Links - 17th December 2019 (3) (Bolivia/Evo Morales)

Bolivia’s election panel declares Evo Morales winner after contested tally; opponents demand second round - The Washington Post - "Bolivia’s government electoral tribunal on Thursday declared President Evo Morales outright winner in the election for a fourth term in office after a controversial vote count that sparked protests across the South American nation... Tensions continued to escalate in the Andean nation of 11 million, which this week became the latest in Latin America to erupt in violent anti-government demonstrations. Protesters burned and looted election offices Monday night after the socialist president emerged from an unexplained gap in the publication of election results in better shape than he entered it... [Morales] had warned the night before of a coup attempt led by “the right,” in coordination with foreign powers: “We have confronted it without violence, but I have to say, we are in a state of emergency to defend democracy.” Mesa, who has united opposition parties from the right and the left against Morales, called the accusation “incredible” and accused Morales of “maneuvering a massive fraud.”  “If there is someone that systematically violates and breaks the constitutional rule of law, it’s Evo Morales,” said Mesa, who was president from 2003 to 2005. “He controls and gives orders to all the powers of the state.”... The Coordinator for the Defense of Democracy, a committee formed Wednesday by Mesa, other opposition leaders and civil society groups, called for “peaceful protests” until the government agrees to go to a second round of voting. The chief elections observer for the Organization of American States said Wednesday that Bolivian authorities had no valid explanation for the gap in publishing vote counts. The OAS, which met in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the election, has called the gap “surprising” and “worrying.” Gerardo de Icaza, the OAS director of electoral observation and cooperation, said the election should go to a second round, no matter the results of the first.  “Given the context and the evidenced problems in this electoral process, it would still be a better option to go to a second round,” he said. On Thursday, the European Union agreed... The fact that he was running for a fourth term was controversial: After losing a referendum in 2016 that would have allowed him to sidestep term limits, he secured a court ruling that enabled him to run again anyway."
Of course online a lot of people were fulminating about a CIA coup and sharing the usual paranoid delusions and frothing denunciations

Bolivia: Researchers at risk for denouncing fraud | Amnesty International - "On 24 October Edgar Villegas, systems engineer and analyst, denounced irregularities in Bolivia’s general elections of 20 October on public TV. His study done with other academics pointed to large discrepancies between the preliminary count and the final electoral results that gave victory to incumbent president Evo Morales. Following the TV interview Villegas, his family, and Mónica Ximena Galarza, the journalist who interviewed him, were intimidated. These incidents happened in a wider context of repression by the authorities in response to social protests following the election results."

The fall of Morales is a body blow to the Corbynista Left's utopian delusions - "There was a time when the fall of a Bolivian president in the middle of a British general election wouldn’t have made waves here. Jeremy Corbyn, however, is not one to let his own electioneering get in the way of a denouncing an imperialist coup anywhere. And he is right to sense the end of an era in the fall of Evo Morales.What happened on Sunday was not just another small political earthquake in the Andes. When enraged crowds chased the Bolivian president from office as a vote-cheat they punctured long-held Left-wing fantasies that Evo Morales was shaping an eco-socialist Shangri-la... Morales’ sudden fall is as bad a trauma for them as Chile in 1973. Jeremy Corbyn’s generation of Left-wingers never recovered from General Pinochet’s brutal toppling of the elected socialist Allende then. A CIA-steered military coup became their template for explaining why their hero of the moment failed to fulfil his revolutionary promises.  Hoping to see their kind of popular uprising overthrow today’s elected conservative president in Chile, they ignored how, up the Andes in Bolivia, their own hero had squandered his political capital. Evo Morales lost a referendum on whether he could stand a fourth time, then stood anyway. Then he fiddled a first round lead into an outright win which fooled no one there but Corbynistas everywhere.   Morales began life as an agitator for the small coca farmers’ lobby, disguised as an Indian rights organisation. However, over fifteen years in power – but unnoticed by the Corbynistas – Morales and his cronies had constructed the type of Latin American extraction-based economy which they normally denounce as neo-imperialist. After centuries of exporting silver, today’s Bolivia is a natural gas supplier to its neighbours and exporter of lithium to battery-makers around the globe.  After early years when poverty fell sharply as the President re-orientated priorities to the poor, ordinary Bolivians had recently begun to grumble that the regime was putting itself first. Morales’ failure to detect his slipping popularity pointed to serious delusions of grandeur. Fuelled by praise for his regime from Western fellow travellers and even the IMF, he began to act like an elected Ceausescu. Thirty years after the fall of Romania’s communist dictator with his architectural megalomania and museum of gifts to himself, Morales was building a 25-storey presidential palace and a museum of his own life in his home town. Yet the political realities of in Latin America always came second in Corbynista minds to identifying the next Left-wing utopia somewhere up the Amazon."

Jeremy Corbyn condemns 'appalling coup' as Bolivia's Socialist President Evo Morales quits - "Mr Morales said yesterday he would resign after the military called on him to step down and allies deserted him following weeks of protests over accusations of election rigging."
Is there a left-wing authoritarian that Corbyn *doesn't* support?

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, A 'wow' moment in Latin America - "[On Morales] He did good things at the beginning, admits Americo, but then it was all corrupt. Bolivians watched as he became increasingly undemocratic. First in 2016, he lost a referendum on whether to scrap presidential term limits. He appealed to the Supreme Court, stuffed full of his people, which ruled that it would be against his human rights if he were not able to run. It was at this point he lost a lot of goodwill. And then an election last month, pushed Bolivians over the edge. I was there. It was the most uncertain election since he had come to power, still loved by millions. But his popularity was waning. One opposition politician I spoke to foresaw all of this. If Evo wins in the first round, that means fraud, she told me. No data points to him being able to win this straight out. Sure enough, on the evening votes were counted, something strange happened. By the time more than 80% of votes had been tallied, it looked like Evo was going to have to go through to a second round. Then the counting stopped. It was odd. Then a tweet from the Organization of American States who'd been observing the vote, demanding that the government explain this mysterious pause. A colleague asked the electoral board for comment. Their reply: don't believe in fake news, please. But when the full count came in the next day, sure enough, Evo had won outright. Few people believed the result. And that was the start of weeks of unrest. The fear among some Bolivians was that Evo was taking Bolivia in the same direction as Nicolas Maduro, the socialist leader of Venezuela, a country rich in oil, but now an economic basket case. For a man who professed to be a very normal person, many were also outraged when Mr. Morales decided to build a new presidential palace in the heart of old La Paz"
Maybe the CIA forced Morales to rig the election

Terry Glavin: The delusional Euro-American ‘left’ locks in its revisionist tale of Bolivia - "Nearly three weeks had passed since the official vote tally had inexplicably frozen in Morales’ constitutionally dubious fourth run for the presidency in an election that would end up conclusively shown to have been rigged. There had been mounting chaos in the streets of La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, El Alto, Cochabamba, Sucre, Potosí — the whole country, in other words. Bolivia was writhing in rumour-fuelled leaderless pandemonium and riot... he’d been done in, Morales explained, by “racist, coup-plotting, right-wing sellouts.” Amplified by the Venezuelan propaganda channel Telesur, the storyline is now locked in. Slight variations are permitted. It was a CIA operation. Or it was a cunning plot by the Organization of American States to overthrow an anti-imperialist indigenous folk hero. Or it was a neoliberal conspiracy to enforce capitalism’s hegemony by capturing Bolivia’s vast lithium resources to turn them over to the wicked multinational corporations. Canadians are to be particularly ashamed, because by publicly noticing Bolivia’s corrupted elections, Chrystia Freeland, our foreign affairs minister, is once again serving as the hemispheric lickspittle and criminal accomplice of U.S. President Donald Trump. Since last Sunday, this delusional revisionism has been articulated and recapitulated in one iteration or another by British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, by the upstart U.S. Democrats Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by the New Democrats Niki Ashton and Jenny Kwan, by the Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom, and by all the undead Chomskyite webzine pamphleteers who continue to suck the oxygen out of all the spaces in the Anglosphere where a properly radical internationalism might otherwise thrive... The “coup” storyline is also of a piece with the fashionable caricature of the crises in Venezuela and Nicaragua, where formerly “progressive” regimes have degenerated into brutal strongman states — which is exactly the direction in which Morales’ increasingly corrupt government was headed... The Bolivian uprising — and that’s what it can be called, or at least it is more accurate to call it that than to call it a “coup” — is in the same category as the current upheavals involving millions of ordinary people taking to the streets in Beirut, Moscow, Hong Kong, Santiago and Baghdad. These are insurrections against unaccountable, unresponsive and — almost always — despotic governments. The Euro-American “left” has had almost nothing to say about this phenomenon, which involves challenges to the entrenched establishment at least as radical as anything that the gringos have managed to mount in Paris, or San Francisco, or London, or Washington, since perhaps 1968... It’s a tragedy, and a great shame, that in his final years in power Morales began to corrupt the system he and his Movimiento Al Socialismo had built, almost from scratch. But that’s what he did. And when threatened by an almost certain electoral loss, Morales took the despot’s way out."