What Do Lula's Release and Morales's Ouster Signal For Latin America - The New Yorker

11/13/2019 What Do Lula’s Release and Morales’s Ouster Signal for Latin America?
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Daily Comment
What Do Lula’s Release and Morales’s

Ouster Signal for Latin America?
By Jon Lee Anderson November 12, 2019
https://www-newyorker-com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/news/daily-comment/what-do-lulas-release-and-moraless-ouster-signal-for-latin-america?utm_medium=social&utm_… 1/8
11/13/2019 What Do Lula’s Release and Morales’s Ouster Signal for Latin America? | The New Yorker
The release from prison of Brazil’s former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, last week, is likely to alter
Brazil’s political equation.
Photograph by Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters
t’s been an extraordinary few days in Latin America. On Friday, Luiz Inácio Lula da
I Silva, Brazil’s charismatic former President, was released from prison after serving a
year and a half of a twelve-year sentence . Two days later, Evo Morales, the embattled
President of Bolivia, was forced to resign, at the suggestion of the commander-in-chief
of the armed forces, and amid increasingly violent protests over the disputed results of
his recent reëlection.
The Latin American chessboard became especially kinetic, as an American military

man might say, in the past four weeks. A convulsive series of events began in mid-
October, with unexpected angry protests in normally stable Chile. The protests,
triggered by a hike in metro fares, spread widely, rocking the government of the
conservative billionaire Sebastián Piñera and setting off a sort of existential crisis, across
the social spectrum, over issues of inequality and inclusion. Chile’s eruption was
followed, a week later, by Bolivia’s Presidential elections, in which the leftist Morales,
controversially running for a fourth term, was declared the winner.
In 2016, during his third term in office, Morales held a referendum on whether he
should be allowed to stand for an unconstitutional additional term. (As it was, he had
nagled his third term with the argument that the country’s new 2009 constitution,
which he had promoted and allowed for two terms only, provided him with a new
beginning, despite his having entered office in 2006.) He narrowly lost the referendum
but appealed to the constitutional court, a pliant body, which ruled in his favor, on the
grounds that to deny him the right to run would be an infringement of his human
rights. The decision enraged the opposition, but Morales, who retained signi cant
support, especially among poor and indigenous Bolivians, ran again. On Election Day,
he took a slight lead in the closely watched electronic vote tallies, but it appeared that
his margin would not be large enough to avoid a second round. At that point, the
tallying was halted for twenty-four hours, and, when it resumed, without explanation
from the electoral tribunal, the trend lines had changed, giving Morales a margin
sufficient to claim victory in the rst round. Even before that, though, his opponent had
complained of irregularities, and, when Morales was declared the winner, the protests
began. His departure, after nearly fourteen years in power, brings to an abrupt end to
one of the longest Presidencies of the diminished group of leftist leaders once branded
as the Pink Tide.
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Ironically, Morales’s election came just a week before elections in neighboring

Argentina saw the victory of a left-of-center Peronist candidate, Alberto Fernández,
over the unpopular conservative incumbent, Mauricio Macri. Fernández’s running mate
was the amboyantly controversial former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
C.F.K., as she is often referred to, has been embroiled in a series of corruption scandals,
but, as a senator, a post to which she was elected after her Presidential term ended, in
2015, she enjoys immunity from prosecution. Fernández will not take office until
December, but the promise of a friendly government in Argentina has already
galvanized the left across Latin America, with celebratory greetings extended from the
Andrés Manuel
socialist governments of Cuba and Venezuela, and from Andrés Manuel López
López
Obrador, the left-of-center President of Mexico.
Obrador
Meanwhile, Lula’s release from prison, even though he still faces criminal charges in a
series of corruption cases, will inevitably alter the political equation in Brazil, by
offering a counterbalance to the far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro. On Sunday, Lula
tweeted a statement in solidarity with Morales, with whom he has been friendly for
years: “I just heard that there was a coup in Bolivia and that comrade @evoespueblo was
forced to resign. It is unfortunate that Latin America has an economic élite that does
not know how to live with democracy and the social inclusion of the poorest of the
poor.” There is a strong sense, among both Lula’s supporters at home and his observers
abroad, that he was railroaded by political opponents, led by the crusading judge Sérgio
Moro, in order to prevent him from running in the 2018 elections, which the polls
suggested he would have won by a wide margin. Moro brought charges of corruption
and money-laundering against Lula, though many deemed the evidence as less than
convincing, and sentenced him. After Bolsonaro was elected, Moro accepted his offer to
be the justice minister. Last week, Brazil’s Supreme Court freed Lula, along with
thousands of other prisoners who are appealing their convictions.
Lula’s release also allows him to retake his role at the forefront of the leftist leaders of
the region and may help launch a leftist resurgence at a time of deepening political
Donald Trump
polarization across Latin America. But, for now, with Donald Trump in office in the
United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and right-of-center governments in Colombia,
Ecuador, and various Central American nations allied to both of them, a Pink Tide 2.0
seems less likely than an increasingly Cold War-like atmosphere in a region that is
Venezuela and the
already sharply divided over how to handle the crisis in Venezuela
consequences of its colossal economic meltdown. Heads of governments on the right
welcomed Morales’s resignation and called for a prompt democratic transition in
Bolivia. The leaders on the left, including Lula, Argentina’s Fernández, Venezuela’s
Nicolás Maduro, and Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, all denounced Bolivia’s military
“coup.”
In the hours after the resignation of Morales, an ethnic Aymara who was the rst
member of an indigenous community to become the President of Latin America’s only
indigenous-majority country, sectarian violence broke out across the country. The Vice-
President, the Senate leader, and the leader of the chamber of deputies resigned along
with Morales, and power seemed to fall to Jeanine Áñez Chávez, a vice-president of the
Senate. On Monday, Áñez made an emotional televised address, in which she appealed
to the commander-in-chief to put troops on the streets to assist the police. On Tuesday,
as unrest continued, the available members of Bolivia’s legislative assembly gathered in
an attempt to ratify Morales’s resignation and to swear in Áñez as Bolivia’s “interim
President,” but, according to the Associated Press, the legislators lacked a quorum for
an assembly session.
Morales rst went to ground in the rural region of Chapare, which he had made his
base, with a handful of aides, and denounced plans by the police to arrest him. His
home in the city of Cochabamba was vandalized and looted, while a house belonging to
one of his sisters was burned down. Luís Fernando (El Macho) Camacho, a
conservative Christian who is the increasingly prominent self-styled leader of the
opposition, and whom some call the Bolivian Bolsonaro, entered the Presidential palace
with some followers and then emerged to declare that “the Bible has reëntered the
palace.” Outside the palace, one of his loyalists, a Christian pastor, was reported to have
triumphantly declared that “the Pachamama”—a deity regarded as the Earth Mother
by indigenous peoples of the Andes, including the Aymara—“will never return.” Late in
the day on Monday, Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, announced that
Morales and twenty of his cabinet ministers and legislative allies, many of whom had
already taken refuge in the Mexican Ambassador’s residence in La Paz, had accepted
his government’s offer of asylum. On Tuesday morning, after hours of secret discussions
to guarantee his safety, Morales arrived in Mexico City aboard a small Mexican air-
force jet that had been sent to retrieve him.
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Translating the Meaning of Presidential-Campaign Songs
While the consequences of neither Lula’s release nor Morales’s ouster can yet be fully
understood, it’s clear that, while the far right appears to be gaining strength again in
Latin America, as it is in Europe, the left can’t be completely discounted. And neither
can the military, which largely retreated to the barracks a generation ago, in the post-
Cold War restoration of democracy across the continent, but in some countries has
lately begun, if not to seize power outright, then to assume the role of institutional
arbiter. In Guatemala and Honduras, for instance, the military has never relinquished
its in uence over civilian politics, while in Brazil, where a third of Bolsonaro’s cabinet
members are former military men, it has become much more explicit. The military role
has also expanded in Mexico (where the armed forces are prominent in the failing war
on the drug cartels), and, to varying degrees in Cuba and Venezuela, military officers
either share power with civilians or are making it clear that they regard themselves as
an integral part of the national destiny. They have now done so in Bolivia, too.
This trend, along with the deepening sense of an ideological fault line, is being aided
and abetted by the Trump Administration, which has relied on threats and carrot-and-
stick policies to impose its will on the region, applying escalating sanctions against
regimes that it doesn’t like—such as those in Cuba and Venezuela—and strong-arm
tactics to get its way with Mexico and the states of Central America on questions of
immigration. By repeatedly sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and by
periodically threatening armed action or support for military coups against Venezuela’s
government, Trump is undermining the efforts made by recent Administrations,
notably Barack Obama’s, to effect a more respectful rapport with the governments of
the hemisphere.
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Yet signs of a new levelheadness, or perhaps of fairness, are beginning to emerge. Lula’s
release demonstrated a refreshing independence on the part of the Brazilian Supreme
Court and seemed to offer a belated counter to the politically and ethically tarnished
judiciary that had convicted him. In Chile, an effort is building to amend the
constitution, which was rewritten during the dictatorship of the late general Augusto
Pinochet, and has been little modi ed since then. And the Organization of American
States, or O.A.S., a multilateral body long repudiated by the left as an overly U.S.-
in uenced institution, may have resurrected its viability as a more balanced regional
player, after Morales agreed to settle his disputed reëlection by authorizing it to carry
out an independent investigation. On Sunday morning, the O.A.S. released the ndings
of that investigation in a report that found a number of serious irregularities, including
evidence of fraud in Morales’s favor, and concluded, “The audit team cannot verify the
results of the present election, and thus recommends a new vote.”
Morales accepted that verdict and announced that new elections would be held—only
to be told by the military that he should go. And he did leave. It was not a good ending
for anyone. It left Bolivia in a state of angry, polarized ux, with Morales and his
followers able to decry his ouster as a coup, while his opposition was robbed of agency
and the opportunity to have possibly seen him off publicly, and without coercion, in a
new round of supervised voting. Now, Bolivia’s democracy will go forward, but it may
seem weaker than it would have if things had ended more cleanly. There will be work to
do to restore the people’s faith in the system that rst gave them Evo Morales and then
delivered the chaos that his departure has created. In the latest swing between autocracy
and democracy, it seems, contradictory forces are at work, and not only in Bolivia but
across the hemisphere.
Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to the magazine in 1998. He is the
The Fall
author of several books, including “The Fall of
of Baghdad
Baghdad.” Read more »
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11/13/2019 What Do Lula’s Release and Morales’s Ouster Signal for Latin America?

| The New Yorker

Zotero automatically redirected your request to

What Do Lula’s Release and Morales’s

The Latin American chessboard became especially kinetic, as an American military

Enter your e-mail Sign me up

Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Ironically, Morales’s election came just a week before elections in neighboring

VIDEO FROM THE N YORKER

Translating the Meaning of Presidential-Campaign Songs

Waking Up from the Why Is Trump What House In His

What Border Life Looks Like

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