There were two reasons given for the coup. The first was that Morales had acted against the law by seeking another term, following his failure to win a 2016 referendum which, had it passed, would have altered the law around term limits. Bolivia’s constitutional court ruled that he could run again in 2019 anyway, but critics charge that the court is packed with his allies in the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party, making the ruling a farce. What is missing from all of these charges is that the constitutional court is popularly elected, chosen by the people of Bolivia. If this isn’t a democratic system then one has to ask – what do we call the systems in the US and Canada where the executive chooses Supreme Court justices who then sit for decades, sometimes till the end of their life? If a leader without term limits is a dictator, what does that make Angela Merkel?

The second charge is that the government committed voter fraud on October 21, the night of the recent election, to push Morales to victory. Bolivian presidential elections operate on a two-round system. A candidate can win outright in the first round if they win 50 per cent or more of the vote, or if they win 40 per cent or more and have a 10-point lead over their nearest challenger. Bolivia has two vote counts. The first is the quick count, which is an unofficial count implemented on the recommendation of the Organization of American States (OAS), and provides a preliminary but incomplete result to give the media something to report on. The official count is legally binding and takes longer, as it includes votes from rural regions that take much longer to be transported and counted. The quick count ended on October 21 with 83.85 per cent of tally sheets counted, and Morales slightly under the 10 point lead he needed over his opponent Carlos Mesa of the Revolutionary Left Front (a centre-right party, despite its name). 

The ending of the quick count, and subsequent release of the official count which ended with Morales at 47.08 per cent to Mesa’s 36.51 per cent, sparked allegations that the government halted the quick count in order to stuff ballots. Facing nationwide protests, Morales accepted an audit by the OAS (an organization far from sympathetic to leftist governments) to determine if electoral fraud had occurred. Strangely enough, the opposition rejected this audit, claiming (without evidence) that it was clear Morales had rigged the elections and that his presidency was illegitimate. On November 10, the OAS declared that it had found irregularities in the electoral process, and recommended that new elections be held. A study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that the OAS report produced no evidence to indicate that there had been irregularities, but Morales stayed true to his word and complied with the recommendation. 

Despite his conciliatory actions, he was forced from office hours later, with the military demanding he step down. Opposition figures declared that they would not accept new elections with him as a candidate. Evo Morales did nothing illegal, complied with the requests of international observers, and was still kicked out of office and forced to flee the country. The “resignations” didn’t stop with him. Álvaro García Linera, his Vice President, was also forced to step down, as were senior MAS members of Congress. The military forced out the first five people in the line of presidential succession until they got to a non-MAS politician, Jeanine Añez, who has now been illegally sworn in as the new president. 

So what’s behind the flagrant violation of constitutional law and democratic norms from these opposition figures who claim to be fighting for democracy? The answer is that it’s never been about democracy, but rather about power. More specifically, which types of people get to wield it. 

Evo Morales is Bolivia’s first Indigenous president. Before entering politics, he worked as a coca grower and union leader, and like most native Bolivians, came from rural poverty. Indigenous groups were economically and politically disenfranchised, and despite them making up a majority of the population, the country had always been controlled by the white and mestizo elite in the East. This changed with the creation of MAS and Morales’ election in 2005. MAS channeled Indigenous political power and put native Bolivians in control of the country for the first time. The 2009 constitution established Bolivia as a “plurinational state” and elevated Indigenous languages to official status, established provisions for local assemblies and direct democracy, and designated the whipala, a multicoloured Andean banner, as the official co-flag of the country.

Despite the success of Bolivia’s economy under Morales, these changes infuriated the old ruling class, who saw the Indigenous as backwards and inferior, to be confined to the countryside while the settlers ran Bolivia. Their prejudices instantly manifested themselves in the wake of the coup, and the last pretensions of democracy fell away. Hours after Morales was deposed, protest leader Luis Fernando Camacho marched into the old presidential palace and placed a Bible on top of the Bolivian flag, declaring “Pachamama [a “mother earth”-type figure to Andean people] shall never return to the palace. Bolivia belongs to Christ.” Is it democracy when a Christian supremacist declares that the Bolivian government is not for Indigenous people? Is it democracy when mutineering police cut the whipala from their uniforms? Is it democracy when a mob drags a MAS mayor through the streets, cuts her hair and pours paint on her, and forces her to resign? 

This isn’t just an assault on the government or one party, it’s a colonial attack on Indigenous sovereignty and power. After being sworn in, the new president, Jeanine Añez, declared “the Bible returns to the palace.” Her (now deleted) tweets show her mocking Indigenous people, even calling them satanic.

On Wednesday, Adriana Salvatierra, President of the Senate and third in line for the presidency, attempted to enter the Senate with her fellow MAS congresspeople (who make up a majority of the legislature) and nullify the appointment of Jeanine Añez, who was sworn in without quorum. They were assaulted by the police and blocked from entering. The opposition has abandoned any pretense of constitutionality or rule of law, but still American and Canadian media outlets refuse to call it a coup. The governments of Canada, the United States, and other right-wing countries in the Americas have lauded it as a victory against authoritarianism.

When the military forces a democratically elected president to step down, when constitutional law is suspended in order to expel his party from power, it is a coup. Terms limits don’t change that, nor do the claims of the OAS. At the time of this writing, security forces have killed at least 25 pro-Morales protesters, a number that will surely rise in the days to come. Instead of taking steps to prevent this violence, the Añez government has issued a decree granting amnesty to police and military who brutalize protesters in their “pacification” campaign. Perhaps most worrying, the new Interior Minister says he has a list of MAS leaders and politicians, who he plans to prosecute for “subversion”.

In following this story, you likely will hear a refrain something along the lines of “this is not a coup as white left-wingers are saying, listen to Bolivians”– often repeated by an opposition activist invited to come on American TV. The truth is that nobody can speak for all Bolivians. But 2.9 million Bolivians made their voices heard when they voted for Evo Morales on October 20. And they are making their voices heard right now in the streets as they mobilize to oppose this colonialist attack. The coup-mongers can try to silence them, make them invisible to the rest of the world, but they can’t change the fact that millions are ready to defend Evo, defend democracy, and defend their sovereignty.

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I couldn’t tell at first which party people were disgusted at. It turned out to be the Kahanists, along with a good dose of enmity towards Netanyahu for facilitating the alliance. But the Jewish Home, currently a coalition partner to Netanyahu’s Likud party, is an equally repulsive organization, and nobody should be surprised by such a merger. For me, the announcement and the reaction serve as a reminder of the perverted nature of Israeli politics, whose fundamental racism and anti-democratic character are ignored by too many.

Otzma Yehudit are Kahanists, followers of the late Meir Kahane, a fundamentalist rabbi and onetime politician who envisioned a greater Israel rid of Arabs and operating under conservative Jewish law. The party he founded, Kach, was so extreme and violent that it was eventually banned as a terrorist organization by multiple countries, including Israel. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990, but his legacy lives on in North America and Europe, where the paramilitary wing of Kach, the Jewish Defense League, remains active.

In comparison, Jewish Home has had in its ranks figures like Ayelet Shaked, the Justice Minister, who once referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes” in a borderline-genocidal Facebook post. Its former party leader, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, stated in a discussion in 2013: “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life — and there’s no problem with that.” On that count, Bennett is not lying. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he led an operation in which Israeli forces shelled a United Nations compound, killing 106 Lebanese civilians. Both Bennett and Shaked left the Jewish Home late last year to form a new party, but it remains fundamentally the same.

The announcement and the reaction serve as a reminder of the perverted nature of Israeli politics, and of how its fundamental racism and anti-democratic character are ignored by too many.

The current outrage against Netanyahu misses the fact that he has for years been in government with these fascists in the Jewish Home. Where is the difference between the two parties? Kahanists massacre Arabs illegally, while Jewish Home politicians do it through the legal apparatus of the military. Kahanism has become a dirty word for most Israelis, especially for self-identified liberal ones who revile it as a racist and fanatical ideology. Multiple headlines condemned the merger as bringing Kahanists into the Knesset, the Israeli legislature, but the Kahanists are already there. They just don’t call themselves that; they call themselves “conservative” or “nationalist,” all while pushing the same genocidal beliefs that Kahane pushed decades ago.

More broadly, the outrage over the merger also misses the fact that this racism is not unique to the the Israeli right composed of Netanyahu and his allies. Benny Gantz, a retired general, is the newly-anointed anti-Netanyahu figure. His new Hosen L’Yisrael party, which positions itself as “centrist,” has skyrocketed ahead of the other opposition parties in the polls. Gantz has also bragged in a series of campaign ads about his role in the bombing and devastation of Gaza in 2014, bragging that it was “returned to the stone ages,” and boasted about killing over 1,300 Palestinians. A lawsuit for war crimes against Gantz was filed by a Dutch-Palestinian man at the Hague last March, and it is possible that the campaign ads will be considered as evidence. On top of the genocidal campaigns ads, the party’s slogan is “Israel Before Everything,” a domineering expression of supremacy.

In reality, there is no Zionist left, just varying shades of ethno-supremacists and apartheid apologists, because there cannot be a Zionist left.

Other parties in the opposition also line up poorly. The dying Labour Party, which has been eclipsed by Gantz in the polls, is lead by Avi Gabbay, who has confirmed his support for West Bank settlements. Gabbay’s allies include retired general Amiram Levin, who stated in 2017 that “the Palestinians deserved the occupation” and “if they violate agreements, the next time we’ll fight, here they will not remain, we will toss them across the Jordan.” Even the supposedly secular-leftist party, Meretz, opposes the right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled during the Nakba.

In reality, there is no Zionist left, just varying shades of ethno-supremacists and apartheid apologists, because there cannot be a Zionist left. This is not to equate parties like Meretz with Otzma Yehudit and the Jewish Home, but to reinforce that in the end they uphold the same unjust structures. Zionism and leftism are incompatible — one cannot genuinely hold the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice while simultaneously supporting active settler-colonialism. The outrage over Netanyahu’s dealings with the Kahanists reminds me of the “moderate” Republicans who were scandalized when Trump appeared in 2015 advocating the same racist policies and worldview they’d been pushing for years, except that he didn’t bother to try to hide that racism. Western pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC don’t hate Kahane for his ideology: they hate him because he puts the ugliness of Zionism on display for the world to see.

In 1988, Meir Kahane said “a Western democracy and Zionism are not compatible. You can’t have both.” This is as true now as it ever was. The idea of liberal democracy is thoroughly at odds with a state created for one ethnicity, one religion. Israel not only disenfranchises millions of Palestinians under its control, but relegates its non-Jewish citizens to second class status and declares non-Jewish immigrants to be inferior, undeserving of the same freedom to immigrate that Jews around the world have. Benjamins Gantz and Netanyahu are two sides of the same bloody coin, and whichever one of them ends up leading the next government will have as much legitimacy as the South African apartheid governments of Hendrik Verwoerd, B.J. Vorster, and P.W. Botha.

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