Bolivia’s Post-Coup President Has Unleashed a Campaign of Terror
In November, Evo Morales was forced out of office in a right-wing coup. He was trying to avoid a campaign of terror from the Right — but under Bolivia’s new ultraconservative president, Jeanine Áñez, that terror, now carried out by paramilitaries, is still escalating.
Interim president of Bolivia Jeanine Áñez speaks during a press conference at the presidential palace on November 15, 2019 in La Paz, Bolivia. Gaston Brito Miserocchi / Getty
When Evo Morales was forced to resign the presidency last November, Bolivia received its second female head of state in its history. Technically an “interim” president, Jeanine Áñez has sought to consolidate her grip on power, and in the six months since receiving the presidential sash from the army, she has waged a ferocious war on the country’s most marginalized sectors — among them the indigenous populations and the country’s poor and working-class women.
An ultraconservative Catholic senator, Áñez hails from the thinly populated Amazonian department of Beni, a region whose indigenous peoples first made the demand for a constituent assembly in the 1990s. But Áñez is no ally of indigenous Bolivians. She believes indigenous spirituality to be a sign of Satan, and upon seizing power in the days after November 10, she declared the national government to be “at last” free of paganism. Her partisans trampled upon and burned the Wiphala — the banner of indigenous unity — prompting tens of thousands of indigenous people to pour into the streets in protest.
The Bolivian Right
Áñez’s actions have a broader context in the region. In recent years, class hatred among Bolivian conservatives has turned very ugly, and it now resembles that of the protest mobs in Venezuela that in 2017 killed over 120 people, many of whom were set on fire. There, conservatives claimed their violent protests proved the socialist government’s ineptitude. The Bolivian right, for their part, have made constant threats to burn people alive, going so far as to target high-level officials from Morales’s former government.
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