Two Problems with the Mainstream Narrative of Bolivia's Coup

UPDATE: There is a helpful synopsis provided by Antiwar's David Decamp of the "electoral irregularities" at the heart of the Bolivia coup:

The claims of election fraud stem from a 24-hour pause in the vote count on election day after 84 percent of the vote was tallied. After the pause, the data was updated, and it showed Morales with a 10 percent lead, which he needed for an immediate victory to prevent a run-off vote. The OAS report found Morales had a favorable increase in the last five percent of the votes that was not consistent with the first 95 percent.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think-tank based in Washington, released their own detailed report on the election on Friday. The CEPR found "no evidence that irregularities or fraud affected the official result that gave President Evo Morales a first-round victory."

The CEPR argument for the increase in Morales votes towards the end was geography. The areas where the votes were counted before the 24-hour pause have a history of being friendlier to Morales’s opposition.

As for labeling the coup a non-coup, Jason Ditz reminds us why it is important:

The US not wanting to recognize a coup as a coup is not just about superficial appearances. Rather, US law forbids the US from providing military aid to a nation under military rule. The US has often used a failure to recognize to dodge that requirement, with Egypt a major recent example of a nation where an overt, violent military takeover went unrecognized by the US, in no small reason because the US preferred the junta to the elected government.

 ****

After his house was torched and a warrant issued for his arrest, ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales decided to take Mexico's offer of asylum.

There is little doubt that what transpired was a coup. Read the non-mainstream reporting from World Socialist Web Site and Max Blumenthal's Grayzone and a picture forming is of La Paz as a Kiev and Morales's Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) the victim of far-right political forces.

Two things interest me about the mainstream U.S. coverage of the Morales coup: 1) How a coup is being defined as a non-coup, and 2) How the purported election fraud which lies at the heart of the Morales coup has gone undefined altogether.

Regarding the first, the coup is being defined as a non-coup because the military isn't directly taking over the responsibilities of government. This has been repeated numerous times since Sunday, the latest example of which is found in "‘This Will Be Forever’: How the Ambitions of Evo Morales Contributed to His Fall" by Ernesto Londono, The New York Times' coup apologist:

Ms. Hummel [Calla Hummel, a political scientist at the University of Miami] said the sequence of events did not necessarily constitute a coup, considering that the military seems uninterested in taking control of the country. “We’re seeing people taking to the streets and demanding better governance, which is potentially hopeful,” she said.

Pretty weak. In other words, a thief isn't a thief if he doesn't wear the watch he just stole.

Second, Londono's total avoidance of an explanation of the October 20 presidential election fraud leads a seasoned news consumer to suspect a CoRev (color revolution) at work. Here is Londono's synopsis:

Mr. Morales was declared the winner in the Oct. 20 vote, albeit by a tighter margin than in any presidential election since 2005. But his victory set off a firestorm of protests and violent clashes amid mounting evidence of electoral irregularities.

As the unrest spread, and the legitimacy of his victory became impossible to defend, Mr. Morales on Sunday called for a new vote. But it was too little too late. With much of the police force in open revolt, the military chiefs on Sunday urged Mr. Morales to resign.

So what were the "electoral irregularities"? Not a word.

According to Blumenthal,

On October 20, Morales won re-election by more than 600,000 votes, giving him just above the 10 percent margin needed to defeat opposition presidential candidate Mesa in the first round.

Experts who did a statistical analysis of Bolivia’s publicly available voting data found no evidence of irregularities or fraud. But the opposition claimed otherwise, and took to the streets in weeks of protests and riots.

The events that precipitated the resignation of Morales were indisputably violent. Right-wing opposition gangs attacked numerous elected politicians from the ruling leftist MAS party. They then ransacked the home of President Morales, while burning down the houses of several other top officials. The family members of some politicians were kidnapped and held hostage until they resigned. A female socialist mayor was publicly tortured by a mob.

Following the forced departure of Morales, coup leaders arrested the president and vice president of the government’s electoral body, and forced the organization’s other officials to resign. Camacho’s followers proceeded to burn Wiphala flags that symbolized the country’s Indigenous population and the plurinational vision of Morales.

The Organization of American States, a pro-US organization founded by Washington during the Cold War as an alliance of right-wing anti-communist countries in Latin America, helped rubber stamp the Bolivian coup. It called for new elections, claiming there were numerous irregularities in the October 20 vote, without citing any evidence. Then the OAS remained silent as Morales was overthrown by his military and his party’s officials were attacked and violently forced to resign.

The day after, the Donald Trump White House enthusiastically praised the coup, trumpeting it as a “significant moment for democracy,” and a “strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”

Things are going to get very messy in Bolivia.