The Overthrow of Bolivia’s Evo Morales Takes Us Back to Latin America’s ‘Dirty Wars’
CALI, Colombia—A firebrand president stands accused of bucking constitutional limits so he can run for another term. At last his enemies see their chance. The military drives him not just from the presidential palace but into exile. Then his right-wing rivals name the successor of their choice, without due process, violating the nation’s charter yet again. The White House vows to recognize the successor despite mass protests and international outrage and—bang, zap, just like that!—the coup is legit.
Such was the script used by far-right oligarchs and generals to take down the democratically elected president of Honduras, Mel Zelaya, in 2009. And those same events played out in eerily similar fashion in Bolivia this November, when the military and wealthy opposition leaders deposed President Evo Morales, labeled him a “terrorist,” and forced him to flee the country fearing for his life.
In fact, this is a very old pattern in Latin America, where the far-right and its allies in the military high command seize power with Washington’s blessing because, to paraphrase a line attributed to President Franklin Roosevelt, they may be sons of bitches, but they are our sons of bitches. The result in the 1970s was a series of “dirty wars” that involved massive human rights abuses by military regimes with or without civilian facades.