Israel instrumentalizes ‘anti-Semitism’

Thomas Suárez is a London-based historical researcher as well as a professional Juilliard-trained violinist and composer. A former West Bank resident, he devoted several years to researching poorly-tapped and newly-declassified historical archives to compile his latest book: Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea. His previous books include three landmark works on the history of cartography, and Writings on the Wall: Palestinian Oral Histories. His personal web page can be consulted here.

This is an edited version of his presentation to a seminar sponsored by Weekly Worker on January 25.

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Clear the smoke and mirrors

Zionism relies on anti-Semitism and is itself a form of anti-Semitism. Thomas Suárez discusses the ability of the Israeli state to excuse its crimes and silence critics

Why are we discussing seemingly academic topics like anti-Semitism and Zionism while the Palestinians are being massacred? Seventy-five years of exposing Israel’s crimes has failed to stop it, and so its uncanny impunity must be dissected to see how it works. Key to that impunity is Israel’s weaponisation of anti-Semitism, and so defeating that weaponisation is essential if we are to defeat its weapons of steel and explosives.

I would like to preface this by explaining that I do not like the term, ‘anti-Semitism’, and think it should be dropped in favour of ‘anti-Jewish bigotry’. The use of a dedicated term for bigotry against Jews - as opposed to bigotry against anybody else - feeds into the notion of Jewish exceptionalism. It is also illogical and inaccurate in its use of the term ‘Semitic’; and above all, for reasons I will explain, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ aids Israeli impunity; it is an asset in its wielding of the smear of anti-Jewish bigotry to silence critics.

But I will continue to use the word ‘anti-Semitism’ here to avoid distracting from the larger issue at hand. That larger issue is, of course, the ongoing genocide, which requires us to address not the victims, but the perpetrator and its principal weapon: the Israeli state/Zionism and its weaponisation of anti-Semitism.

First, I think we should look at the various roles that anti-Semitism plays in the Israeli state and in its ongoing genocide.

1. Anti-Semitism is, of course, the alleged rationale for Zionism and the Israeli state.

2. For devotees of the Zionist cult, anti-Semitism is both the threat and the fetish that Zionism wields to keep them obedient.

3. The transference of historic western anti-Jewish bigotry onto Palestinian identity is core to the dehumanisation of the Palestinians that Israel requires to justify its slow and not so slow genocide against them.

4. Anti-Semitism is Zionism’s essential fuel that it must ensure never runs out, and thus:

5. The cry of anti-Semitism, real or fake, is the key money-raising tool for the Zionists, and

6. The false smear of anti-Semitism is, of course, the principal weapon wielded to squash opposition to its crimes.

7. Importantly, anti-Jewish bigots were courted by the Zionist movement, with anti-Semitism used as a positive marketing strategy. If you do not want Jews showing up on your shores, support Zionism! Because we have a huge ghetto for them far away from you.

8. And so the last point: actual anti-Semitism, white nationalism and neo-fascism, are soulmates of Zionism, as is the anti-Semitism of the rabidly pro-Israel Christian Zionist movement.

In short, anti-Semitism is integral to the Israeli state - a multi-purpose, inseparable tool. Israel is woven out of anti-Semitism.

Under the hood

Now, for a quick look at the beginning of it all, I would like to quote the correspondent for the London Standard, reporting on the first Zionist Congress in 1897:

The idea of founding a modern Jewish state which goes by the name of Zionism, finds little favour in Germany, except among the anti-Semites … the Frankfurter Zeitung sums up an article on the subject as follows: In short, the degeneration which calls itself anti-Semitism has begotten the degeneration which adorns itself with the name of Zionism.

‘Anti-Semitic’ should have been the epitaph that buried Zionism along with Theodore Herzl. But Herzl and those who followed fought back through the only tactic that could counter Zionism’s obvious anti-Semitic nature. They claimed worldwide Jewish allegiance and crowned Zionism as the standard by which good Jews and bad Jews are distinguished.

To quote Herzl, “No true Jew can be an anti-Zionist. Only Mauschel [an offensive word for a religious Jew] is one. Merely to look at him - let alone approach or, heaven forbid, touch him - was enough to make us feel sick.” So here we have the beginning of the hijacking of Jewish identity by this racial-nationalist movement, resulting in the nation-state today that calls itself ‘the Jewish state’.

Now, we accept this trilogy of words - the Jewish state - with little thought. But, even on the obvious level, the term ‘the Jewish state’ already creates a magic shield around Israel. Compare the psychological difference between ‘Why are you always criticising [whatever state]?’ and ‘Why are you always criticising the Jewish state?’

The term, ‘the Jewish state’, serves as a weapon that shoots its bullets without leaving any forensic evidence. It empowers the smear of anti-Semitism in the most insidious way, because it strikes without the overt accusation, thus leaving the victim not even the option of responding to the smear, unless he or she overtly raises the issue of anti-Semitism - which only has the appearance of vindicating the smear.

So, in order to disable this magic shield, we need to look inside to see what powers it. Under the hood, we see that ‘the Jewish state’ is a stealth term that creates a messianic gateway to the public mind, sparking its message of exceptionalism past any critical thought. There is an entire world of narrative hidden within these three words, the most powerful of which is the first one, ‘the’. Israel does not claim to be merely ‘a’ Jewish state, in the sense of countries that have a national religion. Indeed to quote David Ben-Gurion, Israel has nothing to do with Judaism, but rather with ‘being a Jew’. And nor with being just an Israeli Jew, but the ethnicity itself. According to Israel’s construct, it is the state of all Jews, as Jews - free of national borders and indeed free of individual Jewish consent on the matter.

This is anti-Semitism, and it is unique in the world. There is no analogy to it with any other nation-state, as much as Israel’s apologists try to pass Israel off as analogous to any other state with a national religion. Simple experiment to prove that. There are multiple Christian states; there are multiple Muslim states, Hindu states, Buddhist states. Now, imagine that some state somewhere in the world were to establish itself and declare that it is a Jewish state, just like Israel. Israel would go ballistic. It would say, ‘No, you can’t be the Jewish state: we are the Jewish state.’

For states with an official religion, that officialness extends to their borders and stops. Such states neither claim exclusivity on the religion or its various cultures, nor to have any claim on co-religionist citizens of other countries. Israel is the opposite. Israel is the ‘only Jewish state’ (as its apologists constantly remind us) not in the sense that there happen to be no other, but because by Israel’s construct there can be no other. Why? Because its claim over Jews is global and involves ethnicity itself, not citizenship. This nation-state adaptation of tribalism, in which the state is part of the DNA of an ethnic identity, bears no relation to states with a national religion. And it is the internal workings of its weapon of silencing critics through the smear of anti-Semitism.

Now, where else do we come across this same mentality? It is the method of common bigots. Racists blame individuals by virtue of claimed oneness with some ethnicity or nationality or ‘type’. And so, during the spread of Covid19, ‘Chinese-looking’ people were attacked because the virus came from China. ‘They’, ‘the Chinese’, caused Covid. This is classic ignorant bigotry, and we all condemn it.

Israel’s magic shield works by doing precisely this to Jews - but turning it around in order to hold Jewish identity ransom to insulate its crimes. And, instead of condemning this anti-Semitism, we run in fear from it - which is doubly tragic, because we are also running in fear from Zionism’s fatal flaw.

We would say, Israel did xyz, while a bigot would say the Jews did xyz. But that bigot is now the Israeli state and its cheerleaders, who have made state and ethnicity synonymous in order to repackage criticism of the state as anti-Semitic.

Other states deflect criticism of their crimes by ‘hiding behind the flag’, accusing dissenting citizens of being unpatriotic to the state. Israel instead hides behind the ethnicity, free of borders, accusing dissenting voices anywhere of being traitorous to Jews as Jews.

IHRA

Now, we are all familiar with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism, which in reality is not a definition of anything, but rather a tool to silence Israel’s critics and thus empower Israel’s crimes. The IHRA does, however, contain one truth: it states that it is anti-Semitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. Well, of course! - but that, ironically, is precisely what the IHRA is engineered to do. That is its purpose, and that is the inner workings of the smear.

You do not even need to unscrew the cover of the IHRA to look inside to see how it works. It is a very simple and obvious mechanism: what Israel does ‘the Jews’ do, so to accuse the state of crimes is to accuse Jews as Jews of those crimes - which, of course, is blatant anti-Jewish bigotry, and we must start saying so.

This same tactic Israel wields to silence us. It is its Achilles heel, but we have collectively been so beaten down that we have not exploited it. Israeli theft of Jewish identity makes Jews, as Jews, simply because they are Jews, the doers of its crimes. Traditional anti-Semitism, for all its horrors, is powerless to harm the integrity of Jews or Judaism, powerless to make its libels true. However, the Israeli state and Zionism - if we accept them at their word - succeed. If we accept their claims on Jewish identity, then we are common racists, blaming Jews as Jews.

The very name ‘Israel’ is of course also part of the weaponisation of the smear of anti-Semitism. For anyone from the larger western tradition (and I include secular people) the name ‘Israel’ exists apart from all other place names. Its very sound transcends the realm of the profane and touches a nerve deep within our collective cultural subconscious.

It is a place rooted in Genesis itself, and Israel - the modern nation-state - very openly exploits this to position itself as that place, the land’s ancient artefacts as the nation-state’s artefacts, and its settlers as that Biblical land’s people. As laughable as that may (and should!) sound, its power is very real, and is the reason the name was chosen.

Zionists’ use of Hebrew as the vernacular operates in tandem with the weaponisation of anti-Semitism. Hebrew was necessary for the theatre of the messianic ‘return’ to biblical lands. It, too, is an artefact serving to place the Israeli state in a protected part of our collective psyche. To criticise someone speaking Hebrew is, in this militarisation, to criticise Jews.

In sum, Zionism has hijacked Jewish individual identity and turned it into a monolithic, racial, supremacist cult. Why is this not blatantly obvious to the general public?

One key aspect, in my view is this: What, as seen by the public, are the two ‘sides’ to what they are told is a ‘conflict’? Well, they would say that ‘It’s obviously Israel versus the Palestinians (or the Arabs)’. To me, this juxtaposition is very misleading, and it hides Israel’s anti-Semitism.

Question: what is it about the Palestinians that makes Israel target them? Why does Israel place them under apartheid, ethnically cleanse them and commit genocide against them? Why? It is not because they are Palestinians per se. It is not because they are Arabs. It is solely because they are not Jewish. If they were Jewish, whether Palestinian or Arab or anything else, they would instead be welcomed by Israel and given a generous subsidy to take over a house whose owner was expelled because s/he is not Jewish.

Jews were always part of the fabric of Arab Palestinian civilisation - until the arrival of the Zionists. The Zionists extracted all Jews from Palestinian civilisation, robbing them of their Arab identity. More Zionist anti-Semitism. That the rest were by definition not Jewish - and nothing else - is why Israel has condemned them to apartheid, bantustans and camps, why the Zionist militias depopulated several hundred villages in 1948, and why it continues to depopulate them in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and, especially, in Gaza. The core goal of Zionism is a racially pure Jewish state from river to sea. Anyone there who is not Jewish is to be gotten rid of.

So, Palestinians are the targets because Palestinians are the native people river-to-sea minus the Palestinian Jews, who were all removed by the Zionists.

Describing the situation as ‘between Israel and the Palestinians’ falsely frames this racial nationalism as a real estate dispute - a conflict - and indeed provides Israel the rhetorical gymnastics through which it denies it is an apartheid regime. Accurately describing the situation as Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian non-Jews exposes Israel’s crimes against Jews - its hijacking of Jewish identity as a human shield to insulate its crimes in the name of Jews.

Thus the Israeli state is genocidal in its very nature, as its goal is and always has been to effectively erase the original ethnic identity by expulsion and the hijacking of their cultural iconography as its own. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, and in slower motion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - and, of course, within Israel itself - is all part of Zionism’s grotesquely anti-Semitic crime of hijacking Judaism into a racial supremacist cult. Israel is in effect conducting genocide and blaming it on the Jews.

Israel’s squandering of Jewish identity is also obvious if we look at the people who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and beyond - ongoing through to this moment - because they are not Jewish, and have for generations been reduced to life in camps. What do we call these camps? Unfortunately, playing right into Israel’s narrative, we call them refugee camps, shielding Israel from this aspect of its abuse of Jewish identity.

No - what is a refugee camp? It is a camp for people displaced by conflict or natural disaster, on account of which are unable to return home. But this has not applied to the Palestinians for 75 years. Since the end of 1948, they have been perfectly able to go home, have wanted nothing more than to go home, have the unqualified individual right to go home, and there is nothing stopping them from going home ... except that the Israeli state blocks them! Why? It blocks them because they are not Jewish.

So these are not refugee camps - they are Israeli internment camps for non-Jews, paid for by the ‘international community’. The term, ‘refugee camps’, obscures this crime Israel is committing in the name of Jews, making the fact that millions of people wake up every morning to the squalor of camps sound like some tragedy of circumstances. No - Israel keeps them imprisoned in internment camps, because they are not Jewish - end of story.

As an example of how cynical is Israel’s theft of Jewish identity, one of these Israeli internment camps for non-Jews, Shu’fat, is already in what is claimed to be Israel. According to Israel, East Jerusalem (where the camp is) is Israeli, as much a part of the state as any other. So, the people of Shu’fat camp do not even need to ‘return’ - they are already there!

But they are in camps. They are in camps, even though they are in Israel, according to Israel, in order to preserve Israel’s self-professed identity as ‘the Jewish state’ - a remarkably cynical term, in that its exterior demands unqualified respect, while its interior hides a neo-fascist, racist abuse of Jewish identity to empower its crimes against the Palestinians.

Smears

Since its purpose is to protect the state itself, not Jews, and since the very mission of the state is a racist one, anti-racists - that is, the vast majority of the people working for Palestinian liberation - are the targets of the smear, whereas actual anti-Jewish bigots, and even neo-fascists, are not targets because they are invariably avid supporters of the state.

I came of age in the United States during the height of the US-led war against Vietnam, and like many people of all ages at the time, I was active in the movement to stop it. Now, we were called traitors, but traitors to what? Traitors to a state of which I was a citizen by happenstance of the geography of my birth. It was an external aspect, not part of my DNA. Citizenship is like belonging to a club. Everyone - well, except the Palestinians and other stateless people - automatically belong to one of these clubs, and sometimes join another or resign from one.

But people brainwashed from birth by Zionism believe that Zionist ideology and the Israeli state are part of who they are. And it is for this reason that Israel does not allow Israeli nationality for Jews. The nationality of Jewish citizens of Israel is, by Israeli law, Jewish. Israel claims a hold on Jews by what it treats as ‘race’, and thus cannot be renounced. Israel claims to own Jews as Jews.

One example of how this plays out: in the 1980s, during former Lehi bigwig Yitzhak Shamir’s second term as Israeli prime minister, Russia finally allowed Jews to leave. Most wanted to go to the US, but Shamir, furious, called them ‘defectors’ and successfully coerced US president Ronald Reagan to close its doors in order to force them to go to Israel, where they were needed as place-holders for the state’s expansion into the West Bank.

In my view, this psychosis - this drug of anti-Semitism, to which Zionism has gotten its devotees addicted - is why we have the phenomenon of Zionist Jews faking anti-Semitic incidents, such as scrawling swastikas on the wall or their dormitory door, this sort of thing - even bomb scares - a phenomenon that I believe is more widespread than has been acknowledged.

Anti-Semitism has become a racket. For many years, organisations such as the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Community Service Trust and the Board of Deputies - or in the US the Anti-Defamation League - have been devoted to maintaining an ever-increasing hysteria over anti-Semitism, both to keep Zionism’s adherents terrified and satisfied, and to keep us silent.

Does anyone remember any of these organisations announcing, ‘Great news - anti-Semitism has declined this quarter’? Or even levelled off? No. It is so farcical that several years ago the Daily Mail reported that “Jews feel as threatened as they did in the holocaust, experts say”, and there has been no let-up since. Yet the media continue to parrot one new alarm after the other without betraying the slightest curiosity.

The struggle for Palestinian liberation demands that we counter this weapon - the militarisation of anti-Semitism. What, then, to do if you are falsely smeared with the ‘anti-Semitism’ label? Absolute rule: never respond on the terms handed you. Do not respond with protestations of your innocence; nor with any form of pseudo-apology for anything you did not do, thinking you will placate the inquisitors.

The smear is to silence you, of course; but they are also thrilled if you protest, because anti-Semitism remains the issue, you remain on the defensive, and because the words, ‘Palestine’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ are nowhere to be found.

In my view - and I feel strongly that I am correct in this - when the Scarlet Letter, ‘A for anti-Semitism’, is scrawled on your chest, you should instead - correctly - boomerang the charge back. And it must include the words that the smear was intended to silence:

• No - don’t blame Jews for the crimes of Israel.
• I’m arguing for simple human rights. Stop smearing Jews as bigots - as opposing equality - in order to shield Israel.
• No, the only anti-Jewish bigotry here is from those defending Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide in the name of Jews.

Similarly:

• It is not enough to say that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism: rather, Zionism is anti-Semitism.
• It is convoluted to say that criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic. Rather, adulation of Israel is far, far more likely to spring from anti-Semitism.

The militarisation of anti-Semitism has to be thrown back - exposed - for the racist outrage that it is. And here is why I maintain that the term ‘anti-Semitism’ should be dropped in favour of ‘anti-Jewish bigotry’, or any straightforward term consistent with how one would reference any other target of racism.

The smear, ‘anti-Semitic’, is a blunt weapon that not only infers Jewish (and is thus understood as Israeli) exceptionalism, but obscures precisely what act is being alleged. If instead the accuser is forced to clarify that bigotry against Jews (as opposed to Israel) is the accusation, that puts the onus on the accuser to explain why, for example, arguing for equal rights river to sea, is somehow anti-Jewish. It suddenly becomes more transparent that it is the accuser, not the accused, who is libelling Jews.

Israel - the world’s great purveyor of anti-Jewish bigotry - has created a world of smoke and mirrors out of the crime to grease the wheels of genocide. It is long overdue to clear the smoke and mirrors.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (II)

Palestinian Liberation and the MENA Revolutions

By Joseph Daher

October 22, 2023

The following article was originally published by Joseph Daher, a Syrian/Swiss academic and internationalist, in the journal Tempest on July 5, 2021. I republish it here believing it provides important background, particularly on Palestinian formations and their politics. – RF

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Israel’s recent attacks against Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza demonstrated, once again, the brutal colonial, racist, and apartheid nature of the Zionist state. The replacement of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government by a new coalition led by ultranationalist Naftali Bennett will change nothing for Palestinians.

The new regime’s policy is no different than Netanyahu’s. Proving this reality, Bennett ordered fresh air strikes on Gaza just a few days after his assumption of power. These new acts of violence and repression prove why the international left must stand in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.

But we also must engage in the strategic debates about how to win liberation and our role in it. Socialists should see the Palestinian struggle as inextricably tied to the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) against all the region’s states, most importantly Israel. This combination of resistance in Palestine and regional revolution is the only realistic way to free Palestine and all the peoples of the region.

Israel: a settler-colonial state

The Zionist movement from its origins in Europe to its foundation of Israel in 1948 and its displacement of Palestinians today has been a settler-colonial project. To establish, maintain, and expand its territory, the Israeli state has had to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, homes, and jobs. Throughout this process it allied with, and found sponsorship from, imperialist powers, first the British empire and then the United States, which used Israel as their agent in the struggle against Arab nationalism and socialism.

Thus, the Israeli state’s support for Zionist settlers’ expropriation of Palestinians’ homes in Sheikh Jarrah must be seen as a continuation of the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) that drove over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. This process of ongoing colonization is the reason why more than 5 million Palestinians refugees live in camps and cities in the Middle East and North Africa.

Even mainstream groups now recognize the reactionary nature of Israeli colonization. For example, both Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem have recently denounced Israel’s ongoing seizure of Palestinian land. They have documented how Israel has violated international laws to back 620,000 colonists building colonies in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They also concluded that Israel is an apartheid state that gives Jews special privileges and reduces Palestinians to second-class citizenship.

Given the utterly reactionary nature of Israel, the far right’s political hegemony over the last decade should come as no surprise. It is in some sense the logical outgrowth of the Zionist movement, its ethnonationalism, Israel’s institutional racism, and its more than seven decades of oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. These create the conditions for the flourishing of right-wing Zionist mobs that march through Palestinian neighborhoods chanting “Death to Arabs.”

Mistaken alliances with authoritarian regimes

Just like any other population under colonial occupation and apartheid, Palestinians have the right to resist, including with military means. Support for this right should not be confused with support for the political perspectives of the various Palestinian political parties. None of these parties—Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front of the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and others—offer a political strategy capable of winning Palestinian liberation.

The dominant Palestinian political parties look not to the Palestinian masses and the regional working classes and oppressed peoples as the forces to win liberation. Instead they seek political alliances with the region’s ruling classes and their regimes to support their political and military struggle against Israel. They collaborate with these regimes, and argue for non-intervention, even as those regimes oppress their own popular classes and Palestinians within their borders.

One of the key examples in the evolution of this approach was in Jordan 1970, and culminated in the events known as Black September. Despite the strength, organization and popularity of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) within Jordan— a country whose population was seventy percent Palestinian— the Fatah leadership of Yasser Arafat initially refused to support a campaign to overthrow the country’s dictator, King Hussein. In response, and with the backing of the U.S and Israel, Hussein declared martial law, and with the regional Arab governments largely passive, Hussein attacked the PLO camps, killed thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians, and ultimately drove the PLO out of Jordan and into Syria and Lebanon.

Despite this history, and its subsequent experiences in exile, the PLO pursued this strategy of collaboration and non-intervention for decades. Today, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas supports Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s dictatorship in Egypt. In another shocking example, Abbas recently sent a message of congratulations to Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad on “his re-election” in May 2021, despite Assad’s brutal repression of Palestinians participating in the Syrian uprising and destruction of the Yarmouk refugee camp.

Hamas pursues a similar strategy; its leaders have cultivated alliances with monarchies in Gulf states, especially Qatar more recently, as well as the fundamentalist regime in Iran. In 2012, Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas government in Gaza at the time, praised Bahrain’s “reforms” while the regime with the backing of its Gulf allies smashed the country’s democratic uprising. Many Hamas leaders viewed it as a “sectarian” coup d’état by the Shi’ites of Bahrain supported by Iran.

In April 2018, former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal praised Turkey’s invasion and occupation of Afrin in Syria during a visit to Ankara. He stated that “Turkey’s success in Afrin serves as a solid example” hopefully to be followed by similar “victories of the Islamic ummah in a lot of places in the world.” The occupation of Afrin by Turkish armed forces and its reactionary Syrian proxies drove out 200,000 mostly Kurdish people and repressed those who remained.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian left has for the most part implemented its own version of the same strategy. It too has withheld criticism of its allies’ repression of their people. The PFLP, for example, has not voiced any objections to the Syrian regime’s crimes and has even supported its army against “foreign conspiracies,” declaring that Damascus “will remain a thorn in the face of the Zionist enemy and its allies.” The PFLP’s relationship towards the theocracy in Iran, and the military dictatorship in Egypt follow a similar pattern.

Regimes betray the liberation struggle

Rather than advance the struggle, despotic states in the region have repeatedly betrayed it and even repressed Palestinians. As noted earlier, the Jordanian state crushed the Palestinian movement in 1970, killing thousands and expelling the PLO during Black September.

In 1976, Hafez al-Assad’s regime in Syria intervened in Lebanon against Palestinian and leftist organizations in support of far-right Lebanese parties. He also conducted military operations against Palestinian camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. By 1990, approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were held in Syrian prisons.

Egypt has collaborated in Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007. Iran opportunistically seeks to use the Palestinian cause as a foreign policy tool to achieve its wider objectives in the region.

While the Syrian regime has supported Hamas, it drastically cut assistance to it when it refused to support the regime’s counter-revolution against the democratic uprising in 2011. Iran only resumed formal ties with Hamas after the election of Ismail Haniyeh and Saleh al-Arouri as the new leadership.

Tehran collaborated with U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s why during the recent Iraqi uprising protesters marched under the slogan “Neither USA, Nor Iran.” These examples alone demolish the idea that Iran is a reliable ally of the Palestinian cause or that is an anti-imperialist state.

Turkey, despite Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s criticisms of Israel, maintains close economic connections with it. Erdogan has increased the volume of trade with Tel Aviv from the $1.4 billion when he came to power to $6.5 billion in 2020. Thus, the regimes restrict their support for the cause to areas where it advances their regional interests and betray it when it doesn’t.

Dead end of peace deals brokered by U.S. imperialism

With the failure of its strategy of relying on political support from, and alliance with the regions regimes, the PLO turned to an even more bankrupt approach of pursuing a peace deal brokered by the U.S. and other great powers. The hope was to secure a two-state settlement through the Oslo Accords struck in 1993.

Instead of winning Palestinian liberation, such a settlement would amount to surrender, accepting Israeli colonialism in historic Palestine, while at best winning a Palestinian rump state, and betraying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their stolen land in Israel. In the final analysis, the peace process has reduced the PA to ruling over a bantustan entirely under the control of Israel.

This disastrous result should come as no surprise. The U.S. and other imperialist powers have supported Israel as their local police force against the revolutionary transformation of the region, an event that would challenge their control over its strategic energy reserves.

Israel served this purpose repeatedly since its founding. In 1956, it participated in France and Britain’s attack on Nasser’s Egypt following its nationalization of the Suez Canal. In 1967, Israel’s Six Day War targeted Nasser’s Egypt as well as the Syrian state during their radical nationalist phase.

Since then, the U.S. has backed Israel. Washington has poured an average of $4 billion annually into Tel Aviv’s coffers, backing its colonization of Palestine and its wars of aggression against progressive governments and movements in the region. Washington supported Israel’s military intervention in Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 that oversaw the terrible massacre of Sabra and Shatila, destroyed progressive Palestinian and Lebanese forces, and installed a friendly regime in Beirut.

Israel’s victories against Arab nationalist states and its intervention in Lebanon led to the retreat of radicalism in the region, isolating the PLO. This predicament led, in 1978, to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction adopting the two-state solution, a necessary step along the path to its signing off on the 1993 Oslo Accords.

In effect, this meant the surrender of the struggle for the liberation of historic Palestine, and the transformation of Fatah into the Palestinian Authority (PA), administering the occupied territories. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, who opposed the Oslo agreement, declared that it represented “a massive abandonment of principles, the main currents of Palestinian history, and national goals” and “relegated the diaspora Palestinians to permanent exile or refugee status.”

The U.S. and Israel have supported the PA controlling Palestinians in the West Bank as well as Gaza (before the latter was taken over by Hamas in 2007). The PA has been happy to serve as Washington and Tel Aviv’s cop. For example, during the recent uprising, the PA arrested more than 20 activists for their social media posts and leadership of protests. More recently, Nizar Banat, a leading Palestinian activist and critic of the PA, was killed in a raid by its security forces on his home in Dura in Hebron.

With the PA functioning as a quisling regime, the U.S. has promoted Israel’s political and economic integration with states in the region, most recently through the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords. This normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab states further isolates the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Newly elected president Joe Biden has reaffirmed Washington’s unflinching support for Israel, whatever its crimes against Palestinians. In the midst of its most recent bombing of Gaza, a sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel passed Congress and the billions in annual aid will continue to pour in. The PA strategy of collaborating with the U.S. entails surrender to the occupier and its imperial sponsor.

The Weakness of the Palestinian Working Class

If strategies based on the region’s states and peace deals brokered by the U.S. are dead ends, what about an alternative orientation on the Palestinian working class? That too is foreclosed by Israel’s particular nature as a settler-colonial state.

Unlike apartheid South Africa, which relied on Black workers’ labor in its factories and mines, Israel has driven Palestinian workers out of any central role in its economy and replaced them with Jewish workers. As a result, Palestinian workers do not have the means to shut down the Israeli economy through strikes like Black workers did in South Africa.

That does not mean that the Palestinian resistance is powerless within the state of Israel and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The struggle of workers of other groups remains central to the movement.

The most recent wave of Palestinian struggle demonstrates its power as well as its potential to forge a new strategy to supplant the failed one of relying on support from the region’s regimes. New youth and feminist groups such as Tal’at as well as the working class have been at the heart of the recent resistance.

The workers’ general strike on May 18 was called and led from below. It shut down sections of the economy from Israel to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As Haaretz noted: “The Israel Builders Association observed that Palestinian workers had observed the strike, with only 150 of the 65,000 Palestinian construction workers coming to work in Israel. This paralyzed building sites, causing losses estimated at 130 million shekels (nearly $40 million).”

The character of the strike, while extremely important, should not be exaggerated. As Assaf Adiv, the director of the MAAN Workers Association — the only Israeli trade union that organizes Palestinians in the industrial zones of the West Bank settlements (from which Palestinian trade unions are barred)—noted the observance of the strike by Palestinians who work in Israel was in part “due to closure of the checkpoints and uncertainty on the roads of the West Bank.”

Regardless of the breadth of the participation in the strike, the Israeli economy was relatively unscathed, showing that the Palestinian working class and other social movements need solidarity from other workers, peasants, and oppressed peoples. The question is which ones should Palestinians orient on to win a secular democracy in historic Palestine.

The Israeli working class—not a strategic ally

The first and perhaps obvious strategic orientation would seem to be on the Israeli working class. But it has always placed loyalty to Israel over and above class solidarity with the Palestinian masses.

This is not just the result of ideological devotion but material interest in the Israeli state, which provides Israeli workers with homes stolen from Palestinians as well as inflated standards of living. The Israeli ruling class and state thus integrate the Israeli working class as a collaborator in a common project of settler colonialism.

Its working class institutions such as its union, the Histadrut, have played a central role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Labor Zionist leaders established the Histadrut in 1920 as an exclusively Jewish union and used it to spearhead the displacement of Palestinian workers.

Its slogan “Jewish land, Jewish work, Jewish product” neatly summarizes its ethnonationalist class-collaborationist project and underlines how fundamentally hostile it is to solidarity with Palestinians. Applying these slogans during and after the founding of Israel, it has helped ensure that land was only leased to Jews; farms and industries hired only Jews; and Palestinian farms and industries were boycotted.

On top of that, the Israeli state has militarized the incorporation of Israeli workers through mandatory conscription. This compels them to participate in the repression of Palestinians, enforce the occupation, and defend Zionist settlers’ theft of Palestinian homes and land.

Given this incorporation into the colonial project, it should come as no surprise that, with few exceptions, workers supported the most recent assault on Gaza. In just one example among many, the union of the Israeli Electric Corp (IEC) went so far as to declare that it would not repair power lines to the Gaza Strip until two Israeli soldiers and a missing Israeli civilian were returned.

Does this mean that Palestinians should not seek collaboration with progressive sectors of the Israeli working class? Of course not. Examples of small-scale solidarity exist, but they are rare.

It is hard to imagine these becoming a counter to the overwhelming pattern of ethnonationalist unity of Israeli workers with the Zionist state. A strategy focused on trying to build working class unity against Zionism between Israeli and Palestinian workers is thus unrealistic.

The regional revolutionary strategy

The key to developing a better strategy for liberation is putting Palestine in the regional context. Because Palestinian refugees in their millions are integrated in the Middle East and to a lesser extent in North Africa, their national and class struggle is necessarily intertwined with that of the region’s masses.

Those workers and peasants remember their forebearers’ fight against colonialism, confront imperialist powers that support the regimes that oppress them, identify with the struggle of the Palestinians, and therefore see their own battle for democracy and equality as bound up with its victory. That’s why there is a dialectical relationship between the struggles; when Palestinians fight it triggers the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine.

Their united revolt has the power to transform the entire region, overthrowing the regimes, expelling the imperialist powers, ending both forces’ support for the state of Israel, weakening it in the process, and proving to Israeli workers that the regional transformation can end their exploitation. Far-right minister Avigdor Lieberman admitted the danger posed to Israel by the Arab Spring in 2011 when he declared that the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to democracy was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.

The power and potential of this regional strategy has been repeatedly demonstrated. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Palestinian movement spurred a rise in class struggle throughout the region. In 2000, the Second Intifada opened a new era of resistance, inspiring a wave of organizing that would eventually explode in 2011 with revolutions from Tunisia to Egypt to Syria.

In the summer of 2019, Palestinians in Lebanon organized massive demonstrations for weeks in refugee camps against the Labor Ministry’s decision to treat them as foreigners, an act they considered to be a form of discrimination and racism against them. Their resistance helped inspire the broader Lebanese uprising in October 2019, which in turn has led to the popular uprisings in Iraq.

To implement a strategy based on this regional solidarity, Palestinian groups and movements must abandon the policy embraced by the PA, Hamas, and most of the left of non-intervention in the affairs of countries in the region. Such non-intervention was the precondition of getting aid from various regimes. Accepting that policy means cutting Palestinians off from the social forces that can help them win liberation.

Instead, the Palestinian struggle must recover the regional revolutionary strategy that was pursued by leftists in the 1960s. Unfortunately, most abandoned this strategy to tail the PLO in allying with the region’s reactionary states.

The strategy of regional revolution based on class struggle from below is the only way to win liberation from Israel to Saudi Arabia and Syria as well as their imperialist backers from the U.S. to China and Russia. In that fight, Palestinians and those in other countries must embrace the demands of all those that suffer national oppression like the Kurds and others who suffer other forms of ethnic, sectarian, and social oppression.

Now is the time to resurrect the regional strategy. The whole of the Middle East and North Africa is in a long-term revolutionary process rooted in the masses’ blocked political and economic aspirations. There have already been two waves of uprisings, the first in 2011 that rocked the whole region and a second in 2018 and 2019 that swept through Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria, and Iraq.

With none of the popular grievances won, no doubt a third wave is on its way. And Palestine can and must be at the center of this next wave in a fight to liberate it and the entire region.

Palestine in the revolutionary process

Only through this regional revolutionary strategy can we envision the establishment of a democratic, socialist, and secular state in historic Palestine with equal rights for both Palestinian and Jewish people within a socialist federation throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In the new Palestinian state, all Palestinians would have the right to return to their land and homes from which they were forcibly displaced in 1948, 1967, and after. In addition to this, the liberation of Palestine must also include a global project of economic development and reconstruction to guarantee Palestinians their social and economic rights.

To implement this strategy, Palestinians must forge a new political leadership committed to self-organization from below within historic Palestine and the region. They cannot do that alone but must do so through collaboration with socialists from Egypt to Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and all the other countries.

The most important task for those outside the region is to win the left, unions, progressive groups, and movements to support the campaign for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. Forcing this on institutions and corporations in the imperialist powers, especially the U.S., will help block their support for Israel and other despotic regimes and weaken their hold in the region.

The liberation of Palestine thus passes through the liberation of all the peoples living under tyrants in Damascus, Riyadh, Doha, Tehran, Ankara, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Amman, and all the others. As a Syrian revolutionary wrote from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights in the summer of 2014, “freedom—a common destiny for Gaza, Yarmouk and the Golan.” This slogan holds out the hope of regional revolutionary transformation, the only realistic strategy for liberation.

*I would like to thank Ashley Smith and Sai Englert for their help in the writing of the article.

Further reading

“Secular democracy and the future of Palestine,” by Haidar Eid, January 28, 2022  https://mondoweiss.net/2022/01/secular-democracy-and-the-future-of-palestine/

“A Secular Democratic State in Historic Palestine: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?” by Ghada Karmi http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=1690&CategoryId=8

One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel       by Ghada Karmi  One State (plutobooks.com)

Bolivia’s Perfect Storm: Pandemic, Economic crisis, Repressive coup regime

COB mobilization marches through El Alto Photo by La Razón

Introduction

The rising toll of diseased and deceased from the Covid-19 pandemic has hit Bolivia particularly hard, in a continent that is now in the lead in global contagion rates. As of August 8, more than 100,000 cases were officially confirmed or suspected, with 3,600 deaths among a total population of just over 10 million.

The coup government, installed in November, has mismanaged the crisis from the outset. Hospitals are understaffed and ill-equipped, testing is minimal, and the main response by the de facto authorities is to threaten lengthy jail terms for those who circulate “inaccurate” information about the pandemic — in a country where only a minority of workers are employed, the vast majority eking out a living in the “informal” economy of street markets and self-employment.

Typical of its approach, the interim regime headed by President Jeanine Añez was quick to expel more than 700 Cuban healthcare workers who, under the previous government, had provided needed services in remote areas and helped to train new medical staff.

Aggravating the misery is an unprecedented economic crisis. The coup regime paralyzed state development projects initiated by the previous government, privatized key state enterprises, and brought the IMF back with a $327 million loan. These policies, writes Bolivian journalist Oliver Vargas, have had “dramatic consequences for the ability of the country to weather the economic impact of Covid-19. 38% of the country has lost the entirety of their income, while 52% have lost a part of their income. The deliberate retreat of the state has meant that the 90% who are suffering during quarantine haven’t received any income support, the only gesture has been a one-off universal payment of US$70. In April, to last four months of lockdown.”

Remittances from relatives working abroad — crucially important for many families — have fallen by more than 30% in the first six months of this year, as many of the 3 million Bolivians living abroad in economic exile have lost their jobs.

“Bolivians are again experiencing shortages,” tweets deposed president Evo Morales from his Buenos Aires exile. “Long lines to buy food, drugs and gas amidst uncertainty and pandemic. The people have to struggle not only against the #Coronavirus but to survive as best they can, totally abandoned.”

“In the face of this desperate situation,” says Vargas, “voters were looking forward to ending the eight month coup experiment at the ballot box in September. Polls show that the MAS [the party led by Morales] is on course for a first-round victory, with Añez trailing behind in a distant third. It might have been a peaceful end to a violent period. However, determined to cling on to power whatever the cost, the regime is using Covid-19 as an excuse to postpone those elections. Claiming that elections would spread the virus, even as public transport and most of the economy re-opens, they have pushed for further delays.”

When the new elections tribunal, the TSE, arbitrarily postponed the election to October 18, overruling the legislated date of September 6, mass protests broke out throughout the country, initiated by the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) and the Pacto de Unidad, the coalition of organizations allied with the deposed government party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). Starting August 3 more than 100 roadblocks were set up, only vehicles delivering medical supplies being allowed through. Thousands of Bolivians have taken to the streets demanding the national elections be held September 6.

Road blockade opens way for trucks carrying medical oxygen toward the Altiplano. Photo by La Razón

COB leader Juan Carlos Huarachi stated: “We need a democratically-elected government so as to discuss new policies, not just for social issues, but also for economic issues… in eight months we’ve seen the collapse of our country. Sadly, this is the reality, with recipes from the IMF, by blackmailing the people, by blackmailing the legislature.”

The Añez regime has responded by charging MAS leaders with “terrorism, genocide, sedition” and “offenses against public health.” And it has supported demands that the TSE disqualify the MAS candidates from the election. The TSE has referred the matter to the Supreme Court.

The following article by Cochabamba-based journalist Fernando Molina, published before the most recent events, describes the political climate, the MAS reactions to its overthrow in November, and the difficult perspectives it faces, whether it wins or loses the elections. I have translated it from the July-August 2020 issue of the magazine Nueva Sociedad, edited by Pablo Stefanoni in Buenos Aires. I have supplemented Molina’s notes with a few of my own, for clarification, signed R.F.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

What Outcome for Bolivia’s Crisis?

Elections and political reconfiguration

By Fernando Molina

Bolivia is heading toward presidential and legislative elections amidst a new political scenario. After the fall of Evo Morales and the blow suffered by his political force, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) has regained ground and could win again. Will it succeed? If so, can it return to power? Whatever the case, a polarized battle looms between the MAS and its adversaries.

Bolivia’s elections, scheduled at this point for next September 6, will express a huge political and social polarization. It is not unique in this: so does the U.S. election in November. But while this is characteristic of the bipartisan U.S. electoral system, it is unusual in Bolivia. Several parties will be participating but the electorate will be divided according to a single alternative: for or against the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS).

We still don’t know which party will manage to represent the anti-MAS voters. Various Center and Right-wing parties are competing, encouraged by Bolivia’s electoral laws which allow for a second round of voting where no party wins a sufficient plurality. This opens space for the parties to make individual calculations — a practice that many MAS opponents consider outrageous, since it jeopardizes what was achieved with the overthrow of President Evo Morales last November, that is, the abrupt departure from office of the socio-political bloc that had managed the country since the early 21st century.

This is now the main concern of Bolivia’s economic, intellectual and media elites: to prevent dangerous games between the old opponents of Morales (who resist yielding to each other and are unable to form a united front against “public enemy number one,” as a La Paz daily calls the former president[1]) evoking the most terrifying specter for the upper classes: the “return of the MAS.”

These parties respond to their critics with claims that each is not only the very opposite of the MAS but has the unique ability to guarantee a definitive and sustainable victory over it.[2] At the same time, each of them seeks to show that their rivals are not trustworthy because their actions bring water to the mill of the MAS. The common accusation is that they are “functional to the MAS.” This was the tone adopted, for example, by the de facto government, which is running interim President Jeanine Añez as the presidential candidate of the Juntos group, toward opposition candidates Carlos Mesa and Luis Fernando Comacho when they criticized her handling of the health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.[3]

Conversely the other opposition parties have accused the interim government of promoting the return of the MAS through its mismanagement of the crisis.[4] The media are playing the same game, as indicated by this headline in El Deber, the main daily in Santa Cruz, when reporting on the former president and current candidate Carlos Mesa: “Mesa shares a forum with the President of Argentina Alberto Fernández, who gave refuge to Evo.”[5]

Hatred of the MAS

Abhorring the MAS is the dominant passion of the country’s traditional elites. The roots are found in a mix of memories of grievances suffered (the loss of spaces of power due to the dissolution of the technocracy of the 1990s and the devaluation of their “genealogical capital” for 14 years), ideological differences (liberal-republicanism versus national-caudillismo), and racism against the Indigenous and mestizo plebeians or “cholos.”

Hatred of the MAS began even before the coming to power of the “first Indigenous president” and the installation in the government of social movements that brought together Indigenous peoples, peasants and workers. This could already be felt in 2002, when the MAS because a serious alternative for office. Between 2006 and 2008, during the first two years of Morales’s government, it came close to unleashing a civil war between the north-western and south-eastern regions of the country. If this did not happen, it was due to the weight of the president’s popularity, although he did not manage to consolidate himself in government without first blunting the more radical edges of his program of state reforms and reducing to the minimum his program of redistribution of agrarian property.

Despite this, the abhorrence of the leftist party and its leader did not disappear. Even during the boom period, 2009-2015, while the country was experiencing the best economic moment of its history, the majority of Bolivians had more income and social welfare increased, the animosity smoldered like a votive candle on the secret altars of the business organizations, social clubs, lodges, fraternities of the Santa Cruz carnival, the card games of wealthy women, and ultimately in the multiple settings of private life in which the traditional white elites had not lost their primacy. Even if some bourgeois leaders “went over” to the MAS government or pretended they were fraternizing with it, or if most of the intellectuals and journalists were careful not to “overly criticize” the powerful regime, the class and racial enmity was always there, awaiting a better time in which to express itself.

The same thing occurred with racial prejudice. Although public expressions of this prejudice were tempered by fear that the government would implement the legal and moral sanctions it deserved, the country continued to be weighed down by the vestiges of the estates of the colonial order. The MAS even had to make realpolitik concessions to racism, such as appointing figures that were more picturesque than persuasive in the newly created Vice-Ministry of Decolonization, which was intended to direct egalitarian policies, or allowing the Armed Forces to maintain a rule that discriminated against sergeants and corporals, most of whom are of Indigenous origin.[6]

Those longing for the old powers and the old relations between the classes were gradually strengthened as the MAS government was weakened by the natural wear and tear of its prolonged stay in power, the errors it was making and the limitations it revealed. Being “anti-MAS” became a sign of social and racial status, and therefore began to be internalized by the lower middle classes as an “aspirational” element, that is, as a mechanism for social advancement.

What were the mistakes made and the limitations that the MAS government revealed? Its “electoralism,” which ended up reducing the social process to a succession of triumphs at the ballot box and the retention of power at all costs, even with authoritarian methods; its “peasantism,” which must be understood as a relative indifference to the demands of the urban sectors; its cooptation of unconditional “Evistas” as a part of the leadership; its corruption and bureaucratization; its ideological unclarity between extreme pragmatism and “national-Stalinism,”[7] and above all its caudillismo.

With his political, economic and governmental success, Morales became the most important caudillo in a country that had been full of them; a country in which, as its most creative sociologist, René Zavaleta, put it, “the caudillo is the way that the masses organize.”[8] The centrality of the president and the state cult of his personality attained levels as high as those achieved by other great national leaders such as Victor Paz Estenssoro or José María Linares. If at first the official flattery of Morales corresponded in part to reality, it later became a mirage and a mechanism for ratification and manipulation of the Bolivian president’s narcissism. To such an extent that he believed he was even strong enough to turn his back to the source of his power, the electoral majorities, if they were to oppose him.

That was what happened with regard to the constitutional referendum of February 21, 2016, which ruled out his re-election,[9] and perhaps also with regard to the result of the elections of October 20, 2019, which, as most Bolivians perceived it,[10] he had arranged to alter in order to avoid a second round (a notion, however, that Morales and the MAS deny and that is now a subject of dispute in the election campaign and the courts).[11]

In any event, to assume that the undeniable strength of his figure was superior to Bolivians’ attachment to the vote — which in this country is key because it serves to resolve the everlasting disputes over the rents derived from natural resources — was a very serious misstep. It ended up confusing and fragmenting the social bloc that had backed the MAS government, and which was already weakened by its long incorporation within the ruling party with all the advantages and temptations that this situation implied.[12]

In the end, in the final hours of his government the MAS, which had arisen from social struggles, was unable to mobilize its adherents. It had been transformed into an electoral machine that could still get out the vote but which no longer aroused any progressive fervor. Only the ultraloyal cocaleros of the Chapare, the residents of the most Indigenous neighborhoods of the Aymara metropolis of El Alto, and certain groups of state functionaries were willing to fight effectively to prevent Morales from falling.

After his overthrow, the burning of buses, factories and homes of opponents of Morales in La Paz, as well as the “siege of the cities” ordered by the ex-president from exile, aroused the age-old terror of the Bolivian whites of the “Indian thug” and raised the hatred of the MAS to the level of collective hysteria. It was then that there arose the ferociously anti-socialist narrative that still prevails today.

Pablo Stefanoni has singled out “three key words in it: ‘hordes’ (the MAS members are reduced to mere criminal shock troops); ‘waste’ (the widely praised macroeconomic management [of Morales] was simply virtual reality; and ‘tyranny’ (the last 14 years are said to have been pure state despotism).”[13] This narrative has served in part as the motive and in part as the cover for the repression of the MAS carried out by the interim government. Groups that mobilized in support of ex-president Morales were dismantled by the combined forces of the Police and the Army, costing the lives of more than 30 people. Almost 1,000 leaders were temporarily detained. Several dozen former officials, among them Morales and his vice-president Álvaro García Linera, had to leave the country for Mexico and Argentina. Hundreds have been investigated for corruption. Two ex-ministers were arrested and remain in jail. Seven MAS leaders took refuge in the Mexican embassy in La Paz, where they are stranded due to being denied safe conduct to leave the country.

At the same time, the public sphere has been taken over almost completely by the spokespersons — genuine and upstarts — of the “revolution of the pititas,” as the press called the protests that preceded the overthrow of Morales.[14] Even intellectuals who had been linked with and thrived from the previous government have begun to practice target shooting against Morales, making him the “punching bag” of anyone who knows how to string together a few phrases to produce an opinion piece. The most important left-wing academics have been careful not to go against this climate of opinion, and have sought to exonerate themselves.[15] From the outset, the Añez interim government has enjoyed hegemony over the mass media,[16] and only recently has this begun to lessen due to the rapid erosion in the government’s management although it is still unanimous if invoked against the MAS.

In this context, one would have thought that the MAS’s days were numbered, that its future would be that of a secondary political group, and exclusively rural. However, early in the new year, notwithstanding the adverse conditions we have described, the MAS appeared to be heading the first surveys of voting intentions, even before it had named any candidates. The acronym attracted “hard-core” support — ideological and sociological — of massive scope. In January 21% of the electorate was prepared to vote for it regardless of who its candidates were or what they were offering.[17] In March, with its candidates now chosen, 33% of the population supported it.[18]

The workers, the plebeian sectors of the population, the Indigenous peoples and the cholos who had not been upwardly mobile to another social class continued to see the MAS — although it had made no consistent self-criticism of its errors — as the only force capable of representing them and defending the statism, nationalism and racial egalitarianism that the return to power of the traditional elites seemed to have put at risk. But in addition, that force is associated with a period of unusual prosperity and political stability. That is why, among other reasons, the initiative of the most radical “pititas” to use the charge of fraud hanging over the MAS to veto its participation in the election went nowhere. This outcome was counter-intuitive. Despite everything that had occurred, the MAS continued to be at the centre of politics, and the other forces had to position themselves in relation to it. Not even the defeat of historic scope that the party had suffered last November had displaced it from this focal location. It was a surprising example of political resilience that no doubt expressed, as we have said, simultaneous processes of class and racial identification.

The MAS response since its fall

“Evismo,” or the admiration and loyalty — not always healthy — manifested for Evo Morales, on the one hand, and on the other the possibility of obtaining an electoral victory in the coming elections are the two forces that have preserved the unity of the MAS after the terrible earthquake that its violent departure from government meant for this party. For those who suppose that its fall was due solely to the action of an external force (the “empire’s conspiracy to appropriate Bolivian lithium,” or the “police and military coup”), the unity of the Masistas may seem an obvious premise. But this is not the case because, as we have seen, the overthrow of the Morales government was the result of both external and internal causes. Furthermore, the MAS has never been an ideological party; it is “sindicalista,” and part of its appeal has been its ability to enable the social ascent of the most awakened and ambitious elements of the unions and the plebeian middle classes. So the expectation of an early return to power has influenced its unitary behaviour.

Morales has also played a fundamental role in this, by becoming the only reference for groups that without him would probably seek to compete with each other to express that 33% or more of the electorate that today leans to the left. This has always been the role of Morales. If the MAS managed to fulfil one of the most cherished hopes of the 20^th century progressives, the “unity of the left,” it did this not on the foundations predicted (ideological hegemony, defensive front, etc.) but in the Bolivian style, around a guardian figure.[19] Morales articulates the three main wings of his party, all of which are “Evistas.” This ensures that “they stay in the Political Instrument,” while at the same time avoiding the emergence of dangerous competitors for his charismatic leadership.

The three major factions of the MAS, each of which includes many minor groups, are as follows:

(a) The one formed by the workers and peasants organizations of the so-called “Unity Pact.” This is led, on the one hand, by David Choquehuanca, an Indigenous leader in the Altiplano who served as foreign minister between 2006 and 2018 and is now the MAS vice-presidential candidate, and on the other by the young Andrónico Rodríguez, the effective leader of the cocalero union federations that Morales continues to head.

(b) The one formed by the numerous groups of militants that come from the traditional left; radical and “national-Stalinist” leaders predominate in this wing, although it also contains the more moderate candidate for President, the former Minister of Economy and socialist activist Luis Arce.

(c) The one formed by the neo-Marxist, post-modern, left-wing humanists and progressive democrats who joined the MAS just before and after it came to power and who, given their educational capital, played an important role in government management. A minority part of these middle-class elements have links with Choquehuanca, while another, larger part was related with García Linera (whose future role is uncertain).[20]

The Indigenous and sindicalista wing read Morales’s departure from power in a purely racial key. In part, this sentiment was turned against the middle-class members of the MAS, whom they considered opportunists who had taken advantage of the “government of the Indians” to build their fame and fortune. This was the context for the resurgence in popularity of Choquehuanca, who had been “in the freezer” for a couple of years after Morales kicked him out of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when he was considered a possible successor in the Presidency just at the time when the Chief of State was seeking the unconditional support of his party for his third re-election. Choquehuanca had actually played an important role, as the coordinator of several rural-based NGOs, in promoting the rapid rise of the young “brother Evo” from peasant syndicalism to national politics.

When the MAS was founded, Choquehuanca was its main operator in the Aymara area of the country (the altiplano that includes La Paz and Oruro), while Morales, despite his Aymara origin, dominated the valleys of Cochabamba where the population was primarily of Quechua origin. Choquehuanca is a cultural Indianista and therefore a moderate but he tends to gather political strength from the opposition between the Indigenous and the middle class of the MAS. Within the cabinet, he found himself in muted conflict with García Linera. In accordance with his racially-shaded view of the balance of forces within his party, he accused the then vice-president of being guilty of all the government’s failings, including his own departure from power, while absolving Morales, at least in public.

After losing control of Foreign Affairs, Choquehuanca’s supporters were removed from the government and Choquehuanca himself was sent into “golden exile” in Venezuela as executive secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). After Morales’s ouster, the Unity Pact nominated him and Andrónico Rodríguez as candidates for President and Vice-President, respectively. The party approved this nomination along with the list of candidates determined by the Unity Pact — an illustration of which of its wings was the strongest. However, Morales objected to this formula and imposed instead a middle-class figure who was close to him, Luís Arce, shifting Choquehuanca to second position. Unlike Choquehuanca, Arce has no social base of his own, and if elected would be dependent on Morales. Characteristically, the former foreign affairs minister accepted Morales’s decision in public, but was reluctant about it in private and attributed it to an intrigue by García Linera. His compliance, hypocritical or not, prevented a clash between the Unity Pact and the exile in Buenos Aires, which would have been very dangerous for the MAS.

However, the tensions between “workers,” “professionals,” rural “founders” and urban “guests,” “nationalists,” and “communists” continue to exist and will surely be expressed more openly in the future, whether the MAS wins or loses the elections. […]

Another political figure who has emerged from the social organizations is the President of the Legislative Assembly, Senator Eva Copa, who has upheld the Indigenista claims and has led the MAS parliamentarians with a certain independence of both Arce and Morales. She can not easily be classified among the Choquehuanca supporters. Shortly after the November overthrow of Morales, Copa reached certain agreements with the Añez government that she did not coordinate with her comrades in Bolivia or, in some cases, with those in Buenos Aires. And she has criticized publicly middle-class leaders like Senator Adriana Salvatierra despite the fact that she was in a difficult personal situation.[21]

None of this has been disavowed by Morales. He, like so many other caudillos, maintains relations with all groups and individuals that he can use to achieve his plans. Evo’s attitude — and, on the other hand, the interim government’s lack of interest in or commitment to achieving this — has prevented the defection of the MAS caucus in the legislature. After the most crucial moment of the repression, when this defection seemed imminent, had passed, the parliamentarians regained the initiative and launched what some observers have viewed as a counter-attack by the national-popular bloc.[22]

The extreme tolerance and even the ideological neglect of the MAS are due to the fact that this party is profoundly electoralist. At the same time, these characteristics determine that it remains as such: amorphous, and thinking that the solution to all its problems — or, better yet, that its only problem — lies in winning the coming elections. Obviously, this has forestalled any systematic debate on the causes of its political defeat, learning from its mistakes, or improving…. If Morales, very reluctantly, came to accept that he had been wrong in trying to re-elect himself for a third time,[23] he has now changed his mind in view of the slight improvement of his situation in Bolivia owing to the problems of administration confronting Añez, among them those related to the health crisis. He has just said, once again, that he was not mistaken in running once again.[24]

Can the MAS return to power? Is this advisable in the medium term?

Can the MAS return to power in September? Technically, yes. It needs to win more than 40% of the votes — not impossible, given that it now polls between 33% and 35% — and hope that Mesa and Añez, running separately, do not rise far above the 20% support they now have. The major obstacle to this lies in the possibility that the anti-MAS electorate, on the eve of the elections, turns massively in favour of either of those candidates. This is what happened in October 2019, and the polling does not discount it. Should the MAS be forced into a run-off second round with either Mesa or Añez, the intense polarization would probably result in a slim victory for the anti-MAS candidate.

Should the MAS win, could it take office? In Bolivia’s history there is a period with similarities to the current one. In the late 1940s, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), which had co-governed with nationalist military officers between 1943 and 1946, likewise faced the hatred of the elites. In the 1951 elections Mamerto Urriolagoitia, the outgoing president, did not accept the victory of Paz Estenssoro, and instead handed over power to a military junta. This maneuver went down in history as the “mamertazo.”

Is there room for a new “mamertazo” in Bolivian history? Today, of course, the international situation is quite different. However, very powerful forces could resist with all the resources at their disposal the return of “Bolivia’s cancer” — as a columnist has called the MAS.[25] Among them, a section of the Army.[26]

Urriolagoitia argued that the MNR victory could not be recognized because the “communists” could not be allowed to take power. Today some might argue that it should not be given to “narcoterrorists,” or that the rise of a party that tried to cheat the country with a fraudulent election should be prevented, perhaps by banning it before the elections are held. Morales has warned of this possibility, referring to it as their “Plan B.”[27]

The more democratic section of the Bolivian elites, however, would see a re-edition of a “mamertazo” as the repetition of an error. Bear in mind that a few months after Urriolagoitia’s action, the National Revolution exploded and Paz Estenssoro returned from his Argentine exile to take office as President. An even more interesting (if naïve) question is whether an immediate return to power is advisable for the MAS. It is conceivable that in such case it would not have time or space to overhaul itself, recover from its wounds, establish a healthier relationship with its “President Evo,” in short, it could not avoid making the same errors and suffering the same damages as before. On the other hand, it is also true that as a party now hemmed in by the state security services, staying out of government could end up decimating and dividing it. There is no doubt that such a thing as the “advantage of losing” is not in the mind of Morales, Arce and the other MAS leaders, and much less in the minds of the Masistas involved in trials, imprisoned or exiled.

What would Arce and Choquehuanca do if they came to govern? What would they have to face in 2020-2025? Some forecasts: they would face resistance, at least initially, from the state security agencies; the relentless campaign against them by the economic, social, university and media elites; the constant mobilization of certain sectors of the middle class that would not want to retire to their winter quarters after having tasted again the fruits of power; a divided parliament; a MAS agitated and eroded by the battle between “revanchists” and “conciliators”; and above all the blows of the pandemic and one of the worst economic crises in the country’s history.

In this context, there is no doubt that Arce would be lucky if he could stop the restoration process that his enemies have begun, and administer the state from the perspective of those below. Assigning him any other objective would be unrealistic. And if he failed in this, it would probably compromise even further the possibilities of mounting a far-reaching leftist project in the future. In any case, as the annals and epics testify, the generals have never heeded the fortune tellers when they have already decided to go into battle.

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[1] Robert Brockmann, “El enemigo público No 1,” Brújala Digital, June 18, 2020.

[2] “[Carlos] Mesa: mi responsabilidad es ganarle al MAS en elecciones para evitar que siga gobernando el país,” ANF, June 24, 2020.

[3] “Samuel [Medina Dorado, Junto’s vice-presidential candidate] accusa a ‘Camacho, Mesa y el MAS’ de conformar un bloque contra el Gobierno,” Correa del Sur, May 26, 2020.

[4] Erika Segales: “Camacho, Mesa y Tuto pasan a la ‘ofensiva’ contra Añez,” Página Siete, May 26, 2020.

[5] Marcelo Tedesqui, “Mesa comparte foro con el presidente de Argentina, Alberto Fernández, qui dio refugio a Evo,” El Deber, June 20, 2020.

[6] For example, they were not allowed to eat in the same canteens as the officers. See Fernando Molina, “Patria o muerte. Venceremos. El orden castrense de Evo Morales,” Nueva Sociedad No. 278, November-December 2018.

[7] That is, a stereotypical anti-imperialism, inclined to fantastic conspiracy theories, with little attachment to democracy and a tendency to organize internal purges.

[8] Zavaleta, “La Revolución Boliviana y la cuestion del poder [1964],” Obras completas Tomo I, (Plural, La Paz), p. 112. [See also Moira Zuazo, “The MAS government in Bolivia: Are the social movements in power?”]

[9] After its narrow loss in the effort to overrule the constitutional re-election limitations, the MAS chose not to select other candidates for president and vice-president but instead to devote its energies to finding ways to circumvent the popular verdict. In the end it got the Supreme Court to adopt a dubious international legal precedent ruling out re-election limits for all elected positions in the country. – R.F.

[10] Katiuska Vásquez, “El 70% cree que Evo se fue por revuelta y 62% que hay fraude,” Los Tiempos, December 23, 2019.

[11] Claims of fraud have been refuted by several studies. See, for example, “New York Times and New Report Confirm CEPR Analysis Refuting OAS Claims of Flawed Bolivian Election Results,” CEPR, June 7, 2020. – R.F.

[12] Pablo Stefanoni, “Las lecciones que nos deja Bolivia,” Sin Permiso, March 14, 2020.

[13] Pablo Stefanoni, “Bolivia: anatomía de un derrocamiento,” El País, January 21, 2020.

[14] An allusion to the strings and thin ropes used to block streets, obviating the need to mobilize many demonstrators — a custom of the Bolivian middle classes ridiculed by Morales in one of his last speeches as President.

[15] For example, see Luis Tapia, “Crisis política en Bolivia: la coyuntura de disolución de la domination masista. Fraude y resistencia democrática,” CIDES-UMSA, November 19, 2019.

[16] Fernando Molina, “Hegemonía instantánea: la prensa en la crisis boliviana,” Contrahegemonía, on-line, December 3, 2019.

[17] Paula Lazarte, “Ciesmori perfila al candidato del MAS como ganador en encuesta,” Página Siete, January 2, 2020.

[18] “Arce aumenta ventaja y Mesa afianza el segundo lugar, según encuesta de Ciesmori,” Página Siete, March 15, 2020.

[19] Fernando Mayorga, Mandato y contingencia. Estilo de gobierno de Evo Morales, Fundación Friedrich Ebert (La Paz, 2019).

[20] The exiled García Linera has accepted an academic position in Argentina. – R.F.

[21] Salvatierra, Senate president at the time of the coup, was next in line for President following the resignations of Morales and García Linera. She promptly resigned too, alleging later that she was instructed to do so by her party leader Evo Morales. – R.F.

[22] Fernando Mayorga, “‘Elecciones ya’: ¿el MAS recupera la iniciativa?,” Nueva Sociedad, June 2020.

[23] Deutsche Welle, Evo Morales: “Fue un error volver a presentarme,” January 17, 2020.

[24] Boris Miranda, “Evo Morales en entrevista con BBC Mundo: ‘Nosotros vamos a recuperar el gobierno,’” June 24, 2020.

[25] Francesco Zaratti, “El cáncer de Bolivia,” Página Siete, November 16, 2019.

[26] Isabel Mercado, “El plan del MAS es «sacar esta ley, maniatarnos y crear milicias»,” Interview with Añez’s Minister of Defense Fernando López, Página Siete, June 29, 2020.

[27] Natalio Cosoy, “Evo Morales cree que puede haber un ‘golpe’ si el MAS gana las elecciones en Bolivia,” France 24, March 17, 2020.

In the wake of a right-wing racist coup, Bolivia’s MAS struggles to regain the initiative

Introduction

What happened in Bolivia in October and November may best be described, perhaps, as an unfolding coup: a rapidly escalating succession of violent street protests against the narrow election victory on October 20 of President Evo Morales and his party, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), culminating in a police mutiny, the army’s refusal to defend the president, the resignation and exile of Morales and his vice-president, the resignations of their constitutionally designated successors, and the seizure of the presidency by Jeanine Añez, a right-wing senator, in a legislature without a quorum.

The coup terminated the quest by Evo Morales, the country’s president for 14 years, for an unprecedented fourth mandate in defiance of a referendum vote in 2016 that had reaffirmed the two-term limit in the country’s constitution.

Bolivia has now reunited with its longstanding record as the country in Latin America that has experienced the most coups d’état in its history.

Self-appointed president Añez moved quickly to violently repress anti-coup protests and begin reversing the former government’s progressive international alignments while launching a witch-hunt of former ministers and top officials, many of whom face trumped-up charges ranging from corruption to sedition and terrorism.

The de facto transition regime has agreed to hold new elections May 3 to be overseen by a new electoral tribunal chosen by the outgoing MAS-dominated legislative assembly. However, the coup has radically shifted the balance of forces in the country and there is no certainty that the electoral process will enjoy democratic legitimacy or that the results, if they conflict with the agenda of Añez and her allies, will be respected.

Leading the opinion polls are the MAS candidates Luis “Lucho” Arce for President and David Choquehuanca for Vice-President. Arce served as finance minister during most of the MAS government’s mandates and is considered the architect of its relatively successful economic record. Choquehuanca is an Aymará leader who served for 11 years as Morales’s foreign minister. The opinion polls give Arce and Choquehuanca a substantial lead over rival parties and alliances, and probably underestimate MAS support as the party is strongest in rural areas ignored by polling. The MAS hopes to win on the first ballot, as it did in October—in a vote discredited by the OAS and falsely denounced as “fraudulent” by its opponents[1]—with a score of more than 40% and more than 10 percentage points ahead of its nearest rival.[2] Should it fail in this, a run-off vote in June will probably see the right-wing parties unite behind the anti-MAS candidate.

Confronting the MAS are the presidential candidates of six right-wing parties and alliances—among them Carlos Mesa, a former president who came second to Morales in 2019, and “interim” president Añez, who publicly bemoaned the diversity of anti-MAS candidatures but then announced her own candidacy.

Evo Morales, barred by the constitution from running again for President, was nominated by the MAS as its primary candidate for Senator in Cochabamba but was ruled ineligible by the electoral tribunal on technical grounds, as was former MAS foreign minister Diego Pary nominated for Senator in Potosí.

However, the MAS has named Evo Morales, now exiled in Argentina, as its “campaign manager” and his influence—not always positive, in my view—has proved decisive in the designation of the party’s candidates. At a party leadership meeting in Buenos Aires, Morales rejected making Choquehuanca the candidate for president along with Andrónico Rodriguez, the dynamic young leader of the Chapare coca growers’ union federation, as vice-president—as proposed overwhelmingly by MAS assemblies in Bolivia seeking to reflect the Indigenous and peasant roots of the party. And he subsequently excluded popular MAS Senate leader Eva Copa—who has exercised remarkable leadership in the legislature independently of Morales—from the party’s list of candidates in El Alto, while endorsing the former Senate leader Adriana Salvatierra, a Morales devotee, as a candidate in Santa Cruz despite her rejection by party leaders in Bolivia.

In later articles, I will critically assess the balance sheet of the MAS’s 14 years in government. However, the following article by Emily Achtenberg provides a very useful account of the recent events and the challenges facing the MAS in this election. I have omitted a few paragraphs (indicated by ellipses) on potential election candidates, as this information in now out-of-date. Her article was first published January 10 in her column Rebel Currents on the website of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). Emily Achtenberg, an urban planner, is a member of NACLA's Editorial Board.[3]

– Richard Fidler

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MAS Party Under Threat as Bolivia Moves Towards New Elections (Without Evo)

By Emily Achtenberg

Bolivians will head to the polls again on May 3 for the first presidential election in 18 years without Evo Morales as a candidate.

The “do-over” vote—for president, vice-president, and members of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, to be followed shortly by regional elections—has been called by Bolivia’s transitional president Jeanine Añez, who assumed power after Morales’s forced resignation on November 10 in a civic-military coup. A law adopted on November 24 annulled the results of the disputed October 20 election which led to Morales’s ouster, while guaranteeing a spot for his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party on the new ballot. But it also ratified the existing constitutional provision that bars candidates, including Morales, from seeking more than two consecutive terms.

The compromise elections law was passed unanimously by the MAS-controlled legislature, in an effort to defuse the deadly violence that convulsed the country for weeks after the contested October 20 vote. At least 35 people were killed and 700 wounded in the post-electoral conflict, almost all following the coup.

Along with the elections law, negotiations brokered by the Catholic Church, the European Union, and the United Nations forced the Añez government to withdraw its troops from civilian conflict zones, and to annul a controversial decree granting impunity to the military in repressing social protests. In exchange, anti-coup protesters lifted the massive road blockades that had paralyzed food and gas deliveries to the cities for weeks, allowing an effective truce to be declared with the promise of imminent elections.

Añez supporters are flaunting the call for elections as a significant step towards the restoration of political normalcy and democracy in Bolivia.  In reality, while the killings and violent clashes have ceased, the country remains highly polarized and politically unstable, with explosive tensions simmering just below the surface. In no small part, this is due to the confrontational discourse and vengeful actions of a de facto regime that is governing widely outside its “caretaker” mandate, stoking divisiveness and eroding the prospects for a peaceful political reconciliation.

The De Facto Government

As has been widely reported, Jeanine Añez, an obscure right-wing Senator from the lowlands Beni region, acceded to the presidency when a power vacuum—created by the resignation of several MAS Congressional leaders in the wake of Morales’s departure—put her next in the line of succession. Her party received only 4 percent of the vote in October, and she herself did not seek re-election. According to some accounts, the MAS leadership agreed to her succession in a moment of desperation, in exchange for the promise of Morales’s safe passage out of the country.

Añez assumed the presidency with the support of the army and the Constitutional Court—the same institution that earlier upheld Morales’s “right” to run for a fourth presidential term. However, she failed to gain the legislative quorum required by the Constitution for presidential succession. According to conflicting narratives, MAS deputies either boycotted the session or stayed away out of fear.

Despite her limited mandate as a “caretaker” president charged only with preparing the country for new elections, within days Añez wiped out Morales’s cabinet and installed a new leadership team with deep ties to Bolivia’s right-wing sectors. For the past eight weeks, the Añez regime, elected by no one, has mounted an aggressive and vindictive campaign to undermine the MAS party by reversing its policies, persecuting its leaders, and intimidating its supporters. Not coincidentally, these tactics have served to energize the regime’s conservative base ahead of the upcoming election.

For starters, Añez deployed the armed forces to repress Indigenous anti-coup protesters at Sacaba and Senkata, leaving a toll of 19 dead and several hundred wounded. In its recent report, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) characterized these incidents as massacres, with massive human rights violations committed by the military under the government’s illegal impunity decree. To date, the interim government has refused to accept responsibility for these killings. The IACHR has called for an independent investigation.

The regime has issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Morales, charging him with terrorism and sedition for allegedly inciting the “siege of cities” carried out by MAS-affiliated protesters after the coup. Morales, currently a political refugee in Argentina, has assembled a formidable international legal defense team with the help of President Alberto Fernández, including famed Spanish jurist Baltazar Garzón.

Meanwhile, nine former MAS officials are holed up in the Mexican embassy in La Paz, having been denied safe passage to Mexico by the Añez government. Añez recently caused an international uproar by expelling three senior Spanish and Mexican diplomats who were alleged to be plotting the asylum-seekers’ escape.

To date, more than 100 MAS government officials  have been detained or are facing criminal charges, ranging from terrorism to electoral fraud to misuse of state resources. Añez has announced that close to 600 former authorities of the executive branch and their families are under investigation. 

In the Chapare, the highly-organized coca-growing region that historically has been a bastion of MAS support and is now the epicenter of anti-coup resistance, residents face severe government reprisals. Following the police mutiny of November 7-8—a key event leading to the coup—protesters burned down a local tourist hotel owned by Arturo Murillo (now interior minister) and torched all nine police stations, causing the police to flee and cede security operations to coca union federation guards.

Murillo has threatened to disenfranchise the entire region in the upcoming election if the police are not permitted to reenter. In view of the hard-line anti-drug discourse now emanating from the presidential palace, coca growers anticipate a crackdown that could undermine their livelihoods and the successful system of community-controlled coca production inaugurated by Morales.[4]

Domestic press censorship and media blackouts have been rampant under the de facto regime. TeleSUR, Russia Today, and other foreign outlets have been eliminated from the national cable system, while 53 community radio stations have been shuttered. While the new minister of communications has recanted her earlier pledge to crack down on free speech, three journalists were detained on New Year’s Eve and charged with terrorism and sedition for criticizing the government on social media.

The regime has overhauled the MAS government’s foreign policy, shifting allegiances in Venezuela from President Maduro to rebel opposition leader Juan Guaidó, restoring diplomatic ties with the United States and Israel, and expelling 700 Cuban doctors that were the backbone of Morales’s public health system. It has pulled Bolivia out of the left-leaning ALBA and UNASUR alliances and joined the U.S.-backed Lima Group. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has lifted a long-standing ban on foreign aid to Bolivia, imposed when Morales failed to cooperate with U.S. counter-narcotics efforts.

Añez’s development minister has declared his support for privatizing public enterprises and shrinking the state, raising the specter of a return to past austerity policies and control of the economy—including natural resources such as lithium—by transnational corporations. What’s more, the interim president’s divisive racist discourse—ranging from deleted past tweets scorning “satanic” Indigenous celebrations, to more recent comments characterizing MAS leaders as “savages”—suggests to many Indigenous Bolivians that the significant gains achieved under Morales’s decolonization policies are at risk of being dismantled. 

The Electoral Landscape

While the electoral timeline established by the interim government is longer than initially planned—leaving more time for Añez to wreak damage—the deadlines for party registration (January 24) and candidate selection (February 3) are relatively short.

Facing all these daunting challenges, the MAS party is struggling to realign itself and identify a new presidential slate. Predictably, without Morales as the party’s charismatic unifying and controlling force, competing factions have emerged, along with expressions of dissidence not publicly revealed in the past.

Still, Morales remains highly visible as the party’s official campaign manager operating from Argentina, commenting frequently on social media. […]

Since the coup, a more moderate, dissident wing of the party has gained increasing prominence, especially in the Legislature, where new Senate president Eva Copa has led negotiations with the Añez government.  Copa, 32 years old and representing the Indigenous city of El Alto, has openly criticized the hardline wing of MAS closest to Evo in Argentina, as a “privileged group” that has damaged the party. She has accused Adriana Salvatierra, who resigned her Senate leadership post after the coup, of handing over the presidency to the opposition in an effort to save her father, a former MAS minister, from prosecution.

Copa defends her legislative pragmatism—attacked by some as complicity with the regime—as a necessary strategy to move beyond the current political crisis. “We didn’t have the money to escape,” she says, “so we have to face the consequences.” While Copa has denied any interest in seeking the presidency at this time, she has challenged party leaders to ensure that the MAS ticket is not dictated from Argentina, but reflects a popular consensus of the party’s bases in Bolivia.

Opposition forces are also divided, but may be taking steps towards greater unity. Three candidates who participated in the October election have declared their intention to run again: Carlos Mesa, the center-right former president who was Morales’s chief rival, winning 36.5 percent of the vote; Chi Hyun Chung, an evangelical conservative who took 8.8 percent; and Félix Patzi, Aymará governor of La Paz, who captured 1.25 percent.[5]

In addition, Luis Fernando “Macho” Camacho, the charismatic Santa Cruz civic leader who was catapulted to national fame as the popular face of the coup that toppled Morales, has announced his candidacy. Camacho is a prosperous member of Santa Cruz’s new economic elite, whose family wealth derives from insurance, agribusiness, and natural gas distribution. He has deep ties to the far right, as former director of the Union Juvenil Cruceñista, a proto-fascist paramilitary youth group known for publicly beating and humiliating Indigenous people in Santa Cruz during the secessionist revolt of 2006-2008.

Also a born-again Christian, who famously laid a bible on the Bolivian flag when entering the presidential palace to demand Morales’s resignation, Camacho has been dubbed “the Bolsonaro of Bolivia.” It was his aggressive combination of “bible and balls,” say political analysts Pablo Stefanoni and Fernando Molina, that succeeded in radicalizing the middle class-led regional protests against perceived electoral fraud and channeling them into a national police-civic-military coup. In the process, Mesa’s more moderate center-right leadership was completely eclipsed.  

Camacho has also demonstrated considerable political skill in reaching out to, and pacting with, disparate popular sectors that have accumulated grievances against Morales, including dissident Yungas coca growers, miners, transportation workers, and even some peasant organizations. Most notably, his designated running mate for vice president is Marco Pumari, an Indigenous miner’s son who has led a long popular struggle around lithium extraction in Potosí, as well as recent anti-Morales protests in the region. 

The Camacho-Pumari ticket was announced on New Year’s Eve with great fanfare, together with a 14-point program for a “united Bolivia, with dignity, freedom, and democracy.” The slate offers a powerful antidote to Camacho’s racist history, as well as an image of east-west popular unity that belies his elitist, revanchist roots, with the potential for broad appeal.

Still, the alliance came close to self-destructing before it began. After initially denying their political aspirations, Camacho and Pumari shared their mutual interest in a joint ticket last November. Two weeks later, the partnership fractured when Camacho accused Pumari of having demanded a substantial payoff in the form of cash and ministry quotas, with audiotapes of the conversation leaked to social media and CNN. Each agreed to run separately.

A few days later, Camacho met in Washington, DC with Luis Almagro, head of the OAS, who heralded his “commitment to democracy.”  The next day, he was a guest speaker at the Inter-American Dialogue, a DC-based think tank, where activist group Code Pink protested him and the event. Two weeks later, the alliance was publicly revived.

Interim president Añez has called for an opposition summit to unify the anti-MAS vote—presumably behind Camacho, with whom she has close political ties. In a sense, the Camacho-Pumari alliance was literally made in the presidential palace, when Añez, after her swearing-in ceremony, appeared on the balcony flanked by the duo. 

While it’s still early in the game, the MAS has trumpeted recent polls showing the party’s still unnamed candidate in first place with 21 percent of the vote, as compared to 16 percent for Añez (who denies any intention to run),  16 percent for Camacho and Pumari combined (with each running separately at the time of the poll), and 14 percent for Mesa. Still, in a second ballot scenario, only 24 percent say they will vote for the MAS while 47 percent would vote for an opposition candidate.

The youth vote, representing approximately one-third of the electorate last October, will be even more critical this time around, since the registry will be updated to add newly-eligible voters. Significant numbers of youth turned against Morales in October to join the so-called “Revolution of the Pititas”—named for the makeshift cords strung across streets by novice protesters, which Morales ridiculed.

Camacho has significant appeal for this sector, which is strongly influenced by social media and susceptible to manipulation. The IACHR identified some 60,000 false twitter accounts created between November 9 and 17 that generated more than 1 million tweets in support of Camacho and Añez. Still, the coup has also spawned a resurgence of pro-MAS militancy among youth in places like El Alto, who were previously alienated from the struggles of their parents and grandparents.

As anthropologist Nicole Fabricant has argued, to defeat Bolivia’s ascendant right-wing forces—which will continue to be nourished and fortified by the Añez regime during the run-up to the election—will require a broad united front of left-Indigenous groups across the historic pro- and anti-Morales divide. For the MAS, choosing a presidential slate that is more independent of Morales could help to appeal to popular opposition sectors. For the anti-Morales left, which has been disturbingly silent regarding the Añez regime’s abuses, taking a stand against political persecution, racist discourse, and the erosion of democracy occurring under the de facto government could go a long way towards reconciliation. 

January 10, 2020

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[1] For a rebuttal of these charges, see OAS Final Audit Report on Bolivia Elections Raises More Questions about its Own Work than It Answers, CEPR Analysis Concludes, and CELAG, Análisis del informe final de la OEA sobre las elecciones en Bolivia.

[2] Constitución Política del Estado, art. 166(1).

[3] For more on the background of the recent events, see Nicole Fabricant, “The Roots of the Right-Wing Coup in Bolivia.”

[4] See Linda C. Farthing and Kathryn Ledebur, Habeas Coca: Bolivia’s Community Coca Control.

[5] Patzi has since dropped out.