AJ 25th Book

The Morales Paradox

The Morales Paradox Hassan Masoud | Al Jazeera Correspondent - Brazil

I had just landed at Brazil’s Brasilia Airport on my way to cover the 2019 BRICS summit. As I switched on my phone following the 13-hour flight, it was flooded with messages. Then came the call from the news editor telling me to board the next plane bound for Bolivia. The country’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, had resigned under pressure from the army following a disputed re- election. I had hoped my first time in Bolivia would have been under better circumstances, but as the plane came in to land, the capital city, La Paz, looked from the sky like a scene in John Erick Dowdle’s ‘No Escape’ movie: there were plumes of smoke, massive gatherings of people and a general state of mayhem. The newsroom urged me to rush for a live position as soon as I could, so I jumped in a cab and promised the driver a generous tip if he could get me through the chaos surrounding the airport and closer to where the story was. But as we left the boundary of the airport, we were stopped by a group of angry protesters. They took my personal effects and some attempted to assault me. “No foreigners are allowed into our country,” they shouted.

I immediately flashed my journalist card and told them: “I work for Al Jazeera. We are here just to tell your story to the world; we are here to tell the truth.” Some of the protesters recognised the Al Jazeera logo and went to speak their leader, an Indigenous woman. They gracefully returned my belongings and asked me to go back to the airport in peace. Upon returning to the airport, I went live explaining to our viewers what was happening. We were held inside the airport for nine hours. But, along with a fellow journalist from a Brazilian TV station, we managed to sneak into the city at dawn. Within a few hours, I was live again on the morning bulletin from one of the roadblocks manned by vigilantes. The headline was ‘Evo Morales takes asylum in Mexico’. The following day, as warplanes hovered above the parliament and presidential palace, Jeanine Anez Chavez, declared herself the interim president. It was a move the exiled president described as a ‘coup d’état.’

The next day, the Information Ministry invited the media on a tour of Morales’s presidential residence, a building joining the presidential palace in the heart of the capital. The Information Minister alleged that “Morales was leading a luxurious life at the expense of his own people.” But, to my surprise, what we saw was a simply furnished house that might best be described as “average”.

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