While our eyes and ears were trained to the impeachment hearings concerning our president's attempt to solicit foreign interference in the upcoming presidential election, clandestine and nefarious forces were at work overturning an election in Latin America.
This was nothing new of course. We have a long and tortured history of interfering in Latin American affairs. The Central Intelligence Agency sponsored and orchestrated the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, replacing him with military despot and war criminal Augusto Pinochet. Under the cover of security interests, we have conducted or supported coups and attempted coups in Haiti, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Panama, Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela and Bolivia.
Perhaps because it is named for Simon Bolivar, the founder of Latin American independence, Bolivia holds a special place in the history of our subversion. The CIA carried out Bolivian coups in 1952, 1964, 1970 and 1980 prior to the current action.
It seems the United States of America holds a patent on hypocrisy when it comes to supporting the principles of democracy in the world.
The most recent event was the overthrow of Evo Morales in Bolivia. To fully understand this event and to appreciate its gravity, we need to go back to the year 2005 when Morales became the first elected indigenous leader in the American hemisphere. Long ruled by military juntas and corrupt elites, the Bolivian people suffered from mass poverty.
Morales vowed to lift the people up from poverty and he largely kept that promise. In twelve years of his government, the poverty rate fell from an astonishing 60% to 35% in 2018. The extreme poverty rate fell from 38% to 15%. Like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, no one did more for his nation's poor than Morales. No one came even close.
Evo Morales served his people well but he was not perfect. Like Chavez he appeared to confuse the movement he represented with himself. No movement can survive if it is dependent on one individual. Morales won three presidential elections by large margins but when he sought a fourth term he discarded the expressed will of the people in a February 2018 referendum asking him not to run again.
Morales did run again and there is little question but that he won. Still, his defiance of the term-limit referendum provided an opening to his enemies including it seems the clandestine forces of the United States of America. What follows is a timeline of events from Election Day to the present.
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