In Bolivia, thousands of protesters marched Tuesday in the city of El Alto demanding the right to elect a new president, after the government of right-wing interim leader Jeanine Áñez said it would postpone elections for the second time this year, citing the pandemic. Unions and Indigenous groups accuse Áñez of continuing the coup d’état that ousted former President Evo Morales last November.
Protester: “We will not allow this de facto government to embezzle our Plurinational State of Bolivia. In this council, we determined we will carry on with protests until the September 6 elections are ratified.”
Following the coup, Bolivia has experienced one of its deadliest and most repressive periods in decades as the government carries out summary executions and arbitrary detentions, according to a new report by Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic and the University Network for Human Rights. James Cavallaro, the former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said, “These abuses mirror the authoritarian behavior of the dictatorships of the 1970s in the Americas. This must stop.”