Bolivia

He directed the purchase of tear gas and non-lethal weapons at inflated prices during Jeanine Añez de facto administration and is currently detained in the U.S. Bolivia's Attorney General Wilfredo Chavez confirmed the judicial hearing of former Interior Minister Arturo Murillo on Aug. 9 in the U.S.  RELATED: Bolivia Commemorates 196th Anniversary of Its Independence Murillo has been detained in the United States since May under money laundering and bribery charges. He directed the purchase of tear gas and non-lethal weapons at inflated prices during the de facto administration of Jeanine Añez (2019-2020).  The case is also being investigated by Bolivian authorities, who claimed the resources were diverted for the real estate project El Doral S.A. in Santa Cruz.&n...

BY JOE EMERSBERGER | FAIR  One can imagine an editor of the London-based Guardian (3/17/21) shaking her head sadly as she typed the headline: “Cycle of Retribution Takes Bolivia’s Ex-President From Palace to Prison Cell.”  The subhead told readers, “Jeanine Áñez’s government once sought to jail the country’s former leader Evo Morales for terrorism and sedition—now she faces the same charges.” The Guardian article by Tom Phillips wants us to lament an alleged incapacity of Bolivian governments to stop persecuting opponents once they take office. We are told that Áñez’s government did it, and that now the government of President Luis Arce (elected in a landslide win on October 18, 2020) is also doing it. The article’s premi...

BY BENJAMIN DANGL MAS supporters celebrate in La Paz following electoral victory. Photo credit: Thomas Becker. Against all odds, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party won the October 18th elections in Bolivia with 55.1% of the vote. This is better than even Evo Morales did in 2005 with 53.75% support. It gives MAS President-elect Lucho Arce one of the biggest mandates in Bolivian history, and is in part a major endorsement of MAS policies and its 14 years in power. The election took place a year after a coup overthrew former MAS President Evo Morales and installed right wing Senator Jeanine Áñez in power. Under Áñez and her notorious Government Minister Arturo Murillo, the government repressed dissidents and anti-coup activists, killing dozens and wounding hundreds of people ...

 by Cassandra Howarth As the much-delayed Bolivian election approaches, and with the presidential candidate of Evo Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) way ahead in the polls, the right-wing coup government that seized power a year ago is panicking. The mass mobilisation of the Bolivian working class has blocked any hope of postponing the vote for a fourth time, and so it is resorting to every dirty trick in the book to attempt to maintain its illegitimate hold on power.  On 16 September, a major poll carried out by the Jubileo Foundation confirmed that, on current trends, Luis Arce of MAS would comfortably win the presidential election in the first round, with 40.3% of the vote. His nearest rival, the ‘centre-right’ figurehead Carlos Mesa of Civic Community, is on 29.2%....

by VIJAY PRASHAD – MANUEL BERTOLDI Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair On November 10, 2019, President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia announced his resignation from the presidency. Morales had been elected in 2014 to a third presidential term, which should have lasted until January 2020. In November 2019, protests around his fourth electoral victory in October led to the police and the military asking Morales to step down; by every description of the term, this was a coup d’état. Two days later, Morales went into exile in Mexico. On November 16, Morales told Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada that the coup that unseated him “was prepared” by the U.S. embassy in La Paz. The reason for the coup, he said, was—among others—Bolivia’s considerable lithium reser...

Bolivia’s ‘lithium coup’ is yet another example of a regime-change operation carried out at the behest of imperialist corporations. Proletarian writers Lithium mining at Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni. The salt flat contains more known lithium carbonate reserves than any other location on earth. In July, billionaire Elon Musk, a grown man with all the maturity of a rebellious teenager, took to his favourite attention-seeking platform, Twitter, to make known his opinion, not that anybody asked for it, on a proposed economic stimulus package to help soften the blow of the latest crisis of overproduction that the capitalist world is presently reeling from. “Another government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people imo,” the sagacious entrepreneur opined. To w...

The self-proclaimed President Añez says her administration's priority is "the economy." Bolivia's coup-born government led by Jeanine Añez Thursday announced the closure of its diplomatic offices in Nicaragua and Iran. RELATED: COVID-19 Death Threat to Bolivian Amazon's Indigenous Peoples "We have nothing against those noble and brotherly countries that we respect and are friends, but we are going to close those embassies to save and invest those savings in health and against the COVID-19," Añez said. She did not offer the embassies’ closure date or the alleged savings amount. Nor did she specify what would happen to Bolivian diplomatic representation in both nations. "I also have ordered the cabinet to make a detailed review of all the unnecessa...

The Bolivian state recognizes at least 36 Indigenous nations that are sparsely populated. Bolivia’s Center for Legal Studies and Social Research (CEJIS) denounced that the COVID-19 pandemic can devastate the Bolivian Amazon's Indigenous peoples close to the Santa Cruz and Beni regions. RELATED: Bolivia: Añez Summoned To Declare On Ventilator's Alleged Scam "We are very short of witnessing a catastrophe," the CEJIS director Miguel Vargas said to warn of a possible "ethnocide" in more vulnerable Indigenous populations. He explained that 46 out of 58 indigenous territories are close to municipalities in which the number of COVID-19 cases continues to increase exponentially. This happens, for example, in Lomerio and Urubicha in the Department of Santa Cruz, where the Yu...