BOLIVIAN activists accused the United States of hypocrisy today after Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised “human rights concerns” over the arrest of coup president Jeanine Anez.

Mr Blinken accused the elected Bolivian government of “anti-democratic behaviour” for prosecuting Ms Anez and other ministers in the government installed by the 2019 US-backed military coup for the massacres of protesters they ordered.

Miriam Amancay Colque of the Bartolina Sisa Resistance said the US complained of far-right white supremacists storming the Capitol in Washington but supported their counterparts in Bolivia.

She slammed Washington’s support for the Anez regime of “fascists, racists, looters, arsonists and torturers.

“In just one year Anez and company murdered 37 indigenous brothers, wounded more than 800 and put thousands in jail,” she said. “Now that the coup plotters are out of power and being prosecuted for their crimes, following due process, the US comes out in defence of its partners who committed crimes against humanity.

“Nothing strange for the country whose police kills African Americans in a growing wave of racism.

“Mr Blinken complains that the Luis Arce government ‘politicises the legal system,’ but the US did not complain when the paramilitaries, police and army applied an arbitrary and lawless process to crush a democratically elected government.

“Are they afraid that the dirty deals of their intelligence agencies will be exposed, as happened in Chile [with the exposure of] Operation Condor?”

She also attacked the Catholic Church, which has complained of Ms Anez’s arrest, pointing to its “nefarious history of supporting vile reactionaries in Latin America,” including by enabling the resettlement of Nazi war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, who became an adviser to Bolivian military dictatorships as well as working for the CIA and West German intelligence from the 1950s-80s.