Coup in Boliva?!
I first head about this earlier today. Does anyone else know more?!
Coup d'etat in Bolivia planned for Wednesday, October 11, 2006
By Heinz Dieterich in La Paz, Bolivia.
Translated by John Manning
Oct 11, 2006, 15:55
High level government sources requesting anonymity have revealed that the first coup d´etat against the government of democratically elected President Evo Morales is under way. Wednesday, October 11, is the crucial date. Driving forces are police officers and the Air Force. The army is divided. Chilean military officers, at the rank of generals, are participating with the conspirators.
1. Looking for Pinochets
A few weeks ago, officers of the Bolivian police approached generals of the Armed Forces of Bolivia (FAB) investigating their disposition for organizing a coup d' etat of both forces. One of the key military officers for the success of the coup refused to participate, and notified the President. The preparations are now proceeding without him. And the radio broadcasts continue which eulogize the "patriotic army which killed Che Guevara and the subversives".
The military never undertakes a coup in a social vacuum, my friend General Alberto Mueller Rojas, today a member of the Presidential General Staff of Hugo Chavez, told me seven years ago. It is this logic which can be seen developing at present in Bolivia. An extensive conspirational network, composed of different social and state forces is accelerating its preparations, to finish the government of President Evo Morales by force.
2. The institutional conspirators
The prefects (governors) of the separatist and energy states, Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Tarija, are promoting the formation of the so-called "Civil Committees", which are the spear points of visible political subversion. The prefects, like the civil committes have entered into frank rebellion against the constitutional government of Evo Morales, in declaring that they "will not respect the Political Constitution of the State emerging from the Constituent Assembly if it is not approved in all its articles by two thirds of the votes of the constituents”. They warn that they will advance "departmental autonomies" if this condition of theirs is not complied with.
They can certainly count on the support of the National Supreme Court of Justice - as reactionary and corrupt as its bourgeois counterparts in the rest of the world - that will provide the conspirators with the apology for the planned overthrow of the government.
On the recent declaration of the Constituent Assembly that it considered itself as "original, plenipotential and functional", that is, not restricted in its constitution of the new State by the existing norms, the magistrates sustained the position of the prefects. They dictated that according to constitutional law, the power of this Constituent Assembly is not "original-foundational", but "derivative-reformist" and therefore, subject to the existing legislation which requires a two thirds vote on all articles.
3. The social conspiracy
The "civil committees" count on the financing of employer sectors and the collaboration of high officials of the police, colonels, for example. Their actions are inflated and promoted by the private media of communication, often with the patterns of fascist propaganda that have been used against President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Some of the most important media are in the hands of capitalist magnates with big agricultural investments in the separatist provinces and who fear the land reform of the government.
The associations of heads of families, which are generally reactionary and controlled by the Church, in Latin America, in alliance with educational sectors of private colleges and universities promote strikes, blockades and demonstrations against the government. Enterprises of the energy-retail market are generating shortages of diesel fuel and gasoline, supplying the black markets in the higher priced neighboring countries, producing resentment among the population.
4. The Chilean model
The same as in Chile during Salvador Allende, the transport sector has been assigned the function of breaking the economy and the public peace with a national stoppage, called for next Wednesday, with the intention of bringing all the anti-government sectors to join together in a great destabilizing front. Referring explicitly to the subversive strike of Chilean transporters against Salvador Allende, (1972), financed by the CIA, Evo Morales last week characterized the planned entrepreneurial transport strike as an "ideological" strike: "It is the struggle for power", said the popular leader, and made clear what is at stake: "Either the gamonal (elite) groups, or the people's movements".
The Bolivian President´s comment is right on target, as show the Church Committee documents (1976) and the recently published (February, 2006) memoirs of the military leader of the fascist Chilean organization "Patria y Libertad", Roberto Thieme, in which he details how his organization, the Chilean Navy and the transport sector cooperated subversively in order to destroy the legitimate Allende government.
5. The political costs of the Huanuni massacre
The armed confrontation between cooperativist and salaried miners in Huanuni, Department of Oruro, which has left some fifteen dead and more than a hundred wounded has pushed the Bolivian Labor Central (COB) and the Regional Labor Union (COR) in El Alto, which historically have been dissociated with Evo Morales and his peasant-popular MAS-movement, towards a more confrontational position against the government.
The conflict in Huanuni is of economic origin. It was brought about by the intent of some four thousand cooperative miners organized in the FENCOMIN, that is the social base of the Minister of Mines Walter Villarroel, to take over exploitation of the richest tin mine of Bolivia, Posokoni, expelling in a violent manner some thousand salaried miners of the State enterprise COMIBOL.
Although the state had knowledge of the conflict and tried more than a dozen times to deactivate the “social time bomb”, it was taken by surprise by the violent operation. Faced with the dilemma of killing miners with the Armed Forces, on one hand, and of being accused of "negligence” and “absence of the State" on the other, 24 hours went by which were converted into a propaganda and political gold mine by the Right. This was used to the maximum with their hegemony of the media and, very much like the media manipulation during the days of the coup in Venezuela (2002), has been brought to bear incessantly on the government.
6. The international Falange
In Bolivia the United States manual of antidemocratic subversion is being followed meticulously. The factional machine is lubricated with money, propaganda experts and policy programming by the US governent, which since September 11, 2001, had put Evo Morales on its list of possible terrorists which the security forces of the U.S use to track down security risks.
The accomplices in the European Union and the energy transnationals fill out the subversive falange. "BP Tony", British Prime Minister and political agent of British Petroleum, has suggested to the energy enterprises of the United Kingdom not to invest in Bolivia's gas.
This is the policy which Petrobas, the Brazilian-International transnational guided by Wall Street and the City in London, practices and whose predatory and neocolonial attitude toward Bolivia and the other Latin American countries makes the behavior of other Western transnationals look pale: A neocolonial policy which requires urgently the organization of a boycott of all its products in all Latin America to break its chauvinistic technocracy, the same as that of PDVSA before the Bolivarian government.
7. Stop the coup d´etat in Bolivia
They all want to remove the "Indian" Evo, who disturbs business, the same as the “Negro" Chávez, in Venezuela. For Chavez, after the failure of the military coup, the medium of "removal" selected is poison or accident. In Bolivia, the elite and its imperial godfathers coincide in that a military coup d' etat could be the adequate medium. Only that a military coup, as friend Mueller Rojas says, can not be done in a social vacuum. What we are seeing in Bolivia is the intent of the world Right to fill the vacuum.
The exit of a military coup, as much as a bank assault, depends on the moment of surprise. That moment has been taken away from the conspirators. The world wide discussion of their plot makes it impossible for them to proceed as planned.
Thus, for now, they have been defeated. But, as in Chile, they will come back with a vengeance, if the government doesn't crush their conspiracy completely.
Today, more than ever, The Bolivarian Revolution needs our world solidarity.
© Copyright 2006 by AxisofLogic.com
(This report is an abbreviated version of the one published in Spanish elsewhere on the Internet.)
Coup d'etat in Bolivia planned for Wednesday, October 11, 2006
By Heinz Dieterich in La Paz, Bolivia.
Translated by John Manning
Oct 11, 2006, 15:55
High level government sources requesting anonymity have revealed that the first coup d´etat against the government of democratically elected President Evo Morales is under way. Wednesday, October 11, is the crucial date. Driving forces are police officers and the Air Force. The army is divided. Chilean military officers, at the rank of generals, are participating with the conspirators.
1. Looking for Pinochets
A few weeks ago, officers of the Bolivian police approached generals of the Armed Forces of Bolivia (FAB) investigating their disposition for organizing a coup d' etat of both forces. One of the key military officers for the success of the coup refused to participate, and notified the President. The preparations are now proceeding without him. And the radio broadcasts continue which eulogize the "patriotic army which killed Che Guevara and the subversives".
The military never undertakes a coup in a social vacuum, my friend General Alberto Mueller Rojas, today a member of the Presidential General Staff of Hugo Chavez, told me seven years ago. It is this logic which can be seen developing at present in Bolivia. An extensive conspirational network, composed of different social and state forces is accelerating its preparations, to finish the government of President Evo Morales by force.
2. The institutional conspirators
The prefects (governors) of the separatist and energy states, Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Tarija, are promoting the formation of the so-called "Civil Committees", which are the spear points of visible political subversion. The prefects, like the civil committes have entered into frank rebellion against the constitutional government of Evo Morales, in declaring that they "will not respect the Political Constitution of the State emerging from the Constituent Assembly if it is not approved in all its articles by two thirds of the votes of the constituents”. They warn that they will advance "departmental autonomies" if this condition of theirs is not complied with.
They can certainly count on the support of the National Supreme Court of Justice - as reactionary and corrupt as its bourgeois counterparts in the rest of the world - that will provide the conspirators with the apology for the planned overthrow of the government.
On the recent declaration of the Constituent Assembly that it considered itself as "original, plenipotential and functional", that is, not restricted in its constitution of the new State by the existing norms, the magistrates sustained the position of the prefects. They dictated that according to constitutional law, the power of this Constituent Assembly is not "original-foundational", but "derivative-reformist" and therefore, subject to the existing legislation which requires a two thirds vote on all articles.
3. The social conspiracy
The "civil committees" count on the financing of employer sectors and the collaboration of high officials of the police, colonels, for example. Their actions are inflated and promoted by the private media of communication, often with the patterns of fascist propaganda that have been used against President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Some of the most important media are in the hands of capitalist magnates with big agricultural investments in the separatist provinces and who fear the land reform of the government.
The associations of heads of families, which are generally reactionary and controlled by the Church, in Latin America, in alliance with educational sectors of private colleges and universities promote strikes, blockades and demonstrations against the government. Enterprises of the energy-retail market are generating shortages of diesel fuel and gasoline, supplying the black markets in the higher priced neighboring countries, producing resentment among the population.
4. The Chilean model
The same as in Chile during Salvador Allende, the transport sector has been assigned the function of breaking the economy and the public peace with a national stoppage, called for next Wednesday, with the intention of bringing all the anti-government sectors to join together in a great destabilizing front. Referring explicitly to the subversive strike of Chilean transporters against Salvador Allende, (1972), financed by the CIA, Evo Morales last week characterized the planned entrepreneurial transport strike as an "ideological" strike: "It is the struggle for power", said the popular leader, and made clear what is at stake: "Either the gamonal (elite) groups, or the people's movements".
The Bolivian President´s comment is right on target, as show the Church Committee documents (1976) and the recently published (February, 2006) memoirs of the military leader of the fascist Chilean organization "Patria y Libertad", Roberto Thieme, in which he details how his organization, the Chilean Navy and the transport sector cooperated subversively in order to destroy the legitimate Allende government.
5. The political costs of the Huanuni massacre
The armed confrontation between cooperativist and salaried miners in Huanuni, Department of Oruro, which has left some fifteen dead and more than a hundred wounded has pushed the Bolivian Labor Central (COB) and the Regional Labor Union (COR) in El Alto, which historically have been dissociated with Evo Morales and his peasant-popular MAS-movement, towards a more confrontational position against the government.
The conflict in Huanuni is of economic origin. It was brought about by the intent of some four thousand cooperative miners organized in the FENCOMIN, that is the social base of the Minister of Mines Walter Villarroel, to take over exploitation of the richest tin mine of Bolivia, Posokoni, expelling in a violent manner some thousand salaried miners of the State enterprise COMIBOL.
Although the state had knowledge of the conflict and tried more than a dozen times to deactivate the “social time bomb”, it was taken by surprise by the violent operation. Faced with the dilemma of killing miners with the Armed Forces, on one hand, and of being accused of "negligence” and “absence of the State" on the other, 24 hours went by which were converted into a propaganda and political gold mine by the Right. This was used to the maximum with their hegemony of the media and, very much like the media manipulation during the days of the coup in Venezuela (2002), has been brought to bear incessantly on the government.
6. The international Falange
In Bolivia the United States manual of antidemocratic subversion is being followed meticulously. The factional machine is lubricated with money, propaganda experts and policy programming by the US governent, which since September 11, 2001, had put Evo Morales on its list of possible terrorists which the security forces of the U.S use to track down security risks.
The accomplices in the European Union and the energy transnationals fill out the subversive falange. "BP Tony", British Prime Minister and political agent of British Petroleum, has suggested to the energy enterprises of the United Kingdom not to invest in Bolivia's gas.
This is the policy which Petrobas, the Brazilian-International transnational guided by Wall Street and the City in London, practices and whose predatory and neocolonial attitude toward Bolivia and the other Latin American countries makes the behavior of other Western transnationals look pale: A neocolonial policy which requires urgently the organization of a boycott of all its products in all Latin America to break its chauvinistic technocracy, the same as that of PDVSA before the Bolivarian government.
7. Stop the coup d´etat in Bolivia
They all want to remove the "Indian" Evo, who disturbs business, the same as the “Negro" Chávez, in Venezuela. For Chavez, after the failure of the military coup, the medium of "removal" selected is poison or accident. In Bolivia, the elite and its imperial godfathers coincide in that a military coup d' etat could be the adequate medium. Only that a military coup, as friend Mueller Rojas says, can not be done in a social vacuum. What we are seeing in Bolivia is the intent of the world Right to fill the vacuum.
The exit of a military coup, as much as a bank assault, depends on the moment of surprise. That moment has been taken away from the conspirators. The world wide discussion of their plot makes it impossible for them to proceed as planned.
Thus, for now, they have been defeated. But, as in Chile, they will come back with a vengeance, if the government doesn't crush their conspiracy completely.
Today, more than ever, The Bolivarian Revolution needs our world solidarity.
© Copyright 2006 by AxisofLogic.com
(This report is an abbreviated version of the one published in Spanish elsewhere on the Internet.)
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