The United States played a key role in the military coup in Bolivia, and in a direct way that has scarcely been acknowledged in accounts of the events that forced the country’s elected president, Evo Morales, to resign on November 10.
Just prior to Morales’ resignation, the commander of Bolivia’s armed forces Williams Kaliman “suggested” that the president step down. A day earlier, sectors of the country’s police force had rebelled.
Though Kaliman appears to have feigned loyalty to Morales over the years, his true colors showed as soon as the moment of opportunity arrived. He was not only an actor in the coup, he had his own history in Washington, where he had briefly served as the military attaché of Bolivia’s embassy in the US capital.
Kaliman sat at the top of a military and police command structure that has been substantially cultivated by the US through WHINSEC, the military training school in Fort Benning, Georgia known in the past as the School of the Americas. Kaliman himself attended a course called “Comando y Estado Mayor” at the SOA in 2003.
At least six of the key coup plotters are alumni of the infamous School of the Americas, while Kaliman and another figure served in the past as Bolivia’s military and police attachés in Washington.
Within the Bolivian police, top commanders who helped launch the coup have passed through the APALA police exchange program. Working out of Washington DC, APALA functions to build relations between U.S. authorities and police officials from Latin American states. Despite its influence, or perhaps because of it, the program maintains little public presence. Its staff was impossible for this researcher to reach by phone.
It is common for governments to assign a small number of individuals to work at their country’s embassies abroad as military or police attachés. The late Philip Agee, a one-time CIA case officer who became the agency’s first whistleblower, explained in his 1975 tell-all book how US intelligence traditionally relied on the recruitment of foreign military and police officers, including embassy attachés, as critical assets in regime change and counter-insurgency operations.
As I found from the more than 11,000 FOIA documents I obtained while writing my book on the paramilitary campaign waged in the lead up to the February 2004 ouster of Haiti’s elected government and the post-coup repression, U.S. officials worked for years to ingratiate themselves and establish connections with Haitian police, army, and ex-army officials. These connections as well as the recruitment and information gathering efforts eventually paid off.
In Bolivia, too, the role of military and police officials trained by the US was pivotal in forcing regime change. U.S. government agencies such as USAID have openly financed anti-Morales groups in the country for many years. But the way that the country’s security forces were used as a Trojan Horse by US intelligence services is less understood. With Morales’s forced departure, however, it became impossible to deny how critical a factor this was.
As this investigation will establish, the coup plot could not have succeeded without the enthusiastic approval of the country’s military and police commanders. And their consent was influenced heavily by the US, where so many were groomed and educated for insurrection.
Leaked Audio Exposes School Of The Americas Grads Plotting A Coup
Leaked audioreported on Bolivian news website La Época, and by elperiodicocr.com and a range of national media outlets, reveals that covert coordination took place between current and former Bolivian police, military, and opposition leaders in bringing about the coup.
The leaked audio recordings show that former Cochabamba mayor and former presidential candidate Manfred Reyes Villa played a central role in the plot. Reyes happens to be an alumnus of WHINSEC (formerly known as the School of the Americas), who currently resides in the United States.
The other four who are introduced or introduce themselves by name in the leaked audio are General Remberto Siles Vasquez (audio 12); Colonel Julio César Maldonado Leoni (audio 8 and 9); Colonel Oscar Pacello Aguirre (audio 14), and Colonel Teobaldo Cardozo Guevara (audio 10). All four of these ex-military officials attended the SOA.
Cardozo Guevara, in particular, boasts about his connections amongst active officers.
The identities of these individuals are confirmed by cross-checking the data of the School of Americas Watch lists of alumni with Facebook and local Bolivian news articles and the leaked audio recordings.
The School of the Americas is a notorious site of education for Latin American coup plotters dating back to the height of the Cold War. Brutal regime change and reprisal operations from Haiti to Honduras have been carried out by SOA graduates, and some of the most bloodstained juntas in the region’s history have been run by the school’s alumni.
For many years, anti-war protesters have staged a protest vigil outside the SOA’s headquarters at the Fort Benning military base near Columbus, Georgia.
The leader of those protests, Father Roy Bourgeois, has described the SOA as “a combat school. ” He continued:
“Most of the courses revolve around what they call counter insurgency warfare. Who are the insurgents? We have to ask that question. They are the poor. They are the people in Latin America who call for reform. They are the landless peasants who are hungry. They are health care workers, human rights advocates, labor organizers, they become the insurgents, they’re seen as ‘el enemigo’ — the enemy. And they are those who become the targets of those who learn their lessons at the School of the Americas.”
Bourgeois was deported from Bolivia in 1977 when he spoke out against the human rights abuses of Gen. Hugo Banzer, a right-wing dictator who rose to power through a US-backed coup that toppled a leftist government. History repeats itself today as Banzer’s ideological heirs drive another socialist leader from power through time-tested destabilization tactics.
In the recently leaked audio recordings, coup plotters discuss plans to set ablaze government buildings, get pro-business unions in the country to carry out strikes, as well as other tactics – all straight out of the CIA playbook.
Also alluded to in the leaked audio is that the coup attempt would be supported by various evangelical groups as well as by Colombian President Iván Duque, ex-Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, and most notably Brazil’s neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro.
The plotters also mention the strong support of ultra-right U.S. senators Ted Cruz, Bob Menéndez, and Marco Rubio, who is said to have the ear of President Donald Trump when it comes to U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere.
Military And Police Attachées In DC: A Breeding Ground For U.S. Intelligence Networking
As tensions built over recent weeks, it was the commanding general of the Bolivian Police, Vladimir Yuri Calderón Mariscal, who broke the stalemate by leading large parts of the police force to revolt on November 9th, just a day prior to the resignation of Morales.
In 2018 Calderón Mariscal served as President of Police Attachés of Latin America in the United States of America (APALA), which is based in Washington, DC.
APALA has been described as a “multidimensional security” program that works to build relations and connections between U.S. authorities and police officials from many of the Organization of American States members.
At APALA’s founding in 2012, then-OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza (center in photo below) met with the group’s leadership.
Today APALA hosts police attachés from 10 countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
According to its Facebook page, the group “was created, with the objective of generating, promoting, and strengthening ties of solidarity, friendship, cooperation and support between the members of the group and their families through social, cultural activities, which allow to generate integral development.”
It claims to be facilitating the “integration and exchange of the police institutions that comprise it, in addition to promoting the exchange of successful experiences developed by the different police forces of Latin America.”
Photo of Calderón Mariscal (center-right) at the FBI training academy that is 36 miles outside of Washington, DC
A mysterious organization, APALA has shut down its website ApalaUSA.com and does not answer phone calls. It functions in some capacity as an arm of U.S. federal agencies as its social media platform and now defunct website showcase numerous meetings and photos of APALA officials and participants alongside FBI, DEA, ICE, and other U.S. officials.
As Philip Agee explained in his book Inside the Company, the CIA often uses other U.S. government agencies such as the FBI and USAID, as well as various front-organizations, to carry out its clandestine activities without leaving fingerprints.
Below: APALA participants at the FBI headquarters in Washington DC
— APALA Agregados Policiales de América Latina (@apalausa) November 16, 2017
One of APALA’s key local members is Alex Zunca, a police officer in Baltimore who is the director of international affairs for the Hispanic National Law Enforcement Association, which is based in Washington, DC.
APALA’s street address listed on its now defunct website is the same address as the embassy of Mexico in Washington, DC. The group was apparently run out of the Mexican Embassy, at least between 2017 and 2018 when its website was active during the administration of the US friendly former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Interestingly, a colleague of Calderón Mariscal’s and also a former President of APALA is an associate minister of the Federal Police of Mexico named Nicolás González Perrin.
Below, he can be seen seated beside a Mexican national flag and an FBI hat.
In a 2017 interview with the Washington Hispanic, a DC-based Spanish language newspaper, González Perrin declared “that APALA holds meetings, permanently, with the most significant federal agencies in the United States, ‘from INTERPOL to DEA, ICE and the FBI, who work with us, based on mutual needs.’”
Another important APALA participant is Hector Ivan Mejia Velasquez, the former General Commissioner of Honduras’s National Police, who has led brutal operations against protesters in his own country, and regularly posts anti-leftist screeds on social media.
— APALA Agregados Policiales de América Latina (@apalausa) January 12, 2018
Calls to APALA’s public contact, whose name appears to be Alvaro Andrade, went unanswered. My calls to his number, which is listed as being located in Rockville, Maryland, went straight to a voicemail stating that it was restricted. The webmaster of APALA’s former website is Mario Ruiz Madrigal, a system’s engineer in Mexico.
APALA, whose Facebook page Andrade appears to operate, has worked with other Bolivian police officials as well, such as Bolivian police attaché Heroldina Henao.
#apala Reconocimiento a la Agregada Policial Bolivia Heroldina Henao por parte del Presidente NICOLÁS G. PERRIN. pic.twitter.com/DvUbRNTtA1
— APALA Agregados Policiales de América Latina (@apalausa) November 30, 2016
The other key official that helped to bring about the November 10th coup is General Williams Kaliman, the head of Bolivia’s military. He served as a military attaché for his country’s embassy in Washington, D.C. in 2013. A decade prior, he had taken part in training at the SOA. Little is known about his time in the United States.
General Williams Kaliman, head of Bolivia’s military
After the coup, Kaliman was replaced. Some Latin American media outlets reported that Kaliman was paid a large sum of money and fled the country, potentially to the United States, although this has not been independently confirmed.
At different times both Kaliman and Calderón Mariscal appear to have either been loyal to or feigned loyalty to the constitutional government, but ultimately split from it or were convinced over time to carry out a military putsch.
For his part, deposed President Morales has claimed that a member of his own security team was offered $50,000 to betray him.
The November 10 coup d’état did not materialize out of thin air. Events that have transpired inside Bolivia are intimately connected to U.S. efforts to influence military and police forces abroad through programs like SOA and APALA.
While U.S. President Donald Trump cheers on a “a significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere,” Bolivians are suddenly under the control of a de facto military regime.
Editor’s note: This article was updated after publication to more accurately describe APALA’s public contact and to include the replacement of Williams Kaliman.
The Grayzone obtained audio of a call in which Roger Waters confronted Amnesty leadership over efforts by Syria regime-change operatives – including its own staff – to sabotage an Amazon Watch webinar on Chevron’s pollution of Ecuador.
The campaign manager of Amnesty International UK, Kristyan Benedict, appears to have removed an Amnesty International tweet announcing an Amazon Watch webinar to raise awareness both of Chevron’s pollution of an indigenous region of Ecuador and the company’s ruthless persecution of environmental lawyer Steven Donzinger.
A hardline advocate of Western intervention in Syria, Benedict apparently deleted the announcement because of the participation of Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters in the event.
Donzinger, for his part, is a self-described “corporate political prisoner” whose persecution began in 2011 after he won a multi-billion dollar legal judgment against Chevron over the oil giant’s toxic dumping in Ecuador’s indigenous Lago Agrio region. He is charged with contempt of court for refusing a federal judge’s order to turn over his cellphone and computer to Chevron. With the order still under appeal on constitutional grounds, Donziger has refused to obey it
Chevron has never paid the $9.5 billion it owes in damages. Instead, it has retaliated with a multimillion-dollar campaign to demonize Donzinger, hiring a massive team of corporate lawyers to oversee an attempt to disbar the environmental lawyer and freeze his personal bank accounts.
In August 2019, a federal judge ordered Donzinger placed under house arrest pending a contempt of court hearing, and confined him to his New York City apartment.
“I’m like a corporate political prisoner,” Donzinger told reporter Sharon Lernerthis January. “They are trying to totally destroy me.”
Roger Waters has worked since 2012 to draw attention to Donzinger’s persecution, as well as to the suffering of the victims of Chevron’s toxic practices in Ecuador. The Amazon Watch webinar which Amnesty was supporting was to have been one of the most important events on the issue this year. Though the event itself was not canceled, its attendance was undoubtedly limited thanks the censorship campaign initiated by regime-change fanatics incensed by Waters’ views on Syria.
A crusading anti-war activist, Waters has been a vehement critic of US and British government intervention in Syria, and especially their funding of extremist proxy forces to advance a destabilizing regime-change policy.
At the end of the first week in April 2018, Washington claimed the Syrian government had launched a chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma, which had just been cleared of Saudi-backed extremist forces in a dramatic victory for the national army.
The central piece of evidence bolstering the dubious US claims was a video circulating on social media and produced by a US- and UK-created organization called the White Helmets. Waters told The Grayzone he “smelled a rat, did some research, realized the video was not credible, and decided to speak out.”
From the stage at his “Us and Them” show in Barcelona, Spain, on April 13, the Pink Floyd co-founder denounced the US and UK-funded White Helmets as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for jihadists and terrorists.” By this point, the US, UK and France were signaling their intention to bomb Syria in reprisal for the supposed chemical attack.
Waters pleaded with his audience “to encourage the governments of the USA, UK, and France to properly investigate the alleged attacks before dropping bombs on the Syrian people.”
This August, when US- and UK-based Syria regime-change lobbyists learned of Waters’ participation in the Amnesty International-supported Amazon Watch event with Donzinger, they launched a coordinated campaign to pressure Amnesty into cancelling its support. Within hours, Amnesty’s Twitter announcement of the event mysteriously disappeared.
“Yep – not good at all – it’s been deleted,” Amnesty UK’s Benedict assured several allies after the tweet promoting Waters’ Amazon Watch event with Donzinger was erased.
I would appeal to @amnestyusa not to promote this event given Roger Waters participation because slandered #WhiteHelmets repeating Russian propaganda putting their lives at risk when saved over 150,000 lives & cannot remain silent as know them well as a filmmaker @SyriaCivilDefhttps://t.co/8e311Xcj2S
Among those who complained vociferously about Waters’ participation in the Amnesty USA event was Eliot Higgins, the founder of the US- and UK government-backed Bellingcat “open source” media operation, which was among the first major Western outlets to accuse the Syrian government of a chlorine attack in Douma in April, 2018.
In a tweet addressed to Amnesty USA, Higgins denigrated Waters as a “famous war crimes denier.” One minute later, he accused Waters of “spread[ing] conspiracy theories about chemical attacks.”
Benedict responded by assuring the Bellingcat founder that the “tweet was deleted a few hours ago.”
The coordinated attempt at canceling or undermining an event on corporate wrongdoing and the environment was just the latest instance of a tight-knit motley crew of Syria regime-change operatives sabotaging left-wing or social justice organizing.
The same cadre of regime-change fanatics has also sought to divide the Palestine solidarity movement, encouraging the movement to turn against any activist who contradicted the Syrian opposition’s line – which also happens to be the official line of the US State Department that has sponsored it.
Kristyan Benedict, for his part, is a central figure among the echo chamber of regime-change operatives. In recent years, he has helped organize several actions promoting Western military intervention and economic sanctions against Damascus.
Asked on Twitter by this reporter if he was responsible for deleting the tweet advertising the event on Chevron’s abuses, the Amnesty UK staffer declined to respond.
“While Dutch prosecutors prepare war crimes charges against the Syrian government for fighting off the onslaught”
Your man here is justifying torture.
Think what that means to those Syrians the regime tortured.
That should be all you need to know to not share such pieces. https://t.co/YXTfgp8yrI
The Grayzone has obtained audio of a phone call between Waters and Amnesty International Chief Impact Officer Tamara Draut in which Draut claimed her organization had been lobbied to retract its support for the event by “folks in the White Helmets,” as well as “Syrian human rights activists,” who said they were “hurt by what they saw as [Amnesty’s] promotion” of Waters.
“What on earth has this got to do with a webinar about the plight of rain forest dwellers in northern Ecuador?” Roger Waters asked.
“Because your position on the White Helmets and [Amnesty USA’s] position on the White Helmets is so different from one another,” Draut replied, “people interpreted our promotion of an event where you were speaking as promoting your position on the White Helmets.”
Draut has spent her career in liberal non-profits and authored several books on the US economy; she has no apparent record of foreign policy experience or Middle East affairs.
Draut was joined on the call by Amnesty USA’s Head of Artist Relations Matt Vogel, a recruit from the recording industry who also has no notable experience in international affairs.
Without mentioning Benedict by name, Draut appeared to distance herself and the organization from his apparent actions.
“Sometimes staff try and solve problems on their own. I would not have taken down this tweet,” Draut told Waters. “That is not the policy I like to follow on Twitter. Instead, I would have much rather dealt with this directly and honestly, as opposed to disappearing the tweet.”
Draut privately apologized to Waters during the call. Waters responded by requesting a public apology from Draut for Amnesty USA’s withdrawal of support from the Amazon Watch event to free Donzinger and support Ecuador’s indigenous population.
Since the September 25 conversation, neither Draut nor anyone affiliated with Amnesty have expressed regret for the organization’s actions. Further, they have not clarified Benedict’s role in undermining the Amazon Watch event.
The Amnesty staffer lobbying Western governments for regime-change war
While Amnesty International states that its “mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of human rights,” Kristyan Benedict has engaged in a series of actions designed to pressure Western governments to enact interventionist policies that have demonstrably violated the rights of Syrians.
Amnesty UK’s Benedict has been a leading cheerleader for regime-change and Western intervention in Syria. In fact, his chapter sponsored a 2016 rally in London demanding that NATO forces impose a No Fly Zone over the country.
As the Financial Times acknowledged in a June 24 report, “The first and biggest act of the Caesar act was felt, not by regime insiders, but by ordinary Syrians, who saw prices spike as the threat of sanctions roiled the country’s currency market.”
In 2015, Benedict participated in a London event sponsored by the Saudi- and Qatari-backed National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, and aimed at promoting the economic blockade against Syria.
Joining the Amnesty UK staffer on stage were two of the key Washington lobbyists behind the sanctions push: Stephen Rapp, then the State Department’s “ambassador at-large for war crimes” presiding over US lawfare efforts against Syria; and Mouaz Moustafa, the Syrian opposition lobbyist who escorted the late Sen. John McCain to his infamous 2013 photo-op inside Syria with CIA-backed insurgents who turned out to be extremist kidnappers.
(L) Mouaz Moustafa with Kristyan Benedict, seated to his right, promoting sanctions on Syria in 2015. (R) Mouaz Moustafa, standing to the far-right, on a foray into Syria with Sen. John McCain and CIA-backed insurgents.
The so-called Caesar Sanctions were the result of an elaborate propaganda operation in which a still-unknown supposed military photographer was smuggled out of Syria and delivered to the CIA along with thousands of photographs showing casualties of Syria’s proxy war.
A team of lawyers was hired by the government of Qatar – one of the top sponsors of Syria’s armed opposition – to verify and analyze the trove of photos.
While the mysterious “Caesar” figure was shepherded around official Washington by Mouaz Moustafa, invariably covered in a blue shroud to shield his identity from the public, a selected handful of his alleged photos were put on display at events like the one Amnesty’s Benedict participated in in London.
In fact, as The Grayzone reported, nearly half of the photos depicted Syrians who had been killed by anti-government insurgents, inadvertently confirming the violence of the Syrian opposition. This highly inconvenient fact has been concealed from the British and American public by the operatives that brought forth the so-called Caesar file.
As regime-change lobbyists like Benedict pushed intervention in Syria in the name of human rights, they were forced onto the defensive after confidently claiming that an alleged bombing in Douma, Syria on April 7, 2018 was a chemical attack carried out by the Syrian government.
Punishment for sounding the alarm on Douma
The official story of the incident in Douma has since been upended by several Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigators, including two of the most important members of the organization’s fact-finding mission to Douma.
In testimony before the United Nations Security Council this January, former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson statedthat the organization’s investigation in Douma, Syria indicated in clear terms that no chemical attack took place, and that the incident was likely staged by the Syrian opposition to trigger Western military intervention.
Henderson and three other OPCW investigators have alleged that the organization’s initial report on Douma was censored by management under pressure from the US and UK governments.
Roger Waters has emerged as the most high-profile supporter of the OPCW whistleblowers, using his public platform to demand accountability for what appears to have been a cynical deception designed to justify a military assault on Syria and nearly led to another disastrous regime-change war.
But well before the OPCW staffers went public with evidence that US-aligned organization leadership censored their factual report, Waters issued his dramatic statement on stage in Barcelona condemning the White Helmets organization that spearheaded the apparent deception in Douma.
Marketed as peaceful heroes, designed to trigger military intervention
So who are the White Helmets, and why were they worthy of so much suspicion?
The White Helmets were established thanks to $55 million in funding from the British Foreign Office, $23 million or more from the United States Agency for International Development (USIAD) Office of Transition Initiatives — the State Department’s de facto regime-change arm — and untold millions from the Kingdom of Qatar, which has also backed an assortment of extremist groups in Syria including Al Qaeda.
A British former military officer-turned-mercenary named James Le Mesurier founded the White Helmets in southern Turkey in 2014. Le Mesurier would go on to die in an apparent suicide at his home in Istanbul on November 11, 2019. The Dutch paper NL Times revealed that he had stolen millions donated from Western governments to the White Helmets to finance a lavish lifestyle, and that some of the donor governments apparently looked the other way as the money disappeared into a web of accounts.
Throughout the Syrian proxy war, footage and testimony by the White Helmets provided the basis for the West’s accusations of government chemical attacks on civilians and other war crimes. When Defense Secretary James Mattis cited “social media” in place of scientific evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, he was referring to the now-infamous video shot by members of the White Helmets.
Similarly, when State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert sought to explain why the US bombed Syria before inspectors from the OPCW could produce a report from the ground, she claimed, “We have our own intelligence.” She, too, appeared to be referring to social media material published by members of the White Helmets.
However, the accounts by White Helmets members of a chlorine attack in Douma in April, 2018 were immediately challenged by Western journalists on the ground as well as by Syrian eyewitnesses. As the dust cleared, it became increasingly apparent that the armed extremists that had been driven out of Douma by the Syrian army had staged a bogus chemical attack in hopes of inviting military intervention by Western governments.
The White Helmets’ attempt to recruit Roger Waters backfires
During his Barcelona concert, Waters implored his audience to exercise critical thinking: “If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions for us as human beings.”
As The Grayzone reported days later, an eccentric French photojournalist had been lobbying Waters in the days ahead of his concert to allow him to deliver a message on behalf of the White Helmets and the “children of Syria” from the stage in Barcelona. He claimed to Waters that he represented a “powerful Syrian network.” It was in response to this appeal that Waters said he made his public statement.
Over a year earlier, in October 2016, a London-based public relations firm representing the White Helmets called The Syria Campaign attempted to recruit Waters by inviting him to a lavish dinner organized by a Saudi-British billionaire, Hani Farsi. The Pink Floyd founder was told that by signing on to the organization’s mission, he could help “elevate the voices of Syria’s peaceful heroes.”
Rather than signing on to a humanitarian interventionist public relations scheme as so many other celebrities had, Waters stood on stage in Barcelona on the eve of war and encouraged his audience to see through the wall of misinformation.
“What we should do is go and persuade our governments not to go and drop bombs on people,” Waters proclaimed, inspiring applause from the crowd. “And certainly not until we have done all the research that is necessary so that we would have a clear idea of what is really going on. Because we live in the world where propaganda seems to be more important than the reality.”
With his anti-interventionist jeremiad in Barcelona, Waters made himself the most prominent critic of the West’s catastrophic regime-change campaign in Syria – and a top target of the forces behind it.
He told The Grayzone that he saw the undermining of his Amazon Watch human rights event as part of a much wider phenomenon of censoring and smearing of public figures who challenge the official narrative on Syria. He pointed to the US, UK and French governments blocking the OPCW’s first Director-General, Jose Bustani, from delivering testimony to the United Nations on the organization’s cover-up of its own original Douma investigation, as a recent and especially disturbing example.
“What’s happened with Jose Bustani going public and The Grayzone having to publish the statement he wanted to make in person to the UN Security Council because the US and its allies blocked him is about the same thing that caused Kristyan Benedict to have Amnesty’s tweet in support of indigenous people in Ecuador deleted,” Waters reflected. “It’s all about covering up Douma and preserving the lies that led to missile strikes on a sovereign country and almost took us to war again.”
Bolivian coup officials and supporters stalk international election observers, launch violent incitement campaign
Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
By the time a team of electoral observers arrived in Bolivia – including members of The Grayzone – right-wingers had already published a flood of online threats, smearing them as “terrorists” and circulating photos captured while stalking them in the airport.
SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA – Contributors to The Grayzone including Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil, and Ben Norton traveled from the United States to Bolivia in order to join a delegation of independent international observers of the country’s October 18th presidential election – the first vote since a November 2019 US-backed military coup removed the country’s elected president.
Little known to us, however, was that we were being stalked on the way. A number of Bolivians covertly took photos of us as we waited for a connecting flight in the airport in Chile, snapped more as we boarded the plane, and published the images on social media, along with our personal information and a flight itinerary showing when we would arrive to Bolivia. The incitement campaign has led to a wave of physical threats and calls for harassment.
Camacho dice: "Si vuelve Evo Morales es la voluntad del Pueblo y habrá que respetarla"
Pues bien, Ya llega su avanzada:
" Llegando a Bolivia. Experto en desinformación de RT encargado de reafirmar teoría del golpe"
NO VUELVE CAMACHO, LO ESTÁS TRAYENDO DE VUELTA pic.twitter.com/LKgEHCKuAI
It remains unknown whether those who stalked and photographed us were private citizens or members of the intelligence apparatus surrounding the hardline Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo Prijic, who is considered the enforcer of Interim President Jeanine Anez’s coup administration.
Hours after photographs of us were published on social media, Murillo issued a thinly veiled threat. “Our elections will be a democratic celebration, the more observers there are, the better for everyone. We warn agitators and people who seek to generate violence, they are not welcome. We will put them on a plane or behind bars. Behave, we know who you are and where you are.”
Nuestras elecciones serán una fiesta democrática, mientras más observadores hayan, mejor para todos.
Advertimos a los agitadores y gente que busca generar violencia, no son bienvenidos. Los ponemos en un avión o entre rejas.
Compórtense, sabemos quienes son y dónde están.
Bolivia’s Director General of Migration, Marcel Rivas, escalated the incitement, tweeting, “The [Supreme Electoral Court] sent invitations to “monitor” the elections to 4 well-known extreme left agitators linked to the criminal Maduro regime. The Ministry of Migration will enforce law 370: those who violate the determined purpose of their stated objective will suffer the consequences.”
El @TSEBolivia remitió invitaciones para “acompañar” las elecciones a 4 conocidos agitadores de extrema izquierda vinculados al régimen criminal de Maduro. @MIGRACION_BOL hará cumplirá la ley 370, quienes violen el objeto determinado de su ingreso sufrirán las consecuencias.
By the time we arrived in Santa Cruz, an eastern city that serves as the power base of the Bolivian right-wing, an online network of Bolivian far-right activists had unleashed a deluge of threats, outlandishly libeling us as drug-linked “terrorists” and supposed paid disinformation agents, inciting violence against international electoral observers officially recognized by the government of Anez.
We have obtained official letters of invitation from Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) / Plurinational Electoral Organ (OEP). Blumenthal, Parampil, and Norton are part of a US delegation of electoral observers organized by the human rights group CODEPINK: Women for Peace. Wyatt Reed, who has also contributed to The Grayzone in the past, is also here in his capacity as a CODEPINK election monitor.
While we have our own personal political views, we arrived in Bolivia as independent electoral monitors following the guidelines presented to us by Bolivia’s electoral court, and outlined by the United Nations.
The flood of threats that greeted us is just one example of the suffocating atmosphere of right-wing intimidation in Bolivia on the eve of the election. The campaign of menacing has targeted not only the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party of former elected President Evo Morales, which is leading in all major polling, but even international electoral observers approved by the government of Anez.
Amid the atmosphere of intimidation, the unelected de facto government has arrested and banned numerous MAS candidates. Meanwhile, the Western-backed Bolivian NGO Ríos de Pie, which played a leading role in the coup to remove Morales, has threatened journalists, including TeleSUR reporter and US citizen Camila Escalante.
The OAS arrives after sanctioning a coup
In addition to allowing the entry of a small team of electoral observers from CODEPINK, Bolivia’s unelected transitional administration signed an agreement to allow the Organization of American States (OAS) to oversee the October 18 election.
CEPR experts have furthermore warned that changes made to the electoral process by Bolivia’s unelected transitional administration threaten to make the upcoming 2020 vote much less transparent than the 2019 election.
Last year, CEPR was able to use Excel sheet data made available by #Bolivia’s electoral authority to show that the OAS had no evidence to support its statement challenging results showing Evo Morales had a 1st-round win. This time, that may not be possible https://t.co/ejj1Ny7fFK
Supporters of Bolivia’s far-right candidate Camacho in Santa Cruz threaten electoral monitors
Most of the threats targeting international observers and journalists have emanated from Bolivia’s commercial hub, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The richest city in the country, Santa Cruz is the power base of the Bolivian right wing, which has a long history of racism against the nation’s indigenous majority.
Santa Cruz was instrumental in the November 2019 coup, in which Bolivia’s democratically elected President Evo Morales was forced to resign by his own military. Since then, Bolivia has been run by an unelected right-wing regime that is not recognized by neighbors such as Argentina, but which enjoys staunch support from the United States.
As The Grayzone electoral observers arrived in Santa Cruz on October 14, we saw a rally held by supporters of Luis Fernando Camacho, a major figure in the 2019 coup, who is now the far-right candidate in the upcoming election, running against both the MAS and the center-right candidate Carlos Mesa. (State Department cables published by WikiLeaks show that Mesa has coordinated closely with the US government for more than a decade.)
After the Camacho march, we saw his supporters mingling in central Santa Cruz with distinctive white t-shirts reading “Creemos,” or “We Believe,” the name of the far-right candidate’s political party.
It was some of these fanatical Camacho supporters who took to social media to whip up an intimidation campaign against international electoral observers.
Smearing independent observers as “terrorists,” inciting violence
On social media platforms, Bolivian extremists smeared The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal as a “terrorist” and supposed “propagandist,” who purportedly came to “burn the entire country.”
Many of these fanatical users tagged the US State Department, the US embassy in Bolivia, and officials from the unelected transitional regime, including the far-right Minister of Government Murillo, in their incendiary and often libelous commentary.
A far-right Bolivian activist and coup supporter, Nadia Beller, published photos on Facebook and Twitter of The Grayzone electoral observers. The images make it clear that we were being closely monitored while in the airport in Chile. Photos of Blumenthal as he boarded the airplane in Santiago were also published online.
Beller shared the itinerary of when our flight was due to arrive in Santa Cruz, implicitly encouraging her followers to come to the airport to threaten election monitors.
She also falsely smeared Max Blumenthal as a “disinformation expert from RT.”
These stalker photos were subsequently amplified by prominent right-wing Bolivian media personalities, such as Agustín Zambrana Arze.
Other extremists called for creating groups and stalking Blumenthal, following and “supervising” him, filming everything he does.
A fanatic living in Virginia threatened the safety of electoral observers by falsely calling them a “terrorist threat in Santa Cruz.”
This US-based user, Teddy Rivero, libeled Blumenthal with a series of outrageous slander, claiming he “is one of the most infuriating enemies of Bolivia’s democracy, very close to pro-Cuba-Chavista drug trafficking.”
American regime-change lobbyists also contributed to the campaign to endanger The Grayzone electoral observers. Democratic Party activist Kareem Rifai, who co-founded the group Students for Biden at Michigan, re-posted the photos of The Grayzone electoral observers at the Chilean airport and falsely tried to link Blumenthal to Russia and Venezuela, claiming they will be “working in overdrive to incite bloodshed in an already crippled Bolivia.”
Rifai has also worked in 2019 as a lobbyist intern at the Syrian American Council, a neoconservative group that has lobbied for direct US military intervention in Syria, and hosted an opposition extremist who called for the genocide of Syria’s Alawite religious minority, while also campaigning to censor Blumenthal’s book “The Management of Savagery.”
EXCLUSIVE: Max Blumenthal of Grayzone arrived in Bolivia today, just 3 days before the country’s extremely volatile elections.
Mark my words, propaganda arms of the Russian and Venezuelan governments will be working in overdrive to incite bloodshed in an already crippled Bolivia pic.twitter.com/F8hN6QY2IN
In reality, numerous reports and our personal testimony on the ground shows that it is Bolivia’s right-wing political forces that have been inciting bloodshed, by threatening international electoral observers, journalists, indigenous activists, and MAS party candidates and supporters.
Top Bolivian officials have themselves stoked these threats. The de facto government’s representative to the OAS, Jaime Aparicio Otero, a staunch right-wing activist and supporter of the coup, publicly attacked electoral observers from the Progressive International and Puebla Group. Aparicio falsely smeared these independent monitors as “activists from MAS” who have supposedly “come to provoke.”
The Progressive International’s request for observer status was initially rejected by Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Court, but this decision was later overturned, following public backlash.
In response to Aparicio’s inflammatory remarks, a Bolivian right-wing activist posted a photo of Blumenthal and claimed he is an “instigator” who is supposedly spreading “false information.”
Grupo de Puebla / Internacional Progresista no son organizaciones de observación electoral sino activistas del MAS. Vienen a provocar. TSE sólo debe acreditar a las que han suscrito la Declaración de Principios para Observadores Internacionales de elecciones de la ONU
Aparicio Otero has himself expressed extremist views. In November 2019, days after the coup, Aparicio tweeted from Maryland that, “For the intolerant international left, being Catholic and of European descent has become a crime.” He accused the left of “crucifying” Camacho, and insisted, “That left is what has sunk Latin America.”
Para la izquierda internacional intolerante ser Católico y de orígen europeo se ha vuelto un delito. No conocen en absoluto al señor Camacho, pero ya lo han juzgado y crucificado. Ignoran deliberadamente a Pumari. Esa izquierda es la que ha hundido América Latina.
Another Bolivian right-wing extremist falsely implied that Evo Morales or Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was paying Blumenthal, linking to a photo of when he carried out a strictly journalistic interview with Maduro.
— ????????????????????????????????????❤️???????? (@AdriAeroshk) October 14, 2020
Other far-right activists also falsely accused The Grayzone electoral observers of “being paid by Morales,” calling Blumenthal a “parasite” who “is in our country to cause disturbances.”
The Grayzone is a completely independent media outlet with no fiscal relationship with any government.
This fact did not deter a horde of Bolivian right-wingers from claiming that Blumenthal is a “‘terrorist’ who works for the communists,” who came to “produce chaos.”
— ♥️????????una carioca collita????????????????????(@megustaserclau) October 14, 2020
Other fanatics tagged the US embassy, claiming the electoral observer Blumenthal “is in Bolivia preparing to burn the entire country.”
Los 100.000 dólares complementan los 20.000 dólares ya proporcionados a FAN en septiembre para combatir los incendios forestales.#AmericaActs#IncendiosForestales
— Embajada de Estados Unidos en Bolivia (@EmbEUAenBolivia) October 14, 2020
This environment of threats and intimidation has made it clear that supporters of Bolivia’s unelected coup regime are not open to holding a free and fair election on October 18, one in which international observers, yet alone candidates from the left-wing MAS party, are able to exercise their fundamental democratic rights. Whether leaders of that regime will allow a fair vote to proceed remains to be seen.
The Russians have an expression: words are deeds. Indeed, words contain a mesmeric power, and while this power can be used for good, it can also be used to harness dark and pernicious forces. For as Orwell understood all too well, words can be hijacked by a corrupt ruling class and used to indoctrinate, manipulate, and deceive.
In order to understand how the liberal class has come to be so beguiled by the forces of reaction, one must take note of the unprecedented liberal hysteria over racism, sexism, and homophobia. Indeed, the more liberals remain transfixed with this unholy trinity, the more indifferent they become to the terrible suffering inflicted by capitalism, as they are drawn further and further to the right, and pulled ever more deeply into a vortex of amorality.
This is not to suggest that racism, sexism, and homophobia do not exist, but rather, that these words have been co-opted by a ruling establishment which has succeeded in duping the faux-left into embracing policies that are deeply antithetical to the interests of American workers, patients, and students.
In politics either one believes in unions, single-payer, and public education or one doesn’t. Either one opposes imperialism, or one does not. The problem with anchoring a political discourse around who opposes racism, sexism, and homophobia and who (allegedly) doesn’t, is that these words are inherently ambiguous to the point where they can be manipulated to mean almost anything. All too often, the racists, sexists, and homophobes can simply comprise anybody who has the temerity to challenge liberal orthodoxy.
In an article in U.S. News and World Report titled “The Problem with Hillary-Hate,” Joanne Cronrath Bamberger bemoans the criticism of her hero, arguing that, “Pundits and journalists alike continually refer to her as corrupt and untrustworthy, even though the things people point to for support either are false or they can’t say why they use those words because, well, it’s just a feeling they have”. “We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary famously blurted out when asked about the brutal murder of Gaddafi. While this may never be mentioned on CNN, Libya was a country that had a high standard of living, and had attained a sound nationalization of its health care and education systems. Gaddafi infuriated the Western elites by attempting to establish a gold-backed dinar, leading NATO to unleash a barrage of merciless savagery and violence on a country that is now in a state of complete and utter lawlessness, yet this fails to elicit even so much as a shrug from the sanctimonious imaginary left. For these acts of barbarity pale in the decaying liberal mind with an accusation of sexism.
Bamberger continues:
Disagree with her policies all you want. Propose different plans that are better. But continuing hate-based commentary about Clinton implicitly says to us all that it will also be acceptable to throw the next woman presidential candidate – viable or not – under the bus with detestable accusations and made-up charges. To let that kind of hateful disrespect for any woman continue allows it to become our cultural norm.
This lamentable mentality is illustrative of how the sexism card can be used to stifle criticism – not only of an extremely corrupt politician – but of foreign policies that are nothing short of genocidal.
In an equally inane article in the HuffPost by Maya Dusenbery, titled “Medicine has a Sexism Problem, and it’s Making Women Sicker,” the author (who has rheumatoid arthritis and a female rheumatologist), writes:
While I’ve been a feminist writer for years, before I got sick, I hadn’t given much thought to how sex and gender bias has skewed what we know and don’t know about health and disease and how it affects the quality of medical care that patients receive. But after my brush with the autoimmune epidemic – an epidemic that seemed strangely off the radar of both the public and the medical system – I started to explore it. What I’ve discovered is that a lack of knowledge about women’s health, and a lack of trust in their reports of their symptoms – entwined problems that have become remarkably entrenched in the American medical system – conspire to leave many women misdiagnosed, dismissed and sick.
Hospital errors are the third leading cause of death in this country, and thousands of Americans continue to file for bankruptcy due to medical bills they cannot pay, while little Cuba has had constitutionally mandated single-payer since 1959, yet these are mere trivialities. The real problem with our health care system is that it is sexist.
If sexism is the son, racism is the father, and no one loves talking about racism more than liberals. Regrettably, they know nothing whatsoever about it. Last April, Milo Yiannopoulos was driven out of a New York bar by a pack of vituperative liberals who repeatedly yelled “Nazi scum get out.” That Milo is a flamboyant homosexual, married to a black man, and has a Jewish maternal grandmother surely makes him the strangest Nazi that ever lived. Whether one agrees with what he says or not, is neither here nor there. The point is that it is simply far too common for anyone who disagrees with fundamentalist liberal dogma to be beaten with the truncheons of racism and sexism. That the real Nazis are in Kiev, and that they violently seized power in a coup which was wholeheartedly backed by the Obama administration is, to quote John Pilger, beyond irony.
In an article in The Washington Post titled “The Racist Backlash Obama Has Faced During His Presidency,” by Terence Samuel, the author writes, “From the very beginning, Obama’s ascendance produced a huge backlash that was undeniably racist in nature….” This was an administration that destroyed Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, supported death squads in Syria that led to the destruction of over half the country, slaughtered thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, passed the National Defense Authorization Act, set aside a trillion dollars to modernize our nuclear weapons arsenal and brought relations with Moscow to their nadir. Moreover, these genocidal polices were paid for with trillions of dollars, while a vast swath of American society is either uneducated, unemployed, or without decent health insurance. Yet these acts of brazen criminality and barbarity are incidental. So let’s ignore the content of Obama’s character, and just talk about the color of his skin.
At a lecture at Trinity College Dublin in June, Hillary said, “Vladimir Putin has positioned himself as the leader of an authoritarian, white-supremacist and xenophobic movement….” What is striking about these remarks is that much of Hillary’s presidential campaign was anchored in Russophobia – undeniably one of the most dangerous forms of racism – and which contributed to an ideology that led to the murder of twenty-seven million Russians during the Second World War.
Liberals wield an extraordinary amount of power in the public schools, and regard themselves as valiant crusaders against racism. Yet while they repeatedly and vociferously maintain that the ethnic studies programs and the multicultural curriculum are the antithesis of racism, they are actually the quintessence of it. For these policies have fomented an unprecedented degree of segregation in our schools and in our society. Indeed, virtually any attempt at elevating the level of education for poor students of color – especially in the humanities – will invariably land a public school teacher in the doghouse with a liberal administrator. In this schizophrenic order that would make Orwell blush, the real racists are now holier-than-thou anti-racists.
Accusations of homophobia have also become quite useful when it comes to duping insouciant liberals into embracing reactionary policies. In an article in The Guardian titled “Iranian Human Rights Official Describes Homosexuality as an Illness,” the author bemoans the fact that, “An Iranian official whose job is to protect human rights has described homosexuality as an illness, after a UN special rapporteur expressed concerns about the systematic persecution of Iran’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.”
What a pity that the editors of a once respectable newspaper are happy to print anti-Iranian propaganda, so as to foment liberal bloodlust for yet another regime change. The author also fails to question why one of Washington’s best friends in the Middle East, the Saudi monarchy, a regime that delights in decapitating people as punishment for “sorcery and witchcraft,” is permitted to impose a theocracy infinitely more reactionary and medieval than the one in Iran, and can do so without even the faintest trace of rebuke from the Western media. And what of the Washington-backed jihadi death squads in Syria and Libya? What is their record on gay rights? Indeed, the same question could be raised regarding the rights of women living under the yoke of these barbarians. But they are “the good terrorists,” and so all is forgiven.
In an article in The Guardian by Peter Tatchell, titled “World Cup Fever, Gay Rights Abuses and War Crimes – It’s an Ugly Mix,” the author writes, “I’m here for the World Cup – but unlike thousands of fans, I won’t be cheering on this festival of football. LGBT+ people and many other Russians suffer state-sanctioned persecution and far-right violence. These abuses need to be challenged.” The decision of Washington to unleash Neo-Nazi and other far-right paramilitaries on the Donbass that have murdered thousands of ethnic Russians, Moscow’s military intervention in Syria that saved the country from the fate of Libya, and the fact that Russians enjoy free health care and superior education, are of no interest to Western propagandists. Russians are simply terrible people, and what better way to get liberals to embrace Russophobia (not to mention the annihilation of the planet), than to talk about the country’s lack of gay rights?
This is not to say that identity politics and multiculturalism have been a failure. On the contrary, they have been a resounding success. However, contrary to fundamentalist liberal dogma this success lies not unto the heart of the left, but under the iron heel of the right. Increasingly, those who have been indoctrinated to view the world through the warped prism of identity politics are incapable of seeing political reality for what it is, but for what the ruling establishment desires it to be. For they have been enshrouded in a veil of blindness.
That liberals have severed all ties with The Civil Rights Movement, unions, intellectual inquiry, and anti-imperialist sentiment is incontrovertible. The ongoing fervor and cultlike zealotry over racism, sexism, and homophobia has ushered in a new era of witch-hunts, and is indicative of a liberal class that is increasingly unmoored and unhinged. The psychosis of contemporary liberalism has defiled and contaminated our very language, and caused the national discourse to be paralyzed by a deranged political philosophy that has fomented a war of all against all, while allowing the elite to use liberals as attack dogs to vilify, intimidate, and silence all who oppose the machinations of capitalist power both at home and abroad.
Eric Schechter, a special contributing editor at The Greanville Post, is a Mathematics professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University. He maintains a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/eric.schechter.7509. He blogs at https://leftymathprof.wordpress.com/ 
