Thousands of people marched Monday through the centre of Buenos Aires to express their support of former Bolivian president Evo Morales.
The now ex-president resigned Sunday among allegations of voter fraud that led to eruptive protests across the country and pressure from the Armed Forces to step down.
"Evo isn't alone, Evo isn't alone," chanted the demonstrators in front of the Bolivian Embassy in Buenos Aires, just 400 metres from the Obelisk.
Teachers, government employees, political groups, social organizations and Bolivian residents joined. It went off without escalations while participants waved flags of Bolivia and its indigenous communities.
"There are only a few groups that are destabilizing our country, Bolivia. It has planted the hate between upper and lower classes, the rich against the poor. It is a coup against the State from Carlos Mesa and Luis Camacho," Bernabé Busaric, a textile worker of 36 years, told AFP.
Busaric arrived in Argentina 10 years ago, and he marched with a group of Bolivians who reside in this country.
"No to the coup!" read multiple signs in the crowd.
A group of human rights organsations from Argentina, which included Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and Madres de Plaza de Maya Línea Fundadora among others, sent a statement out Sunday in which they "repudiated the coup against the popular government of Evo Morales."
Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel stated the "coup in Bolivia is an attack against all the democracies of the world."
Argentine diplomats from the opposition announced a special session to convene Wednesday with the goal to "repudiate the overthrow in Bolivia and demand the physical safekeeping of Evo Morales, former vice president Álvaro García Linera and other leaders from the MAS party," said Agustín Rossi, a peronist from Frente de Todos.
Sunday, Mauricio Macri's government issued "a call to all political and social actors in Bolivia to preserve the social peace and dialogue, emphasizing the importance of steering this period of transition so that it remains open," without defining what happened as a coup against the State.
Different from the current government, Alberto Fernández defined it as an interruption of the democratic order in Bolivia. "To remove a president with actions that aren't within the framework of the rules of democracy can't be called anything else than a coup," he said Monday.
--AFP
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