A (mostly) decent American foreign-policy Establishment view of the Bolivian coup

Santiago Anria and Kenneth Roberts have a helpful and solid article about the Bolivian coup, Bolivia After Morales: What Lies in Store for the Country? Foreign Affairs 11/21/2019. (Accessing the full article requires registration.)

As one might expect from a piece in the stereotypically Establishment Foreign Affairs, the authors seem to be intent on not showing any special appreciation for Morales, that actually makes their account of his government's accomplishments even more convincing. I'll predict that this paragraph is not something we'll see Sen. Marco Rubio retweeting or asking to be entered into the Congressional Record:

Bolivia also performed well economically, in marked contrast to countries such as Argentina, where leftist rule quickly became a strain on public finances, or Venezuela, where it culminated in economic catastrophe. Unlike the leaders of those countries, Morales combined soaring rhetoric about nationalization with moderate policies. He welcomed foreign investors in Bolivia’s lucrative mining and hydrocarbon sectors while increasing the taxes they paid, producing steady economic growth, low inflation, and an extraordinary increase in state revenues. The government spent this money on basic infrastructure, education, health, and, to a lesser extent, social security. The new taxes also helped finance social programs that allowed Bolivia to reduce income inequality more dramatically than any country in the region. Such is the staying power of these social policies that Carlos Mesa, Morales’s main challenger in the 2019 election, promised to maintain them if elected. [my emphasis]

The dig at Argentinian kirchnerismo is gratuitous, especially in light of the spectacularly bad record of the standard neoliberal policies Mauricio Macri's subsequent Argentine government (2015-2019), which resulted in his loss of the Presidential election this year. And no mainstream American account of any Latin American event these days is complete without a mention of "Venezuela" as a socialist disaster - never, of course, as a petrostate disaster.

Anria and Roberts also make it clear what a nasty piece of work the new coup government has been so far:

[The coup-installed President Jeanine] Áñez’s interim government - purportedly a caretaker cabinet tasked with organizing new elections- seems intent on discrediting not just Morales but the whole of his party as legitimate actors in Bolivian politics. Áñez has threatened to call new elections via presidential decree, a step that would give her broad leeway to bar MAS candidates from running. [MAS is Morales' party, the largest in Bolivia.] Arturo Murillo, the iron-fisted new interior minister, has vowed to “hunt down” members of the old government. In a display of deep racial animosity, the government has cracked down on indigenous pro-Morales protesters using live ammunition and has gone so far as to preemptively exempt the military from criminal responsibility for any use of force against protesters. [my emphasis]

To put that last part in slightly more direct language, the coup government with no electoral legitimation has given the military a blank check to murder protesters.

All of which makes me wonder if the sentence in the lede paragraph that Morales' "ouster was a rare victory for democracy and the rule of law at a time when authoritarianism is on the upswing" wasn't some kind of misguided editiorial insert. Because even their criticisms of Morales don't come close to making a military coup "a rare victory for democracy." Although I wouldn't be surprised to see Marco Rubio tweeting that. But it's an appalling way to characterize what the article itself describes. (Update 11/25/2019: To be fair, that phrase was characterizing the pro-coup position. But it's still a case of phony "balance", i.e., "Neither narrative captures the whole story, yet both contain a kernel of truth.")

Not that it matters in immediate practice now. But I would like to see some kind of independent international review by some credible institution like the Carter Center of the vague and undocumented OAS charges of election irregularities. Although given the very sporadic coverage of Latin American affairs in the US and Europe, it's probably already become an article of faith that lazy pundits will repeat for the next century. But the historical record matters. And the OAS claims so far are unsubstantiated.

I was surprised yesterday when I picked up a copy of the left-leaning German weekly paper Jungle World ("Bolivien auf der Kippe" Nr. 27, 21.11.2019), which had a worthwhile feature on the extremism concept. But it also had an article on the Bolivian coup by Knut Henkel of the Green-affiliated Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung which was plainly slanted in favor of the golpistas, to a degree especially surprising for a supposedly left weekly. Its explanation of the OAS claims about election irregularities was just plain bad.