By Vijay Prashad

November 15, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  On November 10, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales Ayma was removed from office. Technically Morales resigned, but the conditions for his resignation had been set by the Bolivian oligarchy (egged on for thirteen years by the United States government, as Noam Chomsky and I indicated in this statement the day before the coup). Having won re-election for the fourth time, Morales faced an open insurrection from his opponent – former president Carlos Mesa – who lost the election conclusively. A team from the openly hostile Organisation of American States (OAS) arrived and provided legitimacy for the coup with a report on the elections that was long on accusations and short on facts. Using this OAS report – fully backed by the United States – as justification, the police mutinied, and then the army (which had remained neutral) told Morales he had to resign. There was no choice.

A coup is a curious thing. Those who make the coup never admit that they have made the coup. They claim that they are restoring democracy or that they are taking extraordinary means to establish the conditions – eventually – for democracy. This is precisely why the definition of the events are so fraught. But all coups are not the same. There are at least two types of military coups – the General’s Coup and the Colonel’s Coup.

It has been a long time since we have seen a classic Colonel’s Coup, perhaps the last major successful one being in Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso) in 1983 when Captain Thomas Sankara took office. These coups, from that of Egypt in 1952 onwards, are driven by non-commissioned officers who have a close fealty to the working-class, the peasantry, and the urban poor; their coup is often against the oligarchy and in favour of some variety of socialism (the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952 falls into this category).

The General’s Coup, on the other hand, is conducted by commissioned officers who come from the oligarchy or whose interests are closely associated with the oligarchy. These counter-revolutionary coups are the most commonplace (and have been very common in Bolivia – 1964, 1970, 1980, and 2019). General Williams Kaliman, who called on Morales to resign and who was trained by the United States at its notorious Schools of the Americas, has effectively led a General’s Coup against the government of the Movement for Socialism (MAS).

Such events as a coup are merely events of a longer-term structure, a long struggle between the forces of imperialism and of decolonisation. In 1941, the US-based Council on Foreign Relations produced a key document for the US State Department – Methods of Economic Collaboration: The Role of the Grand Area in American Economic Policy. The Council defined the ‘Grand Area’ as encompassing the entire Western hemisphere, large parts of Europe, the British Empire, the Dutch East Indies, and the Pacific Rim (including China and Japan). The countries of the Western hemisphere, which included all of the Caribbean and Latin America, would be a ‘source of raw materials and a market for manufacturers’; this was the 20^th century version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine.