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[MetalSlimeHunt]

If you're going to twist yourself into believing whatever the CIA wants to be true and declare you won't listen to any evidence, you can at least just say so.

[Reelya]

A good yardstick is to take antagonistic media and see if they can come up with anything. The BBC is pretty scathing in its reporting about Venezuela, so you'd think they wouldn't pull any punches on Bolivia.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50431093

There's a section called "how did we get here"

Mr Morales, a former coca farmer, was first elected in 2005 and took office in 2006, the country's first leader from the indigenous community.

He won plaudits for fighting poverty and improving Bolivia's economy, but drew controversy by defying constitutional limits to run for a fourth term in October's election.

So that was literally the worst thing that this fairly strongly Anti-Maduro journal they could actually come up with to say about Morales. He was in power for 14 years, fought poverty and improved the economy, then had the contested election 1 month ago. They literally couldn't come up with a single thing to mention that he did wrong before that.

Not convinced? I'm looking at Fox News articles now and even they can't come up with anything to mention about the guy prior to the current election
https://www.foxnews.com/world/bolivias-political-crisis-sparks-dangerous-clashes-8-killed
https://www.foxnews.com/world/bolivia-president-evo-morales-mexico-police-supporters

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The term limit only even exists because of his government, and didn't apply to the term before it was instituted by ruling of Bolivia's Supreme Court.

[LordBaal]

Wonder what I'll get accused of being for making this post.

You aren't buying into the CIA, you ARE a member of it. Confess and hand over the cancer gun!

[smjjames]

I think MSH was just bullshitting you there ispil, though the bullshitting could be turned way down MSH

Wonder what I'll get accused of being for making this post.

You aren't buying into the CIA, you ARE a member of it. Confess and hand over the cancer gun!

Uh-huh, and windmills cause cancer.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/14/what-the-coup-against-evo-morales-means-to-indigenous-people-like-me

Apparently Anez once tweeted "His replacement, Jeanine Añez Chávez, agreed. “I dream of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rites,” the opposition senator tweeted in 2013, “the city is not for the Indians who should stay in the highlands or the Chaco!!!” She may very well be a white supremacist for all things concerned. I don't know of anybody in the US who holds that kind of view (who wouldn't otherwise be a white supremacist and would automatically hold those views).

[Reelya]

Well the ruling elite have always been the white minority. And I really mean minority. Only 5% identify as "white" (The source for this is the CIA world fact book), and the violent right-wing protests are concentrated in white areas.
http://www.coha.org/behind-the-racist-coup-in-bolivia/

A very small percentage of wealthy white Spanish-descent people have always ruled the land as a colonial holding, and the majority native Americans were a subject race. This is why it's very different to the USA. Rather than a small number of Indians left and a white majority, Bolivia consists of a dirt-poor mass of Indians and a wealthy and brutal clique of white overlords. They weren't happy when their personal little empire got eroded by those dirty brown people "voting".

"back into the hills with you dirty Indians" is basically an extremely small city-dwelling wealthy class trying to maintain poverty so that their relative power base isn't eroded.

[Powder Miner]

I guess I don't know much about racial politics in Bolivia, but it does look like Bolivia is majority mestizo rather than strictly majority indigenous, which I know is a meaningful difference in a lot of LatAm countries.

[Teneb]

I guess I don't know much about racial politics in Bolivia, but it does look like Bolivia is majority mestizo rather than strictly majority indigenous, which I know is a meaningful difference in a lot of LatAm countries.

While I am speaking from what I have observed here in Brazil, I think it carries over to our neighbours: for the longest time, being black or indigenous was considered rather shameful, so a lot of people identified as "mestizo/mestiço" instead. Sure, there's a lot of miscigenation, but unlike in places like the US what "race" you are is mostly defined by physical features rather than ancestry.

Lately, however, there's been a movement for accepting that there is no shame in not being white, leading to a lot more people identifying as black or indigenous.

[Dostoevsky]

Warning: what follows is an anecdote, with no citations. But it may be informative.

I know somebody who spent time in Bolivia in the mid-2000s to early/mid 2010s, mainly for nonprofits in the sphere of indigenous rights. (They also worked in a few other South American countries.) This person was incredibly enthusiastic about Evo winning the presidency, but in the early 2010s grew to dislike Evo. While he did do a lot of good, he also helped build up a now powerful & corrupt police and military, and in at least a few instances had opponents (to the left of him, generally cases of local resistance to 'development' projects) beaten and/or killed.

EDIT: Dropping an edit in here for anyone who happens to stumble across it - I was misremembering my conversations with this person; this person did not know of any killings by Evo / his government.

When learning of the recent events in the country, this person was split. Evo had indeed lost the confidence of many of the non-elite, but the ones who were going to benefit the most from his ouster (and indeed we are already beginning to see this) are the elites that he took to task back in the 2000s. His opponent in the election is literally one of the old white elites who were president in the bad old days - indeed, is the very person who Evo beat to become president.

In short...

What replaced it being shit doesn't absolve the previous government of also being shit.

This kind of applies, though perhaps it's more of a case of a possibly good person getting corrupted over time (Evo was president for more than a decade, after all) which then leads to things regressing back to the bad times before.

Edit: I should add that this person loved/loves a lot of what Evo did. He helped fight back (a bit) against the exploitation of the country by outside companies, at least by getting a much better profit share for Bolivia. E.g. what happened with the oil companies early on. But unbridled exploitation was still pretty much the norm, just under terms more favorable for Bolivia.

[Cheesy Honkers]

Democracy is making it's way to Bolivia one bullet at a time. Five or more protestors have been killed by the military, who opened fire on the crowd surrounding a gasoline plant.

[Iduno]

Warning: what follows is an anecdote, with no citations. But it may be informative.

I know somebody who spent time in Bolivia in the mid-2000s to early/mid 2010s, mainly for nonprofits in the sphere of indigenous rights. (They also worked in a few other South American countries.) This person was incredibly enthusiastic about Evo winning the presidency, but in the early 2010s grew to dislike Evo. While he did do a lot of good, he also helped build up a now powerful & corrupt police and military, and in at least a few instances had opponents (to the left of him, generally cases of local resistance to 'development' projects) beaten and/or killed.

When learning of the recent events in the country, this person was split. Evo had indeed lost the confidence of many of the non-elite, but the ones who were going to benefit the most from his ouster (and indeed we are already beginning to see this) are the elites that he took to task back in the 2000s. His opponent in the election is literally one of the old white elites who were president in the bad old days - indeed, is the very person who Evo beat to become president.

In short...

What replaced it being shit doesn't absolve the previous government of also being shit.

This kind of applies, though perhaps it's more of a case of a possibly good person getting corrupted over time (Evo was president for more than a decade, after all) which then leads to things regressing back to the bad times before.

Edit: I should add that this person loved/loves a lot of what Evo did. He helped fight back (a bit) against the exploitation of the country by outside companies, at least by getting a much better profit share for Bolivia. E.g. what happened with the oil companies early on. But unbridled exploitation was still pretty much the norm, just under terms more favorable for Bolivia.

Yeah, it sounds like a left-wing government started to get corrupt, which was used as an excuse for a more corrupt right-wing/neo-nazi group to move in.

[Cheesy Honkers]

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/27/operation-condor-2-coup-trump-nicaragua-mexico/

After presiding over a far-right coup in Bolivia, the US dubbed Nicaragua a "National security threat" and announced new sanctions, while Trump designated drug cartels in Mexico as "Terrorists" and refused to rule out military intervention.
On November 25, the Trump White House quietly issued a statement characterizing Nicaragua as an "Unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration's designation of cartels as terrorists, "They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their national security."

[scriver]

On the one hand, cartels are definitely a threat to the national security of both Mexico and the USA.

On the other hand, are Trump planning to invade Mexico?

[Teneb]

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/27/operation-condor-2-coup-trump-nicaragua-mexico/

Called it with the thread title!

[Cheesy Honkers]

If the US invades Mexico it will begin the open collapse of the american empire. Previous invasions, Iraq and Afghanistan took place so far away that the consequences did not reach american civillians. A destabilised Mexico is right next to two most populous states. If the violence spills over the border (and it will), then the US will have to deal with not only thousands of refugees, but also retaliatory attacks, terrorism as well as internal opposition to the war.

Invading Mexico is so stupid not even Trump would do it, I hope.