Author: Carwil Bjork-James

Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. (My opinions are my own, and not my employer's.) Author of The Sovereigns Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia (sovereignstreet.org). I conduct immersive and historical research on disruptive protest, grassroots autonomy, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in Bolivia.

Arrest of Luis Fernando Camacho prompts fiery new Santa Cruz protest wave

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Luis Fernando Camacho, governor of Santa Cruz department and regional leader in 2019 protests against Evo Morales, was arrested on December 28, 2022, as a suspect in the Golpe de Estado I (Coup d’état I) investigation. Camacho, whose public statements suggest that he and his father coordinated with the military and police prior to Evo Morales’ ouster, has been named as a suspect as well as convened to testify in the inquiry. The formal charge against Camacho is “terrorism,” though its specifics are more akin to insurrection against elected authorities. Camacho was sentenced to four months of preventative detention, during which time prosecutors promise to deepen their investigation of the nexus among Camacho’s Civic movement, the incipient Áñez government, police mutineers, and military conspirators in November 2019. (For today, I’m not blogging my thoughts on the legality, strategic wisdom, or ethics of this arrest.)

Camacho’s arrest was widely expected. He was known to be the subject of at least eight criminal investigations. As it turned out, the arrest order had been issued on October 31. Three days before, he had issued a video publicly challenging Justice Minister Iván Lima:

Ministro, usted que encabeza esto, que está buscando incriminarme con casos de violencia, no sea cobarde: si quiere, deténgame, deténgame, venga, deténgame
Minister, it is you who are at the head of this, who are seeking to incriminate me in cases of violence. Don’t be a coward: if you want, detain me, detain me, come here and detain me. [my translation]

Molina, Fernando. “Detenido el gobernador boliviano de Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, por la crisis que llevó al derrocamiento de Evo Morales.” El País, December 28, 2022.

Almost immediately, the arrest itself kicked off a new wave of protests in Santa Cruz department, headed by the department‘s civic movement. Camacho previously headed the Comité Cívico Pro-Santa Cruz in 2019 and was Vice President of the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista in 2002–2004. These institutions, joined by the public voice of governor Camacho since his April 2021 election, have engaged in waves of protest challenging the MAS–IPSP governments of Evo Morales (2006-2019) and Luis Arce (2020–). While demands have varied widely—rejection of the constitutional assembly and departmental (2006–08), rejection of judicial elections (2012), of penal code reforms, of alleged electoral fraud (2019), an anti-money laundering law (2020), and a census delay (2021), the mechanisms of regional protests have been relatively stable.

Like other regions, Santa Cruz goes on strike through road blockades and a city-wide work stoppage. And during the 2006-09 political standoff and since 2019, these tactics were enhanced by peaceful or forcible takeovers of national state institutions, as well as direct physical attacks on institutions associated with the governing MAS-IPSP party, such as labor unions and Indigenous organizations, and attacks upon so-called “traitors” to the region, which is to say local MAS-IPSP politicians.

While used only sparsely between 2009 and 2019, arson has been an important tactic for the Santa Cruz Civic movement during the so-called catastrophic stalemate of 2006 to 2009, during the October–November 2019 political crisis, and in protests since Luis Arce’s October 2020 election. (I detail the broader use of arson in the 2019 crisis and the catastrophic stalemate in a forthcoming article in the Bolivia Studies Journal.)

Immediate Responses to Camacho’s Arrest

A crowd of civilians on the tarmac of Viru Viru International Airport

The first responses by the Civic Movement to their leader‘s arrest were attempts to prevent his transport out of the region. Protesters flooded into the terminals and runways at Viru Viru International Airport and El Trompillo Airport. Per El País (of Madrid):

A group of hundreds of the governor’s sympathizers, led by regional authorities and [parliamentary] deputies, headed to the Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz. There, they overwhelmed and beat security personnel, invaded the runway, entered some of the airplanes waiting to take off, and obliged the passengers to disembark, to prevent Camacho from being taken from Santa Cruz. They didn’t find him. Despite this, they decided to paralyze the airport after [Camacho’s] detention.

Molina, Fernando. “Detenido el gobernador boliviano de Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, por la crisis que llevó al derrocamiento de Evo Morales.” El País, December 28, 2022

Among the elected officials present was Paola Aguirre, who reportedly vowed, “No sale ni un avión de este aeropuerto [Not one plane will leave this airport.” Aguirre posted a 33-minute video to her Facebook page beginning with her atop a boarding staircase to an airplane, including an impromptu press conference on the tarmac, live questioning of the airport director about whether Camacho had boarded a BOA flight (at 15m50), and vows that any damage or inconvenience caused to the airport is the responsibility of the national government who ordered Camacho’s arrest (at 30m50).

Flights from Viru Viru resumed on December 29. Airport officials reported 5,000 travelers were affected, with 350,000 Bs (~ $50,000) in material damages and 900,000 Bs. ($130,000) in accommodations purchased for inconvenienced passengers.

The New Daily Protest Cycle

With Camacho successfully removed from the department, the protest mood turned to rage.

Pro-Civic Movment newspaper El Deber reported a “night of fury” that consumed three buildings: the prosecutor’s office, a drug control office that has been used for negotiations w/ the national government, and the home of Minister of Public Works Edgar Montaño.

In its public pronouncement, the Cruceño civic movement called for road blockades to begin at midnight (December 28/29) and the takeover of public institutions, both key tactics in past protests, including the 36-day strike in October–November of 2022. It, along with former centrist presidential candidate Carlos Mesa, qualified the arrest as a “kidnapping” and the act of a “dictatorial” national government. It has convened mass gatherings to mount a new regional mobilization until Camacho is freed.

What is apparent after three nights is that this new wave of mobilization has a daily cycle with a daytime phase focused on blockades and calmer occupations held at/in front of national institutions and a nighttime phase of confrontations with police during which protesters attempt to seize and burn the same class of institutions.

Here are daytime actions, as photographed by the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista:

And night-time attacks on the same class of public institutions, sometimes literally the same ones (like the ABT, the Administration of Forests and Lands) pictured in peaceful protests.

The logic of these actions is twofold: first, a public repudiation of the legitimacy of the national government and second, the assertion that only MASistas work in such instutions and they are “traitors to the region.” A widely shared “order of expulsion” posted by a non-official(?) UJC account urged MAS supporters to leave Santa Cruz. It was “shared” over a thousand times and widely reposted beyond that.

The formal leadership of the Cruceño organizations has been careful to label the arsons as the work of “infiltrators” in their ranks or so-called “self-inflicted attacks” by MAS-led institutions. The claim that a small number of closeted pro-government arsonists are hiding themselves nightly in anti-government crowds who only want to fight the cops is, to say the least, not especially credible. The will and capability of the Santa Cruz civic movement to carry out both crude and sophisticated arson attacks was demonstrated amply in the October 2019 burnings of electoral offices in protest over alleged voter fraud, and numerous attacks during the 2006-09 political crisis.

What is the actual relationship between the daytime pronouncements of the Comité Pro-Sana Cruz and the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista, and the nighttime actions of arson? Is there a real split over tactics, or merely an effort to deny responsibility for arson and insurrection, which might be distasteful to potential foreign allies?

Here’s how Camacho-aligned congressional deputy Paola Aguirre answers that question:

La ciudadanía cruceña, como en su momento lo dijen, no tiene patrones. Ellos se han autoconvocados desde el momento en que se enteraron que el gobernador Camacho estaba siendo secuestrado por el regimen del President Luis Arce. Y han tomado acciones por iniciativa propia. El Comité Cívico Pro-Santa Cruz prácticamente el día de ayer [29 de diciembre] ya la ha dijo a la ciudadanía, ‘ya, tomen ustedes las determinaciones que consideren convenientes.’

Este paro de 24 horas definitivamente es una de las menores medidas que se va tomar. Santa Cruz está convulsionada y no va a volver a la normalidad en cuánto no se restituya la libertad del Gobernador Luis Fernando Camacho. Por que no se trata de encarcelar a Camacho, se trata de encarcelar el voto popular de cientos, miles, y millones de Cruceños que han decido elegir a Camacho como Gobernador.

Translation: “The Santa Cruz citizenry does not, as is sometimes said, have bosses. They have convened themselves from the moment they knew that Governor Camacho was being kidnapped by the regime of President Luis Arce. And they have taken actions of their own initiative. The Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee practically said to the citizenry yesterday, ‘Alright, you take the determinations that you find convenient.’
“This 24-hour strike is definitely one of the smallest measures that will be taken. Santa Cruz has been convulsed and normality will not return so long as the freedom of Governor Luis Fernando Camacho is not restored. Beacuse they are not just trying to imprison Camacho, but they are trying to imprison the popular vote of hundreds, thousands, and millions of Cruceños who have decided to elect Camacho as our Governor.”

Paola Aguirre, interview with Radio Fides, 30 December 2022. At 7m30 in video posted on her Facebook page.

What is clear is that, today, the daytime organizations are now mobilizing for the freedom of protesters imprisoned for confrontation and arson.

And that the night-time factions are promising a New Years’ Eve of escalated confrontation, and inviting Cruceños to equip and prepare themselves for confrontation, starting at 10pm tonight.
A Facebook invite from Unión Juvenil Santa Cruz (not the official account of the UJC), reads, "Gran Bienvenida del 2023 / Recibamos este nuevo año a los pies del cristo / Desde los 22 horas / Entrada: Vinagre, mascara antigas, agua, balde, bicarbonato, palos, piedras, escudos, pinturas, petardos, etc. / Te esperamos!" "Great Welcome to 2023 / Let's receive this new year at the feet of the Christ [the Redemeer statue] / From 10pm onwards / Entry fee: Vinegar, gas mask, water, bicarbonate, sticks, stones, shields, paint, rockets, etc! We're waiting for you!"

Introducing Ultimate Consequences: A digital archive on lethal conflict in Bolivia, 1982–present (video)

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Introducing Ultimate Consequences, presented as video-on-demand at AAA 2022.

This presentation introduces Ultimate Consequences, a quantitative and qualitative database, unique in its depth and completeness of coverage, of all conflict deaths in Bolivia since October 1982, a period of largely elected governments and political dynamism. The country’s 1977–82 return to democracy, 1985 general strikes, 2000–2005 antineoliberal protest wave, and its political crises in 2006–2008 and 2019–2020 each exemplify the ability of mass disruptive protest to remake national politics. The database enables comparative analysis across twelve presidential administrations, four episodes where protesters successfully sought the end of a presidential term, and 192 protest events in 17 domains of conflict. Due to the number of lethal events in the study period, the dataset is both large enough for quantitative research that analyzes patterns and small enough for qualitative, journalistic, and historical examination of the individual deaths involved. To serve these multiple purposes, we are coding information such as individuals’ relation to a specific social movement, protest campaign, cause of death, responsible parties, and location, and writing detailed narrative descriptions about major events. The presentation introduces the open data format of the database and the R-based tools to explore it.

The project draws on journalistic, advocacy, and scholarly sources to comprehensively document all deaths in political conflict, including those not readily categorizable as human rights violations. The project also seeks to ask more intimate, and cultural, questions about the role of risk, violence, sacrifice, and loss in transformative social change. As the database reveals, Bolivian protest can involve intense risk, privation, self-sacrifice, and either enduring or inflicting violence. Bolivian social movement traditions include proclamations of fearlessness and vows to carry on their struggles “until the ultimate consequences,” that is, to persist in collective measures and to refuse to be deterred by deadly state violence. These movements invoke a history of indigenous uprisings, labor militancy, and state massacres in narrating their own histories.

The dataset offers a grounded view on such questions as: What practices and political choices result in some presidencies being far less violent than others? What is the relative importance of different forms of political violence, from repression of protest to guerrilla movements to fratricidal disputes among movements? Which movements have succeeded despite deadly repression? This presentation introduces a new tool for social scientists, oral historians, and human rights advocates to use in answering these and other questions.

Maidan Square with mist, Kyiv. Ukraine

Finding our moral and political compass on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

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How should opponents of oppression, centralized power, militarism, and greed take a stance on the war begun by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Here’s a rundown of the (mostly aligned) factors people of good conscience and/or people on the political left ought to consider as they take a stand.

Note: This piece was born of a Twitter thread written as news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine broke on February 23. I’ve corrected a few things (mostly spelling, he said sheepishly) and enriched that thread with links to sources here.

Anti-imperialism

Anti-imperialism and self-determination are foundational values for looking at international conflicts.

Both are grounded in a refusal of the right to conquer territory by force. Since the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and 1929 Litvinov Protocol, even imperial powers like the US and France, as well as the Soviet Union, are formally signed on to the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force.

Legal condemnation of the Axis Powers in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials are built on this foundation, so is modern international law. The UN Charter made this a treaty obligation of all states. Self-determination and decolonization built on this. Uprisings and resistance across the global South turned the UN framework, built by colonial powers, into an organization committed to decolonization.

“Occupation Is A Crime“: Poster for Palestine by Jorge Arrieta.

This is what we invoke when we defend(ed) Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine, Western Sahara, East Timor.

While freedom of smaller countries from foreign powers has been an uphill climb, large and substantial regional, inter-state peace—notably in Europe, Latin America—has also emerged in this framework. Where the 19th century and early 20th century were full of invasions and border wars in both regions, the European Union and several Latin American forums offer an alternative. (This is why this new invasion is both one point in a long series globally, with Iraq 2003, Georgia 2008, Yemen 2015 as prior examples, and a shocking break in the European context.) So principles of international law are both close to causes of justice and elements that are routinely violated.

Those of us who live in imperial powers have ample opportunity to take stands in defense of international law by demanding that our governments abandon occupied territories and occupying allies… For US Americans, this includes ongoing wars/occupations in Yemen, W Sahara, Palestine. But that doesn’t mean that we have no ethical interest in the anti-imperial struggles, or rights for self-determination of people affected by rival imperial powers.

In the early 21st century, there are at least three independent great powers:
the US (& many allies), Russia, and China.

All are expansionist. All are capitalist.

Part of our ideological work as anti-imperialists is refusing the cognitive structures of empire. We should reject the Monroe doctrine and US domination of Latin America. They are not our backyard. We have no right to veto governments there, or put down opposition protests, much less invade and occupy them.

And for the same reason, we must reject the concept of a Russian near abroad, a sphere of influence where it has a veto over local movements and self-determination, where it can invade with impunity.

Our efforts should focus on alliances and empathy with anti-militarists and anti-imperialists in Russia, not with Russian fears of an independent Ukraine. Mutual recognition among imperialists is our enemy, whether it is Trump’s idolization of Putin or Germany’s commitment to a Russian gas pipeline.

“Occupation of the Crimea is a shame of Russia” (Photo CC-BY-SA Bogomolov.PL)

We should educate ourselves about, and cultivate solidarity around past forms of imperial domination in the Russian orbit, notably the coordinated starvation of Ukraine and the mass deportation of ethnic groups across the Soviet Union. We must listen to Ukrainian voices in a time when they are under attack.

Anti-militarism and the threat of nuclear war

Inter-state wars have been rare since 1946. (Peace Research Institute Oslo)

The next level, militarism, is more complex: Confrontations among countries with large militaries are disastrous. We’re witnessing the beginning of one of only a handful of military-military conflicts since 1945. (Most wars in that period were fought by irregular, non-state forces on at least one side.) Iran–Iraq and US–Iraq (1|2) both illustrate the horrifying toll that such conflicts can bring. De-escalation is a huge priority. As is global diplomatic and economic isolation of states that start such wars.

Between wars, US military alliances like NATO are massive export markets for weapons manufacturers. Each sale increases the risks and costs of future conflict. Despite its successful deterrence so far, then, NATO represents a gamble that could eventually make future conflicts far more deadly.

Separately, the involvement of nuclear powers represents both a severe risk and a mechanism that can cause military powers to think twice before escalating. For a mirror image example, consider Cuba in the 1960s… the Soviet Union developed an alliance with a former colony of the US, provoking a nuclear crisis, but also likely deterring a full-scale US invasion.

Ukraine would be a nuclear power too, were it not for a series of denuclearization agreements in which both Russia and the US promised to respect its sovereignty and territorial integrity. There are long-term implications of a world that reneges on protection for giving up nuclear weapons. Those of us who want a nuclear free world have an implicit stake in Ukrainian security.

Democracy

Last but not least, the conflict in Ukraine sees a democratic government facing invasion by a oligarchical and authoritarian one, whose leader has declared that it isn’t a real nation. Nothing good can come of that.

As anarchists in Russia put it: ”this will mean the further spread of the so-called ‘Russian world’: a crazy combination of neoliberal oligarchy, rigid centralized power, and patriarchal imperial propaganda. This consequence is not as obvious as the rise in the price of sausages and the sanctions on smartphones—but in the long run, it is even more dangerous.”

To sum up

In short, there are wide reasons for left sympathy with Ukraine in this conflict.

In the context of Russian threats, and violence, Ukraine’s practical refuge is engagement with the EU and future alliance with NATO, two institutions leftists have long questioned.

Leftists’ rightful rejection US imperial power should not cloud our moral rejection of Russia’s current imperial invasion.

We can simultaneously be a voice that highlights divisions and dissent in the invading power, builds cross-border alliances against imperial power, supports bold moves to undercut fossil fuel revenue to Russia, and urges caution on military actions.

Other left analyses:

Top photo: Maidan Square with mist, Kyiv, Ukraine. CC-BY Juan Antonio Segal.

The death of Bolivian mining leader Orlando Gutiérrez was accidental, investigators conclude.

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The death of Bolivian mining leader Orlando Gutiérrez Luna remained a matter of dispute for a full year after his untimely death in October 2020, shortly after the electoral victory of Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca. While estranged from the inner circle of Evo Morales, Gutiérrez headed the pivotal miner’s union, Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB), and campaigned hard for Arce and Choquehuanca. He also feared for his life and warned his wife not to accompany him on his final journey to La Paz. From such murky circumstances seems to have sprung the notion that he may have been the victim of foul play. His widow, Karen Calle, was the leading proponent of suspicions of an attack.

Gutiérrez’s death became a matter of public concern, both in Bolivia and for the international left, after a denunciation issued on social media by the FSTMB on October 23, 2020. (Detailed in previous coverage here) The statement, which has since been disavowed by the FSTMB leadership, spoke of “hired killers” and “street thugs” who “assassinated” Gutiérrez. In the wake of some three dozen deaths in 2019, this claim set off concern and more than a few sympathetic denunciations far beyond Bolivia’s borders.

Within Bolivia, however, conflicting evidence was easier to hear. Three friends of the deceased labor leader reported that he fell on stairs in his home when they were with him, causing his fatal injuries. This explanation matched that given by the clinic that cared for him. Karen Calle, too, heard Gutiérrez himself offer this explanation to the medics who cared for him. but felt sure her husband was concealing the real cause out of fear. Bolivian social movement, union, and political leaders, who initially reacted with shock and anger, shifted from calling for “justice” for Orlando Gutiérrez to “clarification” of the circumstances of his death.

And still, that clarification was slow to arrive.

In March 2021, prosecutors declined to treat the matter as a homicide. Their statement said, “While there is testimony from witnesses, there is no place or date of the events, nor an original cause of his death.” However, they did not attempt to clarify the cause of death.

Then in August 2021, a detailed investigation was restarted.

While a final report is still pending, Bolivian prosecutors have now told the independent news network Erbol the results, which confirm that writing on the wall since late 2020: Gutiérrez died of an accidental fall. Other conclusions:

  • Gutiérrez fell in a private residence after an evening out drinking.
  • Both criminal investigation and spatial reconstructions found the fall was accidental.
  • An autopsy found that he died of lesions to his upper nerve centers, cerebral hemorrhage, and cranioencephal trauma.
  • Gutiérrez also suffered from post-COVID pulmonary fibrosis and caridomegaly.
  • The Departmental Health Service audited Gutiérrez’s care during a prolonged clinic.

Hopefully the conclusions can put to rest the concerns of a grieving and fearful widow, concerned members of Bolivian movements, and activists worldwide who feared—for healthy reasons, but without sound evidence—that Gutiérrez was the victim of unknown agents of the Bolivian right wing.

Several men carry the white coffin of Basilio Titi Topolo to a crypt.

Four deaths surrounded Bolivian political mobilizations in 2021. Responsibility for two remains in dispute.

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Four Bolivians died in or around social movement conflicts in 2021. These were the first deaths since the deadly political crisis of 2019, when political violence claimed 38 lives, 29 or 30 of them killed by the security forces after the ouster of Evo Morales. In the year that followed, Bolivian politics centered on a single national struggle.

This year’s deaths came in four separate mobilizations, only one of them around a national issue.

  • Police Sergeant Miguel Ángel Quispe Nina — The ongoing conflict over leadership of Adepcoca, the La Paz Departmental Association of Coca Growers which split between pro- and anti-government factions, resurfaced in 2021 in a series of protests, unarmed street battles, building takeovers, and finally an electoral campaign. In July, this included an episode of armed violence.
    The pro-MAS faction led by Elena Flores convened a meeting of the organization in Coripata. The opposition factor led by Armin Lluta (since Franclin Gutierrez’s incarceration) blockaded a roadway leading to the town. Police came in to break up the blockade and police sergeant Miguel Ángel Quispe Nina was shot dead. Sub-lieutenant Reinaldo Quispe suffered a nonfatal gunshot to the head. Police and Flores blamed Lluta’s faction and alleged foreigners were involved. Afterwards, the government negotiated an agreement to hold leadership elections in the combined organization in September, but dissension and physical confrontations between the two sides continued. Five others died in the Adepcoca conflict in 2018 and 2019.
  • Chiquitano community leader Lino Peña Vaca (78) — One of many ongoing struggles over land between “Intercultural” highland migrant communities and Indigenous residents in Bolivia’s lowlands escalated in San Ignacio de Velasco, in Santa Cruz department. Chiquitano indigenous claims to the land in question stretch back twenty years. They sought title to the land from the National Land Reform Institute in 2016, but were given other lands in 2018, while the Interculturales had the land titled as Jerusalén III. A confrontation on the matter broke out on July 5, during which Lino Peña Vaca was severly injured, including with broken ribs and a broken nose. He was hospitalized eventually died of septic shock, severe pneumonia, and pulmonary fibrosis. However, his cause of death is disputed: his community, including leader Dino Franco assert that he died of complications of his injuries, while the death certificate indicates his respiratory maladies were due to COVID-19. Franco asserts that Peña Vaca’s COVID test was negative.
  • Indigenous marcher Rafael Rojas Abiyuna (63) — Rojas Abiyuna died of natural causes during the negotiation phase of a cross-Santa Cruz Indigenous march in defense of land and territory. At the time of his death from a heart attack in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in late October, the marchers had completed their trek and were unsuccessfully demanding negotiations with the Arce government.
  • Pro-MAS demonstrator Basilio Titi Topolo (21) — During the year’s most significant partisan mobilizations, opposition protesters mounted urban blockades in protest of Law 1386, an anti-money laundering statute that shopkeepers claimed will lead to abusive investigations of their books. In Potosí, as in several other cities, largely rural pro-MAS counterprotesters arrived to challenge these blockades in defense of the Arce government. Among the pro-MAS protesters was Basilio Titi Topolo, a miner of rural origin. He died while fleeing anti-MAS crowds, falling, and according to the official autopsy choking on a ball of coca lodged in his upper respiratory tract. The government alleged that violent anti-MAS groups blocked the passage of an ambulance carrying Titi and that “the lack of medical attention” led to his death. An unofficial autopsy pointed to other signs of trauma. Despite the rapid intervention of the Defensoría del Pueblo, the facts surrounding his death remain sharply disputed. Coverage on this blog: One dead as urban opposition battles pro-MAS campesinos in Potosí.
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“If you enter the city, I will hunt you.”: Sacaba massacre was preceded by open threat of military violence

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On November 13, 2019—one after Jeanine Áñez was sworn as interim president of Bolivia—the highest police authority and highest-ranking peasant union leader of Cochabamba met in the Integral Police Station (EPI) of Huayllani, the neighborhood that would see the country’s deadliest massacre in sixteen years just two days later.

The Cochabamba peasant federation (Federación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Cochabamba; FSUTCC) had joined calls by the Movement Towards Socialism leader and coca grower Andrónico Rodríguez to mount a national march “against the coup d’ètat” and Áñez’s succession to president. Following in the footsteps of many prior mobilizations since the 1980s, the march would proceed from the coca-growing Chapare to Cochabamba and onto La Paz. The outlying town of Sacaba was the necessary first stop on that journey. FSUTCC leader Jhonny Pardo was in Huayllani to prepare the ground for this mobilization.

Colonel Jaime Edwin Zurita Trujillo, departmental commander of the Bolivian National Police, received Pardo and Nelson Cox, the departmental head of the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoría del Pueblo). Zurita had only recently taken command of the region’s police; National Police Commander Yuri Calderón installed him on November 8 in the wake of the nationwide police mutiny, which took a dramatic form in urban Cochabamba. Police officers in mutiny had demanded the removal of their prior commander Colonel Raúl Grandy. (Both Calderón and Zurita had received new commands in 2019 as part of anti-corruption house-cleaning in the police force. Calderón was later investigated by the Áñez government for his alleged loyalty to President Morales during the 2019 crisis, and by the Arce government for his role in the Sacaba massacre.)

After Morales‘ fall, Zurita had publicly embraced the Resistencia Juvenil Cochala, a right-wing motorcycle gang and called upon the it and self-organized citizens of Cochabamba to defend a police station in the city from pro-MAS opposition attacks. Zurita asked them to “organize brigades, organize barricades; we have information that people are coming towards the city from the Sacaba side and from the south… do not let them pass” (GIEI Report, p. 87). He also spoke out publicly to assure police officers in mutiny that he was on their side: ”[I would] say to the the comrades that I came to work … and that this is a moment for institutional cohesion. They should know that the Police chiefs are fully supporting all of the demands and that we are not going to leave them alone.” He offered to step down if it would be in the interest of police unity. “Of course” he supported the police mutiny, as did “absolutely all of the police command,” and he had nothing more in common with Cochabamba MAS leader Leonilda Zurita than their shared last name.

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One dead as urban opposition battles pro-MAS campesinos in Potosí

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Young pro-MAS protester Basilio Titi Tipolo has been identified as the first fatal casualty in renewed partisan confrontations in Bolivia. Titi died amid the yesterday’s most intense street clashes, in the city of Potosí, where the Potosí Civic Committee (Comcipo) was leading the second day of a nationwide strike. In Potosí, as in several other major cities of Bolivia, striking opposition protesters mounted road blockades in protest of Law 1386, an anti-money laundering statute that shopkeepers claim will lead to abusive investigations of their books. But the issue primarily serves as a lightning rod for the civic opposition, which previously led October–November 2019 protests that culminated in the overthrow of President Evo Morales, to coordinate a nationwide challenge to what they call the “authoritarian” rule of Luis Arce, who was elected in October 2020.

During Tuesday’s protests, multiple efforts were on a collision course in urban Potosí:

  • The Potosí Civic movement intended to paralyze economic life through blockades as part of a national strike.
  • Campesinos arrived in town as opponents of the strike and as supporters of President Luis Arce.
  • Bolivia’s National Police were taking a more-hostile-than-usual approach to the blockades, assailed by Arce’s government as economically damaging.
  • The Departmental government, led by Jhonny Mamani (MAS-IPSP), was preparing to hold an honorary parliamentary session on Wednesday to commemorate the department’s anniversary.
  • On Tuesday morning, Comcipo announced that it would not allow President Luis Arce and Vice President David Choquehuanca to attend the anniversary festivities.
  • Once in town, campesinos rallied around and damaged the headquarters of Comcipo.
  • The Potosí Civic movement mounted a sustained effort to push campesinos out of the central Plaza 10 de Noviembre, eventually achieving this objective.

Security forces and pro-government and opposition protesters were thus pursuing objectives that led to confrontation. Unarmed street battles are not rare in Bolivian political life, but most often involve one group of demonstrators and security forces. Tuesday saw clashes between all three groups, as well as prolonged violent attacks upon individuals isolated in crowds of their political opponents. A pall of confusion and self-interested statements hangs over many of the details of yesterday’s events, but some facts are gradually becoming clear.

Potosí’s mayor reports that fifty people were treated in hospitals in clinics following the confrontations, two remain in intensive care, and one protester died. The deceased protester is Basilio Titi Tipolo, a young man just shy of his 22nd birthday. Basilio had residential ties in Surichata and Potosí, where he had worked as a miner. His body lay in state in the Potosí Peasant Confederación headquarters, where he was mourned by his Quechua-speaking mother.

The Defensoría del Pueblo has taken charge of compiling information on Basilio Titi’s death. Defensora Nadia Cruz stated that he died in the context of the confrontations, that he reportedly fell in attempt to reach safety, and that the medical cause of his death was broncoaspiración—the entry of food or other obstruction into the lungs causing suffocation. Separate accounts have been offered by Comcipo and the national government.

Comcipo issued this comment: “We know that a person has died, a 25-year old who had choked on their coca, surely while running away. There were no signs of violence, and I regret very much that there was a death on the side of our campesino brothers.” Further comments alleged that the campesinos were given alcohol, money, and chile pepper (that is, meals) to cajole them into protests. This is a statement so full of hostility and stereotypes that (1) any sincerity to the claimed lament of the death rings hollow; (2) it’s hard to take the claim that the death was accidental rather than caused by violence at face value.

Comcipo was also at pains to declare that Titi was physically unharmed, placing him among the handful of Bolivians who have fled violent confrontations to their deaths over the years.

Álvaro Terrazas, a vice minister of health, presented a more sinister narrative. He alleged that violent groups blocked the passage of an ambulance carrying Titi and that “the lack of medical attention has led to the death of one person.” Terrazas claims that the forensic medical report established that Titi suffered multiple traumatic injuries, including hematomas from the blows that were struck upon him in the street. He did not cast doubt on the medical cause of death, but rather argued that someone who lost consciousness could suffer broncoaspiración from something as mall as a bit of bread. Terrazas also accused blockaders of throwing dirt to attack the ambulance carrying Titi.

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“We didn’t know what we were doing”: Afghanistan as tragic repetition

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

“Everyone” knows that Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers about Vietnam fifty years. What few people know is that the study that compiled those papers was an effort by the military/intelligence apparatus to understand why the US makes such bad, unaware, and self-destructive decisions in war.[1]

Those who do not learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat them.

One of the many ways that history repeats itself is that George W. Bush assembled a team led by Nixon administration alumni to prosecute two massive new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.[2] And the US governments of Bush, Obama, and Trump all repeated many of the same patterns in Afghanistan as they did in Vietnam.

Again, there was a study behind closed doors, leaked to the press. Here’s an opening sentence from the (much less celbrated) coverage: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015.[3]

The fact that the US participated in and enabled atrocities in Afghanistan, and that the precedent of past US wars meant that the most craven local leaders gravitated to the US-backed government does not undermine the fact that hundreds of thousands or even millions of Afghans made their peace with that same government, and built the stability they could find around it. Today is not so much the US government’s tragedy, as it is theirs.

As citizens of a country that has failed to restrain our own military-industrial complex from repeating its own destructive patterns across more than half a century, our first debt is to those it has killed and wounded, to those whose lives it has ended or wasted, and our second debt is to those who sought shelter under its wings. Refuge is the least we owe them.

On a larger level, if you look around the world you will see that the worst off countries are those who were colonized most recently (largely sub-Saharan Africa) and those the US military has invaded and occupied: Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti. Vietnam, for all its continuing problems, has emerged far better than most. We have to stop doing this, because in the wake of our government’s most costly endeavors comes poverty and stagnation.

[1] Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets
[2] Errol Morris, The Unknown Known
[3] The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war, Washington Post

Tick-tock coverage of the overthrow of Evo Morales: What we know now

Carwil Bjork-James1 Comment

A flood of new declarations from politicians and official involved in the 2019 ouster of Evo Morales have come out. These declarations have accelerated because the matter is now the subject of a criminal investigation that led to the arrest of Jeanine Áñez. This post revises and updates my January 2020 coverage of accounts of Morales’ overthrow; the original text remains online there. Since both posts are intended to gather historical evidence and illuminate critical questions, I‘m avoiding using the word “coup d‘ètat” here. Readers are invited to apply their own definition to the mounting facts, as I have elsewhere.

What’s at stake

Without a doubt, the post-electoral protests against President Evo Morales, his sudden resignation under pressure from both protesters and the military, and the unexpected succession of Jeanine Áñez (previously, second vice president of the Senate) are the most significant events of Bolivian political life in 2019. The hinge point of these events was the dramatic week stretching from November 8 to 15, during which the police and military joined protesters as central actors; significant transactions occurred behind closed doors; acts of violence and arson targeted politicians on all sides; uncertainty surrounded presidential succession; and finally, a remobilized military killed a shocking number of people in four dramatic days.

I want to offer here some detailed accounts of what happened during that pivotal week and lay out the crucial questions as to whether, when, and how the overthrow of Morales was planned.

Why did an inexperienced junior senator with no mandate get empowered to lead a disastrous coup, unleashing the deadliest month in 15 years in Bolivian politics? How did a military “suggestion” claiming to head off bloodshed so rapidly lead to operations against civilians that cost many more lives than had been lost in the previous three years (let alone the three weeks of protest since the election)? In short, to what extent was a unified planning process (what we might call a coup plot) at the heart of this political transition?

Put differently, do we understand Evo Morales’ overthrow, Jeanine Áñez’s succession, and the military shakeup that followed the result of:

  • The foresight and planning of a small circle of actors. Did someone in the civic movement set her up? Work out a deal with those in the military who craved a crackdown? There are real signs of premeditation, coordination, and alliances among political forces and people within the military who might have a crackdown as a goal.
  • A convergence of fearful choices that led to a disastrous transition. Did the military leadership believe a quick transition would de-escalate an increasingly deadly confrontation on November 10? Did multiple actors think confirming someone, any civilian at all, was preferable to prolonging interim military rule and nightly violence on November 12? The real consequences of fear, urgency, distrust, violence, and reactions to violence that led people to act without considering the worst-case scenario that could emerge.

Since plotting is necessarily a closed-door activity, we couldn’t fully know the answers to these questions on November 10 or 15. But since these are matters of public concern and the principal actors are talking to journalists, we are getting more and more details (all possibly filtered through self-justifications and political ambitions) about what exactly happened when. What follows is an evolving list of sources for those of us trying to understand what happened in detail.

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Note from the field: Bolivia redefines its history [2010]

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

I’m reposting this fieldwork newsletter account that I wrote in 2010 because it feels relevant to current conversations about narrating American history.

Imagine for a moment the following scenario:

There’s a formal diplomatic function between the United States and France, in which the visiting French president is honoring a hero of the Franco-American effort during the American Revolutionary War. Military and civil honors are being accorded to Thomas Jefferson, say, or the Marquis de Lafayette.* The French President is there, before a special session of the United States Congress. Picture the well of the House, the assembled guests, the audience of Americans watching on video screens on the streets outside the Capitol. The first to speak, on behalf of the United States Government is Joe Biden. He strides to the podium, welcomes the French President, and begins a speech. He remembers the revolutionary era as a period of liberation for the American continent, a key point in a still unfinished process. Then he says we must think of the revolutionary period as two distinct struggles for independence and self determination: the American Revolution we all know, extending through the War of 1812; and the struggles Native Americans fought against invasion during the same decades. He says we must remember as American heroes Tecumseh as well as Jefferson, Blackhawk as much as Lafayette. For good measure, he adds Nat Turner to the list. The Age of Liberation we celebrate as the birth of our nation, he argues, will only be fulfilled when Native peoples have self governance and Blacks have ended oppression and racism against them.

I’m sure I can imagine this scene. You can too; hopefully, you just have. But those words out of the mouth of our current President or Vice President probably seem impossible. At least, I’m confident I won’t hear them. And I’m confident that if I did hear them, I would break into tears with the unexpected justice of the situation.

I mention this scenario not just because it represents a good goal, or underscores the place of talking about history in righting historic wrongs. I mention it most of all because changing the national context, it is exactly what I witnessed on the 26th of March in Sucre. The figure in question was not Thomas Jefferson or Lafayette, but Juana Azurduy de Padilla, a mestiza military commander in the wars against the Spanish from 1809 to 1825. Born in the town of Chuquisaca (now named Sucre after her contemporary military and political leader), she fought for the independence of both Argentina and Bolivia in a war in which she saw four of her sons and her husband die. It was also a war during which she gave birth to a daughter. Azurduy is embraced by nationalists and pro-indigenous activists, as an Argentine and a Bolivian, as a woman and as a soldier.

The speech was given not by Joe Biden, of course, but by Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera. Before becoming Vice President, he was a partisan of a guerrilla movement of the 1980s and 90s, a professor of sociology, and a moving force within a leftist theory collective in La Paz called Comuna.

It is one thing to sit in a graduate classroom and learn about the extended history of South America’s Age of Revolution, to learn how the indigenous revolts of the 1770s and 1780s presaged the independence wars of the early 19th century. It is a different and altogether remarkable thing to watch a country’s national leadership embrace that narrative as a way of understanding its past. One of the better aspects of fieldwork has been the opportunity to do both.

* Military commander and diplomat Lafayette was in fact given honorary American citizenship in 2002. I won’t ask you to imagine the above scenario with Dick Cheney playing the role of García Linera.