Bolivia’s dictatorship and the state of helplessness of Bolivians.

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) The dictatorship in Bolivia is over 15 years old and the world’s democracies still hesitate to treat it as such. For over a decade Bolivia is a country with political prisoners, persecuted, and exiled, without the rule of law, without the separation and independence of the branches of government, and with a judicial system used as an instrument for repression that has institutionalized the violation of human rights. The recent arrest of former President Janine Añez, the unleashed harassment and persecution are a repeat of cases like “October 2003”, “La Calancha”, “El Porvenir”, “Terrorism” and more, that prove the dictatorship in Bolivia has all Bolivians in a state of helplessness.

Dictatorship is “the political regime that by force or violence concentrates all power in one person, group, or organization and represses human rights and individual basic freedoms”. Proof of a dictatorship is the absence of essential components of democracy that are obligatory for all Americas’ countries as mandated by Article 3 of the Interamerican Democratic Charter, and these are: “respect for human rights and individual basic freedoms; access to power and its discharge subject to the rule of law, the conducting of free and fair elections based on universal and secret suffrage as an expression of the peoples’ sovereignty, having a regime of plurality of political parties and organizations, and having the separation and independence of the branches of government”.

The “state of helplessness” is “the situation a person is thrusted into when the person is incapable of repelling, either physically or legally, the attacks that endanger his/her basic rights”. Helplessness is “the state of vulnerability in which someone is in that prevents him/her to resist when confronting an unfair situation that affects him/her, and no one protects him/her against it”. In the legal-procedural environment, it is “the situation in which a person finds himself/herself unprotected by the corresponding jurisdictional institution that is part of the legal due-process with the means for defending such person”.

To use “despicable judges”, trials and false accusations to annul members of the opposition and instill fear in people is the method used by Cuba’s dictatorship for 62 years, by Venezuela’s dictatorship for 22 years, reinstated by Ortega in Nicaragua, and a method with which Correa subjected Ecuadoreans into a state of helplessness for over 10 years. Hundreds of cases, like the one against Armando Valladares in Cuba, or currently against San Isidro’s artists and youth, the case against Leopoldo Lopez or that of General Baduel, or against the U.S. managers in Venezuela, the students in Nicaragua, the El Universo newspaper or that of Galo Lara in Ecuador are proof.

The “judicialized political persecution” consists of the dictatorship building a “false narrative” with which “it covers up its crimes and accuses its victims” and then, using the system of prosecutors and judges under its control, “tries, imprisons, and condemns innocent victims” for the purpose of “annulling, exiling, or recruiting them”.

In the case of President Sanchez de Lozada’s toppling in October of 2003, the false narrative used to cover up Evo Morales’ and his accomplices’ crimes was the alleged “sale of gas to Chile” and under the label of “massacre” attribute heinous crimes to those toppled who were imprisoned and to this date are persecuted and exiled with a constant barrage intending the “assassination of reputation”. In several other cases such as La Calancha, El Porvenir, Hotel las Americas, and Terrorism, the false narrative used to cover up massacres perpetrated by Evo Morales was to present these cases as “crimes of separatists” when -if truth be told- the victims defended the Republic and the Constitution. The victims, turned by the government into terrorists, were imprisoned, exiled, and some recruited to the service of the dictatorship, for whom they continue to be functional until now.

Now, in the case so-called as “the 2019 coup d’état” the dictatorial false narrative pretends to cover up the in-flagrancy crimes of fraud, counterfeiting, and more that were publicly committed by Evo Morales, were certified by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union, that beyond covering up the massacres at Senkata and Sacaba that Evo Morales directed immediately following his flight and that were proved by public recordings. Just as in the October of 2003 case, La Calancha, El Porvenir, Hotel las Americas, and Terrorism, the dictatorship is now repeating -with Janine Añez and an undetermined number of Bolivians- the ritual of falsifying accusations, jailing, extortion, torture, assassination of reputations, and falsely claim to be defending human rights to violate them.

It is the dictatorship in Bolivia that “instead of judges, it has henchmen” and that has “turned trials into lynching” in order to subject under a “regime of terror” peoples who are in a “state of helplessness”. Who is next? . . . up to when?

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators Association, ATA # 234680.