In interview with British journalist, Morales says the U.S. uses NATO to provoke wars and sell weapons. U.S./UK-backed coup against […]
The post Former Bolivian President Evo Morales Calls For a Global Campaign to Eliminate NATO appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.
A Justice Department trial attorney repeatedly contacted Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers asking, eventually under threat of subpoena, about research they had conducted on the 2019 Bolivian presidential election, according to emails obtained by The Intercept. Sent between October 2020 and January 2021, the emails point to the existence of the Justice Department inquiry and add new evidence to support Bolivian allegations that the United States was implicated in its 2019 coup.
The emails reveal the Justice Department’s involvement in the Bolivian coup regime’s criminal investigation into alleged voter fraud, which has not previously been reported. The inquiry targeted a pair of respected MIT researchers about their work for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in which they broadly refuted suspicions that Bolivia’s socialist party had rigged the election.
The short-lived coup regime reached power following a clear script: In the weeks leading up to the Bolivian presidential election in October 2019, the opposition pumped endless propaganda through social media and television networks, warning that incumbent President Evo Morales would exploit widespread fraud to win reelection. Morales had become the first Indigenous president elected in Bolivia in 2005, at the head of his party Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, and by 2019, he was running for his fourth term. He faced intense opposition, often framed in explicitly racist terms, from a Frankenstein coalition of right-wing Bolivians of European descent and supporters of former President Carlos Mesa, once a member of Bolivia’s left revolutionary party who had become hostile to Morales’s social democratic government.
As the votes were counted on election night, Morales was ahead as expected. The question was whether he would win by enough to avoid a runoff, which in Bolivia is triggered when a candidate wins by a margin of fewer than 10 points. In an unofficial tally, Morales led Mesa by 7.9 points, giving the opposition hope for a second round. But when the official count was released, Morales had won by 10.6 points. There would be no runoff.
Without evidence, the opposition immediately leveled fraud charges. It was backed up the next day by the Organization of American States, the powerful hemispheric cooperation organization based in Washington, D.C.
“The OAS Mission expresses its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls,” read the OAS’s incendiary statement. Protesters took to the streets; the military called for Morales to step down; and the opposition installed a new leader, Jeanine Áñez, after three weeks of unrest. Far to Mesa’s right, Áñez assumed office and swiftly attempted to eliminate the sense of enfranchisement for Indigenous people that the Morales government had brought. While 14 out of 16 members of Morales’ first Cabinet were Indigenous, Áñez did not appoint a single Indigenous person to her first Cabinet. In the two months before assuming office, she had tweeted that Morales was a “poor Indian” and implied that Indigenous people cannot wear shoes. When she reached the presidency, she declared that “the Bible has returned to the palace.”
Former interim Bolivian President Jeanine Áñez is escorted by members of the Special Force to Fight Against Crime after being arrested in La Paz, Bolivia, on March 13, 2021.
Photo: Aizar Raldes/AFP via Getty Images
The coup, roughly the same play President Donald Trump would attempt a year later, was complete.
But the U.S. press refused to call it that, instead accepting the allegations of fraud at face value.
“The line between coups and revolts can be blurry, even nonexistent,” wrote Max Fisher for the New York Times. He cited what political scientist Jay Ulfelder calls “Schrödinger’s coup”— those cases which “exist in a perpetual state of ambiguity, simultaneously coup and not-coup”— and dismissed the distinction as “old binaries” now considered “outdated” by scholars.
The Times did not undergo such hand-wringing over allegations that Morales’s party had rigged the election. Its October 2019 coverage reproduced the opposition’s promises for a “damning” unreleased OAS report, raising “the prospect that a victory by Mr. Morales would be regarded by the international community as illegitimate.” The Trump administration’s top diplomat for Latin America, Michael Kozak, condemned the Morales government and vowed that the U.S. “will work with the international community to hold accountable anyone who undermines Bolivia’s democratic institutions.”
Even a surface-level look at the vote-counting process suggested that the surge for Morales was utterly predictable.
But even a surface-level look at the vote-counting process suggested that the surge for Morales was utterly predictable. The bulk of the votes that were left to be counted on election night in 2019 had been cast deep in the country’s rural areas, where Indigenous miners, coca growers, and other working-class people overwhelmingly favored Morales. (The former president hails from the Chapare and was previously the head of the coca growers’ union.) It should have seemed obvious that their votes had put him over the top.
Just over a year later, in November 2020, late-counted Democratic votes put Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election, and Trump called foul. “We were winning everything, and all of a sudden it was just called off,” Trump said on election night. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.” The U.S. media had no difficulty explaining why the surge for Biden was legitimate. But when reporting on Bolivia, all of the American election expertise evaporated.
The OAS followed its October statement with a more in-depth analysis in November 2019, this time finding perhaps as many as a few hundred cases of apparent vote-tampering. But the data in the report did not sufficiently support the organization’s allegations of widespread fraud. In a letter to the OAS later that month, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., asked if the organization was “aware that this steady increase in Evo Morales’ margin was the result of precincts that were, on average, more pro-Morales reporting their results later than precincts that were, on average, less pro-Morales? Why is this apparently obvious conclusion — from the publicly available data — never mentioned in the EOM [Election Observation Mission] press statements or reports?”
The New York Times did not exercise the same scrutiny. “After the Organization of American States declared on Sunday that there was ‘clear manipulation’ of the voting in October,” the paper editorialized, “Mr. Morales was left with no choice but to resign, bitterly tweeting from an unknown location that ‘The world and patriotic Bolivians will repudiate this coup.”
In fact, it would be statisticians who repudiated the coup. Researchers at MIT, commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, took a closer look at the data and evidence behind the allegations and concluded what many other independent observers had already found: The fraud claims were bogus, according to a statistical analysis conducted by Jack R. Williams and John Curiel of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab.
The fallout from the MIT researchers’ analysis, which was published by the Washington Post in February 2020, was considerable. In a stunning reversal, the New York Times published an article on the findings, saying that it “cast doubt on Bolivian election fraud.”
The prestigious release was a major blow to the coup regime, leading to references in many of the same major media outlets that had peddled the coup government’s election fraud narrative. The new insight sapped the coup government’s international credibility, which was further degraded as it repeatedly delayed a new election. With La Paz shut down by protesters — this time the crowds were on the side of MAS — the regime was finally forced to hold an election on October 18, 2020.
Three days before the vote, the researchers received the first of the Justice Department’s requests. Trial attorney Angela George identified herself as an attorney at the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, or OIA, and said she had “received a formal request from Paraguay” for assistance in an ongoing criminal investigation. Curiel told her she had the wrong researcher, as he had not worked on any Paraguayan election study, and she told him that Bolivia was the one she had meant.
George never provided details about the nature of the criminal investigation, the existence of which has not been previously reported. Attempts to reach the coup government’s minister of justice, Álvaro Coimbra, were unsuccessful, as he is in prison facing charges of sedition related to the coup.
“We have a few questions about the data report, and we would appreciate if you could let us know when you are available to speak with us via telephone before or by November 6, 2020,” George wrote to the researchers. When Williams explained that his research was based on publicly available information, she replied threatening “a subpoena being served on you and the lab” but also dialed down her demand, saying that an interview might not be necessary. “I am simply trying to find out if the report, Analysis of the 2019 Bolivia Election, that is embedded in the Washington Post article referenced below includes your research and is an authentic copy of the report that was produced … and includes the comprehensive research you and Mr. Curiel conducted,” the prosecutor wrote.
The Justice Department inquiry frightened election researchers in the academic community and may have had a chilling effect on subsequent research.
The threat of subpoena was an extraordinary move, as the Justice Department has strict protocols to protect the freedom of the press and prevent government intimidation. According to a source familiar with the investigation, who was not authorized to speak publicly, the Justice Department inquiry frightened election researchers in the academic community and may have had a chilling effect on subsequent research.
A former Department of Justice trial attorney who also worked at the OIA told The Intercept that the correspondence was unusual for several reasons. Requesting anonymity to avoid professional reprisal, they said that professional investigators trained in interview techniques usually contact subjects, and there are stiff rules governing any interactions with the media.
“Generally, OIA would enlist the FBI or other investigative agency to execute an incoming MLA request such as a voluntary witness interview or inquiry like this one. It’s unusual for an OIA attorney to handle it,” the former trial attorney explained.
They also said that interactions with the media require authorization from senior Justice Department leadership.
“There is a whole set of onerous protocols in place for trial attorneys seeking information from a media organization, and the decision to move forward would be made at high levels at the DOJ. This particular request is not your run-of-the-mill criminal investigation, so you can be fairly sure that it received very high-level exposure,” the source said.
Justice Department spokesperson Joshua Stueve declined to comment.
Earlier in 2020, the U.S. government-funded media organization Voz de América, the Spanish-language complement to Voice of America, singled out the same two researchers by name in an article. The story implied that they could be taken to court over their study.
“Bolivia roundly rejected the supposed study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, by its English initials), which assured that there had been no electoral fraud in Bolivia,” begins the story dated March 5, 2020, by Yuvinka Gozalvez Avilés.
Avilés writes that Karen Longaric, then Bolivia’s minister of foreign affairs, “dismissed the idea of pressing charges against the two people who published the article,” and warned that there are harsher sanctions than a judicial investigation, namely to be professionally discredited.
“Both experts belong to MIT; however the institution denied any participation or authority in said document, clarifying that both people ‘saw the project through as independent contractors of the Center for Economic Policy and Research,’” Avilés continues. The Center for Economic Policy and Research told The Intercept that they had not received any communication from Voz de América for the article, nor did they hear from the Justice Department about the investigation. MIT’s press team did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.
The article also echoes a baseless allegation from Longaric that the MIT researchers’ report “is linked to people connected to the disputed president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, an ally of former president Evo Morales.” Avilés does not provide any evidence for this claim but quotes Longaric saying of the researchers: “We can assert that once again those enemies of democracy tried under false pretenses to disrupt the rule of law in Bolivia and obstruct the elections.” (Trump allies also claimed that Venezuela had a hand in stealing his own election.)
Leading up to the second Election Day, the right-wing media ecosystem was once again rife with claims that the vote would be rigged, but the effort failed the second time, as MAS won in a landslide. Morales, then still in exile, did not run, but his protégé Luis Arce won 55 percent of the vote. Once again, there would be no runoff.
Áñez had dropped out of contention a month before the new election, leaving Mesa again as the leading opposition candidate. Morales has since returned to Bolivia from exile, and Áñez has been arrested, charged by the new government with terrorism, sedition, and conspiracy.
The post DOJ Threatened MIT Researchers With Subpoena in Collaboration With Bolivian Coup Regime appeared first on The Intercept.
Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
Bolivia has descended into a nightmare of political repression and racist state violence since the democratically elected government of Evo Morales was overthrown by the military on November 10. That month was “the second-deadliest month, in terms of civilian deaths committed by state forces, since Bolivia became a democracy nearly 40 years ago,” according to a study by Harvard Law School’s (HLS) International Human Rights Clinic and the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR) released a month ago.
Morales was the first Indigenous president of Bolivia, which has the largest percentage of Indigenous population of any country in the Americas. His government was able to reduce poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent, which disproportionately benefited Indigenous Bolivians. The November coup was led by a white and mestizo elite with a history of racism, seeking to revert state power to the people who had monopolized it before Morales’s election in 2005. The racist nature of the state violence is emphasized in the HLS/UNHR report, including eyewitness accounts of security forces using “racist and anti-Indigenous language” as they attacked protesters; it is also clear from the fact that all of the victims of the two biggest massacres committed by state forces after the coup were Indigenous.
What has gotten even less attention, but is equally important to understanding how Bolivia’s democracy was destroyed last November, is the role of the Organization of American States in this terrible crime.
As The New York Times finally reported on June 7, the organization’s “flawed” analysis immediately following the October 20 election “fueled a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history.” As the Times noted, the OAS analysis “raised questions of vote-rigging — and helped force out a president ….”
The OAS allegations were indeed the main political foundation of the coup that followed the October 20 election three weeks later. And they continued for many months following the coup. In Bolivia, the electoral authorities report a preliminary vote count, which is unofficial and does not determine the result, while the votes are being counted. When 84 percent of the votes were counted in this preliminary tally, Morales had 45.7 percent of the vote, and was leading the second-place vote-getter by 7.9 percentage points. The reporting in this unofficial, nonbinding tally was then interrupted for 23 hours, and when it picked up again, Morales’s lead had increased to 10.2 percentage points. By the end of the official count, it was 10.5 percent. According to Bolivia’s election rules, a candidate with more than 40 percent of the vote and at least a 10 point lead wins in the first round, without a run-off election.
The opposition claimed that there was fraud and took to the streets. The OAS Electoral Observation Mission (EOM) issued a press statement the day after the election expressing “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results after the closing of the polls.” But they provided no evidence to support these allegations ― because there wasn’t any.
This has since been established repeatedly by a slew of expert statistical studies, including the one that formed the basis of the New York Times article of June 7. As sometimes happens when numbers become the subject of political controversy, the statistical studies were needed mainly to refute other ― in this case, often bogus ― statistical analyses. But the truth was quite plain and easy to seefrom data available on the web immediately following the election. And indeed the Center for Economic and Policy Research ― where I am Co-Director ― used that data to disprove the OAS’s initial allegations the next day, and followed up with a number of statistical analyses and papers in the ensuing months, including a refutation of the OAS’s final audit report.
There was no inexplicable change in trend. All that happened was that areas reporting later were more pro-Morales than the ones that reported earlier, for various geographical and demographic reasons. That is why Morales’s lead increased when the last 16 percent of votes came in, just as it had been increasing throughout the preliminary count. This is a fairly common occurrence in elections all over the world.
But after its initial press release, the OAS produced three more reports, including its preliminary audit of the election results, without ever considering the obvious possibility that the later-reporting areas were politically different from those where votes came in earlier. This by itself is overwhelming evidence that OAS officials did not simply make a mistake in their repeated allegations of fraud, but in fact knew that their allegations were false. It defies the imagination to conceive of how this simple explanation ― which is the first thing that would occur to most people, and turned out to be true ― would not even occur to election experts, in the process of months of investigation.
On December 2, 133 economists and statisticians published a letter to the OAS, noting that “the final result was quite predictable on the basis of the first 84% of votes reported” and calling on the OAS “to retract its misleading statements about the election.”
Four members of the US Congress, led by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, also weighed in with a letter to the OAS asking 11 basic questions about the OAS analysis. One concerned whether they had considered the possibility that the later-reporting areas were “different in any ways that would make them more likely to vote for Evo Morales, by a wider margin, than voters in the typical precinct in the first 84 percent of reported votes?” More than nine months later, the OAS has yet to answer.
In July, the US Congress held briefings with top officials of the OAS, and confronted them with some of the same questions; they gave no substantive answers.
With the original and politically decisive allegations of fraud increasingly discredited, the OAS turned to “irregularities” in the election to maintain their assault on its legitimacy. But it turned out that these allegations, like the ones based on statistical claims, could not withstand scrutiny. The OAS appears hell-bent on justifying its initial, and clearly false, allegations of wrongdoing that precipitated the coup.
Meanwhile, Bolivia has a de facto president, Jeanine Áñez, who has called Indigenous religious practices “satanic;” in January she warned voters against “allowing the return of ‘savages’ to power, an apparent reference to the indigenous heritage of Morales and many of his supporters,” according to The Washington Post. Hers was supposed to be a “caretaker” government, but new elections ― now scheduled for October 18 ― have already been postponed three times.
The wheels of justice grind much too slowly in the aftermath of US-backed coups. And the Trump administration’s support has been overt: the White House promoted the “fraud” narrative, and its Orwellian statement following the coup praised the overthrow: “Morales’s departure preserves democracy and paves the way for the Bolivian people to have their voices heard.”
Senator Marco Rubio is one of the most important influences on the Trump administration’s policy in Latin America. In this case, he got in on the action even before the first OAS press release: “In #Bolivia all credible indications are Evo Morales failed to secure necessary margin to avoid second round in Presidential election,” he wrote the day after the vote, and there was “some concern he will tamper with the results or process to avoid this.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, “Carlos Trujillo, the U.S. ambassador to the OAS, had steered the group’s election-monitoring team to report widespread fraud and pushed the Trump administration to support the ouster of Morales.”
This week, US Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Chuy Garcia called for the US Congress to “investigate the role of the OAS in Bolivia over the past year, and ensure that taxpayers’ dollars do not contribute to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, civil conflict, or human rights violations.”
That would be a good start.
This article first appeared in The Guardian.
The post What the OAS Did to Bolivia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Last minute information, I denounce that General Ivan Ortiz Bravo, head of the third department of the Armed Forces Command, on the instruction of the commander in chief of the Armed Forces, General (Sergio Carlos Orellana), has a coup d’état plan. – Former Bolivian president Evo Morales Ayma
Demonstrators allied to Evo Morales say authorities are using Covid-19 to delay vote
Demonstrators in Bolivia have dynamited Andean passes, scattered boulders across highways and dug trenches along rural roads to protest against repeated delays to a rerun of last October’s deeply contentious election, which led to the downfall of the long-serving leftwing president Evo Morales.
As the country’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic mounts, more than 100 roadblocks and marches nationwide – convened on Monday by Bolivia’s main workers’ union and indigenous and campesino movements allied to Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism (Mas) – have brought the country to a standstill for six days.
Analysis of the 2019 coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia, placing it in the longer historical context of Morales’ political career as well as the more recent events preceding the coup.
In this Nov. 27, 2019, photo, Bolivia’s former President Evo Morales pumps his fist after a press conference at the journalists club in Mexico City. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
AP
In November, 2019, Bolivia’s three-term left-wing President, Evo Morales, was forced by the country’s military and police forces to flee to Mexico after Morales, the prior month, had been officially certified as the winner of his fourth consecutive presidential election. It was unsurprising that Morales won. As the Associated Press noted in 2014, his governance was successful by almost every key metric, and he was thus “widely popular at home for a pragmatic economic stewardship that spread Bolivia’s natural gas and mineral wealth among the masses.”
While Morales’ popularity had marginally waned since his 2014 landslide victory, he was still the most popular politician in the country. On the night of the October 21, 2019, vote, Bolivia’s election board certified that Morales’ margin of victory against the second-place candidate exceeded the ten percent threshold required under Bolivian law to avoid a run-off, thus earning him a fourth term. But allegations of election fraud were quickly voiced by Morales’ right-wing opponents, leading to his expulsion from the country on November 11.
Once he fled, Bolivia’s first-ever president from the country’s Indigenous population was replaced by a little-known, white, far-right senator, Jeanine Áñez, from the country’s minority European-descendent, Christian, wealthy region. Her new, unelected government promptly massacred dozens of Indigenous protesters and then vested the responsible soldiers with immunity. Seven months later, Áñez predictably continues to rule Bolivia as “interim President” despite never having run for President, let alone having been democratically elected.
Bolivia’s “interim” President Jeanine Anez addresses the nation at the presidential palace in La Paz, Bolivia, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Juan Karita)
AP
The central tool used by both the Bolivian Right and their U.S. government allies to justify the invalidation of Morales’ 10-point election victory were two election audits by the regional group Organization of American States — one a preliminary report issued on November 10, the day before Moraels was forced from the country, and then its final report issued the next month — which asserted widespread, deliberate election fraud.
“Given all the irregularities observed, it is impossible to guarantee the integrity of the data and certify the accuracy of the results,” the OAS announced on November 10 as the country was in turmoil over the election. The next day, Morales, under the threat of force to him and his family, boarded a plane to Mexico, where he was granted asylum. The final OAS report in December claimed that “the audit team has detected willful manipulation” of the results based on “incontrovertible evidence of an electoral process marred by grave irregularities.”
But on Sunday, the New York Times published an article strongly suggesting that it was the OAS audit, not the Bolivian election, that was “marred by grave irregularities,” making it “impossible to guarantee the integrity of the data and certify the accuracy of the” OAS’ claims. The paper of record summarized its reporting this way: “A close look at Bolivian election data suggests an initial analysis by the OAS that raised questions of vote-rigging — and helped force out a president — was flawed.”
New York Times, June 7, 2020
To cast serious doubt on the integrity of these critical OAS reports, the Times’ relies upon a new independent study from three scholars at U.S. universities which — in the words of the NYT — examined “data obtained by the New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities.” That study, said the NYT, “has found that the Organization of American States’ statistical analysis was itself flawed.”
That study documented that the key “irregularity” cited by OAS “was actually an artifact of the analysts’ error.” It further explained that with regard to “the patterns that the observers deemed ‘inexplicable,’” the new data analysis shows that “we can explain them without invoking fraud.”
While this new study focuses solely on the OAS’s data claims and does not purport to decree the Bolivian election entirely free of fraud — virtually no election, including in the U.S., is entirely free of irregularities — the NYT explains that “the authors of the new study said they were unable to replicate the OAS’s findings using its likely techniques” and that “the difference is significant” in assessing the overall validity of the OAS’s claims.
”In sum,” the new report concludes, “we offer a different interpretation of the quantitative evidence that led the OAS and other researchers to question the integrity of the Bolivian election.“ Specifically, “we find that we do not require fraud in order to explain the quantitative patterns used to help indict Evo Morales.” The scholars’ bottom line: “we cannot replicate the OAS results.”
It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance of the OAS accusations in driving Morales from his own country and, with no democratic mandate, shifting power in lithium-rich Bolivia to the white, Christian, U.S.-subservient Right. While critics had also accused Morales of improperly seeking a fourth term despite constitutional term limits, Bolivia’s duly constituted court had invalidated those term limits (much the way that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg induced the City Council to overturn a term limit referendum so he could seek a third term), leaving anti-Morales outside agitators, such as the OAS and U.S. officials, to rely instead on claims of election fraud.
On the day the preliminary OAS report was released, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited it both on Twitter and on the official State Department website to demand new elections:
Fully support the findings of the @OAS_official report recommending new elections in #Bolivia to ensure a truly democratic process representative of the people’s will. The credibility of the electoral system must be restored.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) November 10, 2019
Pompeo, in January of this year, visited OAS’ Washington office and heaped praise on the organization for the role its audit played in forcing Morales from the country — a move which Pompeo heralded by invoking the long Orwellian U.S. tradition of depicting pro-U.S. military coups as “pro-democracy”:
More recently, the OAS honored the former Bolivian government’s request to conduct an audit of the disputed election results. The probe conducted uncovered proof of massive and systemic fraud. It helped end the violence that had broken out over the election dispute. It helped the Bolivian Congress unanimously establish a date and conditions for a new election. And it honored – importantly, it honored the Bolivian people’s courageous demand for a free and fair election, and for democracy.
U.S. media outlets and foreign policy commentators dutifully echoed the U.S. State Department’s line, as they typically do, by depicting the violent military coup as an advancement of freedom and democracy for the Bolivian People (the same Bolivian People who had just voted for Morales to be their President). As a Washington Post op-ed in February by two MIT scholars noted: “The media has largely reported the allegations of fraud [from the OAS] as fact.”
Two days before Morales was forced to flee Bolivia, Johns Hopkins Professor Yascha Mounk, who also covers foreign policy for The Atlantic, praised the coup leaders as “bravely standing up for democracy against a wannabe dictator,” and then, the following day, cited the preliminary OAS study as proof that the election was fraudulent:
The Bolivian people are bravely standing up for democracy against a wannabe dictator, and the world is paying virtually no attention.
[Short thread.]
— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) November 9, 2019
Wonderful news:
Election monitors from the Organization of American States found that there were “clear manipulations” of the voting results, calling for new elections.
It looks as though Evo Morales has reluctantly agreed to them.
El Pueblo Unido…https://t.co/oULqwIuBcy
— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) November 10, 2019
No, Evo Morales’ resignation is not a coup; it is one of the few big victories democracy has won in recent years.
Both leftist dictators, like Venezuela’s Maduro, and far-right populists, like Hungary’s Orbán, should be terrified by it.
Me @TheAtlantic.https://t.co/yWsIfXdBM4
— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) November 11, 2019
On November 11, the day after Morales was forced to flee, Mounk wrote in The Atlantic that Morales got what he deserved, claiming, among other things, that he rigged the election: “The strong circumstantial evidence of vote tampering succeeded in inspiring what years of more subtle attacks on democratic institutions had failed to do: Millions of Bolivians went out into the streets to demand a fair election.” One point Mounk got right: the OAS report was decisive. “When an independent observer mission from the Organization of American States published its audit of the election yesterday, the game was finally up,” he wrote.
(Mounk, knowing that there are never consequences for serving as a puppet for U.S foreign policy, has said not a word about the new study debunking the OAS claims).
Former Obama foreign policy official and current Stanford Professor Michael McFaul also cited the OAS report to cheer Morales’ fleeing as some sort of “excellent” blow for freedom and democracy, only subsequently to delete his tweet when it prompted criticism, acknowledging that he lacked the necessary information to form judgments:
I called Morales departure excellent, in line with OAS criticism of election. But then deleted the tweet after not wanting to come to judgement about the causes of his departure. Getting out of this Bolivia debate now; there’s no space for rational discourse in it.
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) November 11, 2019
The editor-in-chief of the ostensibly progressive journal Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in or knowledge about Bolivia, yet somehow decided she was able to credibly snap into line behind the State Department by claiming that it was President Morales — rather than the coup plotters — who had “taken several end runs around a democratic process”:
Dicey times in Bolivia. Morales had taken several end runs around a democratic process but let’s hope it is a democratic process that succeeds him https://t.co/UIFf639orU
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) November 11, 2019
It likely goes without saying that the reliably pro-western-coup magazine, The Economist, was also among those leading the way in echoing the U.S. State Department and cheering the coup as a victory for democracy. “The armed forces spoke up for democracy and the constitution against an attempt at dictatorship,” announced the magazine during the week Morales was forced into exile. The Economist also posted more than a dozen tweets during that week claiming it was Morales who posed the threat to Bolivian democracy by virtue of the OAS findings of fraud:
Evo Morales was a casualty of a counter-revolution aimed at defending democracy against electoral fraud and his own illegal candidacy https://t.co/wmi68iRCrO
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) November 14, 2019
Evo Morales has resigned as Bolivia’s president, following election irregularities. @sarahmaslin tells “The Intelligence” that it’s not clear who is in charge now https://t.co/KQM7qUUBIJ
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) November 11, 2019
But as usual, the two news outlets most influential in disseminating and ratifying false anti-democratic claims from the U.S. government were the Washington Post and — though they neglected to mention it in their article yesterday on the debunked OAS findings — the New York Times itself. The Post, in its article the day after Morales was forced to leave, ratified the election fraud accusation in its headline: “Bolivia’s Morales resigns amid scathing election report, rising protests.” The article heralded the findings of what it called “the multilateral organization,” noting that the OAS found Morales’ victory “was marred by profound irregularities.”
A Post editorial from the same day proclaimed in its headline: “Bolivia is in danger of slipping into anarchy. It’s Evo Morales’s fault.”
The Post editorial decreed: “there could be little doubt who was ultimately responsible for the chaos: newly resigned president Evo Morales.” How could the victim of a coup — who had just been elected President — be at fault for the resulting chaos? Because, explained the Post’s editors, “an audit released by the Organization of American States reported massive irregularities in the vote count and called for a fresh election.”
The New York Times similarly and repeatedly hyped the OAS report as proof that Morales’ victory was illegitimate and the coup therefore democratic. “An independent international audit of Bolivia’s disputed election concluded that former President Evo Morales’s officials resorted to lies, manipulation and forgery to ensure his victory,” its news article claimed, without a syllable of critical pushback until the penultimate paragraph, where it noted that “some economists and statisticians in the United States” had pointed to flaws in the OAS’ data analysis.
But the paper’s Editorial contained no such reservations, pronouncing Morales’ victory the by-product of “a flawed election,” noting that “early suspicions of fraud by the Organization of American States helped fuel the protests and provided cover for the military to ‘suggest’ that Mr. Morales leave office.” The Times’ Editorial then cited the final OAS report — which the paper yesterday called into question — as “substantiating those suspicions” by proving “‘a series of malicious operations aimed at altering the will expressed at the polls’ on Oct. 20.”
In sum, when it came to the 2019 Bolivian coup, the U.S. media played its decades-old, standard role whenever the U.S. wants to depict a military coup against a government it dislikes as a victory for democracy: namely, it blindly and dutifully adopted the State Department’s view and uncritically waved the flag.
As documented in his great, new book on the CIA’s Cold War tactics, “The Jakarta Method,” journalist Vincent Bevins — whom I recently interviewed for SYSTEM UPDATE — recounts how, throughout the Cold War, the U.S. media served as a key propaganda arm of the U.S. government by reliably depicting overthrows of adverse regimes as a joyous advancement for democracy. As but one example, Bevins described how the CIA prevailed on the New York Times to suppress reporting about the savagery of the agency-supported coup-plotters in Guatemala and instead glorify them as “rebels” who were nobly fighting for democracy:
Vincent Bevins, “The Jakarta Method,” p. 45
Exactly the same formula was used by the New York Times and the bulk of the U.S. media when a U.S.-supported coup attempt in Venezuela failed in 2002 to depose the democratically elected President Hugo Chávez. In an extraordinary paragraph, the Times heralded the U.S.-favored coup-leaders in Caracas as the guardians and saviors of democracy, while the democratically elected President was somehow the “dictator”:
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.
The Times similarly lamented the dangers posed to Bolivian democracy back in 2014 as the result of Morales’ landslide victory at the polls. To the Times and the U.S. media at large, democracy is imperiled when a candidate disliked by the U.S. wins at the polls; conversely, democracy can be saved only when such elected leaders are overthrown and replaced by force with a U.S.-backed puppet.
The NYT Editors, while conceding in 2014 that “it is easy to see why many Bolivians would want to see Mr. Morales, the country’s first president with Indigenous roots, remain at the helm” — namely, “during his tenure, the economy of the country, one of the least developed in the hemisphere, grew at a healthy rate, the level of inequality shrank and the number of people living in poverty dropped significantly” — nonetheless insisted that Morales should be regarded as an enemy of democracy because “the pattern of prolonged terms in power is unhealthy for the region” [notably, the NYT would never suggest that Angela Merkel’s “prolonged term in power” as German chancellor (15 years and counting) or Benjamin Netanyahu’s 4-terms-and-counting-in-power as Israeli prime minister pose a similar threat to democracy. This is a “concern” reserved by the U.S. media only for Latin American leaders disliked by the U.S. State Department].
At the end of its 2014 editorial on Bolivia and Latin America, the Times inadvertently revealed the real reason it disliked these elected leaders. Concern for democracy is the pretext. The real reason it wants those elected leaders gone was revealed by this candid sentence: “This regional dynamic has been dismal for Washington’s influence in the region.”
As U.S. media coverage of last year’s coup in Bolivia demonstrates, little has changed since the Cold War when it comes to media fealty to the State Department and the CIA. Because the U.S. government preferred the right-wing coup-plotters to the left-wing Morales, the U.S. media deliberately inverted the entire narrative to describe the elected leader (Morales) as the tyrant and the violent military coup leaders as the saviors of democracy. And they peddled this false narrative only by relying heavily on an OAS report that even the NYT is now forced to admit was, at best, deeply flawed.
That the OAS report was dubious is not, contrary to the subtext of the NYT’s new article, something that was only recently discovered. That has been clear from ample evidence from the start — evidence that the jingoistic U.S. media rarely saw fit to mention.
Shortly after the preliminary OAS report was issued, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), on November 8, issued its own report highlighting numerous flaws in what it called “unsubstantiated doubts cast upon the vote count by the OAS mission.” Explaining that OAS claims of election irregularities were made “without evidence,” the report detailed that “neither the OAS mission nor any other party has demonstrated that there were widespread or systematic irregularities in the elections of October 20, 2019.”
In March, the CEPR issued an even more comprehensive analysis, an 82-page report that concluded: “the OAS’s observation activities in Bolivia’s 2019 general elections are the latest example of a deeply problematic observation mission whose dishonest, biased, and unprofessional conduct has caused serious damage to the country’s democracy.” It added that “while the fraud narrative that the OAS helped promote contributed to Evo Morales, the country’s democratically elected president, fleeing the country,” the OAS Report “does not provide any evidence that those irregularities altered the outcome of the election, or were part of an actual attempt to do so.”
In February — with Morales now in exile in Argentina — the Washington Post published an op-ed by two scholars from MIT. They summarized their argument this way:
The media has largely reported the [OAS’s] allegations of fraud as fact. And many commentators have justified the coup as a response to electoral fraud by MAS-IPSP. However, as specialists in election integrity, we find that the statistical evidence does not support the claim of fraud in Bolivia’s October election.
In sum, the authors concluded, after setting forth their statistical findings in detail: “there is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find — the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’s margin all appear legitimate. All in all, the OAS’s statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed.”
That the OAS is a subservient tool of the U.S. State Department is something that is widely known in Latin America. Yet it is a claim that virtually never appears in mainstream accounts from U.S. news outlets, which — as they did here — treat the group as some sort of neutral, authoritative arbiter of political disputes.
Shortly after Morales was exiled from Bolivia and received asylum in Mexico, I traveled to Mexico City to interview him. I asked Morales about the OAS, and this is what he said:
All along, there was ample reason to seriously doubt, if not outright reject, the OAS accusations of election irregularities and voter fraud. As CEPR’s Jake Johnston said today in response to the New York Times article:
For those paying close attention to the 2019 election, there was never any doubt that the OAS’ claims of fraud were bogus. Just days after the election, a high-level official inside the OAS privately acknowledged to me that there had been no “inexplicable” change in the trend, yet the organization continued to repeat its false assertions for many months with little to no pushback or accountability.
Yet those reasons for doubting the OAS accusations were barely ever even mentioned, let alone vested with credibility, by the U.S. media or its leading foreign policy commentators. Instead, as the MIT scholars wrote in the Washington Post, “the media largely reported the allegations of fraud as fact.” That’s because whenever it comes to changing a foreign country’s government that is disliked by the U.S., the U.S. media reflexively sides with the U.S. State Department and ceases to report and instead engages in pro-government propaganda.
In this case, Bolivia lost its most successful president in its modern history, and is consequently now ruled by an unelected military junta, all cheered on by the U.S. and its media, relying on an OAS report which even the New York Times is now forced to acknowledge is, at best, deeply flawed. Thus did the U.S. government and its media, yet again, help destroy a thriving Latin American democracy.
The post The NYT Admits Key Falsehoods That Drove Last Year’s Coup in Bolivia: Falsehoods Peddled by the U.S., its Media, and the NYT appeared first on The Intercept.
On November 10th, there was a right wing coup in Bolivia led by the military, the police, the Catholic Church, and the country’s agribusiness. The coup was also supported by the US imperialist machine. Since then indigenous and working class groups have been fighting against these forces, building self-defense committees and blocking roads around Bolivia. The police and armed forces have responded with brutal violence and suppression.
As of November 15, the armed forces will not be held liable for any of the violent acts committed. The self-proclaimed transitional government approved Supreme Decree No. 4078, which exempts the Armed Forces from criminal responsibility during acts of repression. It states
The personnel of the Armed Forces, who participated in the operations for the restoration of internal order and public stability, will be exempt from criminal responsibility, when in compliance with their constitutional functions, they act in legitimate defense or state of necessity, in observance of the principles of legality, absolute necessity and proportionality of conformity.
This regulation claims to “restore order” in Bolivia and enables the military to act with impunity. Even before the decree, there were already many deaths and horrid acts of violence. The decree will only allow the further brutality of an armed force that has put its power against the indigenous and working class people of Bolivia.
The coup government has gone even further to support the military. Jeanine Áñez, the self-proclaimed president of Bolivia ordered an increase of 34,796,098 Bolivian pesos (more than $5 million) for the Armed Forces’ budget. Article 2 specifies that the funds are for military equipment.
The Coup Government Is Using Live Ammunition Against the Resistance
Despite all of this, there is a heroic resistance growing against the coup. Indigenous people, peasants, miners and other sectors of the working class are organizing mass assemblies to fight back. They are creating self defense committees, blocking roads around the country, forcing much of the country to a standstill, and organizing mass marches. All of these actions have a rallying cry, a demand that Jeanine Áñez resign her ill begotten seat as President of Bolivia.
In reaction to this community organizing, the growing power and budget of the military is on full display. One of the most brutal examples of this new military impunity came on Tuesday, November 19th, when the police approached a blockade at the Senkata gas plant in El Alto. Protesters were able to cut off access to a major source of fuel for the city of El Paz. In response, the state approached the plant with helicopters, armed cars and tanks. The violent clash ended with three people dead and over 25 wounded.
As Betina, a leader of the Senkata plant barricade, reported “They’re killing us, shooting from helicopters and there is no Bolivian media. Therefore they don’t show the country what is going on. They don’t care about women or children, nothing. Let all the people you can know because this is a massacre.”
Meanwhile, a representative from the government has a different take on the events at the Senkata gas plant. Fernando López, the Minister of Defense, claims that the deaths at Senkata did not happen and that the protesters were paid “money, alcohol, and coca.”
The US targeted Evo Morales for overthrow ever since he became president. And the Organization of American States helped set…
The post OAS and US help overthrow another government: Behind the coup against Bolivia’s Evo Morales appeared first on The Grayzone.
