COUP-COUP-A-DOO

So, since last week when I wrote about Bolivia, shit has turned up to eleven. Evo Morales, the former President, has fled to Mexico (which offered him political asylum) along with several members of his former cabinet. Jeanine Anez, a member of the opposition Democratic Union party, announced that she was “willing” to act as interim president, which is awful big of her considering she didn’t win any, like, vote and nobody actually asked her to be interim president, but nonetheless she’s certainly acting as interim president, having passed a bill which essentially indemnifies the military from killing pro-Morales protestors. The aforementioned protestors have been demonstrating in Santa Cruz and La Paz, mostly peacefully (and upping the ante of “protestors use clever tactics to counter military suppression” by using mass numbers of laser pointers to prevent troops from being able to take aim or even safely fly helicopters and drones), but most recently reports and video of some army divisions defecting to the pro-Morales camp are starting to appear. (There’s no other way to really explain why protestors marching and cheering for Morales are now being accompanied by armored personnel carriers. Those things aren’t easy to steal.)

Governments of “the West” (which has been a very stupid term for some time considering it includes both Japan and England, which are literally on opposite sides of the planet, but whatever) have unfortunately mostly been either quietly or openly supportive of this coup (Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, issued a mealymouthed statement which essentially supported the coup in the most tepid terms possible) which is somewhat depressing but also sort of unsurprising: right-wing dictators in South America tend to provide The West with predictable client states, after all. That said, lefties arguing that this was all a giant conspiracy prompted by (usually) the United States for some reason - the current reason du jour is that Morales had promised, if re-elected, to nationalize Bolivia’s lithium mines and make lithium more expensive - are probably taking their rightly earned moral disgust with out leaders a little too far. Give Bolivia’s awful right-wing faction credit for being assholes who most likely didn’t need any prompting to oust an indigenous socialist when given the opportunity; if Western leaders did anything more than simply say “yeah, we won’t interfere” (which wouldn’t be surprising because none of them are going to invade Bolivia and take a side) I’d be surprised. Not that saying such would be any great shakes, of course.

HERE IS A LITTLE SOMETHING ABOUT CHINA AND LOAN AGREEMENTS… NO WAIT IT’S KIND OF INTERESTING I PROMISE

China, being a large and powerful country, often offers loans to poorer countries. This is pretty par for the course for large countries, who often offer favourable loan terms to poor countries along with foreign aid grants. However, China is a little different from your standard large and powerful country in that its loan terms generally aren’t that favourable and in that when countries default, it has an established track record of simply seizing whatever asset they bargained for as collateral on the loan. In 2017, as part of a loan repayment plan for Sri Lanka, they “leased” a large port for 99 years. (People who know a little bit about modern Chinese history will probably look at the 99 year figure and say “…oh, I see what they did there.”) In 2018, it was the largest international airport in Zambia.

This time around, it’s the port facility in Mombasa, Kenya, which is one of the busiest ports in Africa. Kenya borrowed money -a lot of money - from China to build a new passenger and freight railway between Mombasa and Nairobi, and the railroad isn’t actually profitable yet and may not be profitable for years. (The Kenyans are quite irritated, because part of the terms of the loan involved hiring Chinese contractors to build and initially run the railway - and the Chinese contractors haven’t stopped working all those railway jobs yet so that Kenyans can take over.) The loan agreement also stipulates that if there is a dispute between Kenya and China about the terms of the loan, it will be dealt with via a Chinese arbitrator (who will of course be completely neutral about things). There are a bunch of other terms which are relatively shady, and if you’re wondering why Kenya agreed to these terms, the answer is the international version of “why do people go to payday lenders when they know it’s a bad deal?”

All of this is to make one simple point, which is that China is doing more or less what both Western and Soviet governments did for decades to Africa, except China is honestly being much meaner and selfish about it. Granted, this is technically a rational plan for China to undertake - but the ethics of it are dubious, to say the least. (And in case you’re wondering: India is already exploring much the same kinds of opportunities, because large countries are always going to be interested in fucking Africa over as much as possible.)

THIS WEEK IN PROTESTS: CZECH YOURSELF BEFORE YOU WRECK YOURSELF

In between 200,000 (what the cops say) and 300,000 (what the organizers say) Czechs got together for a protest in Letna Park in Prague, which was incidentally the site of most of the biggest protests of the Velvet Revolution in 1989, and that choice was of course hardly a coincidence. Also, much like the 1989 protests, thus far the leadership has been dismissive of the protests. Plus ca change, and so forth.

The protests are happening because Andrej Babis (who looks sort of like the non-union Czech equivalent of Sam Waterston) is generally considered to be a swell dude - no, I’m kidding, it’s corruption, of course it’s corruption, why would it be anything else? In Babis’ case, in between his appearances on the Czech version of Grace and Frankie he was accused a couple of years ago of accepting a 2 million euro development grant from the EU’s development fund for one of his companies (oh, yes, Babis is a media billionaire, I’m sure you’re deeply shocked by that), which he was not supposed to accept because he was the goddamn Deputy Prime Minister at the time. He was in fact formally charged with fraud, but unfortunately before his case could progress he became Prime Minister in the 2017 election, which gave him immunity from prosecution. (The Czech Republic uses a proportional representation system, so he actually managed this trick with his party only getting just under 30% of the vote.)

Because he won that 2017 election, Babis has of course dismissed all criticism of himself with the old “if I’m so awful and nobody likes me why did I win the election” line of argument. Of course, his first government fell in 2018 after it lost a confidence motion and he had to form a new government with the help of both the Socialists and the Communists, which is sort of amusing. (Less amusing is this aside: before he made his billions in the media, Babis was a secret policeman in the Soviet-era Communist regime. Seriously, this guy is creepy as hell.)

Is anything gonna happen here? Well… I dunno, as always, but in this case my guess would be “wait a year and see.” The lefty parties are in a decent position to extract political capital from Babis, who very much does not want to get turfed from office, but if public disgust keeps rising they’ll drop him like a bad potato because it’s not like they particularly like the guy. This is why paying attention to protests can sometimes be a good idea. 250,000 people is a pretty decent protest, but the Velvet Revolution managed 500 to 600 thousand and that was against a dying regime to boot.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movie rewatched this week:

Glory (1989, Edward Zwick, TCM) - 5/5

We did the free tryout of Disney+ and it’s fine, I guess? A lot of the old Disney Afternoon shows are on there - which is great - but the viewing order is seriously fakakta on a lot of them, which to me screams “rushed to market” and that’s for something that was announced almost a year ago. Oh, and The Mandalorian, the Star Wars teevee show that’s the big opening week draw, is… also fine, I guess? I mean, it feels very Star-Warsy - it has the look nailed and the characters, such as they are, feel organic to the universe, and the fighty bits are good - but there’s barely been a plot over the first two episodes, which have stretched out very little story into nearly two hours. So, thus far, a mixed bag.

See you in seven.