Jeanine Anez

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">dn 920</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span style="color: rgb(25, 31, 36); font-family: Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Bolivia, self-proclaimed interim President Jeanine Áñez has suspended her campaign in an attempt to unify conservative votes against the&nbsp;</span><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: top; color: rgb(25, 31, 36); font-family: Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">MAS</span><span style="color: rgb(25, 31, 36); font-family: Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;party, formerly led by ousted longtime President Evo Morales. This comes less than a year after the extremist right-wing leader rose to power following a military coup against Morales. Áñez’s reign has been marked by skyrocketing military and police repression and violence against Indigenous communities and supporters of Morales. The presidential election is scheduled for October 18.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></div><div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">// bolsonaro re-assert rightful place above uppity indigenous?</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">has doing god's will earned him "magical authority? see below</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-white-evangelical-christians-are-bonded-by-sadism/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-white-evangelical-christians-are-bonded-by-sadism/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">john s eb</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">t<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">here’s still too much confusion over the president’s bond&nbsp;with white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). I suppose there will always be as long as outsiders presume that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters believe in</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;loving thy neighbor as thyself. Once you see that WEPs do not apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally, things become clearer. Once this Christian concept is removed from the discussion, “paradoxes” melt into the air. What’s left is a natural alignment of political interests.</span></font></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">How do I know WEPs don’t truly believe in the Golden Rule? From life experience. I know what I’m talking about. All you have to do is listen carefully, however, and know what to listen for. Elizabeth Dias wrote a big piece in the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Times</em>&nbsp;last week trying to clear up the “contradiction” of WEPs standing by Trump “when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.” A source explains helpfully that there’s no contradiction at all.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her,” Dias wrote of her source. “She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.</b>” The source: “I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country.&nbsp;<b>I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all. Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This makes no sense to outsiders. Freedom for “gay people and members of minority groups” is not taking anything away from anybody. This makes no sense, because outsiders do not generally accept a</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;worldview in which power is ordered. First God, then man, then woman, then child. White over nonwhite. Heterosexual over LGBTQ. Christian over non-Christian. When you believe with your whole being that power is ordered according to God’s will, “giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups” is not political&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">equality</em>, as outsiders would often see it. It’s knocking you out of the order of power. It’s taking something away. Equality is literally&nbsp;<span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">theft</span></span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">when political equality is theft, you cannot apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally. If you did, you’d be complicit in a crime. The Golden Rule demands white people share power with nonwhite people. It demands husbands share power with their wives. Neither can&nbsp;</span><em times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding">ever</em><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">&nbsp;be done.<b>&nbsp;A wife, according to the same source in Dias’ reporting, must “submit” to her husband in accordance with God’s law. If she does not, she’s trying “to rule over him.”</b>&nbsp;Same for whites and nonwhites. If white people are not at the top of the order, they are being ruled over. This is why Dias’ source says that, “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.” The more for “them,” the less for “us.” They believe Trump prevents that from happening.</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>They believe Trump is “restoring their freedom.</b>” Utter nonsense. What they are really saying is that the president will prevent people lower down the order of power from achieving more freedom and equality, “violating” their “freedom.” He must do that by any means, even if he confiscates kids from their mothers, bans a world religion, or<b>&nbsp;commits treason. None of that matters as much as maintaining the supremacy of a religious identity built on sand.&nbsp;</b>And make no mistake: this is a religious identity. These are very real anti-democratic Christians hostile to critical thinking, modernity, pluralism, and all forms of equality. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance,” a WEP source told Dias. “<b>If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”[ // reverse discrimination]</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">If WEPs believed in the Golden Rule, they’d never tolerate other people’s pain. They do tolerate it, however. Indeed, they like it. It feels good to see the president “restoring their freedom.”</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;When WEPs say they want to “live out our faith,” what they mean is sadism is and should be a natural consequence of the natural order of things in which God’s people are chosen to rule in God’s name.&nbsp;</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is,” Dias wrote. “They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.”</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That’s correct, but take that to its logical conclusion. His enemies are their enemies. His pleasures, their pleasures. Their bond is far from a contradiction. It’s an alignment of political interests in which sadism is the point.</span></font></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</font></div><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">has doing god's will earned him "magical authority? ends justify the means? see above</span></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">mis-spoke? made up extreme exec priv or somesuch? invokes article II? or somesuch?that&nbsp;<b>chosen one&nbsp;</b>was a goof/joke? tho rw in bolivia ~ evo m claims she is restoring xian thus doing god's will? reasserts hier over indig prez</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/former-dhs-staff-trump-claimed-magical-authorities-to-break-the-law/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/former-dhs-staff-trump-claimed-magical-authorities-to-break-the-law/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx twt text</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Former DHS staff: Trump claimed ‘magical authorities’ to break the law</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 19, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of all the Never Trump groups that have organized to defeat the president, the one that has impressed me the most is Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT). They’ve asked lifelong Republicans to videotape themselves explaining why they refuse to support Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Because I know quite a few conservatives, I’m aware that many of them are uncomfortable with this president—even though they won’t admit it openly. Hearing from Republicans about their refusal to support Trump can provide a permission structure that allows them to confront their partisan tribalism and begin to surface their distaste for having a narcissistic bully in the White House.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the latest video from RVAT goes a step further and brings us a voice from inside the Trump administration about what’s really going on behind the scenes. It is as terrifying as we’ve all imagined.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security says that the president wanted to exploit DHS “for his own political purposes and to fuel his own agenda.”&nbsp; For example, in the middle of the wildfires in California, Trump told FEMA to cut off funding for assistance to that state because the people who lived there didn’t support him. That lends credence to the story from Katherine Eban that Trump and Kushner were content to allow tens of thousands of Americans to die from COVID-19 as long as they were from Democratic states and counties.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>But here’s the really terrifying part of that video: the president didn’t want to hear that his directives were illegal, saying he had “magical authorities.” What the hell does that mean?</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the same day that this video was released, an op-ed by Miles Taylor was published at the Washington Post in which he states:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Like many Americans, I had hoped that Donald Trump, once in office, would soberly accept the burdens of the presidency — foremost among them the duty to keep America safe. But he did not rise to the challenge. Instead, the president has governed by whim, political calculation and self-interest.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Frankly, there were other people in the room when Trump claimed “magical authorities” to break the law (I’m looking at you Kirstjen Nielsen). They now need to step up to the plate for their country to back up what Taylor is saying …</span>&nbsp;That’s because the stakes are so high. At the end of the video above, Taylor says that people who are still serving in this administration have told him, “Just wait until the second term. It’ll be no holds barred, it’ll be shock and awe, we’ll do what we want.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taylor ends by saying that, despite having policy differences with Joe Biden, he will vote for the Democratic ticket in November. That’s because he understands the difference between what Adam Gopnik called&nbsp;<b>“toxic enemies and honest opponents.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s needed against Trump now is…not an ideologically narrow, politically focussed opposition but the widest possible coalition of people who genuinely value the tenets of democracy, meaning no more than the passionate desire to settle differences by debate and argument, rather than by power and cruelty and clan.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I’d say that, given their latest ad, the Lincoln Project knows the difference too. Above and beyond policy differences, it all comes down to character.</font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-in-bolivia-continues-to-produce-repression-and-tyranny-while-revealing-how-u-s-media-propaganda-works/">https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-in-bolivia-continues-to-produce-repression-and-tyranny-while-revealing-how-u-s-media-propaganda-works/</a>
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</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: none; text-transform: uppercase; line-height: 30px;">U.S.-SUPPORTED MILITARY COUP</span>&nbsp;in Bolivia has largely disappeared from western news outlets ever since the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/20/bolivia-el-alto-violence-death-protest" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">November 2019 massacres</a>&nbsp;of&nbsp;pro-democracy protesters by the right-wing faction that seized power. But for Bolivians, the repression and tyranny that replaced their stable and thriving democracy endures. And, predictably, the “interim president” installed after the coup, Jeanine Áñez, continues to rule the country&nbsp;10 months later, despite no possibility of being democratically elected, while she and her party plot how to prevent an election which all&nbsp;<a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20200316-morales-pick-leads-in-bolivia-opinion-polls" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">polls show</a>&nbsp;will result in victory for the socialist party of toppled President Evo Morales.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What makes the coup in Bolivia and its aftermath so worthwhile to explore is not just the inherent importance of Bolivia itself: a country of 11 million people with a rich and unique ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, as well as an ample supply of the now-vital resource of lithium. It is also instructive because of how&nbsp;<a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">U.S. discourse evolved in support of the coup</a>, with <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">supposed “foreign policy experts” across the political spectrum — The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk, Mother Jones’ Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, former Obama official and <b>Stanford Professor Michael McFaul,</b> along with the Economist, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — spouting outright falsehoods to depict the destruction of Bolivian democracy as the salvation of it.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Since the coup last October, many of the key claims used to justify the ousting of Morales — most particularly claims by the Organization of American States that the election resulting in Morales’s victory was fraudulent — have been proven&nbsp;<a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">to have been lies</a></span>. Yet not a single one of the foreign policy “experts” or media outlets have acknowledged their errors or even addressed these subsequent revelations, because they know that there are never any consequences for journalists and analysts as long as they remain subservient to the U.S. government agenda (while the New York Times reported on the studies proving the OAS claims to be baseless, they never acknowledged that their own reporting and editorializing treated those claims as true).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bolivia is&nbsp;but the latest&nbsp;of&nbsp;a long line of thriving, stable democracies destroyed with the support if not the outright participation of the U.S. government, while jingoistic media figures disseminated the propaganda used to justify it all. And the suffering, violence, repression and tyranny left in its wake are then simply ignored by those who helped bring it about.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today’s SYSTEM UPDATE, which debuts at 2:00 pm ET on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgxK9w5DSvQ" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">The Intercept’s YouTube channel</a>, explores all of these issues, provides an update on post-coup Bolivia, and dissects the key role played by propaganda from U.S. political and media venues. I’m joined by two&nbsp;<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">of the most knowledgeable specialists on Bolivia: Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network,&nbsp;who has lived and worked with coca farmers in Bolivia for the last 30 years,&nbsp;and Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research,&nbsp;the first group to debunk the OAS claims of election fraud. For so many reasons, Bolivia matters, not just to people in the region but also in the U.S.&nbsp;</span></font></p><div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></div><div><div><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx pix twt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>&nbsp;New York Times Admits Key Falsehoods That Drove Last Year’s Coup in Bolivia: Falsehoods Peddled by the U.S., Its Media, and the Times</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. government and its media once again help destroy a thriving Latin American democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Glenn Greenwald</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">June 8 2020,&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In this Nov. 27, 2019 photo, Bolivia's former President Evo Morales pumps his fist after a press conference at the journalists club in Mexico City. Morales went into exile in Mexico after he was prodded by police and the military, forcing him to resigned on Nov. 10, after he claimed victory in an election that international observers invited in by the government said was marred by numerous irregularities. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)In this Nov. 27, 2019, photo, Bolivia’s former President Evo Morales pumps his fist after a press conference at the journalists club in Mexico City. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte) AP]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">IN NOVEMBER 2019, Bolivia’s three-term left-wing president, Evo Morales, was forced by the country’s military and police forces to flee to Mexico after Morales, the prior month, had been officially certified as the winner of his fourth consecutive presidential election. It was unsurprising that Morales won. As the Associated Press noted in 2014, his governance was successful by almost every key metric, and he was thus “widely popular at home for a pragmatic economic stewardship that spread Bolivia’s natural gas and mineral wealth among the masses.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Morales’s popularity had marginally waned since his 2014 landslide victory, he was still the most popular politician in the country. On the night of the October 21, 2019, vote, Bolivia’s election board certified that Morales’s margin of victory against the second-place candidate exceeded the ten percent threshold required under Bolivian law to avoid a runoff, thus earning him a fourth term. But allegations of election fraud were quickly voiced by Morales’s right-wing opponents, leading to his expulsion from the country on November 11.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Once he fled, Bolivia’s first-ever president from the country’s Indigenous population was replaced by a little-known, white, far-right senator, Jeanine Áñez, from the country’s minority European-descendent, Christian, wealthy region. Her new, unelected government promptly massacred dozens of Indigenous protesters and then vested the responsible soldiers with immunity. Seven months later, Áñez predictably continues to rule Bolivia as “interim president” despite never having run for president, let alone having been democratically elected.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bolivia's interim President Jeanine Anez addresses the nation at the presidential palace in La Paz, Bolivia, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020. The message marked the anniversary of the naming of Bolivia as the "Plurinational State of Bolivia," by former President Evo Morales. (AP Photo/Juan Karita)Bolivia’s “interim” President Jeanine Áñez addresses the nation at the presidential palace in La Paz, Bolivia, on Jan. 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Juan Karita) AP]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The central tool used by both the Bolivian right and their U.S. government allies to justify the invalidation of Morales’s 10-point election victory were two election audits by the regional group Organization of American States — one a preliminary report issued on November 10, the day before Morales was forced from the country, and then its final report issued the next month — which asserted widespread, deliberate election fraud.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Given all the irregularities observed, it is impossible to guarantee the integrity of the data and certify the accuracy of the results,” the OAS announced on November 10 as the country was in turmoil over the election. The next day, Morales, under the threat of force to him and his family, boarded a plane to Mexico, where he was granted asylum. The final OAS report in December claimed that “the audit team has detected willful manipulation” of the results based on “incontrovertible evidence of an electoral process marred by grave irregularities.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But on Sunday, the New York Times published an article strongly suggesting that it was the OAS audit, not the Bolivian election, that was “marred by grave irregularities,” making it “impossible to guarantee the integrity of the data and certify the accuracy of the” OAS claims.</b>&nbsp;The paper of record summarized its reporting this way: “A close look at Bolivian election data suggests an initial analysis by the OAS that raised questions of vote-rigging — and helped force out a president — was flawed.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New York Times, June 7, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To cast serious doubt on the integrity of these critical OAS reports, the Times relies upon a new independent study from three scholars at U.S. universities which — in the words of the NYT — examined “data obtained by the New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities.” That study, said the NYT, “has found that the Organization of American States’ statistical analysis was itself flawed.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>That study documented that the key “irregularity” cited by OAS “was actually an artifact of the analysts’ error.” It further explained that with regard to “the patterns that the observers deemed ‘inexplicable,’” the new data analysis shows that “we can explain them without invoking fraud.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While this new study focuses solely on the OAS’s data claims and does not purport to decree the Bolivian election entirely free of fraud — virtually no election, including in the U.S., is entirely free of irregularities — the NYT explains that “the authors of the new study said they were unable to replicate the OAS’s findings using its likely techniques” and that “the difference is significant” in assessing the overall validity of the OAS’s claims.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">”In sum,” the new report concludes, “we offer a different interpretation of the quantitative evidence that led the OAS and other researchers to question the integrity of the Bolivian election.“ Specifically, “we find that we do not require fraud in order to explain the quantitative patterns used to help indict Evo Morales.” The scholars’ bottom line: “we cannot replicate the OAS results.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>IT IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE to overstate the importance of the OAS accusations in driving Morales from his own country and, with no democratic mandate, shifting power in<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;lithium</span>-rich Bolivia to the white, Christian, U.S.-subservient right.</b>&nbsp;While critics had also accused Morales of improperly seeking a fourth term despite constitutional term limits, Bolivia’s duly constituted court had invalidated those term limits (much the way that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg induced the City Council to overturn a term limit referendum so he could seek a third term), leaving anti-Morales outside agitators, such as the OAS and U.S. officials, to rely instead on claims of election fraud.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>On the day the preliminary OAS report was released, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited it both on Twitter and on the official State Department website to demand new elections:</b></font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pompeo, in January of this year, visited OAS’s Washington office and heaped praise on the organization for the role its audit played in forcing Morales from the country — a move which Pompeo heralded by invoking the long Orwellian U.S. tradition of depicting pro-U.S. military coups as “pro-democracy”:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More recently, the OAS honored the former Bolivian government’s request to conduct an audit of the disputed election results. The probe conducted uncovered proof of massive and systemic fraud. It helped end the violence that had broken out over the election dispute. It helped the Bolivian Congress unanimously establish a date and conditions for a new election. And it honored – importantly, it honored the Bolivian people’s courageous demand for a free and fair election, and for democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">U.S. media outlets and foreign policy commentators dutifully echoed the U.S. State Department’s line, as they typically do, by depicting the violent military coup as an advancement of freedom and democracy for the Bolivian people (the same Bolivian people who had just voted for Morales to be their president). As a Washington Post op-ed in February by two MIT scholars noted: “The media has largely reported the allegations of fraud [from the OAS] as fact.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Two days before Morales was forced to flee Bolivia, Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk, who also covers foreign policy for The Atlantic, praised the coup leaders as “bravely standing up for democracy against a wannabe dictator,” and then, the following day, cited the preliminary OAS study as proof that the election was fraudulent:</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On November 11, the day after Morales was forced to flee, Mounk wrote in The Atlantic that Morales got what he deserved, claiming, among other things, that he rigged the election: “The strong circumstantial evidence of vote tampering succeeded in inspiring what years of more subtle attacks on democratic institutions had failed to do: Millions of Bolivians went out into the streets to demand a fair election.” One point Mounk got right: The OAS report was decisive. “When an independent observer mission from the Organization of American States published its audit of the election yesterday, the game was finally up,” he wrote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>(Mounk, knowing that there are never consequences for serving as a puppet for U.S foreign policy, has said not a word about the new study debunking the OAS claims)</b>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Former Obama foreign policy official and current Stanford professor Michael McFaul also cited the OAS report to cheer Morales’s fleeing as some sort of “excellent” blow for freedom and democracy<b>, only subsequently to delete his tweet when it prompted criticism</b>, acknowledging that he lacked the necessary information to form judgments:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The editor-in-chief of the ostensibly progressive journal Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in or knowledge about Bolivia, yet somehow decided she was able to credibly snap into line behind the State Department by claiming that it was Morales — rather than the coup-plotters — who had “taken several end runs around a democratic process”:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It likely goes without saying that the reliably pro-western-coup magazine, The Economist, was also among those leading the way in echoing the U.S. State Department and cheering the coup as a victory for democracy. “The armed forces spoke up for democracy and the constitution against an attempt at dictatorship,” announced the magazine during the week Morales was forced into exile. The Economist also posted more than a dozen tweets during that week claiming it was Morales who posed the threat to Bolivian democracy by virtue of the OAS findings of fraud:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But as usual, the two news outlets most influential in disseminating and ratifying false anti-democratic claims from the U.S. government were the Washington Post and — though they neglected to mention it in their article yesterday on the debunked OAS findings — the New York Times itself. The Post, in its article the day after Morales was forced to leave, ratified the election fraud accusation in its headline: “Bolivia’s Morales resigns amid scathing election report, rising protests.” The article heralded the findings of what it called “the multilateral organization,” noting that the OAS found Morales’s victory “was marred by profound irregularities.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A Post editorial from the same day proclaimed in its headline: “Bolivia is in danger of slipping into anarchy. It’s Evo Morales’s fault.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Post editorial decreed: “there could be little doubt who was ultimately responsible for the chaos: newly resigned president Evo Morales.” How could the victim of a coup — who had just been elected President — be at fault for the resulting chaos? Because, explained the Post’s editors, “an audit released by the Organization of American States reported massive irregularities in the vote count and called for a fresh election.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The New York Times similarly and repeatedly hyped the OAS report as proof that Morales’s victory was illegitimate and the coup therefore democratic. “An independent international audit of Bolivia’s disputed election concluded that former President Evo Morales’s officials resorted to lies, manipulation and forgery to ensure his victory,” its news article claimed, without a syllable of critical pushback until the penultimate paragraph, where it noted that “some economists and statisticians in the United States” had pointed to flaws in the OAS’s data analysis.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the paper’s editorial contained no such reservations, pronouncing Morales’s victory the byproduct of “a flawed election,” noting that “early suspicions of fraud by the Organization of American States helped fuel the protests and provided cover for the military to ‘suggest’ that Mr. Morales leave office.” The Times’s editorial then cited the final OAS report — which the paper yesterday called into question — as “substantiating those suspicions” by proving “‘a series of malicious operations aimed at altering the will expressed at the polls’ on Oct. 20.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In sum, when it came to the 2019 Bolivian coup, the U.S. media played its decades-old, standard role whenever the U.S. wants to depict a military coup against a government it dislikes as a victory for democracy: Namely, it blindly and dutifully adopted the State Department’s view and uncritically waved the flag.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As documented in his great, new book on the CIA’s Cold War tactics, “The Jakarta Method,” journalist Vincent Bevins — whom I recently interviewed for SYSTEM UPDATE — recounts how, throughout the Cold War, the U.S. media served as a key propaganda arm of the U.S. government by reliably depicting overthrows of adverse regimes as a joyous advancement for democracy.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As but one example, Bevins described how the CIA prevailed on the New York Times to suppress reporting about the savagery of the agency-supported coup-plotters in Guatemala and instead glorify them as “rebels” who were nobly fighting for democracy:</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vincent Bevins, “The Jakarta Method,” p. 45</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Exactly the same formula was used by the New York Times and the bulk of the U.S. media when a U.S.-supported coup attempt in Venezuela failed in 2002 to depose the democratically elected President Hugo Chávez</b>. In an extraordinary paragraph, the Times heralded the U.S.-favored coup-leaders in Caracas as the guardians and saviors of democracy, while the democratically elected president was somehow the “dictator”:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Times similarly lamented the dangers posed to Bolivian democracy back in 2014 as the result of Morales’s landslide victory at the polls. To the Times and the U.S. media at large, democracy is imperiled when a candidate disliked by the U.S. wins at the polls; conversely, democracy can be saved only when such elected leaders are overthrown and replaced by force with a U.S.-backed puppet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The NYT editors, while conceding in 2014 that “it is easy to see why many Bolivians would want to see Mr. Morales, the country’s first president with Indigenous roots, remain at the helm” — namely, “during his tenure, the economy of the country, one of the least developed in the hemisphere, grew at a healthy rate, the level of inequality shrank and the number of people living in poverty dropped significantly” — nonetheless insisted that Morales should be regarded as an enemy of democracy because “the pattern of prolonged terms in power is unhealthy for the region” [notably, the NYT would never suggest that Angela Merkel’s “prolonged term in power” as German chancellor (15 years and counting) or Benjamin Netanyahu’s 4-terms-and-counting-in-power as Israeli prime minister pose a similar threat to democracy. This is a “concern” reserved by the U.S. media only for Latin American leaders disliked by the U.S. State Department].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the end of its 2014 editorial on Bolivia and Latin America, the Times inadvertently revealed the real reason it disliked these elected leaders. Concern for democracy is the pretext. The real reason it wants those elected leaders gone was revealed by this candid sentence: “This regional dynamic has been dismal for Washington’s influence in the region.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As U.S. media coverage of last year’s coup in Bolivia demonstrates, little has changed since the Cold War when it comes to media fealty to the State Department and the CIA. Because the U.S. government preferred the right-wing coup-plotters to the left-wing Morales, the U.S. media deliberately inverted the entire narrative to describe the elected leader (Morales) as the tyrant and the violent military coup leaders as the saviors of democracy. And they peddled this false narrative only by relying heavily on an OAS report that even the NYT is now forced to admit was, at best, deeply flawed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">THAT THE OAS REPORT WAS DUBIOUS is not, contrary to the subtext of the NYT’s new article, something that was only recently discovered. That has been clear from ample evidence from the start — evidence that the jingoistic U.S. media rarely saw fit to mention.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shortly after the preliminary OAS report was issued, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), on November 8, issued its own report highlighting numerous flaws in what it called “unsubstantiated doubts cast upon the vote count by the OAS mission.” Explaining that OAS claims of election irregularities were made “without evidence,” the report detailed that “neither the OAS mission nor any other party has demonstrated that there were widespread or systematic irregularities in the elections of October 20, 2019.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In March, the CEPR issued an even more comprehensive analysis, an 82-page report that concluded: “the OAS’s observation activities in Bolivia’s 2019 general elections are the latest example of a deeply problematic observation mission whose dishonest, biased, and unprofessional conduct has caused serious damage to the country’s democracy.” It added that “while the fraud narrative that the OAS helped promote contributed to Evo Morales, the country’s democratically elected president, fleeing the country,” the OAS Report “does not provide any evidence that those irregularities altered the outcome of the election, or were part of an actual attempt to do so.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In February — with Morales now in exile in Argentina — the Washington Post published an op-ed by two scholars from MIT. They summarized their argument this way:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The media has largely reported the [OAS’s] allegations of fraud as fact. And many commentators have justified the coup as a response to electoral fraud by MAS-IPSP. However, as specialists in election integrity, we find that the statistical evidence does not support the claim of fraud in Bolivia’s October election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In sum, the authors concluded, after setting forth their statistical findings in detail: “there is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find — the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’s margin all appear legitimate. All in all, the OAS’s statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That the OAS is a subservient tool of the U.S. State Department is something that is widely known in Latin America. Yet it is a claim that virtually never appears in mainstream accounts from U.S. news outlets, which — as they did here — treat the group as some sort of neutral, authoritative arbiter of political disputes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shortly after Morales was exiled from Bolivia and received asylum in Mexico, I traveled to Mexico City to interview him. I asked Morales about the OAS, and this is what he said:</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All along, there was ample reason to seriously doubt, if not outright reject, the OAS accusations of election irregularities and voter fraud. As CEPR’s Jake Johnston said today in response to the New York Times article:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For those paying close attention to the 2019 election, there was never any doubt that the OAS’ claims of fraud were bogus. Just days after the election, a high-level official inside the OAS privately acknowledged to me that there had been no “inexplicable” change in the trend, yet the organization continued to repeat its false assertions for many months with little to no pushback or accountability.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet those reasons for doubting the OAS accusations were barely ever even mentioned, let alone vested with credibility, by the U.S. media or its leading foreign policy commentators. Instead, as the MIT scholars wrote in the Washington Post, “the media largely reported the allegations of fraud as fact.” That’s because whenever it comes to changing a foreign country’s government that is disliked by the U.S., the U.S. media reflexively sides with the U.S. State Department and ceases to report and instead engages in pro-government propaganda.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In this case, Bolivia lost its most successful president in its modern history, and is consequently now ruled by an unelected military junta, all cheered on by the U.S. and its media, relying on an OAS report which even the New York Times is now forced to acknowledge is, at best, deeply flawed. Thus did the U.S. government and its media, yet again, help destroy a thriving Latin American democracy.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">well, it's official libtard fuckwit [boy kings? // GoT?]</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/we-will-coup-whoever-we-want-elon-musk-and-the-overthrow-of-democracy-in-bolivia/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/we-will-coup-whoever-we-want-elon-musk-and-the-overthrow-of-democracy-in-bolivia/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 0);">On July 24, 2020, Tesla’s Elon Musk&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286673686821515266" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">wrote</a>&nbsp;on Twitter that a second U.S. “government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people.” Someone&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286867520314642443" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">responded</a>&nbsp;to Musk soon after, “You know what wasn’t in the best interest of people? The U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.”&nbsp;</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Musk then&nbsp;<a href="https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/elon-musk-confesses-to-lithium-coup-in-bolivia-20200725-0010.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">wrote</a>: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">Musk refers here to the coup against President Evo Morales Ayma, who was removed illegally from his office in November 2019. Morales had just won an election for a term that was to have begun in January 2020. Even if there was a challenge against that election, Morales’ term should rightfully have continued through November and December of 2019. Instead, the Bolivian military, at the behest of Bolivia’s far right and the United States government, threatened Morales; Morales went into exile in Mexico and is now in Argentina.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At that time, the “evidence” of fraud was offered by the far right and by a “preliminary&nbsp;</span><a href="https://tinyurl.com/swn5q2q" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">report</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” by the&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Organization of American States</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">; only after Morales was removed from office was there grudging acknowledgment by the&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/world/americas/bolivia-election-evo-morales.html" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">liberal</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;media that there was in fact no evidence of fraud. It was too late for Bolivia, which has been condemned to a dangerous government that has suspended democracy in the country.</span></b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lithium Coup</font></b></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over his 14 years in office, Morales fought to use the wealth of Bolivia for the Bolivian people, who saw—after centuries of oppression—remarkable advances in their basic needs. Literacy rates rose and hunger rates dropped. The use of Bolivia’s wealth to advance the interests of the people rather than North American multinational corporations was an abomination to the U.S. embassy in La Paz, which had egged on the worst elements of the military and the far right to overthrow the government. This is just what happened in November 2019.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Musk’s admission, however intemperate, is at least honest. His company Tesla has long wanted access at a low price to the large&nbsp;<a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/11/13/after-evo-the-lithium-question-looms-large-in-bolivia/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">lithium</a>&nbsp;deposits in Bolivia; lithium is a key ingredient for batteries. Earlier this year, Musk and his company revealed that they wanted to&nbsp;<b>build a Tesla factory in Brazil,</b>&nbsp;which would be supplied by lithium from Bolivia; when we&nbsp;<a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/03/10/elon-musk-is-acting-like-a-neo-conquistador-for-south-americas-lithium/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">wrote</a>&nbsp;about that we called our report “Elon Musk Is Acting Like a Neo-Conquistador for South America’s Lithium.” Everything we wrote there is condensed in his new tweet: the arrogance toward the political life of other countries, and the greed toward resources that people like Musk think are their entitlement.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Musk went on to delete his tweet. He then&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286867520314642443" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">said</a>, “we get our lithium from Australia”; this will not settle the issue, since eyebrows are being raised in Australia regarding the environmental&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">damage</a>&nbsp;from lithium mining.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Suspension of Democracy</font></b></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After Morales was removed, an insignificant far-right politician named Jeanine Áñez set aside the constitutional process and seized power. She showed the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/world/americas/bolivia-anez-morales.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">character</a>&nbsp;of her politics when she<b>&nbsp;signed a presidential decree on November 15, 2019, that gave the military the right to do whatever it wanted</b>; even her allies found this to be too far and repealed it on November 28.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Arrests and intimidation of activists from the Movement for Socialism (MAS)—the party of Morales—began in November 2019 and still continue. On July 7, 2020, seven U.S. senators published a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-dem-senators-to-pompeo-call-for-free-and-fair-elections-in-bolivia-criticize-interim-government-for-abusive-oversteps" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">statement</a>&nbsp;that said, “We are increasingly concerned by the growing number of human rights violations and curtailments of civil liberties by the interim government of Bolivia.” “Without a change in course by the interim government,” the senators wrote, “we fear that basic civil rights in Bolivia will be further eroded and the legitimacy of the crucial upcoming elections will be put at risk.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>There’s no need to worry about that, since the government of Áñez seems unwilling to hold an election.</b>&nbsp;By all polls, Áñez looks likely to be defeated in the general elections. A recent poll by El Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica (CELAG)&nbsp;<a href="https://www.celag.org/encuesta-bolivia-julio-2020/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">says</a>&nbsp;that Áñez will get a mere 13.3 percent, far behind the Movement for Socialism’s Luis Arce (41.9 percent) and the center right’s Carlos Mesa (26.8 percent). The election was supposed to have taken place in May, but it was rescheduled for September 6; it has now been&nbsp;<a href="https://www.jornada.com.mx/2020/07/24/mundo/025n2mun" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">postponed</a>&nbsp;once more, this time to October 18. Bolivia would not have had an elected government for an entire year.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Luis Arce of MAS recently&nbsp;<a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/04/30/bolivias-socialist-presidential-candidate-luis-arce-speaks-about-elections-covid-19-and-fascist-oppression/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">told</a>&nbsp;Oliver Vargas, “We face persecution, we face surveillance… we are facing a very difficult campaign.” But, he said, “we are sure that we will win these elections.” If elections are permitted.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CELAG study shows that 9 out of 10 Bolivians have seen their incomes decline due to the coronavirus recession. Because of this—and of the attack by this government on the MAS—65.2 percent of Bolivians have a negative appraisal of Áñez. It is important to note that due to the positive policies of Morales’ MAS, there is widespread support for a socialist orientation; 64.1 percent of Bolivians support taxes against the rich, and Bolivians in general support the resource socialism of the MAS and Morales.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CoronaShock and Bolivia</font></b></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The government of Áñez has been utterly incompetent regarding the coronavirus. The number of&nbsp;<a href="https://boliviasegura.gob.bo/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">confirmed</a>&nbsp;cases of COVID-19 in this country of 11 million people is 66,456; since&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZaNoHvT3xw" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">testing</a>&nbsp;is low, the number is likely much higher.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Musk returns to our story. Earlier this year, on March 31, Bolivia’s Foreign Minister Karen Longaric wrote an obsequious&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/sanktpauliner/status/1286877123815378944/photo/1" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">letter</a>&nbsp;to Musk asking him about the “offer of cooperation posted by you regarding ventilators ready to be dispatched to countries where they are needed the most.” Longaric said, “If it is not possible to send it to Bolivia, we can arrange its receipt in Miami, FL. and transport them from there as quickly as possible.” No such ventilators came.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Instead, the government bought ventilators from a Spanish supplier for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-bolivia-ventilator/bolivia-investigates-health-officials-over-ventilator-deal-after-public-outcry-idUSKBN22W337" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$27,000</a>&nbsp;for each of the 170 devices; Bolivian producers had said they could supply ventilators for $1,000 per unit. The health minister in the Áñez government—Marcelo Navajas—was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.paginasiete.bo/sociedad/2020/5/20/con-cartas-navajas-instruyo-comprar-los-respiradores-trasladarlos-por-boa-256083.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">arrested</a>&nbsp;for this scandal.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales</font></b></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Evo Morales read Musk’s tweet about the coup in Bolivia and&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/evoespueblo/status/1287064230835957762" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">responded</a>: “Elon Musk, the owner of the largest electric car company, says about the coup in Bolivia: ‘We will coup whoever we want.’ Another proof that the coup was about Bolivian lithium; at the cost of two massacres. We will always defend our resources!”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The reference to the massacres is important. In November, from Mexico City, Morales watched as the government of Áñez let loose the dogs of war against the people of Bolivia from Cochabamba to El Alto. “They are killing my brothers and sisters,” Morales&nbsp;<a href="https://www.yucatan.com.mx/mexico/evo-morales-estan-matando-a-mis-hermanos-en-bolivia" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">said</a>&nbsp;at a press conference. “This is the kind of thing the old military dictatorships used to do.” It is the toxic character of the government of Áñez, backed fully by the U.S. government and Elon Musk.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Protests across Bolivia began on July 27 for the restoration of democracy.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Vijay Prashad</b>&nbsp;is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at&nbsp;<a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Globetrotter</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of&nbsp;<a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">LeftWord Books</a>&nbsp;and the director of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>. He has written more than 20 books, including&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The Darker Nations</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The Poorer Nations</a>. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/catalog/product/view/id/21820" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Washington Bullets</a>, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Alejandro Bejarano</b>&nbsp;is a Bolivian musician, documentarian, and social media manager. In 2016, he received the Medal of Honor for Cultural Merit of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly of Bolivia.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This article was produced by&nbsp;</span><a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Globetrotter</span></a><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</span></font></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></p><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bolivia-coup-was-based-on-false-claims-of-election-fraud/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bolivia-coup-was-based-on-false-claims-of-election-fraud/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Bolivia coup was based on false claims of election fraud</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams February 28, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A new study released by a pair of MIT researchers Thursday reveals that, contrary to claims from the U.S.-backed Organization of American States, there was no fraud in Bolivia’s Oct. 20, 2019 elections — an accusation used by the OAS and others as a pretext for supporting the coup in the country that deposed President Evo Morales and replaced him with an unelected right-wing government.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Good lord,” tweeted MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes. “Given the fact the entire Morales government was toppled over accusations of election fraud, the OAS has a lot to answer for.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz took a similar approach to the findings and the OAS’ conclusions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jon Schwarz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">@schwarz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In a surprising development, it appears that the same political forces and media that have lied about absolutely everything about Latin America for the past 100 years were lying again&nbsp;</b>https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/26/bolivia-dismissed-its-october-elections-fraudulent-our-research-found-no-reason-suspect-fraud/ …</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Analysis | Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. Our research found no reason to...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bolivians will hold a new election in May — without ousted President Evo Morales.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">washingtonpost.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">593</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9:01 AM - Feb 27, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitter Ads info and privacy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">248 people are talking about this</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">MIT researchers John Curiel and Jack R. Williams reviewed the OAS report on the election for the Washington Post and found that the “election irregularities” cited by the group were based on “problematic” statistical claims. The OAS report rested its claim on the assumption that these so-called irregularities gave Morales a boost in numbers that raised his results over 10% higher than any other candidate, precluding a runoff election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The researchers say they requested a response from the OAS about their findings, but received no reply.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Curiel and Williams’ study was commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). The group’s co-director, Mark Weisbrot, said in a statement that the OAS has a lot of explaining to do after facilitating the coup through faulty information.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The OAS greatly misled the media and the public about what happened in Bolivia’s elections, and helped to foster a great deal of mistrust in the electoral process and the results,” said Weisbrot.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The orgnaization’s report bolstered the accusations of fraud in the Nov. 10 OAS report that precipitated the coup and the institution of hard-right legislator Jeanine Añez as president. The ensuing unrest and threats against he and his family, as Common Dreams reported at the time, forced Morales to flee the country for Mexico.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to Curiel and Williams, the data used by OAS doesn’t line up with the organization’s conclusion:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Our results were straightforward. There does not seem to be a statistically significant difference in the margin before and after the halt of the preliminary vote. Instead, it is highly likely that Morales surpassed the 10-percentage-point margin in the first round. …</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>There is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find&nbsp;</b>— the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’ margin all appear legitimate. All in all, the OAS’ statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CEPR’s Weisbrot declared the researchers’ findings troubling and questioned the OAS’ credibility.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This important analysis from MIT election researchers is the latest to show that the OAS’ statements were without basis, and that simple arithmetic shows that there is no evidence that fraud or irregularities affected the preliminary results, or the official results ? the ones that actually matter,” Weisbrot said. “The OAS needs to explain why it made these statements and why anyone should trust it when it comes to elections.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“So much for that Bolivian election fraud,” tweeted the Intercept’s Ryan Grim.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The OAS is set to monitor new national elections in Bolivia set for May 3. Morales, still in exile, has effectively been barred from running.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Williams told Common Dreams that his and Curiel’s findings cast doubt on the organization’s impartiality and ability to act as a neutral arbiter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The OAS’s report has basic methodological and statistical errors that make it difficult to see the OAS as an impartial election observer,” said Williams. “The fact that they did not respond to researchers asking about their report on Bolivia seems to suggest they know this.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">National Nurses United director of communications Charles Idelson said on Twitter that the findings throw cold water on an attack line deployed by right-wing opponents of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, who have used his statement at Tuesday’s debate that the U.S. meddles in other countries against him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The fraudulent right wing military coup in Bolivia was carried out with Trump administration support,” said Idelson, “but some apparently still pretend the U.S. never overthrows governments of other countries.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Curiel and Williams also point to the role in the media for uncritically regurgitating OAS claims on face value as the coup against Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS-IPSP) party was underway.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">“The media has largely reported the allegations of fraud as fact,” the researchers write. “And many commentators have justified the coup as a response to electoral fraud by MAS-IPSP.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Utah-based progressive activist Tom Taylor called for accountability on the part of the media.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“Our news outlets took what known liars like John Bolton said about Morales at face value,” said Taylor. “Zero critical thinking. The journalists were old enough to remember when we were lied into the Iraq War.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“There’s no other way to put it,” Taylor added. “Our media supported a coup.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/they-are-afraid-of-democracy-bolivias-evo-morales-protests-as-tribunal-blocks-his-senate-run/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/they-are-afraid-of-democracy-bolivias-evo-morales-protests-as-tribunal-blocks-his-senate-run/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>‘They are afraid of democracy’: Bolivia’s Evo Morales protests as tribunal blocks his Senate run</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams February 21, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Former Bolivian President Evo Morales on Friday accused the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal of being “afraid of democracy” after the seven-member body late Thursday barred Morales from running for Senate on the grounds that he did not meet residency requirements.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales, who is currently living in Argentina after being ousted in a military coup last November, said during a press conference in Buenos Aires on Friday that the tribunal’s decision was “illegal and unconstitutional” and alleged the U.S. government was involved in the ruling.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a tweet Thursday night, Morales called the decision a “blow to democracy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The members of the TSE know I meet the requirements to be a candidate,” added Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president. The former president claimed that the ultimate goal of the current right-wing government of Jeanine Áñez is to ban the Movement for Socialism (MAS), Morales’ left-wing political party.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In December, the Áñez government issued an arrest warrant against Morales, accusing the former president of “terrorism and sedition.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ben Norton</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">@BenjaminNorton</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Bolivia's only elected president, Evo Morales, characterized his ban from running as a Senate candidate as an assault on democracy.&nbsp;</b>"They are afraid of democracy," he said in a presser in Buenos Aires. He accused the Electoral Court of submitting to the dictatorship and US gov't. https://twitter.com/FreddyteleSUR/status/1230862972270018562 …</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Freddy Morales</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">@FreddyteleSUR</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evo Morales calificó su inhabilitación como candidato al Senado, como un atentado a la democracia. "Tienen miedo a la democracia", dijo en rueda de prensa en Buenos Aires. Acusó al Tribunal Electoral de someterse a la "dictadura" y al gobierno de los EE.UU.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Bolivian elections are set for May 3, the first contest since the November coup that deposed Morales and paved the way for Áñez to declare herself interim president. Bolivian lawmakers in November approved a measure calling for the new elections and barring Morales from participating.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Áñez announced last month that her name will be on the presidential ballot in May after previously suggesting it would be improper for her to run.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A poll by Ciesmori released earlier this week found that Luis Arce, the MAS presidential candidate, is leading the presidential field with 31.6 percent support. Former Bolivian President Carlos Mesa polled in second place with 17% support and Áñez ranked third with 16% support.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The ouster of Morales in November was followed by massive military and police repression of indigenous Bolivians, who took to the streets among others to voice opposition to the right-wing government. Days after declaring herself interim president on Nov. 12,<b> Áñez issued a decree shielding military and law enforcement from prosecution for gunning down demonstrators.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Earlier this week, Morales tweeted that in just three months in power the Áñez government has “destroyed” the economic and social welfare policies he put in place during his nearly 14 years as president.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This situation hurts us a lot,” Morales said. “They want to get rid of all our social programs and privatize them.”</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">dn 120</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">B<a data-ga-action="Home Headlines: Headline" href="https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/31/headlines/bolivia_s_movement_for_socialism_candidate_luis_arce_returns_to_bolivia" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgb(241, 242, 243); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; border: 0px;" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-weight="font-weight" text-align="text-align" center="center">olivia’s Movement for Socialism Candidate Luis Arce Returns to Bolivia</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/what-the-right-wing-in-latin-america-means-by-democracy-is-violence/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/what-the-right-wing-in-latin-america-means-by-democracy-is-violence/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ctrpunch no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div>jaNUARY 24, 2020</div><div><b>What the Right Wing in Latin America Means by Democracy Is Violence</b></div><div>by VIJAY PRASHAD</div><div>
</div><div>It was a curious exchange. Frustrated by the attacks on his party—the Movement for Socialism (MAS)—former president of Bolivia Evo Morales made an audio recording in which he called upon his supporters to form militias. Maximilian Heath of Reuters went to Argentina to speak with Morales about this leaked recording; Morales said, “In Bolivia, if the armed forces are shooting the people, killing the people, the people have the right to organize their security.”</div><div>
</div><div>Morales’ anxiousness is rooted in fact. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights—a body of the pro-U.S. Organization of American States—reported in December 2019 that there have been a series of massacres conducted by the armed forces of the current interim government in Bolivia. The use of the word “massacre” in this report is significant; these were not clashes or conflicts, but the targeted murder of civilians who supported MAS and Morales.</div><div>
</div><div><b>The interim president of Bolivia, Jeanine Áñez Chávez, has made inflammatory statements about the indigenous support base of MAS and Morales. She has frequently spoken of them with derision, even saying that she dreams of a Bolivia without “satanic indigenous rites” and that “the city is not for the Indians.</b>” Áñez signed Supreme Decree no. 4078 that exempted the military from any criminal responsibility for its use of force; she wants to ban MAS, and her interior minister has filed a warrant for the arrest of Morales. This is a rapid and disturbing attack on the political fabric of Bolivia.</div><div>
</div><div>Apology</div><div>
</div><div>Morales’ statement about militias came merely as a way to say that he worried about the repression and violence occasioned by the interim government and the military, now immune from prosecution. U.S. President Donald Trump’s main envoy to Latin America—Mauricio Claver-Carone (who organized the bankrupting $57 billion loan to Argentina when he was the U.S. director at the International Monetary Fund)—went to Bolivia and attacked Morales. Morales, Claver-Carone said, is fomenting insurrection from Argentina. This is a bizarre statement.</div><div>
</div><div>Morales was re-elected in 2014. There was not a whiff of impropriety in that election. He had a mandate to remain in office until January 2020. Even if there was a problem in the 2019 election, he should have remained in office until this month. But he was removed by a U.S.-backed military coup. That coup is not the insurrection that worries Claver-Carone. What worries him is that Morales is concerned about his supporters who are being intimidated and killed. It was not the coup, but Morales’ statement of anguish that became the scandal. Morales then apologized for his statement.</div><div>
</div><div>Elections</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Bolivia will face an election on May 3. The Movement for Socialism Party nominated Luis Arce Catacora, Bolivia’s former minister for the economy, as its presidential candidate, and David Choquehuanca, Bolivia’s former foreign minister, as its vice-presidential candidate. MAS has been deeply bruised. More than 100 government officials from the MAS party are either in detention or face criminal charges, while a handful are in the Mexican embassy in La Paz (they have been denied safe passage to the airport).</span></div><div>
</div><div>The anti-coup uprising in Chapare province led the interior minister Arturo Murillo to make a statement that he would perhaps disenfranchise the entire province if the rebellion continues (the rebels burned down a hotel that he owns). Supporters of MAS and its party workers are afraid to leave their homes, let alone campaign in the election. Morales’ statement came as a mirror of their own anxiousness.</div><div>
</div><div>No one imagines that there is going to be a “fair election.” The Trump administration has said it will send a USAID team to Bolivia to monitor the situation, and then to resume U.S. aid to the country; the U.S. will also monitor the elections. Between the U.S. monitors and Supreme Decree no. 4078, the conditions for a fair election simply do not apply.</div><div>
</div><div>And not many outside the region seem to have any problem with this attack against democracy.</div><div>
</div><div>‘Staggering Number’</div><div>
</div><div><b>On January 14, the UN’s human rights body released a brief statement on the killings of human rights activists in Colombia.</b>&nbsp;The UN said that a “staggering number of human rights defenders” were killed last year in Colombia; by the UN’s count, between 107 and 120 activists were murdered. In 2018, 115 human rights defenders were killed, and in the first two weeks of January of this year, 10 human rights defenders have already been murdered. Most of them are from left-wing people’s organizations.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>The UN numbers are conservative. For 2018, the Center for Research and Popular Education Peace Program, based in Colombia, documented 1,151 death threats, 648 assassinations, and 304 cases of physical injurie</b>s. But the UN’s trendline is correct. Of the murders last year, 98 percent took place in very poor rural areas. The killers, the UN suggests, are “criminal groups and armed groups linked to illicit economies in areas vacated by the FARC-EP.” In other words, right-wing paramilitary groups and their affiliated drug gangs have taken advantage of the peace treaty signed by the Left to terrorize the countryside.</div><div>
</div><div>In the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier on Colombia (December 2019), the argument is made that the Colombian oligarchy does not want to move toward peace because this would shift the needle of Colombian politics toward the people’s movements and the Left. The continuation of the war—now as assassination and intimidation—favors the oligarchy. They prefer this violence to democratic politics.</div><div>
</div><div>These targeted murders and this targeted intimidation is only one part of the problem in Latin America. The other is that this region—with its outrageous social inequality—experiences violence at extreme levels. While Latin America is home to only 8 percent of the world’s population, 33 percent of all homicides occur in the region. This includes high violence against young men, and it includes the highest rates of femicide in the world. None of the right-wing governments are interested in addressing this fundamental problem for the hemisphere.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">What the government of Iván Duque is doing in Colombia is what the interim government of Jeanine Áñez is doing in Bolivia—both are using extreme state violence against trade unionists and peasant organizers, against socialist leaders and indigenous leaders. This extreme violence undermines the possibility of democracy and allows the oligarchy to be re-elected in polling booths where the Left not dare enter.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Héroes del Ñancahuazú</div><div>
</div><div>In 2016, Evo Morales inaugurated the General Juan José Torres Anti-Imperialist Command School in the town of Warnes. General Juan José Torres was the socialist president of Bolivia in 1970-71. He was overthrown in a coup by the Bolivian general favored by the CIA, Hugo Bánzer. Bánzer had closely worked with the Nazi leader Klaus Barbie to set up the CIA-run Operation Condor to search out and kill any and every communist in the hemisphere. They killed Torres in 1976. The combination of the CIA, Nazis, and the oligarchies of the region is not something from the past: Brazil’s culture secretary—Roberto Alvim—recently plagiarized a speech from the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.</div><div>
</div><div>The interim government’s interim Defense Minister Luis Fernando López said that his government has renamed the Anti-Imperialist school. “We are not anti-anything,” he said, as if his government is not anti-Morales, anti-MAS, and anti-communist. The school has been renamed Héroes del Ñancahuazú.</div><div>
</div><div>In 1967, Che Guevara and his National Liberation Army of Bolivia operated near the Ñancahuazú River in Bolivia’s southeast. The government of General René Barrientos Ortuño, the CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, and the Nazi Klaus Barbie ran the operation to destroy Guevara’s campaign. They named their operation the Ñancahuazú Campaign. The Anti-Imperialist School in Bolivia now honors the men—led by a CIA agent and a Nazi—who killed Che Guevara. It sends a message to the Che Guevaras of today: We will get you. This is the democracy of the oligarchy in Latin America today.</div><div>
</div><div>This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-weight: normal;"></font></h1><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/old-religious-tensions-re-surge-in-bolivia-after-ouster-of-longtime-indigenous-president/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/old-religious-tensions-re-surge-in-bolivia-after-ouster-of-longtime-indigenous-president/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx many</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Old religious tensions re-surge in Bolivia after ouster of longtime indigenous president</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evo Morales, Wikipedia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Matthew Peter Casey, The Conversation November 21, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Days after the powerful Bolivian leader Evo Morales was forced to resign as president after allegations of election fraud, Bolivia’s new interim president made her first public appearance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climbing to the balcony of the Presidential Palace in La Paz, Jeanine Áñez – formerly a senator representing Bolivia’s weak political opposition – grabbed a Bible.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This Bible is very important to us. Our strength is God,” said the 52-year-old politician from the lowlands province of Beni, holding the modern, pink-covered book up for the cameras. “Power is God.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Invoking a Christian god as the source of political power, while commonplace in many countries, is a radical departure in Bolivia after Morales’ 14-year tenure.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales, a native Bolivian of Aymara indigenous descent, was the South American country’s first indigenous leader since independence from Spanish colonial rule in 1825. Indigenous people and symbols – like the multicolored Wiphala flag that represents the many Andean indigenous groups, and the Andean cross, or chakana – filled the halls of power in Bolivia during his three terms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indigenous religiosity</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bolivia, a mountainous country north of Argentina, is 41% indigenous, according to the 2012 census. Most of the rest of Bolivia’s 11 million people consider themselves to be mixed race, though analysts say that self-reported census data tends to undercount the indigenous population.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Religion does not map neatly onto ethnic divisions in Bolivia. Only around 4% of Bolivians claim to practice indigenous religions. The majority – about 75% – are Catholic, and 18% belong to evangelical or other Protestant denominations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, as my ongoing research shows, religion, ethnicity and culture are tightly woven together in the Andes region. In Bolivia, as elsewhere in Latin America, indigenous people may belong to Christian churches and also observe native religious practices.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since independence, Bolivian political leaders have promoted the country’s Hispanic and Catholic heritage, not in addition to its indigenous history but to the exclusion of it. In the 20th century, indigenous people who revolted against their economic and social marginalization were brutally repressed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Throughout the Cold War, Bolivian Fascist party members pushed for a Catholic republic modeled on Francisco Franco’s Spain. Generations of Catholic school students were taught Christian nationalism from their Spanish Jesuit teachers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales, a former coca farmer, recognized indigeneity as the heart of Bolivian nationhood.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under Morales’ leadership, Bolivia’s name was changed to the Plurinational State of Bolivia in 2009, and the law now recognizes 36 indigenous languages and ethnicities. Morales also protected the right of indigenous communities to practice their religion. August became the Month of Pachamama, the Andean mother earth – 30 days of ancestral celebrations kicked off by the ritual sacrifice of llamas and other animals on the banks of Lake Titicaca.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales also built a new government building designed to acknowledge the country’s indigenous heritage. The 29-story Casa Grande del Pueblo – “Big House of the People” – blends hyper modern design with indigenous artistic flourishes. The interior decor is inspired by the ceremonial ruins of the pre-Inca civilization of Tiahuanaco, located 40 miles east of La Paz.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Distancing Bolivia from Catholicism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales, who has taken asylum in Mexico since resigning as president, also worked to separate church from state in Bolivia. Bolivia’s new constitution, written in 2009, formally ended the Catholic Church’s designation as the protected religion of the state.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales is Catholic. But he is openly critical of the Catholic Church, which supported the Spanish colonization of Latin America in the 16th century and, throughout the 20th century, aided Fascist party organizing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2015, he famously gave Pope Francis a hammer and sickle crucifix designed by the Bolivian priest Luis Espinal before his assassination in 1980 – a symbol of Liberation Theology, a progressive Latin American strand of Catholicism that challenged dictatorships and championed the cause of the poor during the 1970s and 1980s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales’ secular agenda was met with criticism from conservative Christian groups. Some viewed the reforms as fomenting “paganism.” Others said he promoted atheistic socialism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Christian nationalist revival</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The interim administration in Bolivia has ties to the conservative Christian groups that were highly critical of Morales throughout his administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As senator, interim President Áñez made openly anti-indigenous statements. In a 2013 tweet, now deleted, she referred to native Aymara celebrating their new year with ancestral rituals as “satanic.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And just five days before her innaugeration, Áñez mocked a group of indigenous Quechua men on Twitter because they were dressed in ritual vestments with modern shoes and blue jeans, writing, “Original Peoples???”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Her rise to power has reignited some of the anti-indigenous sentiment that was so dominant in Bolivia before Morales’ administration. Since Morales’ ouster, there are reports of Wiphalas flags being torn down and burned. Police officers and military members were filmed cutting the indigenous flag from their uniforms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Bolivia for Christ, Pachamama will never again enter this palace,” said the protest leader Luis Fernando Camacho, an Áñez ally, kneeling before the Bible on the Bolivian flag at the government palace on Nov. 10.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indigenous Bolivians fearful</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indigenous Bolivians are concerned about the direction their country is headed under Áñez, though she may only be in power for a few months until new elections are called.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the days since Morales left office, masses of Morales supporters have marched in from the countryside to convene in Bolivian cities, where they’re calling for the end to the interim government.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many say they fear repression from the military under the interim government. They worry that the political violence that has gripped Bolivia since its Oct. 20 election will turn into a racialized, religious violence targeting indigenous people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“All of us who have Indian-looking faces are signaled as part of Morales’ party, especially indigenous women,” the feminist activist Adriana Guzmán said to the news outlet Telesur news after Morales’ removal.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With dozens dead and more than 700 injured in military opperations ordered by Áñez “to re-establish order,” the political situation remains volatile.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Matthew Peter Casey, Clinical Assistant Professor of History, Arizona State University.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/13/headlines/right_wing_senator_declares_herself_president_of_bolivia">https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/13/headlines/right_wing_senator_declares_herself_president_of_bolivia</a>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/12/evo-morales-arrives-mexico-bolivia-power-vacuum</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Bolivia: Jeanine Añez claims presidency after ousting of Evo Morales</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ex-president’s party refuses to recognise senator’s claim</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales says army told him of $50,000 price on his head</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jo Tuckman in Mexico City and Dan Collyns in La Paz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tue 12 Nov 2019 21.15 ESTFirst published on Tue 12 Nov 2019 14.05 EST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Añez assumes Bolivia's interim presidency as Morales flees – video</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Bolivian senator Jeanine Añez has declared herself the country’s interim president after the resignation of Evo Morales, even though lawmakers from his party boycotted the legislative session where she assumed office.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Añez, 52, took temporary control of the Senate late on Tuesday. “I will take the measures necessary to pacify the country,” she said, swearing on a bible to loud cheers and applause. The move is expected to pave the way for fresh elections.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism called the session illegal and its legislators refused to take part. Nearby hundreds of Morales supporters marched against Añez assuming the role. “She’s declared herself president without having a quorum in the parliament,” Julio Chipana told the Guardian. “She doesn’t represent us.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales, who resigned under pressure from police and the army after a fiercely disputed election, has flown into exile in Mexico, leaving a confused power vacuum behind in Bolivia. Speaking at a hastily organised press conference on the tarmac, the former president thanked Mexico for “saving my life” and repeated his accusation that his rivals had forced him out in a coup.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>He said that before his resignation on Sunday a member of the army had showed him messages putting a $50,000 price on his head.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I thought we had finished with the discrimination and the humiliation, but new groups have emerged that have no respect for life, let alone for the fatherland,” Morales said. “It’s another lesson to learn.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bolivia's Evo Morales flies to Mexico, but vows to return with 'strength and energy'</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Read more]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales, 60, was greeted with a handshake, a hug and a pat on the cheek from Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, after the flight in a Mexican army plane from the Bolivian city of Cochabamba.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He defended his time in government and said that if he were guilty any crime, it was to be indigenous and “anti-imperalist”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales was accompanied by his former vice-president, Álvaro García Linera, who has been his closest political collaborator since before he became Bolivia’s first indigenous president in modern times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“García Linera and I have always been committed to the idea that peace can only come with social justice,” Morales said. “This coup is not going to change our ideology.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Though he promised that this was not the end of his political career, the Bolivian leader gave no indication of his immediate plans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morales left behind a country close to chaos as supporters and opponents clashed on the streets, amid reports of fresh looting, vandalism and arson after the October election, which the Organisation of American States found to have been rigged in his favour.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Tuesday much of Bolivia’s main city, La Paz, was like a ghost town after police warned inhabitants to stay indoors. Roadblocks were thrown up across the city as the political uncertainty continued and residents feared more violent clashes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The country remained in political limbo as senators and deputies loyal to the former leader appeared to refuse to endorse the new interim president, deputy senate leader Jeanine Áñez.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The people who have been in all these protests want us to call presidential elections which are not fraudulent, which are trustworthy,” Áñez, a political opponent of Morales, told journalists in the national assembly building.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shirley Franco, an opposition member of parliament, said: “What Bolivians want in this moment of crisis is certainty and we, the maximum authorities in this country, must work to re-establish democracy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Manning a makeshift barricade a few blocks away, anti-Morales protester Danella Ormachea, 29, said: “We want this to end. We need a new interim president to call new elections so there is democracy and our vote is respected. That’s all we ask.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Martín Cornejo Choque, a rural leader in La Paz province, denied there had been voter fraud.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Before the election, the right said if Evo Morales wins we won’t recognise it. The opposition just don’t want to recognise the votes of the rural areas,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Cornejo, who led dozens of communities to La Paz’s San Francisco square in support of Morales, said Morales had transformed life for rural Bolivians.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Before when there were rightwing, neoliberal presidents they never cared about the peasant farmer. We lived in extreme poverty,” said Cornejo. “Our roads were not paved, we didn’t even have bridges but today, thanks to this government, all the peasant communities have development.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Morales’s sudden departure was a dramatic fall for the former coca growers’ union leader who swept to power 14 years ago in a historic election.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He went on to win two more landslide victories and lifted millions out of poverty, but Morales’s popularity began to wane in 2016, when he ignored a referendum in which voters said he could not run for a fourth term.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mass protests broke out after last month’s election following an unexplained 24-hour halt in the voting which fuelled accusations of electoral fraud.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Áñez denied that Morales had been the victim of a coup, saying: “What happened in Bolivia was the verification of monumental fraud. A coup d’etat is when there are soldiers in the streets.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Neighbouring countries’ responses to the ousting of Morales have reflected the ideological divisions of a continent where populism on the right and the left has been on the rise once again.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Those backing Morales included Venezuela’s embattled leader Nicolás Maduro, Nicaragua’s seemingly eternal president Daniel Ortega, and Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This camp also includes Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who blamed it on Latin America’s “economic elite”, and Argentina’s president-elect, Alberto Fernández, who said it returned the region to “the bad days of the 70s”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Brazil’s current far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro, has been the loudest voice against Morales. “The left uses the word ‘coup’ a lot when it loses, right?” he told O Globo.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Chile protesters: 'We are subjugated by the rich. It's time for that to end'</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Read more]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Other regional leaders have avoided the subject – most notably Chile’s conservative president, Sebastián Piñera, who is clinging to power in the face of a wave of social unrest. His government issued a statement calling for a peaceful and democratic solution. Similar statements have come out of Peru and Colombia.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Beyond the region, Donald Trump said that Morales’s resignation “preserves democracy”, while in the UK the opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn condemned the “coup against the Bolivian people”.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oliver Stuenkel, an international relations professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas University in São Paulo, said that describing what happened in Bolivia as a coup did not necessarily imply that Morales had respected democratic norms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In fact, non-democratic governments are often overthrown through non-democratic means, precisely because they cannot easily be voted out of office,” he tweeted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, Mexico’s very public offer of asylum – which was made before Morales had even asked for it – has prompted some critics of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to accuse him of seeking a distraction from the country’s own security crisis.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Tuesday, Ebrard insisted it fell squarely within a long tradition in which Mexico has provided safety for persecuted political leaders, from Leon Trotsky to activists who fled Argentina and Chile during the military dictatorships of the 70s and 80s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This is a tradition we should be proud of and continue,” Ebrard said on Tuesday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tensions Rise as a Bolivian Opposition Leader, Jeanine Añez</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://time.com › World › Bolivia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tensions Rise as a Bolivian Opposition Leader, Jeanine Añez, Claims the ... of the old presidential palace wearing the presidential sash and holding a Bible in ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bolivia interim president declares 'Bible has returned to the ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.foxnews.com › world › bolivia-interim-president-bible-palace-el...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">33 mins ago - A day after brandishing a giant leather-bound Bible and declaring herself Bolivia's interim president, Jeanine Añez set to the task of trying to ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bolivia: Jeanine Añez claims presidency after ousting of Evo ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.theguardian.com › world › nov › evo-morales-arrives-mexico...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 day ago - The Bolivian senator Jeanine Añez has declared herself the ... pacify the country,” she said, swearing on a bible to loud cheers and applause.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">omg no lnx pix of swastika?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cristian Fascist Luis Fernando Camacho Leads ‘Racist Coup’ In Bolivia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;NOVEMBER 12, 2019 BY MICHAEL STONE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp; 10 COMMENTS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Christian theocracy comes to Bolivia: In a disturbing development Christian fascist Luis Fernando Camacho has seized control of Bolivia via a military coup.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Comacho, a Christian fascist and paramilitary leader, is a millionaire businessman who has promised his fanatical Christian supporters that he will purge his country’s Native heritage from government and “return God” to the presidential palace.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>