Rene Schneider, and in Venezuela with General Raul Baduel, in Bolivia there was also a military figure key to the success of the uprising, who refused to participate and informed the President. Now the preparations continue but without him. And the announcements on the radio continue to praise the “patriotic army that killed Che Guevara and the subversion”.

Military figures never carry out a coup out of thin air, my friend General Alberto Mueller Rojas, nowadays a member of the Presidential General Staff of Hugo Chavez, told me seven years ago. It is this logic that we can see currently developing in Bolivia. A whole conspiratorial bloc made up of different social and state forces is working in an accelerated manner to finish off president Evo Morales.

The institutional conspiracy

The prefects [governors] of the energy and separatist states of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Tarija, are promoting the formation of the so-called ‘Civic Committees’ which are the spearhead of the visible political subversion. The prefects, as much as the civic committees, have entered into open rebellion against the constitutional government of Evo Morales, declaring that they “will not obey the Political Constitutional of the State that emerges out of the Constituent Assembly, in the case that all of its articles are not approved by a two-thirds vote” of the delegates. They warn of advancing towards “departmental autonomy” if their condition is not complied with.

They count, for course, with the support of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation – as reactionary and corrupt as the rest of their bourgeois homologous in the world – who provide the insubordination with the vindication of the crime.

In the face of the recent declaration by the Constituent Assembly to consider itself “originario, all powerful and refoundational”, that is to say, unrestricted by the existent norms in its construction of a new state, the magistrates held the position of the factious prefects. They dictated that according to constitutional rights the power of the Constituent Assembly is not “originario-refoundational” but rather “derived-reformational” and therefore subordinated to the current legislation that demands the two-thirds votes.

The social conspiracy

The civic committees count on the financing of business sectors and the collaboration of high officials from the police, for example, colonels. Their acts are inflated and spread by the private mass media, many times by the same bosses of fascist propaganda that are used in Venezuela against the government of Hugo Chavez. Some of the most important media outlets are in the hands of capitalist magnates with strong agricultural investments in the separatist provinces and who fear the government’s agrarian reform.

In the social sphere, the association of parents of families – generally reactionary and controlled by the Church in Latin America – in alliance with sectors of the teachers and colleges and private universities promote stoppages, blockades and demonstrations against the government. Energy sectors try to generate shortages of diesel and gas, with the aim of producing discontent within the population.

The Chilean Model

As in Chile, the truck driver have the function of breaking the economy and public peace with a national stoppage, convoked for Wednesday of next week, with the intention of bring together all the anti-government sectors in a great destabilizing front.

Referring explicitly to the subversive stoppage of the Chilean truck drivers against Salvador Allende (1972), financed by the US CIA, three days ago Evo Morales classified the Bolivian stoppage as an “ideological” stoppage: “It is the struggle of power” said the popular leader and left clear what is at stake: “or the gamonales [elite – HD] groups or the popular movements”.

Evo is totally right, as the documents of the Church Commmittee (1976) revealed and the recent memories of the military leader of the Chilean fascist organization “Patria y Libertad”, Roberto Thierne, with his subversive collaboration with the Marine and the Chilean truck drivers in the destruction of the Popular Unity government.

The political cost of Huanuni

Making use of the armed confrontation between cooperative miners and waged miners in Huanuni, in the department of Potosi, which has left around 15 dead and more than 100 injured, the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) and the Regional Workers Central (COR) of El Alto moved dangerous towards this destabilizing front, antagonist to the government, whilst the National Federation of Cooperative Miners (FENCOMIN) broke its political alliance with the Movement Towards Socialism, the governing party.

The conflict in Huanuni has an economic origin. It comes about due to the intent by some 4000 cooperative miners from FENCOMIN, clients of the Minister for Mining Walter Villarroel, to keep for themselves the exploitation of the most wealthiest tin mine in Bolivia, Posokoni, expelling in a violent manner some 1000 waged workers who belong to the state company, COMIBOL.

FECOMIN is a predatory petty bourgeois organization which under the weak governments of Carlos Mesa and Rodriguez Veltze converted itself into an economic power and an expansionist and unethical political power. Already in May and June of 2004, they took over the mines of Caracoles and Colquiri, kicking out by force the state miners and their families.

The government of Evo was caught by surprise by the violence in Huanuni. And in front of the dilemma of on one hand killing miners with the Armed Forces or on the other being accused of “negligence” and “the absence of the state”, around 30 hours of energetic discussions occurred, converting itself in a propagandistic and political bonanza for the right. They took maximum advantage of their hegemony over the mass media and, very similarly to the media manipulation during the days of the coup in Venezuela (2002), have incessantly attempted to deal blows to the government.

The international phalange

They are meticulously following the US subversion manual in Bolivia. The factious machine is lubricated with money, propaganda bosses and politico-paramilitary programming from US imperialism, which after September 11, 2001, put Evo Morales on the black list that the US security forces use to track “terrorists”.

The accomplices from the European Union and the energy transnationals complement the subversive phalange. “BP-Tony”, British Prime Minister and political agent for British Petroleum has prompted the energy companies of the United Kingdom to not invest in Bolivian gas.

What Tony Blair is doing in the hidden darkness of 10 Downing Street, the Brazilian-international transnational, Petrobras, is doing with obscene transparency. Administered by Wall Street and London bankers, it has unleashed a predatory attitude and neocolonial front towards Bolivia and the other Latin American countries which makes pale into insignificance the behavior of some of the other western transnationals. Similar to Repsol, and previously PDVSA, it is essentially a façade for the penetration of the petrocracy and Anglo-US finance capital, with a ruthless neocolonial policy, that requires the urgent organization of a boycott of all its products across all of Latin America, to break its parasitic imperial-chauvinist technocracy, and also to strengthen Lula.

The forced disappearance of Jorge Julio Lopez in Argentina is again evidence of an ominous truth that Latin American public opinion does not want to hear, and even less so, recognize: the power of the criollas [local] oligarchies remain intact in all of South America. And, as I wrote in a previous article, it has not been touched nor will it be seriously touched by the developmentalist governments of the region.

An essential part of this power is the military and the continental state terrorist networks from Washington, which in many cases are the ones from “Operation Condor”. The recent attempt to assassinate President Chavez in Zulia, where the assassins were able to escape to Colombia, as well as the participation of Chilean military figures in meetings with the Bolivian conspirators, is evidence of this scenario.

Chile has, of course, a vital interest in maintaining the provision of Bolivian gas at low prices, interests shared by Petrobras and Repsol, which the policies of Evo of recuperating the conditions of commercialization of hydrocarbons go against.

Aborting the coup

All of them want to remove the “indian” Evo who disturbs business, just like the “negro” Chavez in Venezuela. For Chavez, after the military coup failed, the means for selected “removal” was poison or accident. In Bolivia, the gamonales and their imperial godfathers agree that a military coup could be the most adequate means. Only that a military coup, as my friend Mueller Rojas says, can not be carried out in a “vacuum”. What we are seeing in Bolivia is the intent by the international right to fill this vacuum.

But, a military coup is like a bank robbery: it is only successful if they maintain the element of surprise. The Bolivian subversives have lost this moment. It is an ethic responsibility to spread information on their coup plotting project in the broadest possible way, in order to abort it.

Today, more than ever, the Bolivian Revolution needs our global solidarity.

Translated from Rebelion