| Evo Morales, the socialist president of Bolivia, stepped down earlier this month after Bolivians took to the streets to protest election irregularities — and after the head of the military asked him to leave. In Morales’ place, a right-wing government has quickly expanded its power and worried some human rights activists.
Travis Waldron, a reporter who covers Latin America for HuffPost, wrote a smart piece this week about how the far-right seized control in Bolivia. We spoke to him about what’s going on there.
So, to establish this from the start, it's certainly true that many Bolivians had real complaints about Evo Morales, right?
There were existing concerns about Morales, even from people who had supported him, when he lost a 2016 referendum that asked Bolivians to approve constitutional changes that would allow him to run for president again. The referendum was voted down, but he still ran again after a separate court ruling. He has also drawn opposition over some of his more autocratic tendencies, including efforts to limit press freedom and his suppression of groups that criticized him. His support was quite a bit lower in the election than it had been in the past, and then the allegations of fraud ignited it all into the protests that erupted over the last few weeks.
What has been most alarming about how the interim government has acted since Morales left?
The role of the military in Morales' ouster was always the most concerning element of it. The actions of the armed forces and police since then have been the most immediately alarming part since. Military men were accused of killing at least eight pro-Morales demonstrators last week, right after Jeanine Áñez — the self-declared interim president — signed a decree guaranteeing the armed forces and police immunity from prosecution during the interim period. There have also been threats from Áñez appointees to prosecute political opponents and target journalists for "seditious" acts.
Can you describe the battle over whether to call this an official coup or not?
The argument that it was a coup was based on a set of pretty simple facts: The military had a role in Morales’ eventual decision to leave before his actual mandate was up (even if he hadn't run for president again, he wasn't supposed to leave office until January) and paved the way for a group that represents a tiny minority of Bolivians and opposed to Morales ideologically, seized power. There were a lot of people, though, who opposed calling it that because they felt it erased the very real opposition to Morales that Bolivians had expressed, and because the protests had been driven at least in part by people who had once supported him. Settling that argument matters historically, of course, but what's happened over the last two weeks is pretty clear: The right-wing has co-opted legitimate unrest and concern about Morales to seize power they haven't proven capable of winning in an election.
You cover Brazil extensively for HuffPost. Do you see any similarities between that country and what's happening in Bolivia right now?
There are some loose similarities, but the real concerning element in Bolivia, with regard to Brazil, is how much Luis Fernando Camacho — the extremist right-winger who emerged as an "opposition leader" during the protests — seems to have directly modeled himself off of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's far-right president. Bolsonaro prospered by taking everything in Brazil to its extreme, and it helped turn general unrest into total upheaval that made his victory in 2018 possible. Camacho has clearly studied that playbook, and a lot of similarities are apparent. There's a belief there that Camacho or Áñez or some similar figure is too extreme to get elected in Bolivia, and maybe that's true. But I lost count of the number of people who told me the same thing about Bolsonaro in the two years before he won the presidency in Brazil. | 
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