The events of Wednesday, June 26 in Bolivia – widely known as a “coup d’état” – have quickly been clarified as a staging of the kind carried out by 21st century socialism or Castro-Chavism in the countries it controls with its dictatorships. Farces with a highly criminal content aimed at maintaining power by instilling fear in the population, already used in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, which are now presented as a coup script and are only the repetition of “state terrorism” that cannot go unpunished.
The creation of political scenarios to gain advantage or highlight negative conditions of the adversary or change or affirm an agenda is text assignment in political strategy, but it must be framed in respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and respect for the law within the framework of the “rule of law”. When these actions are carried out in violation of the law, they are crimes, and when these are perpetrated by the government with the purpose of producing fear in the population to generate behaviors that would not otherwise be possible, it is “state terrorism.”
The dictatorships of 21st century socialism that hold power in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua use state terrorism as their main mechanism of government and it is one of the main contributions of Castroism in the last century to the expansion of the Cuban dictatorship in our time. One of the most notable cases of state terrorism to mystify the crimes of the Cuban dictatorship was undoubtedly the so-called “case number 1” of 1989 with which the dictator Fidel Castro tried to cover up his construction of Cuba as the first narco-state of the Americas and prosecuted, tortured and shot General Arnaldo Ochoa, Colonel Antonio de la Guardia, Major Amado Padrón and Captain Jorge Martínez, whom he had ordered to implement the relationship with drug traffickers Pablo Escobar Gaviria of Colombia and Roberto Suarez Gómez of Bolivia.
There are more farces converted into “truths of the Cuban revolution” to support the narrative of the criminal regime of the Castros that they developed in the second part of the last century, but what objective reality now shows is that this criminal matrix has been reproduced and repeated for the socialism of the 21st century, which under the command of Cuba has expanded its system and methodologies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua to subjugate the people and hold power indefinitely with impunity. The victims of “21-J” on July 11, 2021 who asked for bread and freedom, convicted of crimes against the revolution, are testimony.
In Venezuela, among many others, the so-called “slow death of General Raúl Isaías Baduel” stands out, presented by the dictatorship as a victim of Covid-19 who died as a political prisoner of the regime, having previously been “recognized, honored and rewarded as the man strong that rescued Hugo Chávez.” The murder of Oscar Pérez surrounded by more than 500 elements of the Venezuelan dictatorship in El Junquillo was an extrajudicial execution at random presented as “a confrontation” when the victims – according to public videos – had surrendered and expressed their desire to surrender.
The Nicaraguan dictatorship has expelled the nuns of the “Mother Teresa” order, accusing them of being “opponents and coup-mongers” and “more than 200 organizations have been closed for alleged non-compliance with the new financing laws.” They have taken over “a school of the Congregation of the Daughters of Saint Louise de Marillac” and “accused the Catholic Church of money laundering.” They have imprisoned all the presidential candidates of the real opposition and after torturing them for more than a year, they have expelled them and deprived them of their citizenship. All of this while presenting the regime as the victim.
In Bolivia, the dictatorial farce is not new. They used it to impose a dictatorship with its plurinational constitution and supplant the Republic of Bolivia, accusing defenders of democracy in Santa Cruz of being secessionists in order to murder them, imprison them and exile them, as certified by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in its report on the “Hotel las Américas massacre”, from which the “Terrorism Case” arose, where the victims were imprisoned and the terrorists were Cuban and Venezuelan operators under the cover of Evo Morales. The “El Porvenir” massacre in Pando with the imprisonment of Governor Leopoldo Fernández, who was a political prisoner for more than 12 years, was presented as a “rebellion”, the same as the current arrest and conviction of former President Janine Añez for a “coup d’état” when she is the victim or the Governor of Santa Cruz Camacho.
In this context, as denounced by the Bolivian people and confessed by Evo Morales, head of Luis Arce, it is definitive that the coup was not a coup but a new Castro-Chavista staging to give life to a dictatorship in crisis. The underlying issue is that some international press continues to cover it as if it were a real event and the democratic governments remain silent instead of denouncing the “state terrorism” that is now advancing to the stage of persecuting, imprisoning and torturing more Bolivians to raise the number of the more than 300 political prisoners.
*Lawyer and Political Scientist0. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy
