Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Will interviews Ollie Vargas about Bolivia

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Will talks to journalist Ollie Vargas about the victory for MAS in Bolivia, how it came about, and what it means for the future of the country. Follow Ollie @OVargas52 His colleague Camila is @camilateleSUR They contribute to Kawsachun News: https://twitter.com/KawsachunNews https://www.facebook.com/KawsachunNews/

Hello everybody, we're back. Welcome to this special bonus episode. And as promised, I am joined now by journalist Ali Vargas. Ali, how's it going? Very good. Very jubilant atmosphere, obviously, here in Bolivia. And yeah, thanks for having me on. I was going to ask you, where are you calling in from? At the moment, I'm in La Paz, Bolivia. And, you know, you said it's a jubilant atmosphere. So, I mean, like, yeah, just what's the energy like in La Paz on the nation as a whole right now? Well, Bolivia is a polarized country along class and racial lines. And in the working class, sort of urban areas such as El Alto here in La Paz, in certain rural areas, there's street parties going on, there's, you know, huge outbursts of joy. Whereas in the sort of center of La Paz and the centers of the big cities, there's a kind of defeated silence, because here is where the sort of pro-covo, Carlos Mesa vote is concentrated. And I think people here have known for a really long time, actually, that the mass is going to win, that the mass represents the majority of indigenous people in the rural areas and in the cities.

And although they were able to seize power briefly, thanks to a military le coup, supported by the United States, that their power was never really built on any kind of foundations. So they've been waiting for the inevitable. And now that it's come, well, people are being quiet. I mean, I've, you know, this yesterday I was walking around with a mass hat, which just a few weeks ago could have got you in quite a lot of trouble walking around the city center, but now everyone sort of bows their heads. And it's a new atmosphere. And it's a liberating one, certainly. So there was sort of a, like you said, wearing the mass hat around a couple weeks ago, it could have been, you know, an incitement to a little bit of, you know, intimidation or even violence. But now it's just sort of like people don't see the point in it because it's just sort of like the game is up. Yeah, yeah. In fact, during the Coon last year, there was a number of cases of people wearing sort of walking home or walking to a shop, let's say, and they're wearing a blue jacket, which is the color of the mass. And they'd get assaulted, they get beaten up by these sort of rioting protesters. Oh, you support the mass. Some of these people wearing, I think there's one case of a man wearing a Pepsi jacket.

They had the Pepsi logo on and it was blue. They thought that he was, you know, a communist. Well, he's probably representatives of the Coca-Cola company. Actually, as long as you're speaking about cool jackets, I saw a photo of Luis Arce wearing one of the coolest jackets I think I've ever heard. I've ever seen. And you know what I'm talking about? It's got this like really cool embroidery on the back and the guy with the flag. What's the deal with that jacket? Where can I get one? No, well, you have to become loved by the certain indigenous communities and then they'll make it one for you. All right. Well, I will get on that right away. Ali, I guess like just like before we get into like the pretty extraordinary events of this weekend's election, I was just hoping we could just go back and maybe for our listeners, could you help us sort of set the stage for us of the events that transpired over the last year?

And just like what led up to this pretty extraordinary election on Sunday? Well, Bolivia for 14 years under Evan Morales went from being the poorest country in Latin America into its fastest growing economy. And because of that, Evan Morales as a sort of left-wing socialist candidate was able to win re-election numerous times. But after 14 years, I think there's often there's a certain level of tiredness to say and he won in 2019, but on a reduced sort of percentage. And that's when there was a huge outburst of sort of right-wing protests, denouncing electoral fraud, using their only evidence was the report released by the OAS, which since has been completely discredited, even in papers like The New York Times, The Washington Post that have pointed out the flaws in the report. But that created that report incited a huge amount of violence in the sort of the centers of the big cities. And what we saw was sort of right-wing gangs going around, burning houses of sort of prominent leftists, assaulting indigenous people in the streets.

It was the most violent periods in Bolivia for around 20 years. Then we see the military stepping, intervene, order Evan Morales to leave. And then a new right-wing government takes power. A government that was never elected. In fact, the new president, Agnes, was from a party that got just 4% at the 2019 election. And then since then, Bolivia has gone through an extraordinary difficult time, extraordinarily difficult time for the majority of people. When Evan Morales left power, Bolivia was the number one fast-growing economy in South America. What happened next was they paralyzed all of the state development projects, key infrastructure projects, the industrialization of lithium, natural gas.

So we saw an economic crisis before COVID-19 hit. COVID-19 hit. They imposed a total rigid lockdown. But without providing any kind of support for the majority of the people in the informal economy, which is the majority of the country who lost their income overnight. So consumer demand disappears. What happens then, small businesses begin to disappear en masse. Unemployment tripled. The economy has contracted 11%.

So this kind of neoliberal approach firstly to the economy, then to COVID-19 strategy has destroyed all of the work of the past 14 years and lifting Bolivia out of poverty. Poverty is now at the sort of levels that it was in 2005 when people rose up and swept Evan Morales to power. So, you know, that's going to, although there's a jubilant mood obviously amongst the people who have faced persecution this past year, the people who have been arrested, jailed, massacred, tortured this past year. Obviously, there's a huge sense of relief of happiness. But I think the next few days, people are going to be, people are going to remember the enormous challenges they're ahead, the fact that, you know, you're going to have to rebuild the country from scratch. You're going to have to rebuild an economy that's been completely destroyed. And that's not going to be overnight. It's a huge amount of expectation, but it's going to take quite a long time to put things right.

There's a number of other obstacles, like the fact that, you know, just a few days before the election, the coup regime took out an enormous IMF loan. So now the Louis Sartre's government is going to be saddled with this huge illegitimate debt. You know, there's a number of problems they're going to be facing. But, you know, Louis Sartre has done this before. When Evo Morales took power in 2005, when Louis Sartre took the minister, the economy ministry, he was the economy minister throughout Evo's government. Bolivia was equally destroyed. Carlos Mesa was the president in 2005. He is the neoliberal candidate now.

And Bolivia was taking out IMF loans to pay the salaries of public sector workers, of teachers, things like this. Which was an awful situation to be in, to take out debt, not to use it for public investment, but to use it just to pay the basic cost of the state. You know, it's like taking out credit card loans to pay your bills. It's a desperate situation to be in. But, you know, throughout the 14 years that Evo Morales ruled in Bolivia, Bolivia managed to pull itself out of that awful position. I mean, yeah, I want to talk about Luis Arce and Carlos Mesa. I mean, the interesting thing here is you mentioned Arce was Evo Morales' economic minister throughout his tenure. But Carlos Mesa was the government that was in power before Evo Morales, correct?

Yeah, that's right. Carlos Mesa was vice president in 2002. He was elected with the Gonzales Sanchez de los Alas on 22% of the vote. 2003, a year later, the president is overthrown. He flies off to Miami with backs for the cash. And Carlos Mesa takes power. Two years later, Carlos Mesa is at the throne. So for the most of the, many of the people who voted both in 2019 and the real election, I guess now, yesterday, on Sunday and this sort of redo election,

have a living memory of what both of these parties' governance are like. So like, what was the contrast being offered to Bolivian people between Carlos Mesa's party, which was the most prominent opponent of Maas, who was the one who could garner the most amount of popular support and was like clearly going to be the one to like, if anyone was going to defeat them, it would have been him. And the 14 years of what Maas and Evo Morales in power looked like for the majority of, sorry, Bolivians. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, in a way, voters were very informed insofar as the majority of people had lived through both what was on offer by each candidate. And Mesa was, Mesa is just, it's quite a tragic figure.

The fact that he became the sort of the leading right-wing figure just shows how weak the sort of Bolivian bourgeois he is. He's someone, he's literally overthrown by popular uprising just a few years ago. He destroyed the economy that was just chaos on the streets. And the fact that there's no one more popular than him goes to show the sort of thin grill that neoliberalism in Bolivia has always offered. And the fact that he's only the leading candidate, leading right-wing candidate, because he was the least hated. The other right-wing candidate was Fernando Camacho, who was the one that led the sort of violent street protests last year. He's the sort of most extremist section in the sort of Eastern region of Santa Cruz, representing the sort of big cattle ranchers. So the oligarchy in the East, loggers, all of the most reactionary elements.

He's the one who went, you know, when Evan Morales left, he went into the presidential palace and said that, you know, Jesus has returned. And like, never again will Pachamama, who's the indigenous god of Mother Earth, never again will Pachamama return here. And but like, I think a lot of the sort of middle class, upper class in here in La Paz, I think it's probably similar in the U.S. Where you have the sort of coastal elites who look at the sort of, some of the more right-wing elites in other parts of the country, see them as kind of brutes and savages and like, ah, you know, we're more sophisticated, we're more culture. They don't have the stomach to just be like openly fascist, you know, like they like all of the neoliberal economic arrangements, but they don't like the embarrassment of having to deal with like, you know, open right-wing thuggery and sort of theocratic fascism. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in Santa Cruz is a region where, you know, till very recently, there was practically slavery,

you know, big landowners with sort of indigenous serfs. That was the case until Evan Morales' land reform in 2006. And you still have that culture, you know, it's sort of ex-creation fascists that own huge areas of land in Santa Cruz, there's actual stutter people who, you know, go around whipping people and, you know, calling people Indians and things. And the sort of middle class here in La Paz see that as just like very un-cultured and very brutish. But they're proposing essentially the same economic setup, they're proposing free market economy. And they think, you know, they try and define themselves, ah, we don't want violence, we don't want repression. And in Bolivia, the social movements are so strong that if you ever try and impose privatization, neoliberalism,

the only way to do that is, you know, through force, you know, down the barrel of a gun. So whatever their cultural sort of differences, they end up at the same place and they did last year. Now, I saw that, you know, obviously in 2019, Evan Morales had to flee the country. I think he went to Mexico, right? Where's he been this last year? The coup happened. Evan Morales went into hiding in the tropical of Cochirabamba. That's where I live most of the time, which is where he was a union leader. He was hiding in the jungle for several days. Mexico, the Mexican government offered to take him out.

They sent a plane to come out. He went to Mexico. But shortly after he went to Argentina. And that's where he is now in Buenos Aires because there's a huge Bolivian community in Argentina. There's about two million Bolivians in Argentina. There's only like 10 million, 11 million Bolivians in Bolivia itself. So it's a huge part of the country in Argentina, which is overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly sports the mass. In this election, around 90% of Bolivian migrants in Argentina voted for the mass. Why? Because those who went to Argentina are economic migrants,

people who left on mass, mass migration in the 80s and 90s when neoliberalism was first imposed. And what we saw there was privatization of almost every state industry. Unemployment rose by three, four times. And you saw over a million people leave during that time looking for work. Now, whole sections of Buenos Aires, just Bolivians working class people who remember what it's like to go hungry, remember what it's like to lose your job and be left on the street by neoliberal government. So they've always been sort of a hardcore vote for the left. So I mean, I saw today that Evo has said that he will be returning to Bolivia.

So this will be sort of a homecoming for him. So he will be returning, but in what capacity will he be involved in the mass government? Or will he be sort of a public figure or what? Will he have any official role to play? Yeah, Evo Morales is going to return. Evo Morales is the historic leader of Bolivia social movements. Evo Morales is the person who took the indigenous struggles in the rural areas out of just demands around human rights or land, but actually took it out of a defensive struggle into an offensive struggle, the struggle to take power, the political struggle.

He's the one who led and articulated that. So there will always be a place for him in the movement towards socialism, his party. So he's going to return, but he's not going to be in government. Luis Arce today and with Fredo Chavez, who's the main lawyer for the mass, they said, Evo Morales is not going to be in government. He's not going to rule, but he's going to play a leading role in the party. He's going to play a leading political role. And Evo himself said that he wants to use his experience as a union leader

when he fought the DEA, USAID, the US military presence, and then building a political party to take power. He's going to use that experience to train sort of new young leaders. So yeah, it's very interesting. He's still the president of the Six Federations of the Tropico of Cochabamba, which is the best organized social movements around Cochabamba. So he's going to assume that. I think he's going to speak to the world as a union leader.

I think it's going to be an interesting period. And what about Haninez? What's she up to? Is she just going to like take her giant Bible and go home or what? Well, I mean, I guess tomorrow we'll get the official count. There's people still nervous that they might try and, you know, last-ditch attempts, maybe a second coup. But the victory is so overwhelming that they seem to have accepted the defeat.

Haninez is, you know, it's just the tragic figure. She was never supposed to play a leading role in anything. And the whole period has been a disaster in terms of the economy, in terms of the handling of COVID-19. And I think the final humiliation for her was this election. She declared a candidacy in January. And then just a few weeks before the election, she realized that she was hated and she was on 9% approval ratings.

And she was in fourth place. So she withdrew from the race and the pressure from other routing forces. But it was too late. The ballot papers had already been printed. So she appeared when I went to vote the other day, she was there on the ballot. So when she went to cast a vote, she saw her own face on the ballot paper. She had to vote against it. But she couldn't vote for herself unless it would be thrown out

or it would just automatically not count, right? Yeah, she had to vote against herself because if you did mark her box, it would be counted as a spoiled ballot. You know, it's funny, with her dropping out, there was this, I guess I'll say strange, but not altogether surprising phenomenon of what are, you know, purportedly objective like newscasters and journalists, essentially coaching her to do just that.

You know, just sort of being like, hey, Janine, it's time to go. You know, we really want to beat, you know, like, this is the only way, you know, you can beat Moss or whatever as if you drop out. That wasn't coming from partisans. That was coming from, like, CNN and places like that. Yeah. A lot of that pressure was exerted against Agnes and against Fernando Camacho, the sort of far-right guy.

They're saying, oh, you know, because you're preciousness, you're going to let the mass in. It's partly true, like, you know, these people are just like jealous sort of petty people who just want their kind of own little section of power. And so, obviously, Camacho made the calculation that if he withdraws, they just, you know, whatever they offer him, whatever corrupt deals they offer him, they'll just throw him aside where he wants to have his own position. And he won that.

But in the end, it didn't matter. Even if all of the right-wing candidates withdrew, the mass got 52, another poll showed 53%, so it didn't matter. But I think the divisions within the right is what I talked about earlier, you know, this kind of cultural division they have. It's quite petty. It's quite, like, nonsensical. But it's part of why they've just never been able to win.

And, you know, the last time they won an election was in 2002, when they got 22% of the vote. That's their last sort of big victory. So it's not looking good for them. You talked a little bit earlier about how Morales was the first person to take the indigenous peoples of Bolivia's, like their struggles out of a defensive posture into a political arena. And could you talk a bit about how the ability to control Bolivia's quite considerable natural resources in terms of natural gas and lithium as being part of their sort of central plank of both how they would govern Bolivia,

but also how they would, you know, redistribute wealth and, you know, like, grow the Bolivian economy. But also why that is such poison to the sort of Bolivian bourgeoisie, but also why that makes mass prime candidates for regime change backed by America? Yeah, I mean, the issue of natural resources is central. It's front and center, about everything. And part of that indigenous struggle, as I said, part of taking, I think in a lot of countries, you know, there's a number of NGOs and sort of human rights groups will talk about, oh, you know, we've got to protect the indigenous people, their waters being contaminated,

all that, you know, this land is being like eroded or something. We've got to try to stop this, like, bad thing that's happening. And I said, no, we've been doing this for too long. We have to be the ones that actually run the country. That's the only way we're going to stop our problems. You know, you can solve one problem, solve another problem, and then it'll come back again. You know, the only way to actually, you know, build a country for ourselves is to govern ourselves, to take power, organize a political party, and rule over the country.

And the issue of natural resources was seen as part of, like, an indigenous, like, an identity thing. These are our resources, these are our land, these are, you know, territory, and we should use it for ourselves. I think that's something also that clashes a little bit with some of the liberal sort of ideas of indigenous politics or human rights type things that, you know, say, oh, no, we don't want to exploit, we don't want to extract all these natural resources. We want to protect this land and be pristine and, you know, et cetera. I don't know if I'm right, what the masses always said was that these resources are ours,

and we need to use it to benefit our people. And why? Because in a country like Bolivia, any global south third world country, where does the government get money from? If you want to build schools or hospitals or whatever, where do they get money from? You can't get it from taxes, because, like, in these countries, no one pays taxes. Like, rich people very easily take their money out to Miami or over. And the rich people aren't even that rich, anyway, compared to the US or Europe. So they don't even pay that much tax.

The majority of working class people don't pay any tax at all because they work in the informal economy. You know, maybe they sell food in a car in the street. They aren't paying sales tax on that. The government doesn't know that's even happening. That's all just informal economy, money circulating without being registered. So where do you get the money from? You can only get it by taking control of natural resources, also other key industries, using those profits, taking those profits, running the company efficiently,

and then using those profits to invest in roads and schools and hospitals, all that sort of thing. And if a country like Bolivia or any global south third world country doesn't do that, then they're resigning themselves to just never being able to provide any kind of basic needs for people. Because how else is the government supposed to get money? So people see their natural resources and nationalization as an extremely personal thing as part of themselves. And when people come along and propose privatizing certain things, privatizing lithium, privatizing gas, people see it as like they're being robbed, like someone's coming up to them on the street and taking their stuff. And people get extremely offended.

And that's why the issue has been key in the selection and always. And when it comes to something like lithium or natural gas, the question is not development, but it's about we are going to bring these incredibly valuable resources to market on terms that are ours, that are not just like we're being looted at the pleasure of fucking Western extraction companies. And then like you mentioned earlier, it gets into a situation where if you don't do that, then like the Mesa government is paying teacher salaries with IMF loans, which will straightjack at the country for generations. And come with all kinds of strings attached about what you can and can't spend your own country's money on

in terms of like debt to GDP and things like that. Yeah, of course, if you can't pay your own basic costs, like you're not free country. I mean, it's the same on an individual level. How many people around the world live with crushing debt? Do those people feel particularly free? Of course not. Debt is a form of slavery as well. And the only way to emerge from that is to have your own income by having control of your natural resources,

not just natural resources, but Key State and Bolivia, the airlines are nationalised, the telecommunications are nationalised, the basic public service are nationalised, the airports are nationalised. All of these things provide huge revenue for the believing government, which they can then spend on things. But yeah, no, that issue is key. It's key to being an independent country as well. And like, you know, from Bolivia going from being one of the poorest countries in South America

to the fastest growing economy, like you said, there's all these kind of Western NGO and sort of well-meaning liberal organisations that are supposed to, they want to help development in countries like Bolivia. But the one thing that they don't abide is, like you said, those countries controlling their own national resources and developing them themselves. It's all just about like, oh, how can we bring your country to a global market that is controlled by us and then, oh, like, in exchange you get, you know, to have roads and schools. Yeah, of course. I mean, the sort of global setup that, you know, benefits Western countries

is a setup in which, you know, countries like Bolivia or Peru wherever, you know, take their oil or their gas to Lithium and just sort of extract it, send it off to the United States where it can be processed in factories, high-tech, et cetera. Whereas Bolivia said no. Bolivia said, well, under every moralist, said we're going to build the capacity to produce things like batteries and electric cars within Bolivia under state and company, because then if you sell a car or a battery, that's worth more than just selling salt, you know.

That's what Lithium is. It's salt. So you earn more money from that. And that money then, if it's a state-owned company that goes to the state and can then be used for, you know, public services to help people's needs. But obviously, I think the whole kind of NGO sort of industry is very attached to a wider kind of U.S., not just U.S., but Western foreign policy interests in kind of keeping these countries down. So a big issue has been like environmentalism, right? I don't know. You may have remembered around last year, just before the coup, groups like Extinction Rebellion

and things attacking other moralists, or like a few years ago as well, there was, whenever a moralist tried to build a road connecting two key regions of the country, and part of that road would go through some forests, and there's a sort of huge sort of outcry by Western NGOs. But actually, you know, it's the same whether it's Bolivia or China. Countries have a right to develop and industrialize and have living standards similar to that of the West. How, you know, countries like the U.S. or the U.K., wherever, people live, have a certain standard of living of sort of dignity.

You know, people have running, like, working toilets. People have, like, internet roads and, like, schools and things. And how is that paid? It's payable because the government has enough money, and the government has enough money because it contacts things because there's an economy. And how did that economy come about through industrialization, which was hugely destructive to the environment, obviously. But when you say that countries like Bolivia mustn't do that, you're saying that, well, is it okay for us to, you know, have Netflix and, like, Wi-Fi in our homes?

But it's not okay for you guys to have it. You know, you should, like, live in the forest or live in, like, shacks forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, you know, as long as there's some country out there that's still, like, fern gully, I can feel good about, you know, my lifestyle here in this country where I'm driving a car everywhere and, you know, like, just eating fast food and, you know, being on Wi-Fi 24-7. Yeah, it's arrogance, you know. And actually what's interesting is that development in countries like Bolivia and China

was actually a lot more sustainable than it was, you know, 100 years ago in the Industrial Revolution. Actually, Bolivia was a country that was building, you know, across the Andes, there's solar panels, wind turbines. It's one of the countries that invest the most in green technology. And Evan Morales discussed this issue many, many years ago when he first took power. He said, Western countries have a debt to colonize countries. Talking about reparations, essentially. But not under reparations, and it's just kind of, you know, a lot of activists talk about reparations,

whatever, in a kind of nebulous way as if it's just like writing a check to, you know, God knows who. But what Evan Morales was talking about was that Western countries should pay for green development and hand over green technologies to countries, to global South countries, so that those countries can develop in a sustainable way. I think that's a very interesting idea and I think it should be, you know, discussed around the world. Just to say directions for a little bit. You know, I'm an outside observer of these events that happened in Bolivia and here in America. You know, I remember watching the coup unfold last year and then like the struggles to get to this point

and this election from afar. But you know, one of the features of that is sort of taking on American commentary about what's going on in Bolivia from our capitalist press through outlets like the Atlantic and the Economist and things like that. And these outlets that, you know, quite frankly cheered on this coup when it happened and then most, more often than not, just said this wasn't a coup. And now that this election, the results have been so overwhelmingly, you know, in mass's favor, which would seem to just basically confirm the exact same results or if I expand the results that happened in 2019, there seems to be a line that's come out now that like, well, Mass won this election

and there's going to be a peaceful transfer of power, so it was never a coup. There seems to be this line that like if the coup doesn't work, then it was never a coup in the first place and you can't complain about it. And it's just like, well, I mean, there was a whole year where the military disrupted the democratic process and then like it was quite a bit of violence to get to this point and it had to be a pretty disciplined and well-organized, you know, popular uprising to demand. I mean, like, they weren't even going to let mass stunned and stand in this election, right? Yeah, that's a stupid comment.

I mean, the Franco dictatorship in Spain, you know, fascist dictatorship, after that end of a referendum in Chile in Pinochet, you know, that ended with a referendum with a vote because, you know, some dictatorships last until they're overthrown. Some dictatorships can see the strength of popular feeling against them and do step down peacefully. This government hasn't left yet. Let's see if they do step down, if they do hand over power peacefully. But so far, they seem to have accepted their defeat precisely because it's so overwhelming. And yeah, you're right.

The circumstances in which they ruled have in no way been democratic. This government that's in power right now is not elected. They didn't win any presidential election. They ruled for almost a year. They didn't even want to hold elections. They postponed elections three times and wanted to do so again. The only reason we had elections at all was because in early August there was a mass uprising, a general strike. People paralyzed the whole country, blocking all the key highways.

Huge protests in the working class areas of the cities. The country completely shut down. It was an uprising. And that's how the guarantees for elections and the right to vote was won. That's why there's no reason we went to vote a couple of days ago. So it's absurd. And if you look at how they've ruled during this time, their first week in power, the first 10 days in power, they committed two massacres.

And then after that, they persecuted every single prominent leftist. The listeners may have been aware at the time there was a big sort of international story of the left-wing mayor of a town called Vinto, a woman named Patricia Arce. She was of the mass and she was kidnapped and tortured by these right wing protesters, anti-Evil Morales protesters. But it was, you know, the world was outraged, as I remember at the time. But that's not all that happened to her. After the coup, she was persecuted throughout this whole year. She currently has 17 criminal charges against her, including for terrorism.

Accusing a mayor of a small town of terrorism because apparently she attended a protest. You know, they broke into her home, arrested her entire family. That's how she's lived this past year. That's how every single prominent mass member has lived. Patricia Arce has numerous charges, corruption charges were invented against him, the day after he was declared to be the presidential candidate for the mass. You know, that's how we've, that's been the political atmosphere for the past year. Nothing at all democratic about this.

So, you know, I guess it is people, you know, all these Western commentators, they presented this as like, the people rejected Evan Morales, but it shows who they consider people. You know, people protest thing. Well, why upper class people? And then the people that after the coup, they'll protest thing to bring back Evan Morales. We're indigenous rural, in indigenous rural areas, working class areas of the big cities. But they're not the people. You know, they're not people there on those hordes or the unwashed masses or something.

Thugs, criminals, I don't know, terrorists, that's what the current government calls them. So, you know, I think it's a lot of people feeling quite embarrassed around now. You know, they're talking about how, oh, Bolivians have rejected Evan Morales and now 53% of the country's voted for his party. So they've got to explain themselves somehow. Yeah. Well, I guess this all begs the question. Like the whole thing was like, oh, it wasn't a coup because the coup didn't work.

So I guess the real question is, why didn't it? That's going to be, I think, very, we're going to have to investigate that, you know. There's so many reasons. The most obvious reasons is that the Bolivian, as I said earlier in the program, the Bolivian bourgeoisie is incredibly weak, rarely poorly developed. They never, throughout Evan Morales' period in government, whenever they stood and lost in every election, they never presented the natural proposal for the country. They never, you know, they, whenever Morales would nationalize this or that,

they'd oppose it and say, oh, this is communism. When election time came around, they'd be like, oh, no, no, we're not going to privatize anything. We're not going to cut this social spending that we were against at the time. No, no, no, this is all fine. We're just against communism. Well, you know, we're not going to say which part of it, because actually most of the policies of Evan Morales were very popular. So they've never been able to articulate an actual political ideology

beyond just kind of racial resentment and the love of free markets, which they don't even want to say too explicitly anyway. So they're very weak. They've never had any popular support. They're very divided. As I said earlier, there's a huge regional issue. The corruption as well over the past years has been extraordinary. You know, Bolivia has been with the countries that has handled COVID-19 the worst.

People dying in the streets, hospitals collapsed. And when the government bought ventilators, 500 ventilators from Spain, it turned out that they robbed half the money from it. They paid double and then put some officials pocketed all the money. That was the time when the country was going broke. So even their own support, even middle-class, upper-class people, were just appalled at this level of corruption, of just open thievery. So there's no social base.

Whereas on the mass, the movement towards socialism, I think it's an extraordinary organization, because it's not a party. It's not just, you know, some left-wing party with good ideas and individuals kind of go on the Internet and join up and sort of enter their bank details. No, it is a coalition of different social movements, Indigenous groups, rural workers unions, urban workers unions. And they're formed together to create what they call a political instrument.

And the committee that runs the party is a committee of the leaders of those movements. So even if you persecute one or two people, one or two leaders, those movements are there because they're in every community, every region of the country, every workplace, every community, the grassroots level. So you can't just, you can't make that disappear. Even if you, you know, shut down their office or like take all their funds or whatever. Yeah, no, you use the phrase a political instrument. And I thought that was an interesting one because I saw it in Morales' comments today.

He said, I'm sort of paraphrasing here, but he said socialism is the only political instrument for the sovereignty of the people and that's why we want. Yeah, because they don't see the masses as a party. You know, they elect them and then the politicians go off and do whatever. They see it as an instrument that they own with which they intervene in politics, which they can rule the country, you know. I think that's got lessons to teach. It's left all over the world, you know, that political struggle has to go along with

sort of grassroots organization, union struggles, all of that. And likewise, that struggle can't just stay on X, Y and Z issues, go beyond that and move into the political sphere. But one without the other doesn't really work. That's how, you know, you can disappear over time. Obviously in Bolivia and every other country around the world, there's been a million left-wing parties that have existed for a short while and then disappeared. But the masses is something that's going to stay.

And the masses being persecuted has been, you know, its members have been jailed, shot, massacred. But it's still here. It's actually bigger than it was last year because it exists at an organic level. It doesn't just exist as a sort of agglomeration of individuals. I mean, you're right. I mean, like if there are lessons to learn for the rest of the world or America here, I mean, obviously it's very hard to compare these two countries because, you know, America's rate of unionization has just, you know, collapsed.

So it's a little hard for leftists in this country to just call for a general strike and think that like, okay, well, you're skipping a few steps here. But I mean, it is certainly very inspiring. And I guess like the last question I want to ask you is sort of the wild card. You mentioned it's a jubilant moment, but, you know, maybe people are a little nervous as well. I mean, given what happened with the last election and how easily, you know, Morales was, I mean, no one say easily, but, you know, he was deposed through the military. So I guess the wild card here is, what about the military?

What about the Bolivian military? Where do they stand now? And how do members of Moss and like both the politicians and their constituents, what do they, what do they think like the future may hold? I mean, I would imagine they're sort of sleeping with one eye open when it comes to these things. No one's, no one's in denial that this is going to be, this isn't going to be an easy ride. People, I think, within Bolivia, Bolivia, the mass wasn't at a level to say the ruling parties in Venezuela or Cuba were at where they've, you know, there's been a much bigger effort to change the political culture

of the military, of the police, to have those institutions as like an armed forces of the people. In Bolivia, there was, of course, there were changes within the military during ever Morales's government, but there was never really an effort to like instill a political culture. They were still under the kind of illusion that the military can be a kind of neutral, should be a neutral institution. And it was for most of ever Morales's government, it was something that worked perfectly well, but at the moment when they felt that they could intervene, they did. And that's, people feel, people feel extremely hurt, people feel confused,

but people feel now more, there's a huge sentiment to people as well, people looking to countries like Venezuela, how you can tie state institutions to the social movements, popular movements, and realizing that the state, of course, is not a neutral institution that someone could just use. The state has either belongs to one class or it belongs to another, and a lot of people have learned the lesson now that even if you control the state or parts of the state, it doesn't mean that you actually have power in sort of total sense. It doesn't mean that the kind of character and institutions of the state still aren't under the control of a different class with different interests. So I think there's got to be a more integral approach to how people view the state.

But I think for the next few days, the focus is on just things going peacefully. You know, Louis Saras is not going to be saying anything against the military for the next few days. He doesn't want them to launch another coup. That's a possibility, you know, that could happen. So we've got to wait for a bit before we tackle these things. Well, Ali Vargas, I want to say best of luck to you. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and for your reporting on this. So if our listeners want to find your writing or reporting, where should they go? Well, I have my own Twitter page over August 52 on Twitter.

We have our outlet, CalSatron News, on Twitter and Facebook. That's an English language page of Radio CalSatron Coco, which is a local radio station here that I work for. And that's something that I do together as well with another brilliant journalist. You may have heard of her probably, is Camila Escalante. You can find her at Camila Press and at Camila Telesud on Twitter. She's been crucial. She's the person who sort of told me to come here, you know, when everything was just like collapsing and the coup was just that it's high. And I was myself scared to come into the country and she encouraged me to do so.

So I think, you know, together with Camila, we've managed to, we've tried to let the world know what's happening in Bolivia because no one else was doing it and it's been difficult. You know, there's been a lot of sacrifices, a lot of threats, a lot of difficult moments. But, you know, now it's all been worth it, definitely. Well, Ollie, once again, best of luck, stay safe and please keep it up. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Cheers. Thank you very much. Cheers.