Russia

This Sunday (10 November) will go down in South American history as one of its darkest days. After weeks of institutional destabilization, business groups, landowners and the Bolivian Armed Forces have just succeeded in removing President Evo Morales and his vice-president García Linera from office. This is a coup d’état with a reactionary character and strong racist components, as shown by the successive attacks on the headquarters of indigenous organizations and the violence of the extreme right against activists in favor of popular sovereignty.

At the beginning of last week an increase in fares was announced for the Santiago subway, a fundamental means of transport in this city, which unleashed a wave of protests led by the students who called for days of “subway evasion”. Subway evasions were harshly suppressed by police inside the metro stations themselves, with tear gas and even shots. The repression did not discourage the protest of the students but expanded it to other sectors.

The solidarity movement with conscripts/soldiers in Greece is under attack for yet again as a new persecution against the Free Soldiers Network “Spartacus” and the Solidarity Committee to Conscripts is underway. More precisely, an active duty officer of the Greek Army (a former commander of an army unit in the city of Alexandroupoli) sued Nikos Charalampopoulos, a member of the “Spartacus” network with the accusation of “continuous libel and slander”.

Today we have learned of the penalties imposed against Catalan pro-independence political prisoners. After two years in prison, Jordi Cuixart, Carme Forcadell, Dolors Bassa, Oriol Junqueras, Jordi Sànchez, Joaquim Forn, Raül Romeva, Jordi Turull and Josep Rull have been sentenced to various terms of between 9 and 13 years for sedition and misuse of public funds.

The international crisis has meant the ruling classes have unloaded the costs of the neo-liberal economic measures onto the backs of workers throughout the world. In a region which is again living through turbulent times, as we see with the people’s upsurge in Ecuador or the political crisis in Peru, the shift to the right in Latin America is real but also unstable. The axis of the authoritarian and ultra-liberal offensive internationally is the Trump administration but a key regional outpost of it can be seen in the semi-fascist Bolsonaro government. This is the context of the upcoming Argentinian elections.