Yves here. Most readers are well enough versed in international news and US foreign policy to recognize that US officials and politicians hyperventilating about yet to be proven foreign influence in US elections is pretty rich. Apparently no one has heard of the coup against Salvador Allende, for starters? Mark Weisbrot describes a more recent example.
By Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2015). Produced in partnership by the and Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has been ridiculed, slathered with contempt, and repeatedly branded a “liar,” as well as an existential threat to democracy in the United States, by the biggest media outlets in the country. This is in response to his attempts to reverse the results of the U.S. presidential election, and claiming—without evidence—that it was stolen. He still clings to these allegations, but he will be leaving the White House on January 20.
But just over a year ago, a similar effort was launched in Bolivia, and it actually prevailed. The country’s democratically elected president, Evo Morales, was toppled three weeks after the October 20 vote, before his term was finished. He left the country after the military “asked” him to resign.
The similarities are remarkable. Leaders of the Bolivian opposition indicated before the votes were counted, as Trump did, that they would not accept the result if they lost. Like Trump, they had no evidence for their allegations of fraud when the votes were counted. And as with Trump, the falseness of their charges was obvious from day one.
Some readers may question the relevance of the comparison with a developing country whose democratic institutions have a shorter history, and are in important ways weaker than those in the U.S. government. But the Bolivian right would not have succeeded, where Trump has failed, if not for another important difference: the Bolivian right had powerful help from outside the country in pulling off their coup.
Not surprisingly some of this help came from the Trump administration, which stated the day after the coup that “Morales’s departure preserves democracy and paves the way for the Bolivian people to have their voices heard.”
Even more important help came from the Organization of American States (OAS), which, not coincidentally, gets 60 percent of its funding from the United States. The OAS also currently has a leader, Luis Almagro, who at the time of Bolivia’s election needed the support of Trump and his allied right-wing governments in the Americas in order to be reelected as the head of the organization. The OAS issued a 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.”
This allegation turned out to be “false,” as the New York Times would later report; but as the Times noted, this false allegation “changed the South American nation’s history.” It changed history because it served as the political foundation for the military coup on November 10, 2019.
Another similarity: remember when Trump and his Republican allies were saying that the Democrats were “stealing” the election here because the later, mostly mail-in votes were coming in overwhelmingly from Democrats? Of course this was false; the truth was simply that more Democrats than Republicans were voting by mail.
The OAS allegation in Bolivia was the same: for various reasons—including geography—votes in the pro-Morales areas came in later than those for the opposing candidates. This was obvious from the day after the election by simply looking at the areas where the earlier and later votes were coming from; the data was all on the web. That’s why 133 economists and statisticians from various countries—the majority from the United States—signed a letter demanding that the OAS retract its false statements.
That’s why four members of the U.S. Congress asked the OAS if they ever considered the possibility—which amazingly was not mentioned in three more OAS reports—that the later-reporting precincts were politically different from the earlier ones.
It’s been a year, and the OAS still hasn’t answered.
In October, the de facto government, which took power after last year’s coup, held elections, after postponing them twice. Luis Arce, Evo Morales’s economy minister for 13 years, won by a margin of more than 26 percentage points.
But the people killed by the post-coup government, including at least 22 people killed in two massacrescommitted by security forces, cannot be brought back to life. The victims were all Indigenous.
Like the effort of Trump in the United States—as seen in the recent Republican attempt to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes from Detroit, Michigan, where nearly 80 percent of residents are Black—the assault on democracy in Bolivia is also tied to systemic racism.
Evo Morales is the first Indigenous president in a country with the largest percent of Indigenous population in the Americas, who have overwhelmingly supported him and his party; the leaders of the coup are infused with white supremacists and seek to restore the dominance of the mostly white elite who ruled the country before Morales was first elected in 2005.
U.S. Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, both of Chicago, have called for Congress to investigate the role of the OAS in Bolivia following the 2019 election.
This is vitally important, because the coup, and the violence and political repression that followed, might never have happened without the OAS’s pivotal role. Perhaps most importantly, the OAS had an enormous impact on the international and domestic media, with many journalists mistakenly believing that the OAS Electoral Observation Mission was impartial, and that therefore their allegations were true.
But the Bolivian coup is not the first time that the OAS has abused its authority as an electoral observer, in order to support a U.S.-backed effort to topple a democratically elected government. This happened in Haiti between 2000 and 2004. And also in Haiti, the OAS did something in 2011 that perhaps no election observers had ever done: they reversed the results of a first-round presidential election, without even a recount or a statistical analysis.
The OAS and its leadership must be held accountable, or these crimes will keep happening.
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‘Like the effort of Trump in the United States—as seen in the recent Republican attempt to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes from Detroit, Michigan, where nearly 80 percent of residents are Black—the assault on democracy in Bolivia is also tied to systemic racism.’
There may be a strong element of that but I think that it is more correct to say that it is a case of classism. As an example, Trump wants those lower class votes thrown out and the Democrats can’t be bothered getting the people there register to vote for them. Both the Republicans and Democrats would rather chase suburban votes as they are nearer in class to who they are themselves.
How long can the US continue to interfere in other countries’ affairs with impunity? The US is the one that needs to be held accountable along with the OAS. It is shameful, immoral, and down right criminal that the majority of US citizens will never know about our history of overt and covert interventions around the world spanning the 20th century. A good book on this topic is Killing hope : U.S. military and CIA interventions since World War II. I didn’t get around to finishing that book. Maybe I should. The courage of the author, William Blum, is amazing. Will anyone pick up where he left off? Without journalism and scholars we won’t know what the US empire is doing.
have you checked out the Grayzone?
excellent reporting on U.S. empire
Yes I have. I watched the piece by Aaron Mate’ on Syria where he interviewed the former UK ambassador. That was quite good.
It has long been the practice of Imperial powers to say:
“Don’t do what we do, Do what we say (or tell you)”
It is not hypocrisy, its simply Empire Building.
When I look at the US map I see 50 countries, all unable to provide for their populations, tied together by an Imperial Government which is totally consumed by Imperial Reach, and managing Satellites. And not one shred of “The Common Good.”
Interesting, never thought to look microscopically inward (inverse imperialism?).
The US will continue to interfere in election processes. But I do think that the Bolivian people need to find the perpetrators of mass killing associated with the coup, and hold them to account.
Keeping those responsible in jail will put off those who think this is acceptable to prevent democracy from functioning.
I think the situation in Bolivia is somewhat more complex than one would conclude from reading this and other articles sympathetic to the now ruling party in Bolivia, MAS.
That complexity can be seen in the difference between the vote percentages for Morales in 2019, compared to his vote totals in 2014 and the vote totals for the current president in 2020. Morales won a majority of the votes in 2014, as did Mr. Arce, the MAS candidate in 2020.
Morales did not win an outright majority of votes in 2019, however. Why? It is not because the majority of Bolivians no longer support MAS. Had that been the case, then Arce would not have won more than 50% of the vote.
It is because Morales tried to remain in power too long. That overreach gave an opening to the conservative opposition which, as Mr. Weisbrot says, has been looking for a way to seize power since 2005.
Any interference from the outside in the 2019 election, then, was only possible because of internal divisions within MAS around the issue of Morales’ leadership, divisions which are continuing.
And the failure of the right to prevail in 2020 desspite such interference, speaks both to the fractured nature of the right in Bolivia and the underlying strength of MAS as an organization.
This good article gives an historical look at Honduras. It serves in microcosm to what the U.S. does in each of the nations using various techniques. It is worth reading: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/20/the-evolution-of-u-s-backed-death-squads-in-honduras/
Thanks for this post. Just more evidence that what comes around goes around. And around. It’s poetic justice that Trump (whom I actually like for several things) got his comeuppance via the same “democratic” voting methods that Evo Morales suffered. Sans the assassinations. Evo was extremely popular. No question. So was Trump. I still think Trump could have swung either way. So it all shows to go that that elections don’t matter. Which is disconcerting. It barricades further political action once the election is over and the media proclaim the winner and his leanings. Compromise and political evolution have literally been precluded by this tactic. This merry go round would be fine if what went around came around. And the end result would be a much higher equality. Less financial gaming of the system. A greater seriousness. But on this merry go round what goes around goes around again.
The OAS is just another extension of the CIA and is no less corrupt and criminal in nature. The fact that 60% of OAS funding comes from the U.S. is most likely overly understated. The 60% funding is the red flag and if that was investigated we would find the remaining 40% also comes from the U.S. too. Nothing the U.S. does internationally is done with good intentions, at least not for the perceived cause. The reason the U.S. does their dirty work this way is to camouflage their crimes. It makes it look like someone else committed the crimes.
The OAS is just another extension of the CIA and is no less corrupt and criminal in nature. The fact that 60% of OAS funding comes from the U.S. is most likely overly understated. The 60% funding is the red flag and if that was investigated we would find the remaining 40% also comes from the U.S. too. Nothing the U.S. does internationally is done with good intentions, at least not for the perceived cause. The reason the U.S. does their dirty work this way is to camouflage their crimes. It makes it look like someone else committed the crimes.