Washington Losing Control of the Narrative: Coup in Bolivia is Now Undeniable

Today Caitlin Johnstone has another worthwhile piece on the coup in Bolivia, “No No You Guys, THIS US-Backed Coup Is Perfectly Legitimate!” Alliance For Global Justice has published a statement on the coup. AFGJ has set up a Bolivia updates page. Reporting from La Paz, Clifford Krauss of The New York Times didn't make it to the front page, though he did get a thumbnail at the bottom of the fold.

The reason? After reading Krauss's "Bolivia’s Interim Leader Pledges to ‘Reconstruct Democracy’" it is well nigh impossible to deny that what happened in Bolivia is a coup. A civil war is unfolding there. At least The Times didn't censor the photo of Morales supporters marching in La Paz against self-declared president Jeanine Añez Chavez.

I was waiting to see how the military would handle the return of Movement toward Socialism (MAS) lawmakers to the legislature. MAS has a large majority, and it was the stated intention of the legislators to declare president Añez illegitimate.

As Krauss explains,

On Wednesday afternoon, after using tear gas to break up a peaceful protest by supporters of Mr. Morales, the police blocked about a dozen senators allied with the former president from entering the legislature. 

“Dictatorship! Dictatorship!” chanted the crowd accompanying the lawmakers.

Less than an hour later, as tear gas wafted outside the government palace, the armed forces announced a shake-up of the high command. An army general, Carlos Orellana Centellas, became the new top commander of the armed forces and promised to take orders from Ms. Añez.

“We will guarantee the security of the constitutional government,” General Orellana Centellas said.

The shakeup in the army high command is textbook coup d'etat stuff. The far-right coup leaders are clearing the deck of anyone squeamish about slaughtering Morales supporters. And make no mistake that is what it is coming. Judging from the size of the crowds in La Paz things are going to get very bloody.

By that time Clifford Krauss will be back in Houston reporting on petroleum and the news will be buried with not even a thumbnail bottom of the fold.

Already Washington and its captive OAS are losing control of the narrative because they can't prove any election fraud and they can't deny that Morales was the rightful winner of the October 20 election (who would have won even if it had go to a runoff). A coup d'etat in Bolivia is now undeniable.

Textbook Coup

It's getting harder for the corporate media to dress up the coup in Bolivia as a people power uprising. Reuters reports that

Earlier on Tuesday, [self-declared interim president] Anez called for Bolivians to come together but fell short of promising protection for MAS lawmakers who have asked for safety guarantees.

“We are emerging from one of the darkest episodes of our democratic history,” said Anez. “To those who have caused damage or committed any crime: God and justice will judge you.”

More than 30 election officials have been arrested following Morales’ resignation, according to the office of Bolivia’s attorney general.

That's why Morales had to resign; he was headed to prison otherwise. The fact that Peru and Ecuador refused to accommodate the Mexican transport of Morales shows that the coup was an international effort of the Organization of American states, which preposterously claimed that yes there was a coup but it was perpetrated by Morales himself when he engaged in electoral fraud on October 20.

On the purported vote rigging Jacobin writes,

Delegitimizing foreign elections where the wrong person wins, of course, is a favorite pastime of corporate media. There is a great deal of uncritical acceptance of the Organization of American States’ (OAS) opinions on elections, including in coverage of Bolivia’s October vote (for example, BBC; Vox; Voice of America), despite the lack of evidence to back up its assertions. No mainstream outlet warned its readers that the OAS is a Cold War organization, explicitly set up to halt the spread of leftist governments. In 1962, for example, it passed an official resolution claiming that the Cuban government was “incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system.” Furthermore, the organization is bankrolled by the US government; indeed, in justifying its continued funding, US AID argued that the OAS is a crucial tool in “promot[ing] US interests in the Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-US countries” like Bolivia.

In contrast, there was no coverage at all in US corporate media of the detailed new report from the Washington-based think tank CEPR, which claimed that the election results were “consistent” with the win totals announced. There was also scant mention of the kidnapping and torture of elected officials, the ransacking of Morales’s house, the burning of public buildings and of the indigenous Wiphala flag, all of which were widely shared on social media and would have suggested a very different interpretation of events.

Words have power. And framing an event is a powerful method of conveying legitimacy and suggesting action. “Coups,” almost by definition, cannot be supported, while “protests” generally should be. Chilean president Sebastian Piñera, a conservative, US-backed billionaire, has literally declared war on over a million people demonstrating against his rule. Corporate media, however, has framed that uprising not as a protest, but rather a “riot” (for example, NBC News; Reuters; Toronto Sun). In fact, Reuters described the events as Piñera responding to “vandals” and “looters.” Who would possibly oppose that?

Morales was the first indigenous president in his majority-indigenous nation — one that has been ruled by a white European elite since the days of the conquistadors. While in office, his Movement Towards Socialism party has managed to reduce poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent, cut unemployment in half, and conduct a number of impressive public works programs. Morales saw himself as part of a decolonizing wave across Latin America, rejecting neoliberalism and nationalizing the country’s key resources, spending the proceeds on health, education, and affordable food for the population.

Bolivia is headed toward civil war. Self-declared interim president Jeanine Añez Chavez is facing dissolution of her self-appointment today by a majority of legislators, according to Clifford Krauss:

It seemed uncertain that Ms. Añez would be able to calm the tense and deeply polarized nation. Shortly after her announcement, members of Mr. Morales’s party said they would hold another legislative session on Wednesday to nullify her decision.

Añez can ignore the duly elected legislature or she can order members of the majority imprisoned. Both are illegal and very difficult to defend in the mainstream press.

Añez has already called the army out into the streets. Can the army quell a popular uprising or are we headed toward another shattered nation?

We know from the last decade-plus that the U.S. prefers a failed state to a functioning one.

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.

Caitlin Johnstone on the Coup in Bolivia

It is noteworthy that neither Chilean president Sebastián Piñera nor Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, nor Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi for that matter, have "stepped down" despite enormous protests for more than a month, but the one socialist president with a true mass base of support, Bolivian president Evo Morales, has "resigned." Might it be that the latter is an opponent of the Washington Consensus while the former are supporters? Might it be the latter is "coup appropriate" but the former have the backing of the United States?

Caitlin Johnstone has the must-read piece, "MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word 'Coup' In Bolivia Reporting," on the coup in Bolivia (which is shaping up to be reminiscent of Ukraine 2014).