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Global condemnation of 'appalling' coup in Bolivia as military forces socialist president Evo Morales to resign
Link information
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- Authors
- Common Dreams, Jake Johnson, staff writer
- Published
- Nov 11 2019
- Word count
- 694 words
So no mention about his power grab, extending his tenure way longer than the Constitution allowed him? Funny how that works.
I know a couple of people in Bolivia, none of them are "right wing", and both joined in the protests and told me that, yes the army had to get involved to get this done, but this is not a 1960's CIA backed revolution.
The mention of "politically motivated charges" against Lula perfectly illustrates the low quality of the article, among other insanely biased statements. Hearing him talk about "social inclusion of the poor" after flying home on a private jet has to be a joke.
https://theintercept.com/2018/10/02/lula-brazil-election-noam-chomsky/
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-lula-operation-car-wash-sergio-moro/
I live in Brazil, please don't try to educate me on the history of my country. I live here, I am a lawyer and worked with government a lot during the PT time in government on behalf of my clients (none have been arrested so far, because we didn't sink into the corruption mud), I know perfectly well what happened.
Saying it's politically motivated is beyond lack of information, it is borderline intellectual malfeasance.
The Intercept has proven to be extremely biased (I had high hopes for it) and seriously lacking in judgment regarding their sources. It was a waste of a great opportunity for an opposition vehicle of information, but they fell into the party line and lost all credibility.
Corruption here has no party line, no right or left (which are ridiculous terms to use these days, by the way). Defending Lula based on ideology is ridiculous, since he has none. All he cares about is his status, he will bulldoze anything in his path to get it (including blaming everything he was charged with on his recently decesead wife, because that's the type of person he is).
All of the evidence that I have points towards (at the very least) lack of consensus on that point. To call it intellectual malfeasance is incredibly disingenuous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash#Leaked_Conversations
Believe whatever you like. I have read the leaked conversations, the judicial decisions, everything. I have talked to numerous judges and prosecutors over the course of my life, and reached my own conclusions based on more than 20 years of law education and practice in Brazil and abroad. You're free to reach your own conclusions, based on whatever sources you'd like to consume, it's just sad that the information exists and people still want to cling on to this idiotic ideological pattern of not believing what's right in front of their eyes.
Just understand that Lula (and many others who were freed based on the same STF decision) did not have their convictions vacated, the evidence against them is overwhelming, and this was a huge step backwards for a country known for taking them. But this was probably the worst step back of the last 10 years.
I thought the year couldn't get worse, after my fellow Brazilians decided that electing that pea-brained sack of dumb was a good idea, but apparently it can, now we can also return to the status quo ante in terms of corruption, under which Lula's party (and many others, because this is not just about PT) stole BILLIONS of dollars of taxpayer's money while our education, health, and all sort of public services go to (even worse than it already is) shit. Good times.
Yours is the first opinion that I've heard that has rejected the claim that the handling of Lula's case was politically motivated (I apologize if this is a misinterpretation of your position on that fact, I can't really parse it from what you've stated so far). The only opposition I've read so far is that the conversations were falsified. I've only heard this story from second hand sources (Greenwald's writing and sources on Wikipedia) and have not read the leaked conversations. I can't figure out if you are contradicting these interpretations or just trying to make a broader point about Lula's guilt and lamenting the handling of the case?
No, the conversations were not falsified. They are real. However, the context matters. I'll try to condense things, because it's past bed time. I can feel a wall of text coming, though. So sorry about that in advance.
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Although yes, those conversations are not supposed to happen, they do, all the time. Brazilian law, especially in terms of judicial proceedings, is one gigantic exercise of lack of boundaries. Judges talk to lawyers when they shouldn't, prosecutors tell judges things they shouldn't, lawyers have dinner with prosecutors and discuss their cases, it's an enormous mess of personal relations, looking the other way, and overall lack of professional ethics.
Should it happen? No. Does it happen in almost all lawsuits? Yes. It wasn't outside the normal and, because it's such a complex case, as are all cases involving corruption, especially on a federal Govt level, it takes a lot of work to make it into something that makes sense. So should it be the basis for saying it was politically motivated and should be thrown out? Holy shit no.
And, added that they were hacked by the most basic stuff you can imagine, like old "click here" level stuff (none of them had 2FA turned on, to make matters worse), it's really baffling that these people were/are handling one of the most complex and important cases in the history of the country (and probably the biggest corruption investigation in the world in terms of reach and money) and managed to get a lot of convictions out of it.
Does it make it OK? No, probably not. Does it mean that they conspired to lock Lula up? No, it doesn't. Especially because there were conversations about all the other cases (I honestly have lost count at this point) and the leaked conversations were extremely selective of what they showed, displaying a pretty high level of editing to make the narrative go one way (more on this at the end).
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The entire proceeding (on a macro level) targeted people from across the political spectrum in Brazil. No party was left untouched, it was truly a national level task force, working across the board. Yes, Lula was a prime target, because he led Brazil for 8 years, electing his successor for another 8 (she was impeached in the last of those) and, under his watch, an enormous corruption scheme was created (expanding on stuff that was already there, but this was beyond anything the country had seen to that point), operated, turned into a political weapon.
Was the case against him strong? No, not really. Did they manage to get enough evidence (based on people they arrested and cut deals with for smaller sentences)? Undoubtedly. Regarding Lula specifically, here are some of those: one construction company (the same embroiled in a ton of case across Latin America - read about Odebretch's corruption scandal in Peru for a good example) paid for a farm he owned through a friend (which was proved beyond reasonable doubt) to be remodelled. They gave him a beachside property (which is one of his convictions) in exchange for legislation passed at their request. His son, before dad became president, was a janitor in a zoo. He now is the largest landowner in Brazil, has one of the largest cattle farms in the country (the largest is another PT crony, who was also set free the other day). Another company donated a place in São Paulo for his "institute", free of charge and not against anything the Govt did for them (it has since emerged that they also had some tax breaks handed to them during that period). The list goes on.
Their corruption scheme was syphoning a % from Petrobras contracts off the top. In a multibillion dollar contract, as Oil & Gas tends to be, it's a massive amount of money. But they also sold laws and rules, paid for construction in countries they shouldn't have (money Brazil will never get back and derives no benefit from – the PT politicians did it because they syphoned money from these projects into their personal stashes). They benefited a few selected companies (rumour has it that many of these have PT people behind them, profiting from them), destroying a few industries in the process because these "national champions" bought the smaller players (not to mention the competition problems and the long list of labour shit that goes with it). The list of things that was done is immense, honestly it's too much to list in one go.
---- x ---- x ----
Long story short, 100% of the politicians that were the beneficiaries of this frankly ridiculous decision by our supreme court (and it takes an extremely lousy reading of the Constitution to reach that decision, which the same court had ruled against a lot of times before) were found guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. One guy had more than 10 million dollars in cash in a flat. Another was getting paid a monthly stipend (his wife, mum, dad, sons, etc. as well) by one construction company. Odebretch had an entire Dept of the company tasked with keeping track of their corruption payment, they even had a proprietary software for controlling that (apparently they spent almost 1 billion dollars in kickbacks, while getting more than 30 billion in Govt contracts during the same period – I'm sure it's because of the competency, nothing to do with money being handed out).
This has been an enormous setback for the fight against corruption in Brazil, a country where it is endemic and causes incalculable harm to millions of people each day. And it was done on the back not only of Lula being set free, but a host of other well-know politicians and business that had finally been asked to pay for their crimes and now they are all walking free. Without the threat of jail time, you can't get people to rat on others, so the crimes become much harder to prove and the fight against corruption suffers more and more.
---- x ---- x ----
To make it even worse, Lula being free not only almost guarantees that Bolsonaro will be re-elected, because people see him as someone who will fight Lula, but this also guarantees that the country will be a slave to these bullshit political sideshows when we should be tackling corruption, inequality, health, education, etc. It's (yet another in a sea of them) lost chance of making the country better, but now it will be an afterthought in the fight by a lot of corrupt, incompetent, and frankly gigantic assholes who are only looking out for themselves.
---- x ---- x ----
So yeah, I'm lamenting the handling of the case, because it showed the worst sides of the Brazilian legal system (especially how fucking disgusting our supreme court has become), it made corruption OK again, because there's no punishment for crimes that hurt society the most, by diverting resources from where it should go to go into slush funds and BVI bank accounts of assholes, and it will guarantee 3 years of the most idiotic political arguments and discussions, killing what little momentum we had built in repairing the terrible damage decades of corruption have done to it. And yeah, I'm contradicting those interpretations because they are intellectually shallow at best and criminally misleading on purpose most likely, because no one that has had access to all the publicly available material, who understands how corruption works, and has paid half a heart beat's attention to Brazilian politics cannot, in good faith, say this was a politically motivated sham.
Lula and the others that had been sent to prison are all, without a shadow of a doubt, guilty of their crimes and much more. It is a shame that some of them are being hailed as heroes for withstanding their unjust prison time when they are simply grafters who took advantage of their positions to make money for themselves, no matter who got hurt in the process.
This is money that could have gone to schools, hospitals, hell, just paying for infra-structure. But no, it went into $15,000 bottles of wine, trips abroad, buying of real estate, etc. And that is what hurts the most, the amount of citizens that suffered, who didn't get one service or another, of kids that went to shit schools, etc., because these assholes wanted to use the money to go to Miami and spend their ill-gotten money on crap.
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Also, just as an aside, when you are elected to Congress in Brazil, you have alternates, that take your job if you leave, become incapacitated, whatever.
Greenwald's husband got his political gig by taking the place of a dude from Lula's party (whose claim to fame was to appear on Big Brother and parley that into a political gig and then fighting with Bolsonaro when they were both in Congress) and the husband's party was, throughout PT's Govt, part of their base (still is, now in the opposition). Funny how that rarely gets mentioned, no? Makes it harder to be impartial when publishing stuff, I'd say.
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So yeah, seeing people claim Lula was a political prisoner kinda pisses me off, sorry if anything I wrote came across as abrasive, it was not my intention.
It just hurts to realise that being an upstanding and law-abiding citizen in my country is for suckers, since crime obviously pays and working and paying your taxes makes you an idiot.
Despondent doesn't begin to describe the mood these days from anyone who isn't blinded by ideology and can still look at things critically in the country (an ever diminishing minority, I'm sad to see).
Thank you for this long response, I'm happy to see some opinions on these things from somebody who actually lives the experiences of corruption in Brazil. All too often I see other European or US leftists excuse Lula as some kind of misunderstood revolutionary or necessary evil in a fight against the far-right.
You are more than welcome, old friend (I love that username).
Regrettably, the public discourse has been completely compromised here, so it's either "Lula didn't do anything wrong" or "Lula should be shot", same with Bolsonaro, either he's the second coming of Jesus or he's the second coming of Hitler. There is no grey, only black or white, 0 or 1.
It's really tiresome, but it's the world we live in now, apparently...
When right-wing nationalism and fascism are as much of a problem as they're becoming, yes, it's closer to black and white. Taking a moderate position only enables them.
I don't understand how your two paragraphs go together. I know enlightened centrists are covert reactionaries, my point is that saying "I hate that everything is so black and white these days" while someone like Bolsonaro is in power enables him. We need to forcefully, unambiguously push back against people like him.
Socialism is good. I don't know enough about Lula to comment on him. Bolsonaro may not be literally Hitler, but he is a fascist and so many people (myself included) are screaming about him, Trump, Orban, Le Pen, et al. because Hitler didn't start out by throwing everyone into concentration camps either.
Moderates may have been a major contributor to the war effort in World War 2, but they also appeased Hitler beforehand in hopes that he would be satisfied. I'd also be willing to bet there were a lot of socialists in the ranks of American soldiers during that war. Where did socialists lose and why?
Trump wouldn't be president if moderates hadn't appeased and enabled him. There have been plenty of Republicans with a reputation for being moderates who spoke out against Trump, but what did they actually do? Susan Collins made a whole big deal about being her own person and then voted for Kavanaugh when the chips were down. Corker and Flake didn't do anything of consequence and are now gone. McCain's one real moment was voting against the AHCA and that was about it. Outside of politics, how many Democratic moderates/center-left people have said that they'll vote for Trump or sit out if Sanders or Warren win the primary? If Donald Trump is running for president and you don't vote for the Democrat against him regardless of who they are, you're part of the problem. Yes, even if Biden gets the nomination.
The only way to fight back against fascists is to support left-wing causes and candidates because moderates don't do enough. Moderates didn't fight for women's suffrage or labor rights or civil rights. FDR didn't get us out of the Great Depression by making the New Deal a bunch of moderate policies (yes, I know suddenly having to make a ton of machinery for war contributed). Moderate policies haven't done enough to stop an ever-growing share of the economy's gains from going to the wealthiest people, and as long as people continue to needlessly suffer because the wealthy want to hoard that money, they're going to move either to the right or to the left because what we have now isn't working. Only one of those sides actually wants a better life for everyone.
I agree. Some have a reputation for it but always fall in line at the end of the day. In a broader sense, you see wealthy center-left people (who we can all probably consider moderate Democrats) sometimes write columns about how if Sanders or Warren win the nomination they'll sit the election out, which is actively helping Trump. They'd rather let the world burn and keep their wealth (fall in line) than face the fact that their policies aren't doing enough (and do the right thing).
Thank you for the time and thought that you put into this response.
Don't mention it. It's the least I can do.
it's not a power grab, he was legitimately voted in. the only other choice bolivia had is u.s. imperialist foreign policy. it's no coincidence that bolivia also has the largest deposit of lithium out of anywhere in the world rn and morales has been on cia target lists for years because he doesn't want u.s. intervention. it's a coup, there's nothing else to call it, and it's backed by the cia in yet another authoritarian regime change in south america
No, he was not legitimately voted in.
He asked, in a referendum, if the population approved of him having another term. They voted no and he still did it. If anything, he did a power grab first. And the most recent election showed really good signs of being tampered with as well.
That CIA backed regime change is such a tired trope. Should have been retired long ago. Please find another conspiracy theory to defend authoritarian leaders you like in order to assess blame onto people you don't.
Not denying the CIA did that a lot back in the day. But this clearly is not the same as the stuff we went through in the 60's until the 80's.
Even if people here have differing opinions on the legality of Morales' tenure, that hardly excuses the rampant anti-indigenous violence which has erupted as a result of this "intervention." Not sure what people expected to happen.
In 2016 Morales held a referendum to change the constitution and remove limits on presidential terms so that he could continue as president. He lost the vote but stayed anyway.
I think this result was inevitable he should have stepped down years ago.
It's amazingly convenient for the author of the article to "forget" to mention these issues.
This translated article of Maria Galindo (Bolivian feminist and founder of Mujeres Creando) offers some interesting perspective:
I don't know much about the situation in Bolivia but I found this article to be insightful as well as flip's comments in this thread.
This is a very good point. There's a strong tendency in leftist struggle to glorify certain leaders and associate their rise and their power with that of the movement as a whole, but that only sets people up for disappointment and failure. A central tenet of socialism is the importance of the people and our will over that of tyrants and oppression, so putting anyone on a pedestal runs counter to that. We should try to continue our criticisms of the coup and its far-right, anti-indigenous enablers without tying that criticism to the millstone of one flawed human.
Other Articles on this topic
Summary of yesterday's events.
Live Updates from Sunday
Tenuous evidence of plans for a right-wing coup with blessings from US congressmen.
Audios linking Civic Ex-Military and US in Coup Plans
Contradiction of the mainstream narrative of election interference
No Evidence That Bolivian Election Results Were Affected by Irregularities or Fraud, Statistical Analysis Shows
Broader Media Criticism
MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word “Coup” In Bolivia Reporting
The New York Times' Attempt on the subject.
Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down
Final words in that article from the trustworthy lips of Jair Bolsanaro. The man who certainly hasn't himself engaged in the anti-democratic behavior of conspiring to jail a political rival and murder a journalist.
Yeah, this is why I qualified that with "tenuous". My understanding is that the recordings include mention of those politicians by name but that's the extent of the evidence of their involvement. I fully recognize that the right wing in Bolivia is capable of acting on their own in this. However, my understanding of US covert involvement in Latin American regime change tells me to be skeptical. This is far from "pinning it on America". If these US politicians had prior knowledge of a planned coup against a democracy in South America and voiced support, I have a problem with that.
But on the other hand, there are certainly some interesting examples like this huge compendium of accounts tweeting the same copypasta that there was no coup going on, which, even if they aren't directly illustrative of CIA involvement, certainly point to something.
Where are any of us saying it's a CIA plot?
Not really something I've seen on here, but it's a very common sentiment on Twitter. There's plenty of reasons to hate the CIA, but in this case just blaming them paints a very simplistic view of the situation.
I think one of the major messaging flaws of the left is promoting the assumption that every reactionary trend is the result of a CIA coup. Even if they've certainly had their fingers in the pot quite consistently in the past and there's a strong possibility they're backing the coup now, I think people underestimate the capability of the Bolivian elites to take these actions of their own accord.
I'm happy he's stepped down, but this is a very delicate situation. This could very easily go way worse; while coups aren't always bad (see Sudan) and in theory are the last line of defense against authoritarianism, they have a habit of becoming military dictatorships, especially in Latin America where the military had wielded outsized political influence for decades. The military needs to stay out of the situation from now on and let the Congress and other state agencies arrange free and fair elections.
The coup has already deposed the vice president and the president of the senate, the people next in the line of succession, and are now claiming opposition senator Jeanine Áñez is the new president. The mask is coming off in earnest now.