[Will the US and the Organization of American States once again be
able to overturn election results?] [[link removed]]

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS UNDERCUTTING DEMOCRACY IN BOLIVIA  
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Mark Weisbrot
November 8, 2019
The Nation [[link removed]]

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_ Will the US and the Organization of American States once again be
able to overturn election results? _

Bolivia's President Evo Morales waves flags before supporters as he
celebrates his reelection in El Alto, Bolivia, on Monday, October 28.,
Juan Karita / AP

 

Multilateral organizations like the Organization of American States
(OAS) have a certain perceived impartiality because they are, in
theory, controlled by a diverse group of nations. But sometimes a
great power can wield a disproportionate influence. It could
theoretically be a coincidence that both the Trump administration and
the OAS have tried—without offering any evidence—to discredit
Bolivia’s national election in the past couple of weeks. But it’s
more likely that this dangerous, ugly, and destabilizing operation is
being pushed by Washington.

On October 20, Bolivians went to the polls to choose their president
and congress. Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president
in a country with the largest proportion of indigenous people in Latin
America, was on the ballot for reelection. His main opponent, former
president Carlos Mesa, is vastly preferred by the Trump
administration. Since Morales was elected in 2005, the US government
has been hostile, and Bolivia has not had ambassadorial relations with
the United States since 2009. Morales is one of the last remaining
members of a cohort of independent, left presidents who have
been opposed
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and in some cases removed
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the help
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the United States.

When the official tally [[link removed]] was done,
Morales had 47.1 percent of the vote, with 36.5 percent for Mesa in
second place. This meant that Morales had won the presidency without
going to a runoff, because the rules allow for a first-round win for a
candidate that gets at least 40 percent of the vote and a 10-point
margin over the closest competitor.

The opposition cried foul. Long before the votes were counted, Mesa
had already indicated
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accept the decision of the electoral authorities if Morales were to
win. What is more surprising, and disturbing, was the press statement
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the OAS the day after the election. It expressed “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 it did not
present any evidence for its questioning of the election results.

This is an outrage for an electoral observation mission, as anyone
familiar with such procedures knows. An official inside this
mission—they cannot be named here because they are not authorized to
speak for the mission—expressed concern about what this would do to
the reputation of the OAS.

Hours before the OAS press statement, and even longer before the votes
were counted, Senator Marco Rubio stated
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“In #Bolivia all credible indications are Evo Morales failed to
secure necessary margin to avoid second round in Presidential
election.” He also alleged, without evidence, that there was “some
concern he will tamper with the results or process to avoid this.”
Trump administration officials followed
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similar statements.

The potentially violence-promoting claims of the OAS, which echo those
of Rubio and the Trump administration, have driven much of the
media’s coverage, and serve as an anchor for those who want to
discredit the election.

For those who bothered to look at the data (the 34,000 tally sheets,
signed by observers, are on the Web
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increase in the share of Morales’s votes in later returns was simply
a result of geography
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In other words, Morales’s support is much stronger
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rural and poorer populations, whose votes came in later. Such a
geographically driven change in vote margins is not that uncommon in
elections—as anyone who has watched election returns on television
in the United States knows. And this change wasn’t even that big of
a shift. The official data show a gradual change in the margin between
the candidates as the mix of returns changed over time.

The OAS mission pointed to a pause in the “quick count” as though
it was cause for suspicion. This is an argument that no election
observer should ever make. The quick count is not an official count
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and does not have the same safeguards. It has never been promised nor
intended to give a complete result. It is done by contractors who take
photos of the tally sheets once they’ve been publicly certified by
local electoral jurists, and upload the results via a mobile
application so as to get partial results out faster.

There were perfectly legitimate reasons for the government to stop the
quick count when it did. In a highly polarized situation that includes
violent attacks
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electoral facilities, it may not be a good idea to continually update
two sets of election results, which differ significantly because of
procedures, in what appeared to be a close election (for the 10-point
margin).

Opponents of the Morales government, and its political party, the
Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), have also argued that Morales should
not have been able to run for reelection. Their arguments are that the
Constitution forbids it, and that in a referendum held in February
2016, a 51-to-49 majority voted not to allow the president and vice
president to run for another term.

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But in December 2017, the nation’s highest court ruled against term
limits. Regardless of what anyone thinks of it, in Bolivia, as in the
United States, the court’s decision
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the law of the land. For many of those trying to overturn the results
of the presidential election—including the Trump administration and
its allies—the end justifies the means, and the rule of law is not a
consideration.

This political intervention by the OAS has implications beyond
Bolivia. It is understandable that many journalists see the OAS
Electoral Observation Mission as neutral and take its statements as
reliable—they usually are. But this is not the first time that OAS
officials put their fingers on the scale of an election result under
US pressure, and with horribly violent results.

Paul Farmer of Harvard’s Medical School, who later became President
Bill Clinton’s deputy special envoy for Haiti at the United
Nations, testified
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2010 to the US Congress about what happened next as the US government

_sought…to block bilateral and multilateral aid to Haiti, having an
objection to the policies and views of the administration of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.… Choking off assistance for development and
for the provision of basic services also choked off oxygen to the
government, which was the intention all along: to dislodge the
Aristide administration._

The OAS’s unjustified change of position on the 2000 Haitian
election was vital to the regime change operation of 2000–04, in
which the first democratically elected president of Haiti was taken to
Africa on a US plane. Thousands of people were murdered following the
coup, and officials of the constitutional government were jailed.

The OAS also intervened in the Haitian election of 2010, doing
something that perhaps no election monitors had ever done:
They reversed
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results of the first round without a recount or even a statistical
analysis.

Looking forward in Bolivia, the government invited the OAS to audit
the election results, and an OAS team arrived on Thursday for a
10-to-12-day visit. There are some voices within the OAS, such as
the Mexican government
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who have criticized
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the OAS has done so far, and we can only hope that a few governments
can keep this latest mission honest in the face of pressure from
Washington and also the governments of Brazil and Argentina, who favor
regime change in Bolivia.

Pushing Morales out will not be easy. After 13 years of some of the
most successful economic policies
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the hemisphere, he remains popular. During his presidency, income per
person in Bolivia has grown at twice the rate of the Latin American
average; poverty has been reduced by 42 percent; and extreme poverty
has dropped by 60 percent.

What could be most important right now is for members of the US
Congress who are against this regime change operation to weigh in.
Rubio and the Trump administration can influence the OAS partly
because Washington provides
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60 percent of the organization’s budget. But the US Congress
approves that funding, and there are people among the OAS staff and
member governments who believe in keeping the organization’s
electoral observation functions honest. These people need all the help
that they can get right now.

[xxxxxx MODERATOR: As xxxxxx is reposting this November 8, 2019
article from The Nation
[[link removed]] on November
11, 2019, the New York Times
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is reporting: 

_President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who came to power more than a
decade ago as part of a leftist wave sweeping Latin America, resigned
on Sunday after unrelenting protests by an infuriated population that
accused him of undermining democracy to extend his rule._

_Mr. Morales and his vice president, Álvaro García Linera, who also
resigned, said in a national address that they were stepping down in
an effort to stop the bloodshed that has spread across the country in
recent weeks. But they admitted no wrongdoing and instead insisted
that they were victims of a coup._

_“The coup has been consummated,” Mr. García said._

_Mr. Morales was once widely popular, and stayed in the presidency
longer than any other current head of state in Latin America. He was
the first Indigenous president in a country that had been led by a
tiny elite of European descent for centuries, and he shepherded
Bolivia through an era of economic growth and shrinking inequality,
winning support from Bolivians who saw him as their first true
representative in the capital._

_“I want to tell you, brothers and sisters, that the fight does not
end here,” Mr. Morales said on Sunday. “The poor, the social
movements, will continue in this fight for equality and peace.”_

The New York Times
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also reported earlier in the day on November 11, 2019:

_Bolivia’s military chief on Sunday called on President Evo Morales
to resign, dealing what was likely a fatal blow to his efforts to
cling to power in the face of widespread unrest over last month’s
fraud-marred presidential elections._

_The commander of Bolivia’s armed forces, Gen. Williams Kaliman,
said the military chiefs believed Mr. Morales should step down to
restore “peace and stability and for the good of our Bolivia.”_

and

_Michael Kozak, the top diplomat at the State Department overseeing
Latin America policy on Sunday endorsed the call for a new election.
“All those implicated in the flawed process should step down,” he
wrote on Twitter
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addressing the question of whether Mr. Morales should be eligible to
run again.]_

_Mark Weisbrot is codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research [[link removed]] in Washington, DC, and president
of Just Foreign Policy [[link removed]]. His
latest book is Failed: What the "Experts" Got Wrong About the Global
Economy
[[link removed]] (2015,
Oxford University Press)._

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