This week marks two years since Bolivian president Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party were overthrown in a military coup. The army’s actions in November 2019 were backed by the Organization of American States, the Trump administration, the European Union, and much Western media, each claiming that Morales had stolen the 2019 presidential election. Their fraud allegations were instantly and thoroughly discredited — but did lasting damage to Bolivian democracy.

Over the months that followed the coup, right-wing forces backed by paramilitaries formed a new regime under transitional leader Jeanine Áñez, seeking to undo Morales’s legacy. While today celebrated by the EU Parliament as a champion of human rights, Áñez’s regime in fact massacred dozens of anti-coup protesters while also driving Morales and many of his colleagues into exile. Yet this was not enough to cow popular resistance, and after massive rallies and strikes demanding that repeat elections go ahead, MAS candidate Luis Arce won a huge mandate in the October 2020 contest.

Juan Ramón Quintana was minister of the presidency in each of Morales’s three governments. A former high-ranking career soldier and a learned sociologist, philosopher, and political scientist, Quintana is considered Bolivia’s most important anti-imperialist intellectual. This August, he published La contraofensiva imperial (Imperial counteroffensive) under the pseudonym Ernesto Eterno, a work whose subtitle promises to examine the coup through the “anatomy of violence and looting” in Bolivia.