Searching for the Dead | Buscando los muertos

By Juan José Toro Montoya, Visión 360:

When “Evismo” gets its dead, it will have one more argument for its ultimate goal: to set the country on fire and seize control of it.

Bolivian politicians are crafty. They know perfectly well the game they’re playing, but they pretend to be clueless in front of cameras and microphones.

Let’s look at what they know and think we don’t: protests such as strikes, blockades, marches, and roadblocks aim to produce deaths so they can be used as banners.

Yes. And this isn’t a speculative claim, but rather an analysis of what has happened in conflicts over the past 30 years — that is, an entire generation.

Since at least the “Christmas Massacre” in 1996, the dead have been used — both by protesters and by governments — as a catalytic and often decisive element. In Amayapampa, when the combined forces of the army and police caused civilian deaths, those responsible realized they had screwed up badly by ordering deadly fire, so they “manufactured” a death on their own side: Colonel Eduardo Rivas, who was shot in the head. That way, when the miners demanded justice for their dead, the government waved its own dead in response.

In 2019, the crisis unleashed by electoral fraud resulted in 27 deaths, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. But it’s worth noting that at the time of Evo Morales’ resignation from the presidency, the death toll had not yet reached ten. The subsequent protests by his supporters — both in Sacaba and Senkata — raised the number. Morales and MAS, then still united, used the dead to build the theory of a coup d’état that is still used today. The circumstances of what happened at the Senkata plant — which was nearly blown up by explosives thrown by protesters — remain unclear. Then-Minister of Government Arturo Murillo, who is still imprisoned in the United States, accused MAS-affiliated snipers of causing the deaths in order to turn the police operation into a massacre. That version has not been definitively confirmed or denied.

What is the goal today, with a blockade that uses the economic crisis as a pretext, when the main objective is — once again — to force Evo Morales’ presidential candidacy? The first answer is this: deaths.

Comfortably seated in front of a microphone at a radio station that serves him, Morales has denied ordering the roadblocks, but justifies them with the same argument used in the statements aired by that station: “the blockades are the expression of the Bolivian people in response to the crisis.” But the blockades are not nationwide — they’re only near the “Evista” enclaves, where he can exert control through threats or by paying the protesters.

The blockades are violent, with attacks on civilians included — as happened in Llallagua — because the “Evistas” want to force the security forces to take repressive action. Once they do, they’ll get the deaths they need to denounce a massacre and play the victim, as always.

When “Evismo” gets its dead, it will have one more argument for its ultimate goal: to set the country on fire and seize control of it.

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