Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, won reelection three times on a leftist platform championing Indigenous rights, anti-imperialism, and Bolivian control over the country’s natural gas reserves. In
Bolivia in the Age of Gas, Bret Gustafson explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia, along with the rise, and ultimate fall, of the country’s first Indigenous-led government. Rethinking current events against the backdrop of a longer history of oil and gas politics and military intervention, Gustafson shows how natural gas wealth brought a measure of economic independence and redistribution, yet also reproduced political and economic relationships that contradicted popular and Indigenous aspirations for radical change. Though grounded in the unique complexities of Bolivia, the volume argues that fossil-fuel political economies worldwide are central to the reproduction of militarism and racial capitalism and suggests that progressive change dema
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Bolivia crisis: There’s more to it than meets the eye
28 Dec 2020 Bolivia’s former President, Evo Morales (right), speaks next to Luis Arce during a meeting with members of their party in Buenos Aires. File/Agence France-Presse
Borzou Daragahi,
The Independent
What if a clique of far-right extremists used the chaos of a disputed election to seize power and try to do away with a democracy? Would the enlightened nations of the world speak out? Would the United States, European Union and United Kingdom impose sanctions and withdraw diplomatic recognition of the coup government?
The answer, at least in the case of the South American nation of Bolivia, is a resounding and dismaying “no” – and it provides a harsh lesson to those who see in the liberal west a bastion of democratic values.