All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got Ted Snyder, regular contributor to antiwar.com, and his latest is called Finally Got Him, The Bolivian Coup.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on the show again.
Very happy to have you here.
Great ride up here, man.
Take us through this, Evo Morales, who don't like him and how come?
Yeah, so the who don't like him, I think, is the states and the sort of right wing opposition in Bolivia and anybody that wants Bolivia's natural resources to go into their hands instead of the Bolivians' hands.
So Morales came into power, I think it was 2005, on a wave that Hugo Chavez started in Venezuela.
And I think a bit like Chavez, Morales was a democratic nationalist, which is the most dangerous thing for the states because a democrat, someone who will do what his people want because they're voting for him, and a nationalist is someone who will keep the resources benefiting the people of their country and the Bolivians wanted the resources to benefit them.
And so Morales kept the resources in Bolivia to go to social programs to help Bolivians and that kept the profit out of the hands of the big companies in the states.
And I think that that's put him in the sights of the Americans for more than 10 years now.
And they finally got him after a decade of trying.
Well, now, can you elaborate a little bit about that?
Is he preventing exports or he's just preventing foreign companies from buying up full ownership of all the local resources?
Yeah.
And I think the key is full ownership.
Because the way you said it, it almost sounded like he's making sure that none of their minerals are allowed to leave the borders of the country or something like that.
It's the money that he's trying to keep in to some degree, it sounds like.
So Morales has been trying to keep a lot of Bolivia's natural resources benefiting the people.
You know, one of the big ones, I'm not an expert on economics, but one of the big ones in Bolivia is lithium.
Lithium is becoming really important because it powers electric batteries for like electric cars.
It's like the new oil.
And what Morales said is that he welcomes international companies' investment in Bolivia.
He welcomes them working in the lithium mines in Bolivia.
But that any international company that came into Bolivia would have to extract and develop the resources in a 50-50 partnership with Bolivia national mining and resource companies that could then use their profit to go back to helping the people to get, you know, increased housing and literacy and education.
So it's not that he was keeping people out.
He just wanted a 50-50 partnership so that Bolivians could also benefit.
And not necessarily a 50-50, if I understood your article right.
Not necessarily a 50-50 partnership with the Bolivian state, but just with Bolivian companies.
Right.
And some of those companies were national companies, but Bolivian companies all could benefit Bolivian companies.
And also, you know, one of Morales' things has been that rather than extracting the resources and taking them out of Bolivia, that somehow the people who live on the Bolivian land should benefit from what's under the Bolivian land.
And he's used money from those resources to increase education and increase housing and decrease poverty and drastic poverty and increase literacy.
So it's been a program of trying to help Bolivians to lift up their lives by not letting other countries, you know, 100% benefit from Bolivian resources, but a sort of sharing that allows the Bolivians to benefit from what's in their land also.
What's interesting is, it's funny because in a sense, in a very technical sense, it's national socialism, whether it's the poor and the left in charge, or whether it's the rich right in charge.
It's the same thing.
It's a national political control of all the resources and the control over where all that money goes.
And only the question is whether it's the very few getting it or whether it's the rich.
But none of this is free market, anything.
No, this is democratic socialism or nationalism.
And it's been, you know, I think, Scott, I think if you look back over the history of U.S. coups, coups that were often disguised as taking communism out or being fear of communism, and you look at the people they were taking out, they were really always nationalists.
The fear wasn't, I don't think the fear was ever really communism.
The fear was always America wants the resources in your land, but this leader wants the resources to stay in his land and benefit his people.
And going back to the very beginning, if you go back through Honduras and go back through Cuba and go back through Panama and go back to Iran in 53 and Guatemala and Chile in the 50s and 70s, you'll find these guys were always guys that were saying in one way or another, we're going to stop you from raping our land and we're going to keep some resource for our people.
I mean, this goes back to Mossadegh and, you know, in Iran in 53, in Guatemala in 54, Allende in Chile in the 70s, even Noriega in Panama who wanted to nationalize the Panama Canal and get some of the profits from that.
You consistently get this picture.
And Morales came in in this kind of movement in 2005.
And almost immediately upon coming in, they tried to take him out in coups.
It's taken them 10 years, which is why I called the article finally got us because you can't look at this in isolation.
Right.
Let me stop you right there real quick, because before you get back into the specifics of this case here, because I'm going to let you go, believe me, I want to learn all about it.
But before you even get into that, since we're already talking about a little bit of theory and practice of the intervention and the economics of it here, we should make it real clear.
And this isn't, I don't even think, an ideological position as a non-interventionist or a left right or any other thing.
This is, I think, just a simple understanding of the constitutional law is that if American corporations or people have investments in foreign countries and then they don't like the policies of the governments of those countries, say they nationalize your fruit grove or whatever it is, tough.
That's tough.
The U.S. Constitution does not give the U.S. government the authority to go and ensure a Republican form of government in every state on the planet, just inside the 50 states of this union.
And that should be the deal, whether you're liberal, conservative, libertarian or any other thing.
If you're a company and you invest in another country where you don't have your rule of law but their rule of law that applies and is as tenuous or as solid as it is, you take your risks.
And it is absolutely wrong to think that just because a government in a country is, as you put it, I think quite well, either left wing or right wing nationalist at the expense of American investors, that that would give our government the right to go in there and intervene.
That's totally wrong.
And no one should think that for a minute.
It's obviously a corrupt deal.
It's like, this is why when Smedley Butler wrote his thing saying, look, I was basically a mercenary for these companies, the famous Marine General back a hundred years ago.
That's what he was saying.
None of our understanding of the Constitution says that the government can do this kind of thing.
But this is what we're really being used for.
Right.
You can't change another country's government or constitution or way of doing things to suit your investments.
If you invest in a country, you invest in a country under their laws.
And this became, I think for the United States, going back more than half a century now, this became far simpler than conquering and colonizing a country, is instead of taking over the country, you just arrange this so that you can get the wealth of the country without conquering the country.
And you do that by making sure you have a government in those countries that will give you their resources, which is why I think America's often so wanted to keep dictators and powers, because they can say to the dictator, I'll guarantee your security if you'll give me your resources.
And as soon as that dictator is replaced by someone who's going to listen to the will of the people, the people are always going to say we want to benefit from our resources.
And I think that's what's terrified American foreign policy.
I think the whole sort of Red Scare communism thing was a bit bogus.
I think even going back to Castro, the Americans went after Castro because he was a nationalist long before they knew he was a communist.
This is true, like I said, through Iran and Guatemala in the 50s.
Just trace them all.
And the guy that gets taken out is always a guy who wants to keep his resources in his country.
And which is a policy which is no more commie than America's government in the 49th state, I guess, Alaska, where is it the 50th state where the government of Alaska lays claim to every bit of the oil resources in that country, every bit of the oil under the ground.
And then they divvy up the dividends to the people of the state, which I'm not in favor of.
But still, if you're going to do a violent coup d'etat on somebody else's country over a policy just like the one that Americans think is perfectly fine in Alaska, then it clearly is not a matter of principle going on here, but a matter of connected political interest, killing for profit.
Yeah.
And despite the really kind of incredible way the Bolivia thing is being presented in the media, this is about as clear a coup as we've seen in a long time.
Nobody's using that word or hardly anyone's using that word.
It's always couched in this, you know, under protest from whatever, whatever, Morales resigned power.
But this was a striking coup.
And it's been like I said, it's really been 10 years in the making, but an opportunity came up.
They they nailed it.
And it was a really clear, striking coup.
All right.
So tell us the whole story, man, everything, you know, and including the other side of the story, incorporate what they're saying, because they're saying that there was some kind of 24 hour hold.
And this was all very suspicious.
Whatever the talking points are on the other side, I'd like for you to please try to address those as you take us through the narrative here, at least.
Okay.
It's a long, complicated story.
So I'll try to go through, like, I'll try to go through the highlights kind of quickly and clearly.
Sure.
And I'll leave my mic off and listen closely.
So as I already suggested, this is a coup that fits a pattern.
The pattern started in the early 2000s.
You had you had left wing or nationalist governments coming into Latin America.
So you get you get these coups that look like democracy.
That's what happened in Bolivia, they said.
It was a it was an illegitimate election that went against the Constitution.
This isn't a coup.
It's a defense of democracy.
That's what Trump called it, a defense of democracy.
So you got that in, you know, in Venezuela starting in 2002, repeatedly.
Then in Honduras, again, you get Manuel Zelaya taken out in a coup that was disguised as an attempt to protect the democracy, that he had a referendum that was asking for too many terms, which wasn't true.
You get the coup in Paraguay, where they're taken out again.
It looks like a constitutional defense of democracy.
Most recently in Brazil, you get again this this election where all the people in the other party are impeached or arrested under false pretenses.
But you get all these sort of coups that look like the workings out of democracy.
They're really, really silent coups.
There's no guns.
There's no tanks.
It's just these really, these coups that allow you to say you're defending democracy.
So then you come to Bolivia, you've got an election coming up, and you know, you want to know, is it a coup?
And the biggest joke about this that the mainstream media is not reporting is that we know it's a coup because the coup plotters told us it's a coup.
There's extensive leaked audio of conversations that happened about 10 days before the election.
You can go online and click on, you can listen to the conversations.
In the conversations, they tell us straight up, there's a coup plan.
They're going to get a political military government put in power.
They talked about invalidating the election results, military civilian uprisings, like everything that happened is plotted out.
So so first of all, Scott, we know it's a coup because they told us it's a coup.
We know it's a coup because it was the generals that told Morales he had to step down.
So it was a military coup, like the phone calls talked about.
The media talks about ministers resigning.
You know, they weren't resigning.
Their families were being kidnapped and their families being held hostage until they did resign.
They were they've they've got arrest warrants out for all of the people in Morales's party that, you know, they've words you use words like hunting them down, arresting them.
We know from things they said in the media that that the opposition had said that they were going to reject this election if they didn't win even beforehand, they didn't wait for the results.
And then the two big claims you see in the media all the time is that there were election irregularities, that that what happened is that Mesa was winning the election.
And then there's this couple hours and then you come back and all of a sudden Morales is winning the election.
So so Morales wasn't winning in the beginning and then suddenly he's winning at the end.
And they called this an inexplicable and inexplicable pattern, inexplicable result.
But it's not inexplicable at all.
First of all, all the polls before this showed the Morales was going to win by the amount he won by, and they all showed he wouldn't be winning at the beginning, but he'd be winning at the end.
And the reason for that is really simple.
And you see this in the States, you see this in Canada, too.
In Bolivia, voting's all tabulated manually.
And what happens is the rural areas, their results come in later than the urban areas.
And Morales, whose support comes largely or mostly from indigenous communities and poor communities, they live in the rural areas.
So all that happened is that Massa's votes from the urban centers came in first and Morales's votes in the rural areas came in slower.
And so it looked like he was losing and then suddenly winning.
But even then, if you look carefully at it, you find that it's not, it wasn't this drastic change.
The pattern was changing slowly and consistently.
There's absolutely nothing irregular about it at all.
This was just something that the opposition seized on because they planned on showing that the election was illegitimate and irregular.
They seized on this pattern.
Everybody knew this pattern would happen.
So there was nothing irregular.
The Bolivian constitution says that you have to have a, you have to win by 50 percent or you have a runoff.
Or the second thing is, if you get 40 percent of the vote and you're ahead of this next closest person by 10 percent, there's no runoff.
You can win the election in the first round.
Morales won by more than 10 percent of the vote.
He had 47.1 percent, so he's over the 40 percent.
His next closest opponent, Carlos Massa, had 36.5, so he beat him by 10 percent.
Carlos won legitimately in the first round.
It was a legit election that's been really carefully looked at, really carefully documented.
It was a legit election.
Yeah.
What's the thing about the 24-hour hold or whatever that was that the OAS was complaining about?
So I don't understand this completely.
Yeah.
I don't totally understand this completely.
The best place to look for this is, Mark Weisbrot's expressed this really carefully.
There's two, there's two tabulations that go on in a Bolivian vote.
There's a quick count, which is not an official count.
It's just sort of a count to sort of keep you updated.
And then there's the real count.
And the quick count was suspended for totally normal reasons.
And then the real count came back and showed this different thing.
So people have said there's been this, they suspended the tab, they didn't even suspend the tabulations.
The quick count is never meant to be an official count.
There was nothing fishy or weird about that at all.
There was no manipulation of the real count.
The real count, when you look at the stuff coming in, was totally legit.
This has been really clearly explained.
It's such an obvious pretext.
If this was really about a rigged election, then how come you have the head of the military tell the president he better leave town or else?
That's not the way the rule of law handles a bad election.
If it was a rigged election, you wouldn't have the military doing that, as you say.
If it was a rigged election, you would have let Morales finish his term.
And then the new party, the new government come in.
If it was a rigged election, they wouldn't have ransacked and burned down houses, chased them out, arrested them.
You wouldn't have had the new government, the interim government, declaring Morales' resignation without the parliament accepting it because the Bolivian constitution says it doesn't matter if Morales resigns, the resignation's not official until the legislature votes and accepts his resignation.
They never did.
So they never did accept the resignation.
None of this has any legitimacy at all.
When Anya's declared herself the interim president, she did that after like an hour-long meeting with the military and then declares herself president without a quorum or a vote, although the court might have said that's okay, but the military's meeting with her, so she declares herself in.
There's nothing about this that followed anything like constitution.
It was a seizure of power, a lot like the attempt in Venezuela recently, only it worked.
And probably it worked this time, because whereas Maduro's in Venezuela had the support of the military, the Bolivian military and police turned on Evo Morales.
And the interesting thing there that, again, is not being picked up in the mainstream media is that the military that turned on Morales has long and deep connections to the American military and intelligence community.
So it's no stretch of the imagination that he wasn't able to hold on because of a military that was aligned with the United States turned on him.
And this has been picked up by a couple of really good reporters in sort of the alternative press.
I don't think I've seen this in the mainstream media at all.
But the general who suggested that Morales better resign was the military attache in Washington for three years, where he would have developed deep connections to the U.S. military and intelligence community.
We know he's the graduate of at least a couple of courses from the old School of the Americas.
That's the machine that turns out coup leaders and dictators.
So they turned on him.
That was probably always the plan.
That didn't happen in Venezuela, and that was probably the difference.
And then you get Morales, who has to flee to Mexico while they put Bolivia in a lockdown, declare that he'll be hunted down and arrested.
And he's got to literally take off for his life while they burn his sister's house down and ransack his house.
It's a coup.
All right.
Now, but this is a week ago.
So, you know, I read one article that said, in fact, I saw a drone footage of one really long march, at least a few miles long.
So tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people protesting.
But so, God, I mean, this we've seen this kind of thing go really badly in the recent and in the more distant past here.
Are we looking at a civil war or is there a possibility the coup plotters are going to back down?
I guess it doesn't sound like it.
So this is scary, Scott.
I mean, when in 2002, when Chavez was taken out of power, the people struck and went to the streets and they were actually able to get back, get Chavez back into power.
But again, the military.
Well, not only that, he had paratroopers hiding in the walls of the palace.
So he had them just absolutely outsmarted and just with a knife to their throat.
What were they going to do?
Coup canceled.
But without a trick up your sleeve like that.
So the scary thing in Bolivia is that the military and the police will switch sides.
What's happened since I wrote the article, so this isn't in my article, but since then what you've got is, is, is the, you know, the coup government has now declared that the military and police can use whatever force is necessary to put down the rise.
And they'll get, they'll get amnesty from criminal prosecution.
So, and you know, the United Nations, human rights organizations have already jumped out and criticized this as you've got an interim president saying you can use whatever force you want and there's no rules apply.
So, so, and you've got the same thing on reporters.
Reporters are being threatened to be arrested if they, if they cover the opposition.
It's really scary.
It's really scary when a, when a head of a country tells the military they can use whatever force they deem necessary against their own people and there'll be no prosecution.
They're saying they're going to publish lists of, of members of parliament from the, from the Morales' government that, that they'll be arresting.
They're clamping down.
I don't know, I don't know enough about the situation to know how long the Bolivian people will hold up and stay out, but they're in a scary situation.
And again, you know, Scott, again, you can't say this is a constitutional change, right?
That's what coup governments do.
You lock down the media, you turn the military on the people, you seize power, you don't allow the reporters to report, you arrest all the people in the other government.
This is an, this is an ugly situation and it just, it just needs to be called a coup and the states isn't calling it a coup, they're calling it a defensive democracy.
They've immediately recognized the new government.
It's a, it's a bad situation.
Man, you know, I just put Bolivia in my Google News and Amy Goodman is reporting 23 people have been killed in police violence against the protesters so far.
Yeah, so I think it's even slightly higher than that now, but there's also, there's at least a hundred wounded as well, so that the numbers are climbing.
They're, they're using live ammunition on, on crowds of people.
The, the interim leader is, is saying that the, it's, that they're, they're, it's not real indigenous people in the protest.
They're faking it.
She's accused them even of firing on themselves to make it look bad.
But yeah, the, the, the death count's up into the twenties or thirties now and the wounded is up over a hundred now.
That's what happens when you give the military and the police carte blanche to break up protests with the promise that no matter what you do, you won't be held accountable for your actions.
Bolivia, Bolivia, quote unquote, meaning the coup d'etat Junta blames Cubans for stirring unrest.
Yeah.
And they've thrown out, they've thrown Cuban doctors out of Bolivia.
They've blamed Cuba.
Spies.
Yeah.
So they're kicking that.
And they also immediately severed all ties with, with other left-wing governments.
So when the, when the coup government came in, one of the first thing they did was sever ties with Venezuela.
And of course, Scott, this was part of it too, right?
Yeah.
They recognize Guaido as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
So like that, why even bother doing that?
I mean, how could that be anything but a PR mistake that early, you know?
That's right.
And if you look at what's happened in the last couple of weeks with, with governments in that part of the world, more than a couple of weeks, but you get, you get left-leaning governments coming back in Venezuela and Argentina, you get Lula da Silva being released from prison in Brazil.
You get the complete failure of the American attempt to get rid of Maduro because the people stand behind him.
So after getting rid of all these, these governments, they start sort of creeping back in.
And here's, here's Bolivia.
That's one of the few still backing Maduro.
And so this election comes, it's a perfect opportunity to get rid of them.
And that's part of the motivation too, I think, is that, is they're trying to stem this tide of the, in my article I called it, you know, the, the pendulum swinging back to the left that the Americans tried to pull to the right, but you know, the pendulum has this domestic will of its own where the people pulled it back.
And so they, it was time, it was a chance to get rid of him because things aren't, things aren't swinging right in America's backyard right now.
Well, and you know, for centrists and right-leaning people and libertarians listening who would like to see the freest markets possible everywhere in the world to the benefit of all of mankind, you got to see how our American government dresses up their empire in the name of freedom and property rights.
It does these completely illegal coup d'etats and regime changes and aggressive wars wherever they want.
They call the coup in Egypt, just like the rest of these, when Field Marshal al-Sisi seized the government in Egypt in 2013, John Kerry said, oh, thank goodness.
It's the restoration of democracy.
Meaning freedom is when your government does whatever the U.S. government says, or we'll kill you.
And you're surprised that people instead embrace this kind of social nationalism as our allies in Ukraine call it?
That's right.
It is not.
Yeah.
And you can, you can talk about Ukraine.
You can talk about Egypt.
You can go out of Latin America and throw a lot of countries in this.
It's not, as we said at the top of the show, it's not a left-wing, right-wing thing.
It's just what you said.
It's a government doing what America wants them to do.
This is what I call, you know, I use this term a lot in America, it's what I call, you know, America's silent coups, that they've, they've gone away from the idea, mostly, of needing to conquer a country or colonialize.
You can just do these sort of silent coups and take over the resources by putting a person in power who will just send you all their resources.
It's just, it's just, it's the new way of American foreign policy.
It's the new way of, you know, you don't have to conquer with your army.
You don't even need a few tanks or guns for your coups.
You just dress your coup up as democracy, which is, that's the claim in Bolivia.
You know, this is just democracy.
What did, what did, what did the official, the official White House statement after the coup in Bolivia, where, you know, Trump said he, that he applauds it because it's a significant moment in democracy, that the Americas are closing, you disguise it as democracy, you come off as the good guy.
It's just a, it's just a bold coup with no shots fired.
It's just disguised as a coup.
Yeah, back in 2004, Justin Raimondo called this the Ukrainian template.
And that was after the orange revolution that you just dispute an election, go out in the streets and do a coup.
It goes back to, I mean, pressure from below essentially.
Yep.
They were doing this in, in, in Iran a little over a decade ago.
They were doing it in Venezuela.
It's like, it's, it's a template they've been following.
There's, there's two ways of doing it.
One is, one is you disguise it as democracy by making it look like the legitimate moves of a legislative assembly.
And the other one is you make it look like the voice of the people.
So you get a government that wins an election by say 60%, which leaves 40% dissatisfied.
You get a couple million people out in the streets.
You make it look like a mass revolution when really those couple million are just part of the minority that lost at the polls, but a couple million people screaming on the streets make a lot more noise than 60% of silent people in a voters booth, right?
So, so you, either way you make it look like democracy and this is what's been going on now, this is what's been going on now for decades is one of these two patterns, make it look like a constitutional defense of democracy or make it look like the voice of the people on the streets.
But the voice of the people in the streets is just the dissatisfied minority that keeps losing.
And Morales kept beating this minority and Chavez and Maduro kept beating this minority.
And when you finally despair of elections, then you take them out another way.
And when they thought they had Maduro, sorry, they thought they had Morales, so he couldn't run again.
And then the courts rule that he can run again.
It's like, oh no, we couldn't get him out that way.
So then you say, OK, if we can't take him out in the polls, then we'll either take him on the streets or we'll take him on the legislative assembly, then an election coming up.
So they didn't need the streets to do a legislative assembly.
And goodbye, Evo Morales.
Yeah.
Well, and for all its flaws, you know, a system of a rule of law and regular elections is certainly preferable to a system without them.
And so, you know, it sucks to be the minority that always loses, depending on just how badly your liberty is being tread on.
But again, cookie cutter in virtually every single one of these cases, there are no libertarians in the mix.
It's right versus left.
Who is going to seize the power of the state to use it for their own ends?
And so there is no real, you know, kind of legitimate voluntary economy either way.
Right.
And this is, you know, this is a potential, this is a potential weakness of democracy that can be exploited, is that a 60-40 election is a big victory, but 40 percent of a country with tens of millions of people is a lot of people that go to the street.
And you can exploit this feature of democracy.
And it's particularly vile if you're the country that claims to be the bastion of democracy that spreads it throughout the world.
And it's really dangerous for the future.
Right.
I mean, to the even the concept of democracy, then I learned this as a kid, one of the very first things about living in a country with regular elections is that when your side loses, you lump it and try and do better next time.
You don't just fight about it.
If we're going to fight about it every time we have an election that we don't like, Democrats right now or the Republicans everywhere else in the world, then we're going to find real quick that people actually like fighting and things get really ugly.
Yep.
Yep.
But anyway, they don't care about that.
They just got some short-term lithium interests in mind here and some dividend check receivers interest at the expense of the rest of us.
So what the heck?
Right.
I'm sorry I talk so much during other people's interviews, especially to you, guest.
But thank you, Ted.
I love talking to you.
You do such a great job, man.
I really appreciate it a lot.
Thanks.
I appreciate it, Scott.
Good talking to you.
All right, you guys, that is Ted Snyder.
He is, I said, regular contributor, but he's not.
He's a columnist for Antiwar.com and his latest is finally got him the Bolivian coup.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
