For Pacifica Radio, November 1st, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, this is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm editorial director of Anti-War.com, and author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And by the way, I'm celebrating 10 years here on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
I've been doing this show really since around 1998 in various incarnations.
I started doing Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio in Austin, Texas in 2007, but moved it to KPFK here at the end of 2010.
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All the archives of these interviews are in with the rest there at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Nicholas J.S. Davies again.
I just talked to him back a couple of weeks ago, but now he's back.
He's got a new piece at Anti-War.com with Mindia Benjamin from Code Pink.
It's called Ending Regime Change in Bolivia and the World.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Nicholas?
Yeah, I'm doing fine.
Nice to talk to you again.
Yeah, great.
Great to have you here.
Listen, so let's talk about this reverse coup, this undoing of the coup in Bolivia.
First of all, can you take us back to last October and the goings-on and then update us on the recent developments here?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, basically, Evo Morales, who has been president of Bolivia for, I think, about 15 years, was basically removed from power in a coup after winning an election that the Organization for American States really very deceptively claimed, you know, had been a rigged election.
They looked at the fact that, you know, the right-wing candidate appeared to be winning and then there was a surge in the vote counting for Morales, you know, and but in fact, this is really the normal pattern in Bolivia because the movement for socialism, the party of Evo Morales, is really, you know, has its support very, very much in the indigenous community who are really the traditional rural majority of Bolivia, whereas the more right-wing candidates have their support in the larger cities from the more, you know, European descended Bolivians.
So this was really a perfectly normal pattern in the counting of the votes, but the Organization for American States and, you know, parroted by the US media and other media around the world, at least in the West, you know, really gave credence to what was a very false picture of what happened in that election.
But as a result of that, I mean, there was really a military coup.
I mean, Morales fled for his life.
At least 32 people were killed in the violence, including, you know, a police helicopter, you know, that fired on demonstrators who were already fleeing from, you know, police riot against their protest.
And so, but what is different about this situation is that the people really united to oppose the results of the coup.
And when the interim president Jeanine Anez kept postponing new elections this September, you know, a general strike was declared that actually, you know, really shut down about six of the nine provinces of Bolivia and forced Anez to go ahead with a new election, which was then, of course, won by the Movement for Socialism by Mr. Arce, who had been the finance minister under Evo Morales.
So, you know, really this is a triumph for democracy and a real, you know, as we wrote in the article, you know, rarely has a U.S. regime change been so firmly and democratically repudiated by people anywhere.
Right.
Yeah.
And so successfully, maybe Donald Trump was just distracted.
Maybe the CIA was distracted framing him for treason.
And that was why they were busy working on their own coup here and they couldn't finish up their coup over there.
None of these guys, the art of the deal.
None of them can close a deal.
Yeah, they've kind of got their hands full around the world at this point.
So, you know, maybe that was part of it, too.
It's a lot of regimes to change, Nicholas, a lot of regimes.
Now, so please narrow in, if you could go back and elaborate on the part about how the people who did the coup were going to try to stay in power, but this general strike prevented that.
Can you explain a little bit better about that, please?
Well, yeah, because I mean, in so many other similar situations, you know, once with the aid of the CIA, local forces have removed a government from power, whether it was Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, you know, they basically removed him, banned his party and and Haiti has just been in a complete, you know, political chaos and just, you know, extreme poverty.
The economy's just been in a complete meltdown ever since, you know, in Ukraine, once Yanukovych fled the country, you know, the US and the European Union basically assisted the coup leaders to form a government and proceed from there.
Likewise in Honduras in 2009, once Emmanuel Zelaya had been taken by soldiers from the presidential palace and flown to a US military base, even though in that case, you know, every single government in Latin America, you know, was calling it a coup and opposing it as a coup and even Obama referred to it as a coup until Clinton got him back in line.
And in each case, the government that has taken over as a result of the coup, you know, has been able to hold new elections in which the former government was more or less excluded.
And so the coup has become a fait accompli and being legitimized by subsequent elections.
So yes, it was really the popular pressure in Bolivia that prevented that from happening, you know, insisting that the Morales' party had to be allowed to stand in the election and that there had to in fact be an election, which, you know, which was in doubt.
And now Agnes had been delaying.
How many times does she postpone it?
I note here from a news report that she was invoking the COVID epidemic to say that this is why we have to delay the elections.
But were they actually delayed or she just tried that and the general strike stopped her immediately or how did that go?
No, there was originally an election scheduled.
I don't have the exact dates, but there was an election scheduled for a much earlier in the year, but then was postponed because of COVID.
And then I think maybe another one.
It maybe got rescheduled for August and then she postponed it again, which then prompted the, you know, the massive popular protest.
And they did that just shut the entire country down in August, right?
I read that.
I think it was like six provinces out of nine that really sort of came to a halt with, you know, the majority of people taking part in the strike.
Well, yeah, so that's really something and you know, it's funny I wanted to emphasize that because I saw people spinning this election and saying, oh, yeah, sure.
It was a coup.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
It was all about stealing the lithium.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
It's a military dictatorship.
If that's true, then how come in just one year the same party that was overthrown won the election, you know, in other words, it was Morales who was creating a dictatorship and all the military coup did was restore democracy, right?
That's all.
Well, you know, I mean Morales, you know that I mean there was a sort of case against Morales and the fact that he had changed the Constitution to be allowed to run again.
But you know, the fact is that the vast majority of people obviously, you know, voted him as voted still voted for him after that.
So, I mean, he clearly had the support of the majority of the population and his party still does.
So, you know, I think this so that I think we change the Constitution and people might argue about the exact legality of the process there, but it's not like he just was an outright violation of it.
Well, no, I think it I think it went through the courts and it went through, you know, there's always as we see with the Supreme Court in the US right now, you know, there are always questions about, you know, a Supreme Court that does the bidding of the, you know, government in power and how independent are the courts, etc, etc.
But, you know, ultimately if there are free and fair elections taking place, then, you know, ultimately the, you know, the people do have the last say and that was certainly the case that has certainly been the case in Bolivia.
Well, and you know, like you're saying it was the people of the country in huge numbers that forced them to finally hold these elections.
The right didn't do this.
Yeah, exactly.
Whatever power grab he was making, they were also making one and a completely illegal one.
As you said, the guy had to run for his life.
They burned his sisters and there was a credible threat there that wasn't play acting.
I mean, there was a credible threat to his life.
He was told you better leave town.
They burned his sister's house down and then they massacred.
I don't know how many protesters, but I don't know if it was as bad as Egypt, but it was ugly.
You know, no, it probably wasn't on the scale of Egypt, but you know, at least I mean the reports I've seen were that at least 32 protesters were killed at those various demonstrations and you know, and then some of the protesters did put up barricades on main roads around the country and those were violently broken up by the military.
And so yeah, I mean the the violence was definitely on the part of the, you know, the coup government and its security forces, you know, the so yeah, regardless of people's politics here in America.
The reality is that at least I don't know the reality.
The theory is that Bolivia is a sovereign nation.
And so we don't have the authority to overthrow their government any more than they have the right to overthrow ours.
So that's the key to the whole thing.
But so then what exactly is the role of the United States here?
Obviously, you know much of it could be secret.
But what do we know for a fact about America's role in the coup last year?
Well, it's always hard to find out exactly what role the U.S. has played behind the scenes.
But where the U.S. comes out into the open is, of course, after the fact in working to legitimize the results of the coup.
On the other hand, for example, going back again to, you know, other coups in the last decade or two.
I mean, you know, it was literally, I believe, either the, you know, 82nd Airborne or U.S.
Marines who went into the presidential palace and asked President Aristide of Haiti to come with them and that they would take him out of the country.
And they basically then flew him to the Central African Republic from where Randall Robinson and Maxine Waters literally had to go and fly and negotiate with South Africa to give him asylum.
And Aristide has eventually been allowed to return to Haiti.
But in Bolivia, I'm not sure that there is evidence that it's been made public of, you know, a U.S. green light to the, you know, to go ahead with the coup or any role of the CIA in actually carrying it out.
And if the Bolivian Armed Forces had U.S. approval from a military attaché at the U.S.
Embassy or the CIA station at the U.S.
Embassy, then that's probably all they needed to go ahead and do what they did.
The U.S. media tends to sort of treat all these situations as if they're unique.
But in fact, I mean, there are basically about four basic ways that the U.S. removes regimes from power around the world, all of which are violations of the sovereignty of the country and the government.
And so that would include coups, as we've been discussing, but also the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which also succeeded in removing governments from power.
And then, of course, we have these sort of hybrid, covert proxy wars, you know, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine.
Well, I guess Ukraine was more the standard standard coup.
But there's also Somalia, which has been raging on for 26, 27 years.
But once the Somalis had actually got a fledgling government of their own under the Islamic Courts Union in 2006, the U.S. backed an Ethiopian invasion of the country, which essentially plunged it back into chaos ever since.
So really, if we compare the situation now of the people of Bolivia with the people of every one of those other countries I've just mentioned, you know, Haiti, Honduras, Ukraine, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Venezuela and Cuba and, you know, draconian maximum pressure sanctions, you know, the U.S. actions have not made life better for the people of a single one of those countries.
And people will justify these actions on saying that, well, yes, okay, so it failed in terms of helping the people, but that wasn't the real intention.
Anyway, this is all about expanding the American Empire and expanding the neoliberal, you know, economic zone that the U.S. is the financial center of.
But in fact, the absolutely uniform failure of all these operations to show any benefit to the people, you know, I mean, these are often justified as so-called humanitarian interventions.
And yet, if the results are uniformly catastrophic for the humanity that, you know, that they're supposedly trying to promote or to help, then, you know, this completely undermines the whole U.S. narrative to support this kind of policy.
And so what we actually have seen is the catastrophic results on the ground of these operations has, in fact, undermined the U.S. efforts to have a new American century or to restore American leadership and the world as Joe Biden claims he wants to do.
You know, the reality of the world we live in today is that it is an emerging multipolar world in which the U.S., the European Union, and China each represent about 15 or 20 percent of the global economy and international trade.
But even the three of them put together, the three largest blocks, represent less than half of the global economy and less than half of international trade.
So we are already living in a multipolar world and, you know, that is not dominated in the way that U.S. leaders hoped they could dominate it after the end of the Cold War.
Neither is it divided between two rival blocks as it was during the Cold War.
And so these efforts to go back to a U.S.
Cold War against China and Russia, as we have seen under Trump and to some extent under Obama in the case of Russia, you know, these are all just really efforts to turn back the clock.
The U.S. has lost that global position it occupied.
And, you know, there's really not, you know, for the U.S. to be pouring our resources, you know, into a military that spends more than the next 10 military countries in the world with the idea of somehow preserving the U.S. as the sort of dominant power in the world or restoring it to that position.
It is just missing the opportunity to actually move on from that, as every past empire has always eventually had to do.
But instead of moving on smoothly when we still have the resources and we still have what could be a shared prosperity for all our people, this focus on extending our military power and military domination is really just tragic for all of us here in America and for the world.
And as we said at the end of our article, you know, the most tragic aspect of this will be if we Americans, you know, wake up in 10 to 20 years time and realize that we missed the opportunity that we had to move on from that phase of our history to a fresh post-imperial life for our country that could be a good life for all our people.
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Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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Yeah, it's so well said, and it's so obvious too, especially, you know, as the odometer's flipping over here.
We're at 2020, which is such an important milestone, you know, one solid generation into the new century, the new millennium and all this stuff.
And looking back these 20 years, and especially these 30 years since the end of the Cold War, how obvious is it that this was all just one big blown opportunity?
And if we'd only tried at all to live up to what we claimed we're about, you know, liberty and justice, then none of this would have happened.
Not Iraq War I or any of the consequences as they played out throughout the Middle East this whole time.
And even in Latin America too, as you say, even assuming the priorities of the American Empire, every time they overthrow one of these governments and plunge that country into chaos, like what happened in Honduras in 2009, and what they tried to do in Bolivia here last year.
All that does, obviously, is just radicalize everybody against American power.
So we can talk about that multipolar world.
It's not just that, hey, the rest of the world is getting wealthier and more equivalent in power to the United States.
But it's also that we've been under the leadership of Clinton and Bush and Obama and Trump, who are just determined to blow America's entire wad in the deserts here, the jungles there, and achieve absolutely nothing for it.
Trillions of dollars wasted and a bazillion dollars worth of goodwill destroyed.
Absolutely.
I don't know what I can add to that.
That's, I mean, yeah, that's where we are.
And I mean, you know, as we see with this two-party system repeatedly, you know, essentially, you know, this is an argument between wealthy business interests in this country about sort of how best to rule the world, you know.
And, you know, whether it's corporate globalization or, you know, just the neocons, just raw power makes right and, you know, American exceptionalism and all of that.
Either way, we did mention it in our article, you know, the fact that it was the United States in the early 20th century who really wedded its economic and military power to the framework of a rules-based world, you know, which even though then after the First World War, of course, you know, the U.S. sort of abandoned the League of Nations, but it did all culminate in 1945 with, you know, the UN Charter and with, you know, the revised Geneva Conventions in 1949.
And the idea that we could live in a sort of global democracy of sovereign nations and the basic principle of it would be peace.
The basic principle would be that these sovereign nations would settle their differences peacefully, and they all agreed to do that.
And so, you know, that is the basic fundamental principle and framework that the U.S. has abandoned, you know, gradually through the course of the Cold War and then this triumphalist period after the end of the Cold War, you know, the U.S. really abandoned the very thing that had enabled it to claim a sort of moral and legitimate basis for its leadership in the world.
Yeah, of course, just like a cop running a red light or getting away with beating his wife to death on a Saturday night, you know, when America's army is the world army and America is the global police force and district attorney, too, in charge of enforcing all of the world law, then, of course, the law can't apply to us because who's going to apply it to us?
And then, surprise, just like with the cops, they act as though they have that total impunity that, in fact, they have.
And so it makes a hollow mockery out of the whole thing.
In fact, I guess, you know, it really just serves all this liberal world order, rules-based global governance, and all this stuff is really just PR for the liberal rubes to get on board for what ultimately is a much more kind of right nationalist imperialist project of resource exploitation and the rest of that.
A neo-neo-colonialism.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, like, like any system of law, I mean, you know, you compare it to the police domestically.
And yeah, it's exactly the same, the same thing taking place.
But I mean, no, if the wealthy and the powerful are immune, then no system of law and justice can really survive.
And, and so, I mean, unruling classes throughout history have figured that out that they, you know, that unless they are willing to accept to be subject to systems of law, then they're not going to be able to maintain the respect of ordinary people or the respect of the less powerful.
And so you're going to have conflict.
And, and so there was some good ideas at the heart of all that.
And it is the United States itself that really has, along with other other powerful countries, but most of all, the United States that has undermined, you know, its own authority and its own leadership in the world.
No question about it.
All right.
I'm so sorry that we're out of time, because I could do this with you all afternoon, man.
This is great stuff.
Everybody, please go and read Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies.
Here they are at Antiwar.com, Ending Regime Change in Bolivia and the World.
Thanks again, Nicholas.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, y'all.
And that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, again, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com and author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And again, celebrating 10 years here at KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
