“Camacho, freedom”, reads the graffiti next to the headquarters of the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee. Inside, under a plaque that claims the “moral and material aggrandizement” of this city in the hot East of Bolivia, dozens of sacks of rice and noodles are stacked. “They are a donation to combat the shortages that occurred due to the blockades,” says a member of the committee.
It is curious, because the roadblocks in the region were set up in January by the Pro Santa Cruz Committee itself in protest against the arrest of the leader of the Bolivian far-right, Luis Fernando Camacho, governor of the department of Santa Cruz.
Camacho, 43, has been in the Choncoro prison, in La Paz, since January 28, accused of being one of the leaders of the forced resignation of then-President Evo Morales, in November 2019, which the political authorities and legal authorities in Bolivia already define it as a coup d’état.
There he meets Jeanine Áñez, the senator from the province whom Camacho helped elevate the presidency overnight after the coup against Morales. Áñez was sentenced to ten years in prison, in June of last year, for her role in the coup, and may also be charged in a second trial known as Coup II, referring to the harsh police actions in Sacaba (Cochabamba) and Senkata ( El Alto) that ended with a balance of at least 30 deaths, almost all workers and peasants from the Aymara and Quechua ethnic groups.
Despite all this, Camacho is considered a fighter for freedom by the elites and the middle class of Santa Cruz, who remain on the warpath against the Government of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) of President Luis Arce, in the same way that They have faced Morales since his first electoral victory in 2005.
Such is the indignation over the imprisonment that it has been considered suspending the carnival, the most important party of the year with its iconic Carnival Queen, an award given in 2019, the year of the coup, to Camacho’s wife, the model Fátima Jordan . The Solomonic proposal: inspire the designs of the comparsas in the slogan “Let’s break the chains for freedom and democracy”.
Although everything sounds like peace and democracy at the headquarters of the Pro Santa Cruz Committee, “the affable presentation hides extreme conservatism, violent methods and feelings of hatred towards dark skin pigmentation,” says Arce government spokesman Jorge Richter. , in a message sent by WhatsApp.
Behind racism is class consciousness. With their redistribution policies through increases in the minimum wage, nationalization of gas and other industries, as well as the redistribution of land with 22% already in the hands of the Quechua and Aymara indigenous groups, the governments of Morales and, now, Arce are the nemesis of the 40 families that have dominated the Santa Cruz economy for centuries. Of course, both presidents have successfully sought alliances with the Santa Cruz agribusiness, giving the green light to the expansion of soybeans and cattle ranching towards the border with Brazil.
Camacho was the architect of the coup against Morales three and a half years ago. Then president of the Pro Santa Cruz Committee, he led the march of hundreds of armed far-right supporters and mutinous police to the presidential palace. “Pachamama will never return,” announced the shepherd who accompanied him.
Camacho publicly acknowledged that his father had agreed with the military to force Morales to resign. The nicknamed macho Camacho adopted “a testosterone-filled speech to lead the ouster of the president”, explains in the new book by British journalist Linda Farthing and American lawyer Thomas Becker, titled Coup (coup). He coordinated support for Bolsonaro’s coup and senators from the Republican right in Florida.
A forerunner of the tactics of Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, Camacho paved the way for the coup by denouncing an inevitable electoral fraud in the months before the elections. The Organization of American States (OAS) helped finish the job by denouncing fraud on election night itself.
Since then, various experts in the United States (from Tulane and Harvard Universities) and Spain (Universidad de Salamanca) have shown that the supposedly fraudulent rise in the last-minute vote in favor of Morales responded to an obvious factor: the strong support for the MAS in remote areas of the Andean highlands whose count is always delayed compared to cities like Santa Cruz. “What happened in November 2019 was a coup: complex national factors in tandem with foreign interference caused the expulsion of a legitimately elected leader,” summarize Farthing and Becker.
Everything became clear in the elections at the end of 2020. Arce swept and Camacho did not reach 14% of the votes, almost all in Santa Cruz, where he was elected governor in the 2021 regional elections. After the failure to take national power , the elites of Santa Cruz return to the demands for decentralization. “The transnational oligarchy from Santa Cruz upholds the discourse of federalism […] because it does not have the capacity to create a project for the entire country,” says La Paz political analyst Áxel Arias.
Despite this, Camacho’s imprisonment creates a danger for the Arce government. Aware of this, the president tried to build bridges for the people of Santa Cruz in the dispute over the postponement of the new census, which, given the latest demographic trends, should be favorable to the region. The Pro Santa Cruz Committee requested the corresponding changes to its quotas in Congress. Arce approved a law that meets some of the requirements. Immediately afterwards, the president was accused of being naive by the more politically experienced (and more Machiavellian) Morales, who fears losing Andean seats. “Chuquisaca, Potosí, Oruro and La Paz lose one or two seats. Those seats are going to go to Santa Cruz,” Morales warned.
For this reason, according to the ex-minister of Morales Pablo Solón, the arrest of Camacho can be understood as part of a power battle within the MAS between Arce and Morales. The arrest has served to deactivate the condemnation of the Government from the MAS bases closest to Morales. “Camacho was detained largely due to an internal dispute,” Solón maintains.
