By Josué Monroy
The recently-elected Bolivian government has vowed to bring those responsible for two massacres in November 2019 to justice. 27 protestors were killed by gunfire in the city of Sacaba and the Senkata area of El Alto city during demonstrations supporting deposed Bolivian president Evo Morales.
The killings were allegedly linked to police forces loyal to the interim government that took over immediately after Morales relinquished the presidency, which was composed of conservatives that staunchly opposed the former president’s socialist policies.
Bolivia was thrown into political upheaval late last year after the forced ouster of Morales, which some accused of being a U.S.-backed coup. This was the culmination of opposition efforts to negate the results of the October 2019 general election in which Morales won the presidency for the fourth time.
The day following Morales’s victory, the Organization of American States (OAS), which monitored the election, claimed there had been irregularities in the election process. This claim emboldened the opposition and led to demonstrations in the following weeks. Government and military officials that supported the opposition called for Morales’s resignation, despite there being no evidence of election fraud.
Morales and his cabinet resigned on November 10 of that year, and he fled to Mexico after being offered asylum by its government. On November 12, senator and religious conservative opposition member Jeanine Áñez assumed power as interim president, while supporters of Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party took to the streets.
What ensued was widespread violent repression by police forces at the behest of the new administration leading to the events at Sacaba and Senkata, according to findings by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The events unfolded between November 22 and 25 of 2019, as Morales supporters descended on the cities to protest. In Senkata, the demonstrators had blocked access to a natural gas processing plant, forming a barricade. Police attacked the protestors in an attempt to break through, shooting and killing several.
In Sacaba, several protestors were trapped on a bridge when they were attacked by state forces, resulting in multiple dead and wounded. This year, Bolivia’s Institute of Forensic Investigations (IDIF) determined the killings were caused by weapons of the National Police and the Armed Forces.
Not long before the violence in 2019, Áñez issued Decree 4078, granting police and military personnel immunity from prosecution during the repressive crackdown on Morales supporters. This impunity would continue to define the de facto regime during the following year.
In the months after the alleged coup, the interim government persecuted Morales’s political allies and charged them with various crimes including terrorism and sedition. The acting Interior Minister Arturo Murillo vowed to purge the current administration of any former members of Morales’s government and went as far as having judges arrested for being “too lenient” on accused collaborators. What was at first touted as a return to democracy from the hands of a would-be dictator, had now turned into an authoritarian regime in itself.
The struggle for power in the wake of the MAS government’s ousting highlighted the racist and far-right religious conservative overtones of the interim administration. The day she declared herself interim president, Áñez held up a comically oversized bible and declared that “The Bible has returned to the government palace.” This was a direct response to Morales banning any form of Christian religious symbols at the Palacio Quemado — Bolivia’s equivalent of the White House — in an effort to separate Church and State.
In early 2020, Áñez warned Bolivians to not “allow the arbitrary, the violent and the savage return to power, ” in reference to the former MAS government. Áñez is originally from the eastern Bolivian province of Beni, a wealthy conservative area that at one point sought to gain autonomy in response to Morales’s policies.
Morales, of Aymara descent, was the first indigenous president of Bolivia, and was reelected to the presidency three times since 2005. He developed what he called “communitarian socialism,” and sought to uplift indigenous communities and poor Bolivians by reducing poverty and illiteracy.
He reduced poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent during his tenure. The base for the MAS party is largely working class and indigenous; the masses that energized Morales and gave him their support. He brought indigenous culture to the forefront of his administration, even making the Aymara wiphala a dual national flag alongside the traditional red, yellow and green Bolivian flag.
In October 2020, after a full year of unrest during which elections were continually delayed, MAS candidate Luis Arce won the presidential election and restored socialism in Bolivia. Arce had served as Minister of Economy and Public Finance under Morales, who was not allowed to run in the election and was still in exile. One of the administration’s first orders of business was to investigate the massacres at Sacaba and Senkata and find those responsible.
On Sunday November 22, Justice Minister Ivan Lima and MAS legislator Leonardo Loza announced that a full investigation would be underway in cooperation with the IACHR. They will scour the files of Bolivian Armed Forces, Police, and the Interior Ministry to find out who plotted and executed the massacres. Five experts from IACHR were due to arrive in Bolivia on November 23 to begin the work on identifying the perpetrators.
Josué Monroy is a 4th year International Relations major at UC Davis. Hailing from Santa Cruz, CA, his interests include Latin American literature and politics, as well as playing music in his spare time
