El presidente Boliviano, Evo Morales, cuyo gobierno ha gestionado la mejora de los niveles de vida y una reducción dramática de la pobreza, ha sido reelegido. Este es otro golpe más para la campaña en curso de Estados Unidos para deshacerse de los gobiernos de centro izquierda en América Latina y instiga a los oponentes que apoyan las politicas de austeridad.
Bolivians vote in a general election on October 20th. Evo Morales has been the President since 2006, winning three successive terms as President. A victory for him would continue the development of the economy and the rise in living standards since he took office. It would be a considerable boost to the left across Latin America, which otherwise faces the impositions of Bolsonaro, Macri and Moreno, backed by the US and in some cases the IMF. Socialists internationally have every reason to support a Morales victory.
Western media outlets, from the Guardian to the Financial Times, and even the supposedly progressive Novara Media have joined in the coordinated attacks on the world-leading, progressive environmental record of Evo Morales’ leftist government in Bolivia. This is part of a convenient and deliberate strategy to divert pressure and attention from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who is widely known to have encouraged aggressive deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.
While other South American leaders stood idly by, and delayed operations to fight fires days after the flames began to spread across the Brazilian Amazon, the President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, personally led efforts to confront the tragedy in the area of Chiquitanía, located in the country’s southeast, between Gran Chaco and Amazonía.
New regime change efforts are underway in Bolivia, this time, bizarrely, aimed at blaming Evo Morales’ leftist government for the fires raging across the Amazon. So far it’s a narrative confined to western funded NGO’s and their contacts in foreign media. However, one should expect an intensification of US intervention and regime change propaganda as the country faces general elections this October. To understand how the US operates in Bolivia, and how they have been defeated, it's worth looking back on the last major CIA-backed effort to get rid of Morales. 2008-2009 was the ‘media luna’ coup - a wave of violence by an elite that knew they couldn’t defeat Morales in democratic elections. It was defeated, in no small part, by the role Venezuela played in helping Bolivia overcome the conflict that very nearly spilled into open civil war.
Eyes on Latin America 