In our brave new age of hybrid warfare, corporate media play the role of ideological heavy artillery within the arsenal of Western imperialist powers. Day in and day out, “reputable” establishment outlets bombard progressive and/or anti-imperialist governments in the Global South with endless salvos of smears and libelous misrepresentations (e.g., FAIR.org, 5/23/18, 8/23/18, 4/11/19, 7/25/19).
The cumulative effect is to delegitimize any government that does not abide by Western dictates, justifying coups, murderous economic sanctions, proxy wars and even full-scale invasions. The recent US-sponsored coup d’etat in Bolivia is an instructive case study. In the leadup to Evo Morales’ military ouster, Western media routinely impugned the indigenous president’s democratic credentials, despite his having won re-election by a sizeable margin (FAIR.org, 11/5/19).
But corporate outlets have not been alone in attacking Morales. Progressive and alternative media in the Global North have long portrayed Bolivia’s deposed Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government as repressive, pro-capitalist and anti-environment—all in the name of “left” critique. Regardless of the stated intention, the net result was to weaken already anemic opposition within Western imperial states to the destruction they inflict abroad.
Equivocating around the coup
In the wake of the November 10 coup, corporate journalists predictably played their part in gaslighting the public, presenting the fascist putsch as a “democratic transition” (FAIR.org, 11/11/19, 11/15/19).
Truly astonishing, however, was the response of Western progressive media, whom one might have expected to unequivocally denounce the coup and demand the immediate reinstatement of Evo Morales.
A dismaying number did not.
Image in Towards Freedom accompanying “Bolivia: New Elections are Not Enough” (11/10/19).
In the immediate aftermath of Morales’s ouster, Towards Freedom (11/11/19, 11/15/19, 11/16/19) published the perspectives of several Bolivian and Latin American intellectuals playing down the reality of a coup d’etat and drawing false equivalences between the Morales government and the fascist right. Other articles posted in days prior accused the government of fraud, justifying the coup to come (Towards Freedom, 11/8/19, 11/10/19). The Vermont-based outlet, with historic ties to the Non-Aligned Movement, declined to publish any alternative Bolivian points of view unambiguously opposing the coup.
Other progressive outlets correctly identified Morales’ overthrow as a coup, but felt compelled to question the indigenous leader’s democratic legitimacy for the sake of “nuance.”
While condemning the coup and rightly dismissing the baseless electoral fraud allegations, the editorial board of NACLA Report on the Americas (11/13/19) nevertheless refrained from voicing solidarity with Morales and the MAS party. Instead, the publication took MAS to task for the “slow erosion of progressive aspirations” and its failure to transform the “patriarchal and prebendal political system.” Even NACLA’s denunciation of the coup was at best lukewarm, citing “MAS’s own role and a history of political miscalculations,” before noting that “the unfolding pattern of rightist revanchism, the role of oligarchic forces and external actors, and the final arbitrating role played by the military, suggests that we are witnessing a coup.”
A subsequent article published by NACLA (10/15/19) preferred to debate whether Morales’ military ouster constituted a coup, failing to note the baseless character of the OAS’s fraud allegations and attributing the fascist right’s “racialized violence” to “polarization.” The authors, Linda Farthing and Olivia Arigho-Stiles, actually made the outlandish claim that assessing if Morales’ ouster was bad for democracy was “complicated.”
Meanwhile, a Verso Blog interview (11/15/19) with Forrest Hylton and Jeffrey Webber made no call for Morales’ democratic mandate to be respected, instead urging international leftists to “insist on the right of Bolivians to self-determination” without “refrain[ing] from criticism of Morales.”
Far from outliers, these editorial positions are very much par for the course in progressive media coverage of Bolivia over the past months and years.
The making of an ecocidal murderer
In the leadup to the October 20 election, many outlets drew or otherwise insinuated false equivalences between Morales and Brazilian ultra-right President Jair Bolsonaro in response to the tropical forest fires in both nations.
Despite rejecting such an equivalence, NACLA (8/30/19) nonetheless blamed the policies of both “extractivist governments” for “stoking destruction in the Amazon and beyond,” while casting Global North countries as having a responsibility to exert effective “pressure” in lieu of paying their historically accrued climate debt.
Others were less subtle. Writing for UK-based Novara Media (8/26/19), Claire Wordley explicitly compared the Morales government to Bolsonaro in Brazil, calling MAS policies “every bit as extractivist and damaging as those of the capitalists Morales claims to hate.” More damning, she cites Jhanisse Vaca-Daza, a Western-backed regime change operative, to disparage the Morales government’s handling of the fires.
Manuela Picq (Truthout, 9/26/19) charges Evo Morales with “genocide.”
A piece in Truthout (9/26/19) took hyperbolic slander to new heights, likening Morales to Bolsonaro and accusing the Bolivian leader of “genocide.” “Evo Morales played green for a long-time, but his government is deeply colonial…like Bolsonaro in Brazil,” Manuela Picq wrote, going on to cite unnamed “Bolivians” who brand the indigenous president a “murderer of nature.” Picq offered no analysis concerning how Western leftists’ failure to shift imperialist political-economic relations has contributed to Global South countries’ ongoing dependence on extractive industries.
The “extractivist” critiques of Morales are hardly new, going back to his government’s controversial 2011 plan to build a highway through the Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). As Federico Fuentes pointed out in Green Left Weekly (republished in NACLA, 5/21/14), the dominant extractivism/anti-extractivism frame of the conflict served to obscure the political and economic dimensions of imperialism.
While the highway did indeed engender important endogenous opposition—which was largely centered on the route, rather than the project per se—the main organization behind the protests, the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia, was being financed by Washington and backed by the right-wing Santa Cruz oligarchy.
Although the USAID’s funding of the Confederación is publicly notorious, many progressive outlets prefer to omit it from their reporting (NACLA, 8/1/13, 8/21/17, 11/20/19; ROAR, 11/3/14, 3/11/14; In These Times, 11/16/12; Viewpoint Magazine, 11/18/19). When foreign interference is mentioned, it is generally presented as an unsubstantiated allegation from the Morales government.
In a particularly revealing case, ROAR (11/3/14) detailed, among its laundry list of “authoritarian” MAS abuses, “obstructing the free functioning of…several NGOs that have sided with the TIPNIS protests,” but avoided any mention of foreign and local right-wing ties to those same NGOs.
This whitewashing of imperialist structure and agency ultimately allows Morales to be vulgarly caricatured as a two-faced “strongman” who “gives to the poor but takes from the environment” (In These Times, 8/27/15).
Passive solidarity?
The “extractivist” critique circulated by many progressive outlets foregrounds a more generalized reproach of the MAS for failing to live up to its socialist discourse.
Jacobin (10/29/15) saw in Morales’ administration “disquieting new forms of class rule and domination.”
Writing in Jacobin (1/12/14; also see 10/29/15), Jeffrey Webber accused the MAS of running a “compensatory state,” whose legitimacy “conferred by relatively petty handouts runs on the blood of extraction.” Under this top-down “passive revolution,” the “repressive” state “co-opts and coerces…opposition…and builds an accompanying ideological apparatus to defend multinationals.”
Webber’s long-running argument that the legacy of Bolivia’s MAS government is “reconstituted neoliberalism” has been challenged by critics, who point to the shifting terrain of class forces under Morales.
Bracketing the empirical veracity of Webber’s claims, it is striking that he dedicates virtually no space to exploring the role Western imperial states play in reproducing Bolivia’s extractive model and constraining possibilities for its transcendence.
Rather, the focus is always on MAS’s allegedly insidious agency “on behalf of capital,” and scarcely ever on Western leftists’ own anti-imperialist impotence, which never appears as an independent variable in explaining the Global South’s revolutionary failings.
The political effect of such one-sided analysis is to effectively equate the “neoliberal” MAS with its right-wing opponents, given that, as Webber put it, “Morales has been a better night watchman over private property and financial affairs than the right could have hoped for.”
Such lines might come as a surprise to current readers of Jacobin, which has fiercely opposed the coup (e.g., 11/14/19, 11/18/19, 12/3/19), whose fascist brutality has thrown to the wind any notion of left/right equivalence. But by now, the damage is already done.
Anti-imperialist reckoning
For all the current talk of a leftist resurgence in the Global North, it is a paradox that anti-imperialist movements are weaker now than they were at the height of the Iraq War 15 years ago.
It is undeniable that the absence of popular opposition to Western imperial interventions, from Libya and Syria to Haiti and Honduras, has paved the way for the coup in Bolivia and the ongoing onslaught against Venezuela.
It is likewise indisputable that Western progressive media coverage of the Morales government and its left-leaning counterparts in the region has not helped to repair this void of solidarity. This editorial stance is particularly troubling, given Morales’ outspoken international advocacy against climate change and for Palestinian liberation.
None of this is to proscribe criticism of Morales and the MAS. Indeed, in the context of places like Bolivia and Venezuela, the task of left-wing media is to produce critical, grassroots analysis of states and popular movements that is anti-imperialist in both content and form. That is, the contradictions endemic to the political process (e.g., the TIPNIS dispute) must be contextualized within the imperial parameters of the capitalist world-system. Moreover, Northern progressive outlets—no matter the intensity of their critiques of the state and political process—must stake a clear editorial position defending Global South governments against Western intervention.
The firm positions taken by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders against the coup in Bolivia are a hopeful sign on the political front. The job of progressive media is to produce truly alternative journalism dedicated to effectively resisting empire.
Koerner is not “Fair” at all. He should come to Bolivia and see by himself. There was no “right wing coup” here. It’s false news. Why is it that people that don’t know Bolivia write about my country so irresponsibly?
I assume that Mr. Gumucio is being facetious, as people still have eyes, ears, and brains.
No, none of what is in this article reflects the reality of what has been happening in Bolivia. You are all getting edited videos and out-of-context clips – and the reality you are being shown is manipulated.
Seriously, all of these “journalists” who know so much about Bolivia, but don’t speak spanish, and have never been to Bolivia for a day in their life – they CAN’T know the reality
Koerner states (in the next to last paragraph) that “None of this is to proscribe criticism of Morales and the MAS”, yet the piece seems predicated on doing just that.
I can’t speak to the motivations of those he excoriates, although I imagine they run the gamut from mendacious to ignorant to forthright, but my assessment of any government is based on what they do for, and what they do to, the people of that nation and the world, regardless of what label they append to themselves.
Anyone who doesn’t call this a coup is a fool, or worse. Anyone who doesn’t stand with the Bolivian people against it is a traitor to the cause of anti-imperialism.
But anyone who doesn’t honestly critique the contradictions of a government out of a misguided fear of aiding and abetting imperial designs is not standing with those they claim solidarity with.
That must be done with proper context, as Koerner says, exposing the lies against the “official enemy” even as we denounce its hypocrisies, but to refrain from doing so is to forfeit the principles that are at the core of a true anti-imperialist credo.
Well put, Doug!
Sure, but aren’t there more urgent and useful fights than arguing details of governments of your own side? Especially when this government is facing violent international désinformation from corporate media?
It seems to me that those ‘leftists’ are simply cowards, who, using an apparently virtuous ‘open’ position, put themselves for a moment on the comfortable side of the multitude and avoid the confrontation required.
Thanks to the author. We need you.
I’m currently too drunk and too conflicted about the substance here to comment on that. Some great points and some I think are facile. There are definitely some leftist sites that are fairweather or simply in error.
So, but, I’ll just ask What the Fuck is the “Global North” and the “Global South”? Is this something commoners are supposed to know? Because to me it sounds so stupid that I’m not even going to google it, lest whatever they mean enter my brain. What the fuck are you talking about?
Either give some definitions that make these terms meaningful, and worthy to enter my and others brain, or stop using those terms. Jesus fucking Christ.
No, it’s better to educate yourself and google a definition you don’t understand because it’s thoroughly ridiculous to expect every writer to give a definition for every phrase (particularly for one so common).
The act of supporting neoliberalism disqualifies any source from being labeled “left” or “progressive”. When you refer to them as “left” or “progressive” you look stupid.
I don’t buy the coup argument. Morales ran a rigged election, self destructed and lost support from key cities and ultimately, the military. The leadership vacuum was filled by constitutional processes, not by overthrow.
What rigged election? Nobody has claimed the actual count was rigged in any way. And careful analysis has shown there is no evidence even in the unofficial quick count:
http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/bolivia-elections-2019-11.pdf?v=2
The leadership vacuum was not filled by a constitutional process, the military appointed the far right senator Jeanine Anez, who is a member of a party that garners about 4% of the support in the country.
You are just another rightwing coup supporter, Roy Anderson.
The election was riddled with fraud.
The Bolivian people held a three week peaceful protest, shutting down the country – but none of these media companies showed up for THAT.
And get your facts straight – Kaliman didn’t overthrow or appoint anyone.
Evo left, and Anez was simply next in line of succession. The constitutional court (the same one that supported Evo’s right to an illegal fourth term in office) – certified that Anez was the correct next-in-law and ratified her.
Anez was not next in line…..it was the MAS Deputy President who was, but he too was forced to leave like Evo.
Morales has been in power 13 years. He lost a referendum on a fourth term. He ran regardless and won an election rife with irregularities. He was forced to resign amid mass protests. Even Bolivia’s main workers’ union asked him to step down. Those facts have been confirmed. FAIR is better than this.
You say ‘those facts have been confirmed’. Please direct us to the evidence of the irregularities you mention.
The hypocrisy and Western exceptionalism. Have anything to say about Merkel?
The German constitution says nothing about term limits. The Bolivian does. The American does. I’m agnostic on term limits, myself, but openly contravening a constitution is a serious matter.
The U.S. has no term limit for the presidency. It is only a tradition to follow the example of George Washington. Prime Ministers have no term limits in Germany and other nations. Lee Kuan Yew was Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1992. An “authoritatian confuzionist” he was adopted as tutor by Deng Xioapeng, the reformer of China, in 1978.
Uncritical support to Morales is not only irresponsible, it is dangerous. it simplifies a complex issue between good and bad people, between indigenous and whites, and ignores the very people (indigenous and working class Bolivians) who once support Morales but after 15 years demanded his resignation, such as ADEPCOCA, the Departmental Association of Coca farmers and producers from the city of La Paz. Of course we must be critical of the interim government under Anez and all the human rights violations it has already committed. We also must hold Morales accountable for leading Bolivians to this crisis. For us, Bolivians opposed to Morales, the coup against our democracy started in 2016 when Morales ignored the Bolivian constitution and the 21F referendum and decided to run UNCONSTITUTIONALLY for a 4th term. where is the mention of this here? This note does exactly what it criticizes, it presents a bias and blind support to Morales, because leftist in the global north must have a macho savior like Morales to led the people, this is socialism from above, not from below, or worse yet, this is state centralism. Solidarity to the people, never to the state (even when it came to be progressive)
Result of election first round:
Morales 46%
Añez 2.4%
Conclusion: Añez president.
Who ‘ignores the very people’?
Way to make up total lies.
Anez didn’t RUN in the election, she wasn’t a candidate.
She is president based on the laws of succession. It’s the same way Nancy Pelosi would be president in USA if Trump and Pence quit/abdicated.
Also, Evo got 46% because he CHEATED. That is why there is civil unrest – the people were upset that the elections were manipulated to give Evo a win.
For readers interested in a serious analysis on what brought Bolivia to this moment, I lived and wrote there for 19 years and published this piece for the New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/21/the-rise-and-fall-of-evo-morales/
“Serious” – more like slimy liberal whitewash of yet another US-backed coup. Bolivia’s Supreme Court is elected to a 6 year term. Its voters therefore have better democratic & constitutional options to reverse a ruling (if the majority in fact does want it reversed) than do voters in the US. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that mutinous generals, police and armed thugs can run the president out of the country. The suggestion that disputes over constitutional niceties were the big problem is bad joke.
Hi Joe. Glad you respond here but not to the Artical you wrote before. You still need to come over here and do some real journalism rather then shout out your opinion from Canada. You insult the people of this country and blame media for misrepresenting information when in fact you are doing it yourself. And before you ask me for proof i will invite you to Bolivia and give you proof first hand. Stop manipulating the real problem for your own agenda.
thank you Jim Shultz, I read your article and it is one of the few articles that offers a critical analysis of Bolivia without polarizing and simplifying this complex situation. highly recommend it.
In Bolivia there was NO COUP. There was a peaceful movement of the Bolivian ppl to recover the respectto our vote, democracy and our constitution demanding the ex president now Evo and his criminal government to resign because of the Fraud now probed links to the narcoterrorism
There is virtually no “progressive” press in the United States or England. The oligarchy’s control of information is almost total. Follow the money. As the ravings of the trolls above demonstrate, the idiot masses believe the propaganda they see on television, since everybody knows it, and you have to be crazy to doubt what everybody knows.
The situation is even worse: The CIA founded a “false Left” in Germany 1948 (Agents Lasky, Neumann, Wisner) that was infiltrated into Latin America after the Kissinger dictatorships in the 1990, with the mission to undermine the left parties und movements. Morales in Bolivia and Correa in Ecuador called them “la izquierda falsa” : Rosa Luxemburg Foundation receives $65 million a year from the German Federal Government, and now in the USA it has helped to activate the CIA’s “American Left” to help in the permanent gepolitical war against China and Russia. The CIA even let the “false German Left” infiltrate former German extreme-leftist into Latin America to further the fake extreme ecology left. Example of a CIA “Leftist” see WIKIPEDIA PETER URBACH
The replies above are unsurprising.
Since the coup, thousands of brand new Twitter accounts appeared with stock photos of supposedly Bolivian citizens who favored the coup. The stock photos are western and the names are not verifiable.
You’ll need another article on all the psy-ops in the comments section…
Keep bringing a few rays of reason to all the darkened pits of media screaming.
Enjoyed FAIR info since the barbarous years of the early 2000s. Do folks remember those years when FAIR documented that less that 1% of all guests on TV were “anti-war”? There is likely less dissent now.
Glad to see this exchange. I was looking to unsubscribe after reading this article but now I will hang around and read comments next time I can’t stand a particularly rigid ideological position.
It does seem to me, though, that we need to acknowledge the very anti-democratic maneuvers of Evo and the MAS. Is this a coup and are bad people positioning to take over? Yes. But at the same time, did many millions of Bolivians–including a lot of one time supporters–oppose his candidacy for re-election for very valid reasons? I believe they did.
I’m in Bolivia and surrounded by people who despise him, so I’m not unaware of who Anez or Camacho are and what they represent. But…when Donald Trump “jokes” about deserving a third term and we recoil, why do we not have the same response when it’s Evo Morales, who was *actually* making that happen.
I think it quite legit to be anti-coup, but also recognize the valid reasons why many wanted Evo gone. Evo Morales is not a victim in the events of the past couple of months; he is a culprit. And he’s betrayed the people he professes to care most about by attempting to cling to power.
Yes Evo made a mistake by not have a canditate to follow him ! (Why did not Alvaro Garcia Linera, the “brain” of the presidency run ? ). WAKE UP: The CIA founded a “false Left” in Berlin 1948 (Lasky, Neumann, Wisener who later acted on Mossadeque 1953 in Iran). In 1990 the CIA began infiltrating “false German leftists into Latin America. They worked against ALL left governments in Latin America. Evo and Alvaro Garcia Linera knew it! But since 2010 the CIA has a second and “American Left” which you now are sensing. The idea is to build a “patriotic loyal American Left” that will participate in the NEW WAR against China and Russia. “Jacobin” magazine is just one of many opportunistic political agents of this “patriotic American Left” which now is being infiltrated from the USA into Germany and Italy and Britain and possibly Brazil. How the “West” operates read : IB REPORT ON NGOS PDF. I am “watching” the “false German Left” of the CIA since many years. They are now concentrating against the current government of Mexico: It’s too damn “independent” !
Allow me to direct you to Bolivia. My Country. See for yourself and confirm for yourself. I am a witness to those facts. Read the Bolivian News Papers. No Coup. No resolution. Just a country whos people want there basic democratic rights respected.