Trump Applauds Exit of Bolivia’s Morales as Clashes Continue

President Donald Trump applauded the exit of Bolivia’s leftist President Evo Morales, saying it cleared the way for democracy in the South American country.

“The United States applauds the Bolivian people for demanding freedom and the Bolivian military for abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia’s constitution,” Trump said in a statement Monday.

Bolivia is in chaos after a night of arson attacks and clashes. Morales quit Sunday following election irregularities that triggered weeks of violence and intervention from the armed forces. Trump’s statement is the first official communication from the administration on Morales’s exit.

Morales took office in 2006, and was the lone survivor of the so-called pink tide of leftist leaders that reshaped the continent’s politics during the 2000s. Unlike his ally Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, he presided over strong economic growth, rising incomes and falling poverty. But his democratic credentials were questioned after he ignored the result of a 2016 referendum on presidential term limits.

“These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail,” Trump said.

Bolivia’s top soldier, General Williams Kaliman Romero, on Sunday called on Morales to step down to restore peace to the country. Russia joined leftist governments in the region, including Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba, in denouncing what the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said on Monday appeared to have been “an orchestrated coup” against Morales.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, took a different position to the president, calling Morales’s exit a coup d’etat.

“What is happening in Bolivia at the moment is not democracy, it is a coup d’etat,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet translated from Spanish. “The people of Bolivia deserve free, fair and peaceful elections – and not to be subjected to violent takeovers.”