Speaker 1: All Media. Welcome to you kadapp here a podcast that
Speaker 1: is groaning under the oppression of whoever keeps changing the
Speaker 1: stupid zoom interface. It's different every time. It always gets worse.
Speaker 1: It never gets better. Please stop.
Speaker 2: We had trads for zoom zoom layout.
Speaker 1: Just get it, get it one time, put the recording
Speaker 1: thing on the stupid panel on the bottom, and then
Speaker 1: never change it. It simply never gets better. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is be a who's extremely annoyed at zoom with me?
Speaker 3: Is James yep also extremely annoyed at zoom high just
Speaker 3: in solidarity with Mia fuck him?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and also also extremely annoyed. Right now is the
Speaker 1: man stages the world's worst coup? Ask to report to prison.
Speaker 3: I don't think we can call it the world's worst coup. Mia,
Speaker 3: that's a bold claim. You're forgetting silver Core.
Speaker 1: No, so okay, here's the thing about Silver Court, right,
Speaker 1: The guys who defeated Silver Court had guns.
Speaker 2: But Silver Corp didn't. They had b B guns.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but here's the thing, right they they those guys Again,
Speaker 1: those guys did not have real guns, defeated by guys
Speaker 1: with guns. These guys had guns. They had a lot
Speaker 1: of guns. They were defeated by people with.
Speaker 3: Flags Yeah yeah, and a guy standing in a doorway
Speaker 3: being like, no, you can't come in, go home.
Speaker 2: You know, so we we are.
Speaker 1: I genuinely believe this is the worst cup I've ever
Speaker 1: seen in my entire life.
Speaker 2: And you know, we lived in Venezuela. One.
Speaker 1: I distinctly remember stepping out of a post office and
Speaker 1: checking my phone and getting eighteen messages from my friends
Speaker 1: that said, do.
Speaker 2: You do you?
Speaker 1: What do you know about the coup and Turkey? That
Speaker 1: was a terrible coup. Was they they could have they
Speaker 1: could have just saved us all this trouble of shot
Speaker 1: aired wh douf a jet fighter, but they didn't. You know,
Speaker 1: there's there's been plenty of bad ones. There was that
Speaker 1: that coup recently in the Democratic public of the Congo
Speaker 1: to the fiasco. Yeah, hilariously, This coup Oblivia recovering today
Speaker 1: happened exactly one year and three days after the the
Speaker 1: march of the Wagner Corp.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I've gotta forgot about that one. What if? Wow? Yeah,
Speaker 2: well we wanted to try it.
Speaker 3: Guys, if you believe you can achieve, give it a
Speaker 3: go to a coup. If you want to why not
Speaker 3: it's gonna trump paye try one did what very well? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean we really I also, I mean, we
Speaker 1: can't forget January ninth, even the.
Speaker 2: The well, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't because January sixth was already farce, but like
Speaker 1: we forgot the farceest, farst version of it in Brazil.
Speaker 2: Yeah even there. Yeah, yeah, they owed a building coup.
Speaker 1: Yeah, lots of lots of very stupid cues, but this
Speaker 1: this is probably the worst one. And so we're going
Speaker 1: to be explaining sort of what happened. But the thing
Speaker 1: about this coup is that in order to understand what's
Speaker 1: happening with this coup, we have to get through, I
Speaker 1: think a part of Bolivian history that has not been
Speaker 1: really well understood or talked about on the left, which
Speaker 1: is effectively what happened in Bolivia.
Speaker 2: After the coup in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: I think I think people sort of know that there
Speaker 1: was a coup and that got overturned, but coma that
Speaker 1: was sort of the point at which which the sort
Speaker 1: of Anglo media and like the sort of press that
Speaker 1: hits the left here kind of just took off. So
Speaker 1: you have your sort of twenty nineteen coup. The place
Speaker 1: where sort of everything getting lost kind of starts is
Speaker 1: that so there's this coup. The left sort of response
Speaker 1: to the coup is not very strong because the sort
Speaker 1: of social movements have been hallowed out by the sort
Speaker 1: of incorporation into the Bolivian state, so they sort of
Speaker 1: just don't have the juice to really kind of you know,
Speaker 1: roll this coup back. This is this is this is
Speaker 1: makes basically this is the twenty nineteen coup, not the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four coup.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know the thing about the twenty nineteen coup
Speaker 1: that makes it very different from this one is that
Speaker 1: that one was you know, there was a broad base
Speaker 1: of support for this right in this sort of in
Speaker 1: this sort of like far right out of Santa Cruz
Speaker 1: and also out of sort of like like more moderate
Speaker 1: center right factions. So you know, there there are sort
Speaker 1: of large street with favor of this. This is not
Speaker 1: true if those recent.
Speaker 3: One yeah, absolutely not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know in by by by twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: as twenty twenty is sort of progressing a Anya's's coup
Speaker 1: government is a fiasco. Their management of COVID is just terrible.
Speaker 1: Enormous numbers of deaths. I mean, actually I mean not
Speaker 1: by American standards, I guess, but you know, really really mismanaged.
Speaker 1: I mean, my I have friends there who were talking
Speaker 1: about how if you were going to the hospital and
Speaker 1: you needed to use like a piece of medical equipment,
Speaker 1: you had to buy the medical equipment or a part
Speaker 1: to fix a machine and then show up to the
Speaker 1: hospital with the part because they couldn't order it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I've yeah, I've seen that in a few places in
Speaker 3: the world. It's never, never a good time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's not good. It was a real shit show.
Speaker 1: And by by sort of I think about September early
Speaker 1: September twenty ninth of twenty twenty, there are the left
Speaker 1: has sort of gotten it shipped together and there are
Speaker 1: these this massive set of roadblocks. Bolivian Blivion social politics
Speaker 1: tends to sort of be about roadblocks because you know, country,
Speaker 1: a lot of mountains, a lot of roads you can
Speaker 1: very easily block off and then prevent anything from you know,
Speaker 1: for example, entering a city, yep. Idea. So they're they're
Speaker 1: able to just basically shut down the Blivion economy. The
Speaker 1: government is once again on the Vergia collapse and once again,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to the first time this happened, but
Speaker 1: even Morallies once again sort of pulls the supporters off
Speaker 1: of the barricade so you can go win an election
Speaker 1: rather than you know, attempt to just bring down the
Speaker 1: sort of coup government. So you know that eventually happens.
Speaker 1: The government is forced to hold elections because you know,
Speaker 1: they've they've lost control of the country, and them as Takes,
Speaker 1: you know, wins this election by overwhelming margins. The MAS
Speaker 1: is even Morales's party, it's the sort of like party.
Speaker 2: Of the oblivion left. But yeah, the guy comes to
Speaker 2: the power. As Lewis R.
Speaker 1: Say, he's an interesting figure because he is kind of
Speaker 1: We're going to get more into sort of what the
Speaker 1: MS is in a bit, but he is from a
Speaker 1: kind of right wing of the party that's not talked
Speaker 1: about very much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he he is.
Speaker 1: A you know, he's not a guy who comes from
Speaker 1: the social movements in the way that sort of Morales did,
Speaker 1: like he was. Even Morales was a guy from the
Speaker 1: the he was like the president of the coca growers union.
Speaker 1: Arsay is a banker. He's an an economist and a banker.
Speaker 1: He comes out of the the Central Bank of Bolivia,
Speaker 1: and he he has had been kind of the guy
Speaker 1: running living economic policy. But but he is from the
Speaker 1: developmentalist wing of the party, which means he is effectively
Speaker 1: from the wing of the party that are the kind
Speaker 1: of like center left capitalists that the social movements kind
Speaker 1: of allied themselves to under Moralees in order to do
Speaker 1: this sort of national economic development policy. So these are
Speaker 1: a lot of these are a lot of minding sector guys.
Speaker 1: These are a very specific sort of cadra of these
Speaker 1: central bank guys, you know.
Speaker 2: And and I think this is the part.
Speaker 1: The thing about the MIAs that's kind of relevant here
Speaker 1: is that it usually also has a base support among
Speaker 1: people you wouldn't expect. I mean, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: small business owners who support them, because, you know, the
Speaker 1: Maas really did for most of the time they've been
Speaker 1: in power preside over sort of astonishing economic growth. They
Speaker 1: sort of did this by marrying these social movements to
Speaker 1: this kind of national bourgeoisie developmentalist faction.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that that the MAAS sort of
Speaker 1: does in the period between when they come back to
Speaker 1: power in late twenty twenty one and now is they
Speaker 1: do they actually go after the people who did the coup?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And yes, who was the previous president is just in
Speaker 1: prison for helping you do the coup. The the other
Speaker 1: big person who's been arrested is Luis Fernando Camacho, who
Speaker 1: is a man who, in one hundred percent complete seriousness
Speaker 1: calls himself Bascho Camacho. So that's that's a sign, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's an oication of who this guy is, which
Speaker 1: is he is a really fanatical, really fanatical Christian nationalist.
Speaker 1: He's playing a very similar role to I mean, actually
Speaker 1: I think even even in a lot of ways sort
Speaker 1: of more radical role to what Bolsonaro played in Brazil,
Speaker 1: where Camacho in Bolivia is this kind of he he's
Speaker 1: the guy who's rallied both sort of Evangelicalism and Catholicism.
Speaker 1: Althose rallied both of them into this sort of virulent
Speaker 1: and and and specifically in Bolivia anti indigenous sort of
Speaker 1: political force. The the twenty nineteen coup is seen in
Speaker 1: very very explicitly is seen in religious terms.
Speaker 2: Both ideas.
Speaker 1: Kabacha talk about how like the Word of God is
Speaker 1: back at the Capitol and the wheel, but like all
Speaker 1: of the sort of indigenous various indigenous stuff is just
Speaker 1: never going to come back. So Kabacho gets arrested in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two for you know, doing this coup, and
Speaker 1: this sets off so he, by the way, like is
Speaker 1: the governor of the state of Santa Cruz. And this
Speaker 1: sets off a bunch of like a right wing general strike,
Speaker 1: a bunch of riots, like hundreds of people are injured
Speaker 1: in street fighting between his sort of fanatics and everyone
Speaker 1: else in the country. It does an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: economic damage. It sets off at a roadblocks the government,
Speaker 1: I mean Kamacho I think also is still in prison,
Speaker 1: but it kind of you know, the government's kind of
Speaker 1: forced to make concessions.
Speaker 2: To these people.
Speaker 1: So, you know, the whole the whole sort of are say,
Speaker 1: government is kind of on shaky footing from the beginning.
Speaker 1: And all of this is before the Bolivian economy really
Speaker 1: hits the ship. But before before we get to the
Speaker 1: Bolivian economy. Do you know what else hits the ship?
Speaker 2: Oh uh?
Speaker 3: Is it the meal kit preparation delivery service that we
Speaker 3: are not allowed to mention for legal reason. It is, yes, yeah, yes, yeah,
Speaker 3: you'll be pooping your brains out, don't do it.
Speaker 1: We are back. So let's talk about the other thing
Speaker 1: that's popping in Bolithya.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, see other.
Speaker 1: Thing, the one of the four other things that's reppening
Speaker 1: in Bolivia, and that.
Speaker 2: Is the real sort of collapse of the Bolivian economy.
Speaker 1: So the Bolivion economy Oblivia has been kind of different
Speaker 1: from the rest of the sort of kind of left wing,
Speaker 1: pink tied governments that were elected in the in the
Speaker 1: in the sort of two thousands era sort of anti
Speaker 1: globalization politics. Most of those countries' economies imploded a long
Speaker 1: time ago, like Venezuela sort of obviously the most famous case,
Speaker 1: but all of these economies fell apart because these were
Speaker 1: all economies based on the commodity boom. We've talked about
Speaker 1: this in some of our Brazil episodes. But the very
Speaker 1: short version is that a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: countries that produce sort of primary commodities, so like you know,
Speaker 1: your copper, your sort of your natural gas, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean things like soybeans to kind of fall in
Speaker 1: this category, you know, so you're you're you're sort of
Speaker 1: mining stuff or you're some some of some of your
Speaker 1: farming stuff. All of these sort of industrial input primary
Speaker 1: commodity stuff all got you know, massive price spikes in
Speaker 1: early two thousands because the Chinese economy had integrated into
Speaker 1: into the rest of the world economy fully by you know,
Speaker 1: joining the joining the World Trade Organization, and this set
Speaker 1: off this massive industrialization boom in China, and you know,
Speaker 1: the Chinese. The levels of sort of demand that this
Speaker 1: induces is unbelievable because Chinese economic growth in that period
Speaker 1: is unreal, and it's it's economic growth that is unreal
Speaker 1: in a country with a billion people in it. So
Speaker 1: this produced a kind of shock of demand for all
Speaker 1: of these sort of mineral resources that was not entirely
Speaker 1: unprecedented but enormously large, and also allowed all of these
Speaker 1: sort of social democratic economies to you know, kind of
Speaker 1: paper over the inherent contradictions of their base being both
Speaker 1: capitalist and also a bunch of like unions by there
Speaker 1: just sort of being enough state revenue from all of
Speaker 1: these all of these exports to just kind of buy
Speaker 1: everyone off of paper everything. Clantalism, yeah, yeah, and that
Speaker 1: stops working when the economy goes under. But Bolivia's economy
Speaker 1: does a lot better than the rest of the economies
Speaker 1: in the region.
Speaker 2: There are There are a lot of reasons for this.
Speaker 1: Part of it is that, you know, are say, who
Speaker 1: is running the economy of Bolivia in the sort of
Speaker 1: the period like post two thousand and eight period, when
Speaker 1: everyone else economies are collapsing. He is genuinely doing some
Speaker 1: pretty interesting macroeconomic stuff. Also, the other thing that's going
Speaker 1: on is that Bolivia main expert and people. Okay, so
Speaker 1: people in the US tend to think of Bolivia as
Speaker 1: a country that produces lithium. That's not true. That might
Speaker 1: be true maybe thirty years in the future that will
Speaker 1: be Bolivia's primary export. But Bolivia's primary export for the
Speaker 1: last two decades has been natural gas, and natural gas
Speaker 1: prices didn't quite do the same thing that sort of
Speaker 1: oil prices did that kind of imploded the Venezuelan economy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so through through sort of like economic management and
Speaker 1: these sort of political alliances and you know, the high
Speaker 1: price in natural gas, the Bolivian economy has sort of
Speaker 1: been fine. Unfortunately, what's happening right now is that Bolivia
Speaker 1: is running out of natural gas. And because it's running
Speaker 1: out of natural gas, and also because their economy is
Speaker 1: an export based economy based on natural.
Speaker 2: Gas, not so good nutsge good vibes. Yeah, it's very bad.
Speaker 1: The entire economy is falling apart because you know, this
Speaker 1: is this is a very very classic kind of economic crisis,
Speaker 1: you know, the economic crisis are having. I'm not seeing
Speaker 1: it described as a balance of payments crisis, but that's
Speaker 1: what it is, which is that the blivid economy works
Speaker 1: on buying things with American dollars. So you know, like
Speaker 1: a lot of the businesses in the country involved are
Speaker 1: sort of import businesses, right, you know, I mean I
Speaker 1: know people who run businesses like this in Bolivia where
Speaker 1: you know, you're importing shoes or like motors, yeah, stuff
Speaker 1: like that, and you buy them with American dollars and
Speaker 1: you sell them in Bolivia. But the thing is this
Speaker 1: requires a constant supply of American dollars to go buy
Speaker 1: good manufacture goods from other places. Because Bolivia's manufacturing economy
Speaker 1: is effectively is a joke. And this is something that
Speaker 1: was true of all of these economies. I mean, Bolivia
Speaker 1: never they kind we've tried to industrialize in the seventies,
Speaker 1: but they've never got as far along with it as
Speaker 1: a country like Brazil or country like Venezuela.
Speaker 2: Did in the seventies.
Speaker 1: And the other thing about these all these sort of
Speaker 1: pink Tai governments is they all took power in economies
Speaker 1: that have been completely deindustrialized maneoliberalism. Right.
Speaker 2: We talked about this with Brazil.
Speaker 1: Brazil went from a country that was a kind of
Speaker 1: like effectively a first not quite a first, right, but
Speaker 1: maybe a second tier a large, a powerful second tier
Speaker 1: industrial power to a country whose economy is almost entirely
Speaker 1: based on sort of primary commodity production and farming bullshit.
Speaker 1: So they've they've moved down that they've moved down the
Speaker 1: value chain. They've been manufacturing less stuff. They're producing shit
Speaker 1: that's on the bottom. They're getting less value from the
Speaker 1: value added bullshit moving up the chain. And this is
Speaker 1: this is also the problem with the Blivion economy. And
Speaker 1: because the natural gases is drying up, they don't have
Speaker 1: enough dollars coming into the economy for people to use
Speaker 1: to buy things. And the Bolivian currency is also pegged
Speaker 1: to the dollar, right, so there's supposed to be an
Speaker 1: official exchange rate at which you know, x amount of
Speaker 1: money worth x amount of dollars and that's all falling apart.
Speaker 1: People are sort of running around in the streets trying
Speaker 1: to find people who will exchange like their currency for dollars.
Speaker 1: This is this is you know, so this is this
Speaker 1: is a classic short of balance of payments. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: it's kind of because it's kind of like kind of
Speaker 1: a balancing, but they're having a giant dollar shortage. This
Speaker 1: is really really messing up. No, I mean not just
Speaker 1: the economy, but the entire political system is really kind
Speaker 1: of coming apart under this Now, okay, I I I
Speaker 1: talked about things kind of coming apart there there there
Speaker 1: is another thing that is coming apart in Bolivia, which
Speaker 1: is the m A S is shattering, Yes, shattering, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's splintering in two. So what is the m
Speaker 1: A S. So the m AS is this part? Oh okay,
Speaker 1: So it has a slightly weirder history, which is that
Speaker 1: So the m A S was a completely random, actually
Speaker 1: kind of kind of right wing political party, but it
Speaker 1: had electoral status. So it's a party that was taken
Speaker 1: over by the social movements at the end of the
Speaker 1: sort of stuff we're going to get to in order
Speaker 1: to be able to run like in order to be
Speaker 1: able to run candidates for office. But this means that
Speaker 1: because again because it was literally it was an existing, legal,
Speaker 1: registered party that was taken over from the outside, and
Speaker 1: because of how it emerged, it's always been seen as
Speaker 1: sort of a movement party, right, it's supposed to be
Speaker 1: like the assembly of Oblivia, sort of left.
Speaker 2: Wing social movements.
Speaker 1: And these left wing social movements are the movements that
Speaker 1: emerges isn't quite the right word, but there the movements
Speaker 1: that solidified and began to sort of exert their power
Speaker 1: from two thousand and two thousand and six and in
Speaker 1: this enormous sequence of social uprising against sort of Bolivia
Speaker 1: and neoliberalism. Of the most famous of these are the
Speaker 1: water and gas wars, which are these fights against water
Speaker 1: privatization and the sort of gas line.
Speaker 2: And this alliance of.
Speaker 1: Peasant unions sort of the traditional sort of urban urban
Speaker 1: sort of proletariat like traditional sort of like urban left.
Speaker 1: These these new street movements, coca growers unions, miners unions,
Speaker 1: and a whole array of indigenous groups that we frankly
Speaker 1: do you don't have time to get into here because
Speaker 1: the politics there are extremely the philosophy is extremely complicated.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I've talked about this on the
Speaker 1: show before, but one of the I mean we're talking
Speaker 1: about like like they have like philosophical constructs that I
Speaker 1: don't understand. It's this philosophical construct that's like a dialectic,
Speaker 1: but there's three parts of it, and they don't it
Speaker 1: doesn't resolve. They just all kind of grind intension with
Speaker 1: each other, right, So like, Okay, we're not really going
Speaker 1: to get into that. Yeah, yeah, it's outside the scope
Speaker 1: of the show of If you're more interested in this,
Speaker 1: read rhythms of the Patchacuti or get a doctorate.
Speaker 2: I guess, yeah, yeah, we returned to grad school. Your
Speaker 2: options are limited.
Speaker 1: But you know, so there's this coalition of of all
Speaker 1: of the kinds of unions, these rural unions, urban unions,
Speaker 1: urban street moves, real straight movements, gathered together, gathered their strength,
Speaker 1: set up a million roadblocks, and just.
Speaker 2: Smash the neoliberal right. They are.
Speaker 1: The Bolivia's right is basically completely destroyed from the period
Speaker 1: of two thousand and six until twenty nineteen's that was
Speaker 1: the first time they ever took power. They did it
Speaker 1: in a coup and they held power for about one
Speaker 1: year before they were kicked out of power again, so
Speaker 1: they basically completely reshaped all of politics in Bolivia. Those
Speaker 1: the second round of roadblocks very nearly destroyed the Bolivian
Speaker 1: state until as I sort of allated to earlier even
Speaker 1: where Allies pulled his supporters out the barricade in order
Speaker 1: to get an election in two thousand and six. And
Speaker 1: this is the election the MAAS one. And to understand
Speaker 1: the kind of seismic change of this, right, the MAAS
Speaker 1: is the first party in the history of Bolivia to
Speaker 1: win a majority of the season of the Parliament by itself,
Speaker 1: first party ever. It completely destroyed the existing sort of
Speaker 1: political system. And again this this, this was supposed to
Speaker 1: be a sort of a sort of new kind of party. Right.
Speaker 1: The theory of the m AS is is the organization
Speaker 1: of social movements. Former vice president and sometimes Marxist Garcia
Speaker 1: Leneira described it as quote, there's a dialectical relationship between
Speaker 1: the social movements and the party. Now this is a lie.
Speaker 1: Or more precisely, if this is a dialectic, it is
Speaker 1: not a Hegelian or a Marxist dialectic, where the subplation
Speaker 1: of two parts creates a concrete totality or a whole
Speaker 1: that is neither of the things that as for it.
Speaker 1: This is a Maoist dialectic where two sides face off
Speaker 1: each other with each other and one of them hits
Speaker 1: the other side of the help with a hammer until
Speaker 1: it dies.
Speaker 2: It's just a conflict.
Speaker 3: It's just there are two three people and they both
Speaker 3: want to control the thing.
Speaker 1: So it's just that's that's what ends up happening, right,
Speaker 1: is so the social movements and the Indigenous movements in
Speaker 1: particular have been fracturing for a decade. You know, they're
Speaker 1: they're a whole series of large fights, even even in
Speaker 1: sort of like the early twenty tens over sort of
Speaker 1: over the NAS doing these infrastructure things that everyone else
Speaker 1: in the country was like, why are you building a
Speaker 1: road to indigenous land.
Speaker 2: There's huge fights, many such cases.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, you know, this is the kind of hollowing
Speaker 1: out in the kind of conflict that had led to
Speaker 1: the social movements being completely unable to overturn the coup
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, and it taking them until the end
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty to really pull their shit together and
Speaker 1: you know, overturn the coup and you know, you know
Speaker 1: what else overturns coups.
Speaker 2: That's a that's a fyrom. It is it arming the
Speaker 2: working class.
Speaker 1: It is ming the working class.
Speaker 2: We are sponsored by yeah, or in the entire working class.
Speaker 2: We're back. So okay, So now we get to the
Speaker 2: present split of the social movements.
Speaker 1: What has happened now is that you know, are Say
Speaker 1: and and even Morales had always kind of gotten along usually,
Speaker 1: but once you know, our Say took power, he instead
Speaker 1: of he didn't want to sort of just be a
Speaker 1: proxy for even Morales. He had his own sort of
Speaker 1: actually like not great agenda either, a sort of more
Speaker 1: technocratic agenda. Although you know, you have to sort of
Speaker 1: ask Evil, like you're the one who brought these people
Speaker 1: into the party, Like, I don't know what you were expecting.
Speaker 1: He brought these people in that they weren't going to
Speaker 1: as governed as a sort of center left technocratic capitalist government.
Speaker 2: You know, you could have seen this coming.
Speaker 1: But they they have been increasingly fighting, and the two
Speaker 1: sides are now implacably hostile. They are saying evil fucking
Speaker 1: hate each other. And this this divide has split every
Speaker 1: single social movement in Bolivia from landless workers' movement, to
Speaker 1: the co growers, to the indigenous federations, to the fucking
Speaker 1: urban trade unions, to the miners unions. Every one of
Speaker 1: these organizations either has officially split into two factions as
Speaker 1: one's in EVO faction and ones in our Save faction,
Speaker 1: or they are in the middle of the fight where
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're they're both sides are still fighting.
Speaker 2: For control over over you know, their union federation.
Speaker 1: And this is not a clean left right split, which
Speaker 1: is this is actually, I mean, that was kind of
Speaker 1: what I was expecting ish when this fight started, that
Speaker 1: I was sort of expecting that this was going to
Speaker 1: end up as a fight between sort of you know,
Speaker 1: the left of social movements and the sort of center
Speaker 1: right base.
Speaker 2: But that's not really what happens.
Speaker 1: It is kind of a left right split, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's also a split over the person of EVO himself.
Speaker 1: And because partially a split over EVO himself, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like sort of more left wing groups that
Speaker 1: are kind of are kind of backing our say, because
Speaker 1: they don't want even more allies to come back into
Speaker 1: power and re solidify his control over all of these
Speaker 1: all the solo social movements and they're you know, angry
Speaker 1: at him for a whole series of attempts to sort
Speaker 1: of co opt their movements. It's also you know, it's
Speaker 1: also it's also split about sort of how autonomous the
Speaker 1: social movement should be, should be able to be from
Speaker 1: government policy. It's it's a it's you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of external to this. But one of the other thing
Speaker 1: that's going on is that EVO has been really unpopular
Speaker 1: with a lot of feminist groups in Blivia for a
Speaker 1: very long time for a lot of reasons, including I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the big ones is Bolivia's horrific
Speaker 1: femicide crisis, which the MS has been in power for
Speaker 1: almost twenty years and has done jack shit to actually
Speaker 1: like deal with, right, you know, So there's there, there
Speaker 1: are all of these sort of fractures breaking out. Partially also,
Speaker 1: it's a war between for control of the maas, between
Speaker 1: the coca goers unions and the miners unions. So this
Speaker 1: is a shit show. It is a complete fiasca. And
Speaker 1: then you know, the thing that makes it more with
Speaker 1: fiasco is, you know, we talked about this sort of
Speaker 1: with uh. We did an episode about kind of what's
Speaker 1: been happening with with the sort of pink.
Speaker 2: Tied governments a while back.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the things you talked about
Speaker 1: in that episode was Ecuador, where Ecuador has this left
Speaker 1: wing base that should win every single election until the
Speaker 1: end of time, and they don't because they're constantly fighting
Speaker 1: each other. And this is effectively the beginning of hopefully
Speaker 1: it doesn't turn into that, but I mean, the ma
Speaker 1: S if it is, if it is even sort of united,
Speaker 1: is in unprecedented Bolivian political juggernaut. It should win every election,
Speaker 1: like I mean, not till the end of time. They
Speaker 1: probably probably should only win I don't know that they
Speaker 1: have had demographic issues right now, but you know they
Speaker 1: should still be winning effectively every every election and they're not.
Speaker 1: And the reason that they're not is because of this
Speaker 1: shit or loasion. They might not is because of because
Speaker 1: of all of these, all all of these splits, and
Speaker 1: these are very these this isn't a these are very
Speaker 1: very serious political splits. I mean, uh, one of the
Speaker 1: miners workers meetings, very famously, the two sides broke into
Speaker 1: into fist fights. I think one hundred and forty people
Speaker 1: were injured. So you know, this is this is the
Speaker 1: these are the these are very serious fights. There's also
Speaker 1: a whole disaster right now over who actually is the
Speaker 1: candidate of the MAS. Because Evo held this Congress of
Speaker 1: the NAS it was his supporters that Arsei was not
Speaker 1: at and they said that because he didn't because Arsee
Speaker 1: didn't show up, he was kicked out of the party.
Speaker 2: Classic, so this is this whole thing. So he's typically
Speaker 2: been expelled.
Speaker 1: But like the courts got the electoral courts are now
Speaker 1: involved because the electoral courts have to decide what like
Speaker 1: you know that, they have to figure out what what
Speaker 1: candidate their party's running. So it's this it's a complete catastrophe.
Speaker 1: And in the midst of this complete catastrophe there is
Speaker 1: the worst coup of the twenty first century. So a
Speaker 1: lot of let's get into finally this coup. So this
Speaker 1: coup is run by a guy named Kwan Jose Zunjega
Speaker 1: is the he's the commander of the Bolivian Army. He
Speaker 1: is hand picked by Arsaye to run the army, to
Speaker 1: be the guy who.
Speaker 2: Yes, say dude, yeah.
Speaker 1: And this is you know this, this this has sort
Speaker 1: of shades of the fact that Pinochet was sort of
Speaker 1: elevated by by all End in the Social Democrats.
Speaker 3: But reminds me of Franco as well, that getting promoted
Speaker 3: about yeah this was this, those were tragedy, This is farce.
Speaker 1: So what happens is that on Tuesday of last week,
Speaker 1: Sniega goes on TV and says, I am going to
Speaker 1: like Louis evil Brallies cannot be allowed to take power again.
Speaker 1: I will stop him from taking power. And our say
Speaker 1: is like, dude, what the fuck? Just immediately fires him,
Speaker 1: because you know you can't do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like almost every every country with a codified constitution
Speaker 3: has prohibitions on its military intervening and its politics, right, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: the basics of democracy.
Speaker 1: Bolivia has had a series of military governments and military
Speaker 1: ques across the sort of twentieth century, including the god
Speaker 1: the fucking cocaine coup that I've talked about at length
Speaker 1: in Our World at the Communist League episodes that ends
Speaker 1: with like Klaus Barbie fucking running around, right, So I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, like, this is a country that has had
Speaker 1: military ques quite literally staffed by actual Nazis, right, So
Speaker 1: you know this this is a place that take that
Speaker 1: takes the threat of a military queue, very very seriously,
Speaker 1: there hasn't been one, blessedly in a long time, but
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people who are fucking alive for
Speaker 1: the last one, and you know, and so this this
Speaker 1: is you know, people are extremely unhappy, even people who
Speaker 1: I think in theory would be okay with, you know,
Speaker 1: the government being deposed, like absolutely, under no circumstances want
Speaker 1: the fucking military running the country because again, right, everyone
Speaker 1: fucking remembers how bad that shit was. But what appearstrauff
Speaker 1: happened is that Zaninka realizes that so he's just been fired, right,
Speaker 1: which means that he has a very short time window
Speaker 1: in which he could try to pull some shit, which
Speaker 1: means that whatever whatever he may have been planning, I
Speaker 1: don't know what his actual plans were, he may have
Speaker 1: been actually planning a coup, he may not have been
Speaker 1: until here, and which just immediately like, well, I guess
Speaker 1: we have to do it now. If it was planning,
Speaker 1: been planning very well, yeah, yeah, what results from this
Speaker 1: for this very I think results on this very short
Speaker 1: timetable is the worst coup I've ever seen. So what
Speaker 1: appears to have happened is that on Wednesday, he gathers
Speaker 1: the troops that he's able to gather, which is not
Speaker 1: that I mean we're talking like a hundred guys. Maybe
Speaker 1: it was not a you know, they had a decent
Speaker 1: number of armored vehicles, but it was not like a
Speaker 1: lot of troops.
Speaker 3: It does not pay that he even had the support
Speaker 3: of a lot of troops, right.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, a lot of the army suits have kind
Speaker 1: of been sitting there going what the fuck is going on?
Speaker 1: But it was you know, I was watching the videos
Speaker 1: or were like the livestreams from journalism the ground of
Speaker 1: these troops, and they're just they're just worth it, any
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 2: No, they really went like it was.
Speaker 3: The whole thing was just really fucking shocking, like shocking bad.
Speaker 2: They didn't even surround the building. They just went up
Speaker 2: to one door.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so so what happens is they used our vehicle
Speaker 1: to ram the door of the presidential palace and they
Speaker 1: try to take control of it. But the thing is right,
Speaker 1: are saying, is it in the presidential palace? He and
Speaker 1: his cabinet are in the next building over.
Speaker 2: So they've taken the wrong building.
Speaker 1: Things are going great, and again this this is not
Speaker 1: a sort of you know, this is not a coupe
Speaker 1: that follows the standard coup repertoire of I seize the
Speaker 1: president's sees the radio station, sees the airport, sees the trains, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and have been tray control over the military barracks, which
Speaker 1: is your short this is your sort of basic five
Speaker 1: step plan to how to do a coup.
Speaker 3: They will be doing that episode soon by the way. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: given today's to find court, we're in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, we're in the yeah, planning to do a coup.
Speaker 1: But you know, so they don't even receive a part one,
Speaker 1: so they're they're kind of just kind of milling around
Speaker 1: the front of the presidential palace and try to get
Speaker 1: into the next building where the president actually is. So
Speaker 1: it's also the demands are also very weird. So Nika
Speaker 1: claims that he's not overthrowing the governments. He claims that
Speaker 1: he's still loyal to our say, but he's going to
Speaker 1: form a new cabinet.
Speaker 2: Oh he's useful. Yeah, that's how you normally do that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he's like yelling about the economic crisis, says he's
Speaker 1: going to quote restored democracy and quote release political prisoners.
Speaker 2: Which I kind of get.
Speaker 1: Okay, So the political prisoner's thing, I think is about
Speaker 1: the people who've been arrested for doing the twenty nineteen coup.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what restored democracy means. I don't
Speaker 1: know if he had any idea what he meant by
Speaker 1: restored democracy. Something was happening. But the thing is the
Speaker 1: other thing about this coup is that he has no
Speaker 1: backing at all. I mean, it doesn't even have back
Speaker 1: in the army. But it has no It doesn't even
Speaker 1: have backing among the right. Both Macho Camacho and Jeanine
Speaker 1: on Ony you with people who did like the last one,
Speaker 1: both condemned the coup. So people she is trying to
Speaker 1: break out of prison condemned the coup. Right, this is
Speaker 1: going nowhere.
Speaker 2: Worst coup I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: So meanwhile are say it is cabinet are in the
Speaker 1: next building over appointing a new commander of the army,
Speaker 1: so that the new commander of the army can go
Speaker 1: outside and order them order the troops to go back
Speaker 1: to their barracks. This is kind of what's happening. But
Speaker 1: also meanwhile outside so that these troops have like taken
Speaker 1: over the square in front of the presidential Palace and
Speaker 1: that they have sort of successfully managed to take over
Speaker 1: the square with a bunch of sort of military police
Speaker 1: and riot gear.
Speaker 2: But there's this sort of crowd who's.
Speaker 1: Come to yell at the army, right, and it's just
Speaker 1: very weird spectacle because it's there's all these soldiers who
Speaker 1: all have long guns, right, being protected by a light
Speaker 1: of cops with riot shields.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like if you open up on the crowd like like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: I have enough numbers to get.
Speaker 1: Every every single one of you is going to be
Speaker 1: individually executed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So they're all people are gonna have guns.
Speaker 1: And unless they that that that you know, and when
Speaker 1: I say execute, I mean they're they're gonna get executed
Speaker 1: by the goverment. That that's assuming they live long enough
Speaker 1: and are not just beaten to death by the crowd,
Speaker 1: which is also a real possibility. But you know, so
Speaker 1: this crowd is sort of approaching a lot of riot police.
Speaker 1: They're getting tear gas a bit. But this is and
Speaker 1: I kind of emphasize this enough, This is not a
Speaker 1: kind of normal like highly organized Bolivian mass protest where
Speaker 1: you know, all of the union, the Union's college general.
Speaker 2: Strike in the middle of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but again, this this whole thing lasts maybe two
Speaker 1: and a half hours, so there's not time to do
Speaker 1: the actual kind of sort of roadblocks and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: There's not time to actually do the organization that you
Speaker 1: would need to do.
Speaker 2: Overturn this coup.
Speaker 1: This coup falls apart so fast that people don't have
Speaker 1: time to make protest signs only have our flags. They
Speaker 1: do not have time to write signs out. That is
Speaker 1: that they don't have time to go up with chance.
Speaker 1: I was watching the funniest part about this whole thing.
Speaker 1: So I was watching a live stream of the protesters,
Speaker 1: and the protesters had gotten this kind of I guess
Speaker 1: you call it sort of a kind of metal gate.
Speaker 1: I guess it was this big sort of it almost
Speaker 1: looked like, you know how there's you get this those
Speaker 1: white shelves that have like metal bars, and it was
Speaker 1: kind of like that like cross hashed.
Speaker 2: It was, you know, it was pretty big.
Speaker 1: I was like bigger than a person, and like three
Speaker 1: people are like carrying in front of them, like going
Speaker 1: to the police lane, presumably to use it as a
Speaker 1: battering ram. But the troops run away so fast that
Speaker 1: these guys couldn't get their gate up to the police
Speaker 1: line fast enough to use it.
Speaker 2: That's how you know it's going.
Speaker 1: Well, it was staggering, it was amazing. So you know,
Speaker 1: the entire coup calls apart. Zuniga gets arrested on Life TV.
Speaker 1: It's like giving a press conference and they just like
Speaker 1: arrest them.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 1: But at the end of this, as it's falling apart,
Speaker 1: the one genuinely masterful stroke that Zunjinga pulls in this
Speaker 1: entire I mean it missed a just a cavalcade of failure.
Speaker 1: The one actual genius line that he does is as
Speaker 1: as he started being arrested, he says, it's in prison too.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: He claims that he's been ordered by Arsay to do
Speaker 1: this in order to bolst Arsey's poll numbers, which are dogshit.
Speaker 2: Fake yeah yeah, now okay.
Speaker 1: This, this whole scheme begs the question, what was Arsay
Speaker 1: supposed to get out of this? Sorry not again, why what?
Speaker 2: What? What is? What does he get out of it?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Because she's just going to prison.
Speaker 1: It's like, why would he do it if it was
Speaker 1: just under orders from the president Because this is a
Speaker 1: lose lose for him, so none of it makes any sense.
Speaker 2: But coma. This is immediately picked up by morell I supporters.
Speaker 1: You fucking hate her, say, and they all immediately begin
Speaker 1: sort of peting is. And now this has become sort
Speaker 1: of the official line. I mean, even Moreeles has been
Speaker 1: on TV on social media is just saying, yeah, this
Speaker 1: was this was a fake coup. This was a coup
Speaker 1: that are say did against himself to help his poll numbers,
Speaker 1: and this is you know, this is a This has
Speaker 1: turned into a real thing, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are sort of like, I don't know, the
Speaker 1: whole coup was really weird, right, And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of people who believe this because they're you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: either because they want to believe it, or because you know,
Speaker 1: I mean it does look weird, or because they fucking
Speaker 1: just hate our say from the beginning, right, this is
Speaker 1: all you know, as funny as it sort of is,
Speaker 1: this has had a sort of catastrophic effect on sort
Speaker 1: of just like regular oblivion people, because people are fucking terrified,
Speaker 1: you know, they're terrified that this is the beginning of
Speaker 1: the Army coming back into politics. They're terrified that someone
Speaker 1: else is going to do a coup. I mean even
Speaker 1: Morales has been saying for a very long time. Actually,
Speaker 1: both of them have been trading accusations that the other
Speaker 1: one is going to do a cue against them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they've been banging the coup drum for a little while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone, everyone has sort of been claiming that there's
Speaker 1: going to be CU's happening. And all of this is
Speaker 1: creating this sort of cauldron of things that are extremely
Speaker 1: bad for the Bolivian left. The economic boom that wielded
Speaker 1: their coalition together is over. It's not clear anyone can
Speaker 1: bring it back, because again, this is a this is
Speaker 1: a natural gas based thing, right. And the other problem
Speaker 1: that they have is, you know, the problem that all
Speaker 1: social democracies have, which is that they've created a middle
Speaker 1: class base of small business owners and people with middle
Speaker 1: class salaries and professional jobs. And we talked about this
Speaker 1: in the Brazilian context, and this is something that Garcia
Speaker 1: la n Earra has talked about too, which is that, well,
Speaker 1: he doesn't say it in these words because he's a
Speaker 1: coward and a capitalist, but social democracy produces its own
Speaker 1: grave diggers by creating a middle class that despises them
Speaker 1: and then eventually destroys everything. The social democrats thought to create,
Speaker 1: and that this is very possible that what we are
Speaker 1: in right now is the opening stages of of this
Speaker 1: entire political project coming apart. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I fucking hope it doesn't.
Speaker 1: And I hope that, you know, but again, like the
Speaker 1: the only, the only actual way to resolve the inherent
Speaker 1: sort of political and social contradictions of attempting to have
Speaker 1: a sort of left wing socialist political base and a
Speaker 1: capitalist government is to eliminate the capitalist state. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: either either you do that or you get another one
Speaker 1: of these shitty fucking cues.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're just constantly vulnerable to this ship, right, like
Speaker 3: at any point, Yeah, yeah, you're creating the condition switch a.
Speaker 1: Wealthy and I mean, and we've we've we've already seen
Speaker 1: the coup that's capable of knocking them out of power, right,
Speaker 1: it's the cue that actually has sort of a mass,
Speaker 1: like a mass backing from the right.
Speaker 2: And this was not that cue. This was this was
Speaker 2: this was.
Speaker 1: The comedian's cup, This was the joker coup, This was the.
Speaker 2: This is the worst coup.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, the next one, the next one
Speaker 1: might not.
Speaker 2: Be yes, and that's quite serious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So until then, hopefully hopefully we don't reach there.
Speaker 1: But until this has been naked, happen here yet, you
Speaker 1: too can overturn a coup by yelling, not even particularly
Speaker 1: menacing at a muns your troops.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, practice practice at home in case do you
Speaker 3: have a need to do it.
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