COUPS & CIVIL WAR

RAINER SHEA—In Chile, the people just voted by more than two-thirds to throw out the constitution which was created for them during the Pinochet dictatorship. This means that the era of dictatorship can now honestly be considered over, and that the neoliberal policies which the old constitution enforced are vulnerable to being eliminated by the democratic will of the population-which has suffered on a unique scale from Covid-19 due to these policies.

BEN NORTON—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.

PATRICK LAWRENCE—Do we have prima facie proof of Washington’s involvement in the coup against Morales? This is rarely available in such circumstances as these. As in many other cases, we may have to wait for the historians and the declassification of foreign- relations records. The closest we come so far in the Bolivia case is a set of 16 audio recordings released Nov. 10 by El Periódico, an independent publication in Costa Rica. These appear to record top coup plotters as they plan actions against the Morales government and, in one, discuss the support they receive from Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Bob Menendez — all of whom have taken a hand in previous Latin American interventions.

ALVARO GARCIA LINERA—Over several weeks, the police had shown great incompetence and neglect of their duty to protect the ordinary people whom fascistic gangs threatened with beatings and persecution. But since last Friday — refusing to recognize their civilian command — many of these same police have shown an extraordinary capacity for attacking, detaining, torturing, and killing protesters from the popular classes. Of course, in the earlier [anti-Morales] protests, it had been a matter of reining in the children of the middle classes — and the police were supposedly powerless to react.

CASS DEAN—Comes the Revolution, the displaced ruling class immediately starts organizing a counter-coup and lots of unpleasantness ensues, including mistrust between people. But Cuba’s ruling class, and its psycho sadist enforcers, were intertwined with both the leading civil criminals, the Mafia, the leading underground criminals, the CIA, and the politicians, of a large country only 90 miles away that rolled out the welcome mat.