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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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 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.
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.”
Bolivians are starting to feel the pinch of weeks-long turmoil roiling the South American country, with fuel shortages mounting and grocery stores short of basic goods as supporters of unseated leader Evo Morales blockade key transport routes.
The US targeted Evo Morales for overthrow ever since he became president. And the Organization of American States helped set…
It would be hard to point to a country whose president who has more democratic legitimacy than Evo Morales. Nobody can seriously dispute that he won the first round of the presidential election on October 20 by a landslide. He reviewed 47% of the vote in an election with 88% turnout, as most polls predicted. That doubles the percentage of the eligible vote that US presidents generally receive. I’ll say a bit more about that below, but it’s crucial to note that he was elected to his present term (which does not expire until January) with 61% of the vote in an election with roughly the same turnout.
Morales’ recent “resignation” came at the point of a gun. He fled to Mexico whose government offered him asylum. The unelected military and police forced him out. Generals openly “suggested” that he resign and both the police and military made clear that they were not going to defend him from armed opponents. Most of the democratically elected members of congress are now in hiding. As in all military coups, it has come with a media blackout to help the security forces brutally suppress protests.
If you support democracy, then you call on Bolivia’s security forces to let Morales return and finish out his term. You call on them to do their job, which is to protect all elected representatives and everybody’s right to free expression and peaceful protest. That’s their only legitimate function. You should also call on your own government to refuse to recognize any “authorities” in Bolivia who stand in the way of Morales’ return and who seek to criminalize his political movement.
No matter how popular a president, there will be a segment of the population who dislike him or her – and a hardcore segment willing to lynch the president if the police and military would let them. If you think US presidents are protected from this nightmare scenario because they have more legitimacy than Morales then you don’t understand your own country. The fact that prominent people as supposedly diverse politically as Trump, the New York Times editorial board, and Human Rights Watch (with varying degrees of bluntness) have helped support the coup in Bolivia is an indication of how shallow support for democracy really is in US political culture. Alan McLeod pointed out in FAIR that the western media has done its part to support the coup by refusing to call it what it is. Here is a petition to the New York Times asking it to retract an editorial that endorsed the coup.
But didn’t Morales make “bad moves”?
In 2016, Morales tried to abolish term limits through a referendum but lost it by two percentage points. A year later Bolivia’s elected Supreme Court (which is elected to a six-year term) ruled that term limits are unconstitutional and thereby nullified the results of the referendum. The ruling was debatable, but not outrageous like many Supreme Court rulings around the world have been. Citizens United comes to mind. The Supreme Court ruling that Handed George W. Bush the US presidency in 2000. The Honduran Supreme Court ruling in 2009 that effectively outlawed a non-binding opinion poll and thereby sparked a military coup from which Honduras has yet to recover.
Also, Bolivians who disliked that ruling had many democratic and constitutional ways to reverse it. They could vote in a new Supreme Court (US citizens can’t) or simply vote Morales and his allies in the legislature out of office – which they didn’t.
Principal aside, was it tactically dumb of Morales to run again? Perhaps, but it’s easier to raise other tactical questions that are much more important.
Why did he allow OAS bureaucrats who are 60% US-funded to have any role in monitoring the election? An analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) showed that the OAS has no basis for impugning the results. Kevin Cashman has elaborated on why the “preliminary audit” issued by the OAS weeks later was similarly baseless.
It is not the first time OAS bureaucrats have impugned a clean election to devastating effect as Mark Weisbrot pointed out in the Nation. In 2000, it helped unjustly discredit legislative elections in Haiti. That helped justify harsh US sanctions which were followed ultimately by a US-perpetrated military coup in 2004. Since then, Haiti has never had elections as free and fair as the ones they had in 2000. In 2011, the OAS struck again and inexcusably changed election results in Haiti.
Why did Morales let them near the election? If he didn’t that would be grounds for his enemies – with Washington’s backing – to say he wanted to rig the election. US sanctions- which don’t require a credible pretext or respect for international law – would likely have followed. He may well have calculated that his popularity and achievements in office would be more than enough to offset OAS corruption. If so, he was wrong.
Why didn’t he do a better job of getting the military under control? He obviously should have done better on that front, but worth remembering how such moves are demonized in the western media and by local adversaries. That would especially true if he had made use of Cuban expertise for example. What about arming his supporters in militias? Same problem.
We are the problem
Name a democratically elected president overthrown by a US-backed coup who was not flawed in some way, or whose hard core opponents, even though clearly a minority, were unable to put a lot of protesters on the streets? That list could obviously not include Goulart, Allende, Aristide, Arbenz, Chavez, Zelaya, or anybody who failed to walk on water.
An honest look at Morales tactical dilemmas shows that the political culture of the US and its top allies is the big problem facing any democracy in the Global South. Democratic legitimacy does very little to protect you when the US and its propaganda apparatus targets you for destruction. The coup against Morales should be an incredibly easy one for any “progressive” to unreservedly oppose – and by oppose I mean demand Morales finish off his term. People eager to highlight their “critiques” of Morales are part of the problem.
Bolivian Senator Jeanine Añez, a leader of the nation’s right-wing opposition party, declared herself interim president of the country Tuesday night despite lacking the constitutionally required number of lawmakers to approve her appointment.
“I assume the presidency immediately and will do everything necessary to pacify the country,” declared Añez, who has a history of racist attacks against indigenous Bolivians.
As CNNreported, members of former President Evo Morales’ leftist party did not attend the session Tuesday, leaving “the legislative chamber short of the legal minimum number of lawmakers required to appoint her.”
“The Bible returns to the Palace,” right-wing Senator Jeanine Áñez says after declaring herself President of #Bolivia w/out presence of MAS Senators, who make up 2/3 majority, so no quorum. They did not attend because they feared for their safety. Military roams streets of La Paz https://t.co/BUPNoxDQP2
Morales, who resigned Sunday under threat from the Bolivian military and police forces, tweeted late Tuesday that “the most crafty and disastrous coup in history has been consummated.”
“A coupist right-wing senator calls herself president of the Senate and then interim president of Bolivia without a legislative quorum, surrounded by a group of accomplices and led by the armed forces and the police that repress the people,” said Morales, who accepted asylum in Mexico.
According to the New York Times, “the military high command met with Ms. Añez for more than an hour at the government palace Tuesday night in what her aides described as a planning session to keep the peace. At the end of the meeting, pictures were released of the senior officers saluting Ms. Añez.”
Earlier Tuesday, thousands of Morales supporters marched in opposition to the coup:
The Guardian reported that hundreds of Morales backers rallied near the Bolivian assembly building late Tuesday to denounce Añez’s assumption of the presidency as illegitimate.
“She’s declared herself president without having a quorum in the parliament,” Morales supporter Julio Chipana told The Guardian. “She doesn’t represent us.”
