Cindy Forster is a professor of Latin American studies at Scripps College.
Bolivia’s socialist-led government has arrested far-right leader Luis Fernando Camacho, a mastermind of the 2019 coup that deposed Evo Morales. It’s an important step to restore Bolivian democracy and to bring to justice those who carried out the vicious coup.
Ex-president Jeanine Áñez has been found guilty for helping to orchestrate the right-wing coup that brought her to power in 2019. The judgment is an essential step to protect the integrity of Bolivia’s democracy.
The Organization of American States made unfounded claims of electoral fraud in Bolivia in 2019. Now a growing chorus of Latin American leaders is calling for the end of the OAS, which has long stood as an obstacle to meaningful democracy across the continent.
When Jeanine Áñez claimed the presidency following the 2019 coup in Bolivia, she unleashed a campaign of terror in a bid to maintain power and stifle dissent. With the Movement Toward Socialism now back in office after last year’s democratic elections, the government is finally taking the “interim” president and her closest associates to court.
Bolivians went to the polls last week for the first local elections since the 2019 coup. Evo Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism party won big — and it would have even performed even better without the undemocratic scheming of the Right.
Fifteen years after Evo Morales was first elected president of Bolivia, his socialist party has returned to power. The far right hasn’t given up — but the indigenous masses that reversed the right-wing coup and forced elections have proven themselves a formidable force for justice and democracy.
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.