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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All right, you guys, on the line is Jeb Sprague.
He is a research associate at the University of California, Riverside, and previously taught at UVA and UCSB.
He's the author of Globalizing the Caribbean, Political Economy, Social Change, and the Transnational Capitalist Class, and also Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, and if you go back and check the archives, you can find where we did one interview in the past on the subject of Haiti there.
But this one is about a new article in the Grayzone Project, that's thegrayzone.com.
It's called Top Bolivian Coup Plotters, Trained by U.S. Militaries, School of the Americas, Served as Attachés in FBI Police Programs.
Oh, you don't say, Jeb.
Welcome back to the show.
Jeb Sprague Hey, thanks so much, Scott, for having me.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, happy to have you here, and so we had Ted Snyder on and Dan McAdams about the Bolivia coup, so we got our kind of 101 here, but maybe you can refresh people's memory or for any brand new listeners to the show, and let us know about what happened, kind of the overall thumbnail sketch of the coup of November the 10th there.
Yeah, so Bolivia, it's a country in the heart of South America, and it's gone through an integration into the global economy over recent decades, but unlike a lot of the other countries around it, it's been headed up by a Latin American left-leaning government and with very vibrant social movements, political movements on the ground, and they've broken with IMF policies, with the diktat from Washington, and a lot has happened in the country.
There are a lot of local particularities, tensions, contradictions, all sorts of things, but one thing is for sure, is that in late October of 2019, the government of Evo Morales, the first ever elected indigenous president in the history of South America, he won with a mandate.
He beat his nearest competitor by over 11%, and according to the rules, their constitution, he had passed the bar to become the elected president.
The country is majority indigenous, working class people, marginalized, negatively racialized population, and he is very popular with that base of support in the country.
What we saw happen was in the lead up to November 10th, which is the day of the coup that we want to talk about today, there was this campaign carried out by the Organization of American States, working with some local Bolivian groups to really delegitimize that election and create this narrative of an electoral crisis.
Now, the OAS has done things like this before.
They've done it in Haiti, which eventually led to the undermining of a progressive government there.
The OAS has this history of taking the side of Washington and a lot of dirty wars in the region.
In the lead up to November 10th, studies were put out by this group called CEPR, Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, D.C., that did a statistical analysis of the election.
There's also an academic at the University of Michigan who carried out another independent study.
They came to the conclusion that the election was overwhelmingly legitimate, that Evo Morales should have this new term in office.
But basically, the OAS carried out this smear campaign of the election.
The OAS is 60 percent funded by the United States.
It's really made up mostly of a lot of neoliberal and conservative governments across the region that side with Washington.
The media just repeated this narrative.
By the 10th, there was around 100,000 Twitter bot accounts that were made, that it was very much clearly an organized, concerted campaign to delegitimize the election and to really attack Morales as a dictator.
On the 9th, there was a rebellion by a head of the police, and then on the 10th, the military asked him to step down.
His supporters have been hunted down, people kicked out of office.
Openly racist woman Jeanine Anez, who's been very harsh, you read her language, very racist language against the indigenous majority, she's been made the de facto head of this new regime.
That's what we're seeing now in Bolivia.
Okay, a couple questions there real quick.
Is it really right then that the only question was whether he had won by a margin large enough to not have to have a runoff in a second round?
Well, there's a whole debate, if you follow this closely.
In the history of the United States, we have a two-term limit on presidential- Well, hang on one second on the term limit thing, because that's kind of a separate question.
On the particulars of this election, you're saying that he won by 11%.
If I understand right, if he had won by less than 10, then because he has less than a majority, he only has a plurality.
If he had less than a 10% margin above his nearest opponent, then he would have to do a runoff election.
But if he has 10 or more, 11 counts, then he doesn't have to do a runoff election.
What I'm asking is, are the opposition saying that he really lost the election outright, or they're saying that it just must have been within the margin less than 10%?
I think you'll have different people in the opposition claiming different things.
Some will say that, yeah, that he inched over and that it was illegitimate.
Other people will say that he lost by a wide margin and that it was fraud, and they take up this OAS narrative.
Different people, there's different factions within the opposition, so there are different claims made.
There are some people that claim that he's been a dictator for years.
You see this real heavily across social media.
But if you go by the CBER study, they have a long track record of getting it right.
What they argue is that the rural vote, the people in the rural countryside, where it's much more indigenous, that took longer for those votes to come into the center vote, where they gather all the votes.
It took longer.
The opposition tries to claim, well, he had fudged the election, but there's no widespread evidence of fraud.
They haven't presented any major cases of vote buying or something that would have changed the percentage that much.
Anyhow, rather than going through the Supreme Court or the different constitutional mechanisms within the country, or even if, say, he had been thrown out, why doesn't his vice president or the head of their Congress take over, which would be according to the Constitution?
There's a number of people that would be in line after him that should have come into power, if, say, the other mechanisms had voted to remove him.
But that's not what happened.
The military not only pushed him out, but they also refused and have hunted down other officials of his party, leading officials, burning down homes.
They ransacked his house, his sister's house, they even ran over his dog with a tank.
He had security officials around him, his own bodyguards, they have text messages showing that they were being offered like $50,000 to betray him.
So it was definitely a concerted campaign.
Even with the Twitter accounts, there's a lot of other factors, too, that we could go into.
Or we can talk about the military and police guys and their connections with us.
Let's do that in just a moment.
I just want to bring up one more thing, which is, I think, probably the strongest argument of the other side, is that he should have left power a long time ago.
They held a referendum about expanding term limits, and that side lost.
But then the court said, no, it's OK, term limits are unconstitutional, even though they're in the Constitution.
And so you can go ahead and run again.
And that sure smacks of a will to power and outside the law.
On the other hand, if you can imagine the same thing here, where the Supreme Court decides that actually Donald Trump can run for a third term if he wants to.
Would that mean, then, that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gets to roll over to the White House and remove him from the chair?
Not civilian cops, not an impeachment in the House and the Senate, and removal.
Not the rule of law, but the army is going to come in here and make sure that the Supreme Court and Donald Trump can't get away with that.
Is that what we would accept?
Never even mind the foreign intervention.
But just for the sake of the way things are there, as you're saying, it's such an important point here, that presume that what they say is right about all the different ways he cheated.
Well then what?
A coup d'etat?
No.
I thought America's whole excuse for killing everybody around the world all the time was because we're giving them democracy.
Instead, everywhere we go, we're canceling one.
Whenever anybody votes wrong, they get removed.
So now we get to the part — well, you can say whatever you want about that rant, if you want — but then we get to the part of how America's, of course, up to — America's government is up to Uncle Sam's eyeballs in this thing here.
Yeah, those are some good points.
And I mean, in our own country, presidents only serve two terms.
But you will remember a man named FDR, who was actually elected to a fourth term.
He died before he could serve out that term, but he was really sort of an important historical juncture in our country in a lot of ways.
Morales is a vital historical juncture in the history of Bolivia, where for the first time, indigenous people are brought into the process.
And I think it's a valid argument in regards to him choosing to run a fourth term.
If that was a bad idea, he could have run as vice president.
But the thing is, that referendum on him having a term limit, that happened in 2016, and he barely lost it.
I think it was like one or two percentage points that he lost that by.
And then after that, they went through the constitutional mechanisms, through the Supreme Court, that ruled that it was against his human rights to not be able to run another term.
And so he did that.
And then if we go by the CPER study, with the statistical analysis, the opposition has not presented any — there hasn't been any clear evidence of, like, fraud on a structural level in this election.
They just haven't presented it.
And so if we go by the CPER study, and he won by 11 percent, why is that 2 percent loss in 2016 sacrosanct, but yet his win in this election in October is not sacrosanct?
So why is one so important, but not the other?
But I agree with you.
Whatever the case, this shouldn't — you know, the U.S. shouldn't be intervening.
It shouldn't be our decision or, you know, in supporting one side or another.
This should be, you know, up to them locally to figure this out through their mechanisms there on the ground.
You know, I — it's really sad to say, but it's true.
I saw a video of a guy from the Cato Institute, who is not from the foreign policy department, which is all really good guys, but he's from some of the — I guess the Latin America department or whatever over at Cato.
And it was really funny to hear him justify all of what has happened in terms of the illegality of Evo Morales and all of his people and abusing the process and staying in office and all these things.
But when it comes to the military overthrowing him, wow, what choice do they have?
And when it comes to some random senator declaring herself presidente for now, well, you know, geez, the guy fled to Mexico.
Gotta have somebody in there.
And this kind of thing.
And in the name of libertarianism, because, hey, as long as the guy, you know, the people seizing power are to the right of these leftists, then I guess it's just perfectly fine, which is completely crazy.
And you don't hear that kind of thing out of their foreign policy department.
You certainly don't hear that kind of thing out of Antiwar.com or the Ron Paul Institute or any of the leaders on foreign policy in the libertarian community.
But that kind of propaganda works on some because, hey, we don't like socialism.
And so, geez, if somebody is doing something about socialism out there somewhere, I guess we just have to get behind whatever it might be, including, you know, as you're saying, I'm just drawing the contrast there.
Oh, what's sacrosanct and what's not?
You know, this guy is breaking the rules.
So now we can break every rule in the world in order to get rid of them.
And that just goes without saying, of course, somehow, you know, they I mean, Abel Morales, I mean, if you if you study it, if you look at the political economy of what happened under him, I mean, it was very moderate in a lot of ways.
I mean, they use the word socialism.
And there are like, you know, infrastructure for the poor and, you know, different things.
But wealthy people had it good in Bolivia over the over the last two decades, they had it really well.
I mean, in the United States, they talk about everything like it's Stalinism, you know, I mean, they there's no there's no differentiation.
I think part of it, I mean, I'm sure some of you might disagree or some of your listeners might disagree.
But I think the center of gravity of our country is so far to the right, because we've never really since World War One and Eugene B. Debs and in the late 19th century, when they made it where labor unions can't have general strikes, where they have to divide up into different sectoral labor unions.
We've never had a really a left in our country.
We've had like, you know, sort of like liberal identitarianism.
There was the New Deal, FDR Democrats.
But in other countries, especially in the global south, there are actual socialists, you know, variety of different communists, Marxists, leftists, anarchists have a much bigger history in those countries in our country.
We just we don't have that.
And so any any sort of debate, it's put in very simplistic terms, in my view.
Well, you know, Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian, said that, hey, land reform in third world countries is in no way, you know, or it should never be presumed that that's de facto Marxist, communist, collectivist and anti liberty.
In fact, you know, all of the rich white right wingers in power across Latin America got their land grants from the king of Spain or some kind of thing, you know, you know, traditional feudalism harking back or American corporations like United Fruit or whoever, you know, buying up from illegitimate power land that truly belong to other people and this kind of thing.
So you could even presumably conceivably have a right wing government that could come to power in any one of these countries, kick foreign interests out, kick feudal landlords off their property, give the property to the people who really worked that land in a John Lockean natural rights sense, divided up among the actual property owners.
And that would be a severe land reform that would be in no way communist.
It would just be in the interest of justice.
So we shouldn't conflate all these things to all these things together.
You know, I'm not sure if it's ever happened like that.
But it certainly could, you know, and it would be right to but anyway, I'm sorry.
So teach us all about the School of the Americas and all of these guys involved the US involvement here.
So yeah, yeah, the article, this article that I published with the gray zone, where it really looks then at a microscope, but really the anatomy of this coup.
So yeah, the previous book I published, Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, that we talked earlier interview about, I had got thousands of Freedom of Information Act documents, where I was really able to trace back the role of US policymakers, elites in the State Department, and US intelligence to really work closely with Haitian police and ex military people, and really sort of trying to manage the country and carry out what they call, you know, transition initiatives, political transitions, quote, unquote, democracy promotion.
And so I was curious, then what about Bolivia, there was this just this coup that happened.
So I looked at the different people that had been heads of the police and the military.
When this, this regime change took place on the 10th.
There was a phone call that had been leaked.
I don't know who gathered this leak, either somebody released it from the phone call, or maybe the Bolivian police, I don't know who, but it's been, yeah, Russia.
It's been all over Bolivian media, where you can hear and journalists, everyone says this is like a legitimate, these are real people, these people have been identified.
And so there's a number of callers on the phone.
And they're talking about working with some different evangelical groups with Bolsonaro, the neo-fascistic president in Brazil, right, who's called for killing homosexuals, the ex President Uribe, right, who was so close to the death squads in Colombia.
And then they also talk about support from Bob Menendez.
And who's your, who's your, who's your senator there in Texas?
Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz.
Yeah, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, of course.
And so they talk about working with these people and, and carrying out this coup.
And I, so I took the names of these guys, because they introduced themselves or are introduced in this phone call.
And I found in total five of them were, had gone to the School of the Americas, the Fort Benning Pentagon, Department of Defense Training Center in Georgia for, for Latin American and Caribbean military officials that have such a long, long history of being involved in massacres and coups, like, you know, or rapes in El Salvador, and such a long history of that.
And then I looked at the head of the military and head of the police, and the head of the military had also attended the School of the Americas, the guy that asked Morales to step down.
And then the head of the police, who was really the key official, this guy named Williams Caliman.
And he would meet with Morales every Monday, they would have security meetings.
And so I think his betrayal really caught Morales off guard.
But he had worked as an attaché in Washington, and in 2018, he had spent a lot of time in DC, where he had been, he was the head of a group named APALA, which is a group that brings police chiefs across Latin America to work in Washington, Washington, DC.
And they really coordinate and do training in close operations work with the FBI, ICE, the DEA.
And so in the article, I go over that.
And then I also talk about Philip Agee, who's the first big CIA whistleblower who died a couple years ago, but published a book in 1975 called Inside the Company, where he talks about how the CIA utilizes other federal agencies like the FBI, the DEA, how they operate often through them.
A CIA agent just can't go up to somebody and say, hey, I work for the CIA, can I get information from you?
Or can maybe I slowly start to recruit you?
They can't operate like that.
So they operate through other agencies.
And so the article goes into this and kind of lays out the case for U.S., definite U.S. involvement and influence on this regime change.
I guess we don't, or do, is there any direct information about the Americans giving the go ahead here?
Or we do have strong connections between the people, certainly.
Exactly.
Well, so there's, I mean, Trump has called it like a great victory for democracy.
America immediately endorsed it, right?
Immediately.
Also, this hasn't been confirmed, but there's been reports in the Bolivian media, I'm trying to investigate this more because I almost don't even want to say it because it's just at this point, I can't confirm it.
But there have been suggestions that the head of the police has, there was a report saying he had been paid off like a million dollars and that he had gotten a visa to the United States.
But this is still like, at this point, that's just, that's not confirmed.
But there has been some, it has been reported in some Bolivian media outlets.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, tell us more about this leaked audio, if you could.
So yeah, the leaked audio, it's basically these five or six guys that are talking on like a conference call and they talk about, I mean it's really out of the CIA playbook what they're talking about.
They talk about assaulting the political party offices of the MAS, the Movement for Socialism, which is the political party of Abe Morales, and trying to go after journalists and activists that were aligned with that political project.
And they also talk about, this is really out of the CIA playbook, trying to find labor unions that they could find that would split from Morales and that they could work to block roads and cause a lot of problems in the country.
I mean, the idea here is that old strategy of death by 1,000 cuts, where if you have, there was a whole project by some environmentalist groups to blame a fire in the Amazon forest on the Morales government, when we really know it was mostly in Brazil and Morales responded much quicker to the forest fires than Bolsonaro did across the border in Brazil.
So with the Twitter campaign, it's clear this was very much of a contemporary hybrid warfare soft power campaign, through social media, through normal traditional media outlets.
And so this phone call is really by these ex-military colonels that had been involved in the SOA, and one of them brags about all of his contacts within the military that he's communicating with.
Within the US military?
No, within the Bolivian military.
And so- But you're saying he's a party leader, and he's bragging to the other guys that have this back channel going with the armed forces.
He's an ex-colonel in the Bolivian military, and he's talking about this.
And there's a number, so each of these guys can have their own thing going on, and they're working together with one another.
But there's one guy that they talk about who's an ex-colonel living in the United States that is an ex-mayor of Cochabamba and an ex-presidential candidate, and so they go over that.
But I mean, what's clear is that really the military and police command structure really had been substantially cultivated by the US through the School of the Americas, this military training program.
And these people clearly have contacts in the foreign policy establishment and within some of the neoconservative elements in the GOP.
And so what's shocking about the whole thing is that how so many people jumped on board this in Washington.
I mean, you really see the bipartisan nature of the foreign policy establishment.
I mean, even Elizabeth Warren basically refused to call it a coup.
I mean, I haven't watched, I haven't seen what libertarian politicians have said, but I know Bernie Sanders came out, directly called it a coup, and I think he also had opposed the Pentagon military increase.
But I think we need to put significant pressure on candidates, independents, Republicans, Democrats, people in elected office to resist this permanent war state and things like the School of the Americas.
There's a group called School of the Americas Watch that every year it's headed up by mostly religious organizations, reverends, nuns, and different priests where your listeners have probably heard of.
They go once a year and they protest in front of the School of the Americas.
So we really need to build back up the anti-war movement in our country because we see how this regime change, regime change apparatus is really trying to mull itself ever deeper into our psyche and in social media and how now they have so many intelligence people that are working in MSNBC and CNN and Fox News.
So many of them get jobs in these big media outlets.
So it's more and more clear the way that they operate and the bipartisan nature of this thing.
Yeah.
Well, that's certainly true.
And it's certainly no surprise to hear that about Elizabeth Warren.
As far as the libertarian candidates, I presume the best about all of them.
But I know that Jacob Hornberger, I don't think he's written about Bolivia yet, but I know he's good on it and has a long track record of being good on all the Latin American coups from, you know, Arbenz in 54 all the way through.
He talks about Chile 73 like it was yesterday constantly.
Yeah, Arbenz in 54 is so important too because, you know, a guy named Che Guevara was riding through his motorcycle in Guatemala in 1954.
And so when they saw what happened to an elected government when it tried to do land reforms and was overthrown, that's one of the reasons that Che Guevara figured, well, hey, I mean, the only way we can carry out these reforms is to benefit the people, is if we take a more regimented, you know, hierarchical, covert, you know, that whole vanguard Marxist-Leninist policy.
So, you know, you see this history of blowback.
When the U.S. carries out these operations, you know, people see how that affects their life and then it has reactions.
So just like what happened in Afghanistan, right?
Our operations around the world, you know, have long-term impacts on so many people and societies.
Well, that's certainly true.
And, you know, it's interesting that in the 21st century, well, I guess certainly in the kind of Bush years, they're so focused on the Middle East that they sort of quote unquote allowed a lot of these leftists to come to power in the first place.
From their point of view, from the empire's point of view, they were kind of neglecting Latin America, whereas now they care more again, as they did, you know, starting during Obama, they backed the coup in Honduras in 2009, at least after the fact, if not before the fact, just like here, but and possibly before the fact.
I don't mean to dismiss that.
And so and that that push has been going on.
And then certainly when Trump came into power, he's not been shy at all about announcing that he's essentially directing the CIA to get rid of all the Latin American leftists.
So here we are.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's very clear.
And I think I mean, it goes back to that when Hugo Chavez came out against the free trade zone of the Americas, right, I think that was like 2001, when Bush was trying to have a free trade zone of the entire Western Hemisphere, and Hugo Chavez came out against it.
And he had been, you know, kind of center left.
And then Bush, you know, attempted that coup in 2002.
And, you know, at that point, Chavez said, well, hey, you know, like I got to work with the Cubans or, you know, I'm going to get killed.
So, I mean, U.S. policy, there's a history of colonialism, a history of empire and people in the global South, you know, they know that history.
So I think, you know, if we want to have a more stable humanitarian, you know, future or, you know, that we want for our children, our children's children, I think resisting the war machine here really in the belly of the empire is, you know, the most one of the very most important things that we can do with our life and figuring out effective ways to do that, you know, and impacting, you know, as many people as we can and getting them to think outside of that box.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, I mean, the whole thing here is that obviously the Americans don't really care if a government is socialist or not.
It's whether they're independent from the American government's priorities or not.
And so it's, you know, compliance is what they seek.
And if Americans, there are Americans who are truly concerned and for good reason in a lot of cases about these countries turning to the left.
But if the leftists are the only ones who really value independence and the right wingers are all in league with the Americans, then who do you think is the major cause of socialism in Latin America, if not the USA and the red, white and blue?
You know, as you're saying, this whole thing is all blowback in the first place, second place and third place.
Yeah, you're right.
And I mean, there's governments right in Europe that have more socialistic policies, like, say, you know, in Scandinavia, but countries that are part of NATO.
So they fit within that, you know, that foreign policy apparatus of Washington.
And so, yeah, you're right.
We don't we don't have a problem with them, you know, that they're part of the you know, if they're part of this Bahamas that we have.
So, yeah, I appreciate the chance to be able to speak to your listeners and come together on this.
Yeah, well, I'm really happy to have had you on the show today to talk about it.
And, you know, really to familiarize people with the concept, too, there are a lot of people listening to this show who are born in this century and know even less than me about American policy in Latin America.
And I'm no expert on this stuff at all.
I got vague outlines going back decades, but not, you know, in-depth study like you have here.
But I know that means that there are a lot of people don't know the first thing about the tyranny of America, of the USA in Latin America, you know, over the centuries really here.
So, yeah, I'm sure this will be a good start for a lot of people interested to to learn more about the whole broader subject, too.
Great thing.
Thanks so much.
I really appreciate it.
Yep.
Me, too.
All right, you guys.
That is Jeb Sprague.
And he is writing at TheGreyZone.com, The Grey Zone Project.
It's called Top Bolivian Coup Plotters Trained by U.S.
Militaries, School of the Americas, Served as Attachés in FBI Police Programs.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool'sErrand.us.
