The New Yorker - 23.03.2020

THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020 43

grievous political error when the three
highest-ranking officials also resigned.
Their gesture was interpreted as a pro-
test, but, by resigning, they vacated the
line of succession for the Presidency. As
a result, Áñez, whose party had won just
four per cent of the vote in the previ-
ous election, was able to declare herself
president of the Senate—and thus next
in line to lead Bolivia.

Á

ñez took charge of a country in tu-
mult. Morales’s opponents had rau-
cously celebrated his departure, waving
Bolivia’s tricolored flag in the street. On
Twitter, Carlos Mesa hailed “the end of
the tyranny.” Others had attacked Mo-
rales’s lieutenants and vandalized their
homes. A mob looted a house that Mo-
rales owned in Cochabamba, and set
fire to one owned by his sister. In Po-
tosí, the brother of MAS’s congressional
leader was stripped naked and paraded
around the main square, while his house
was torched. Another opposition mob
grabbed the mayor of a town near Co-
chabamba, cut off her hair, doused her
in red paint, and marched her through
the streets while beating her.
Morales’s supporters had clashed
with police; others burned and looted
businesses and the homes of some of
his prominent critics. Mobs set fire to
sixty-eight buses in La Paz, and snip-
ers fired on a caravan of pro-opposition
miners, wounding several. Others block-
aded the roads leading to Bolivian cit-
ies, cutting off supplies of food and fuel.
On November 12th, the day that
Áñez took office, she deployed the po-
lice and the Army, and soon offered im-
munity for any crimes they might com-
mit in their efforts to reassert social
control. Within days, the security forces
were involved in two massacres of Mo-
rales supporters. On the fifteenth, a
group of militant cocaleros, marching in
support of Morales, approached police
lines on a bridge in the town of Sacaba,
and nine were killed by gunfire. Three
days later, in the Aymara city of El Alto,
Morales supporters blockaded a state-
owned gas-storage facility called Sen-
kata. Security forces opened fire, killing
at least ten.
Áñez’s government maintained that
the security forces had averted a “terror-
ist attack” at Senkata. Officials claimed
that the demonstrators had intended to

blow up gas holding tanks, causing as

many as fifty thousand deaths. But in-

vestigators for the O.A.S. rejected this

explanation. A MAS organizer who was

there that day told me that the demon-

strators had wanted to “gain attention,”

so they dug trenches in the dirt road

outside the facility, to halt fuel trucks.

But the government had dispatched bull-

dozers to fill the ditches, so they had

thrown rocks at the bulldozers, and then

soldiers had begun shooting. “That

woman has lied,” the organizer said, of

Áñez. “She said we were carrying fire-

arms, but that’s an infuriating lie.”

By the time Bolivia’s unrest subsided,

at the end of November, thirty-four

people were dead and hundreds had

been injured. Arturo Murillo, the new

interior minister, told me that Áñez’s

administration bore no responsibility.

“Out of all of the dead in the country—

and each of them pains us—there is not

any sign that one of them was caused

by the government,” he said. “The ma-

jority are dead from a .22-calibre bullet

in the back of the head, or else in the

back, or under the arm. What does this

mean? This means that the people of

MAS, those who stirred up the unrest,

killed these people to get things going.”

Murillo has provided no evidence for

his claims. It is true that Morales’s fol-

lowers committed violence. (Morales

himself argued that they had been pro-

voked by policemen ripping wiphala

Morales likes to say that he did not just lead Bolivia—he “refounded ” it.