Foreign Correspondent: What Bolivia Can Teach the U.S. About Fair Elections-- The South American Nation Sets An Example Of How To Undo A Coup

 

-by Reese Erlich

Imagine the following nightmare: The US faces a close vote in the presidential election. Trump claims voter fraud and seeks backing from the nation’s military, who then stage a coup to keep him in power.

Farfetched? The Trump Administration already did it in Bolivia last year.

In October 2019, officials in Washington, D.C., orchestrated phony claims of election fraud by Bolivia’s socialist government. The military forced the winner, President Evo Morales, to flee the country. It then installed an ultra-right regime that carried out civilian massacres and arrested opponents on trumped up charges.

But the people of Bolivia never accepted the coup regime. On October 18 this year they voted overwhelmingly to elect Luis Arce Catacora of the leftist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), the party founded by Morales. Arce easily surpassed conservative, former president Carlos Mesa and far-right candidate Luis Fernando Camacho.

Thomas Field, associate professor Global Security and Intelligence at Arizona’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, tells me the US can learn from Bolivia’s 2019 election. The coup leaders claimed fraud based on a preliminary count and rejected the final count that included late reports from rural areas.

“You have to wait until all the votes are counted,” he says. “Late votes matter.”

In Bolivia, opposition parties accepted the 2020 election results, even the ultra-right wingers. Trump, however, has refused to agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

“If the far right in Bolivia is more democratic than Trump,” Field says, “we’re in deep trouble.”

Earlier elections

During a 2008 trip to Bolivia on assignment for NPR’s Latino USA, I covered attempts by right-wingers to oust Morales through a referendum. But he defeated the effort and was later reelected president three times.

In October 2019, Morales ran for a fourth term. The official vote count showed he beat his closest opponent by just over 10 percent. In response, the Organization of American States (OAS) insisted that a major discrepancy between the preliminary quick count and the final tally showed Morales couldn’t have won. The opposition claimed fraud.

The military backed street demonstrations in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, and forced Morales to resign. He fled the country and took exile in Argentina.

But the OAS attack on the elections quickly fell apart. As two election specialists wrote in the Washington Post, “the statistical evidence does not support the claim of fraud in Bolivia’s October [2019] election.”

Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., wrote an eighty-five-page analysis of the 2019 elections.

“The OAS grossly misrepresented the facts,” he tells me in an interview. The organization manipulated the data in order to reach “a political conclusion aimed at justifying the removal of a democratically elected president.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, US Ambassador to the OAS Carlos Trujillo played a key role in “steering” the OAS “to report widespread fraud and pushed the Trump Administration to support the ouster of Morales.”

U.S. role

The ruling elite in Washington has long opposed the socialist policies of Bolivia for economic and geopolitical reasons. The MAS government established close relations with Cuba, Venezuela, and other leftist governments in Latin America. Bolivia is rich in natural gas and contains 70 percent of the world’s lithium, a key mineral used in electric car batteries.

MAS sought to break the traditional model of foreign corporations extracting minerals and shipping them abroad. Morales wanted to generate jobs by manufacturing lithium batteries and started a pilot project to make electric cars.

After the coup, however, the regime wanted to return to the old extractive model and wooed Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla electric car company. Musk publicly supported the coup.

In a twitter exchange, Musk wrote, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

Socialism in Bolivia

MAS, which was first elected in 2006, produced impressive economic gains. Extreme poverty dropped from 36 to 17 percent. The socialists introduced a universal old age pension program and cut unemployment by 50 percent.

Bolivia went from being the second-poorest country in South America to a lower-middle tier country, according to an analysis by the World Bank.

For the first time in Bolivia’s history, the country’s Indigenous people saw significant economic improvements and steps towards political empowerment. In 2009, a new constitution provided rights for the country’s thirty-six Indigenous groups, including equal status for their judicial systems and government courts.

International election observers agreed that the October 18 vote was free and fair. All of the ballots were counted in public, according to Leonardo Flores, an official election observer and member of the US-based group Code Pink. The vote tally was posted publicly at all precincts, allowing for a quick count of the ballots.

“These elections are much more transparent than in the US,” Flores tells me in a phone interview from the capital city of La Paz.

Arce won a decisive 55 percent of the vote, a 21-point lead over his closest rival, Carlos Mesa.

2020 elections

MAS won the election, according to Bolivia expert Field, by mobilizing its strong, traditional base and picking up support from those disgusted with the coup regime.

The coup leaders carried out brutal massacres against the opposition when they came to power in 2019, and gave security forces immunity from prosecution.

“It will go down in history as one of the most brutal regimes in decades,” Field says.

Flores adds, “This was very much a vote against fascism and a vote for socialism.”

Flores notes that MAS is not a traditional political party because it works closely with grassroots unions, peasant associations, and neighborhood groups-- all of which promise to keep pressure on the new MAS government to maintain progressive policies.

Flores describes a recent meeting in which members of the Women’s Alliance criticized what they considered the demobilization of the social movements prior to the coup. Leftist street demonstrations had largely stopped during the Morales presidency, the women said, but, as one activist put it, “We will be willing to go to the streets now.”

Serious problems ahead

The new government faces serious problems when it comes into office next month. The country is reeling from an international recession, low commodity prices and a spreading coronavirus pandemic.

MAS will have to revamp the institutions that provided unemployment, welfare, and pensions.

President Arce promises to re-nationalize key industries as a means of raising government funds. “We need public companies and also solid tax revenues to guarantee all the social programs we have,” he said in April.

Meanwhile, Flores hopes people in the US learn the lessons of Bolivia.

If Trump tries to stay in power despite losing the election,  Flores says, “Lawsuits and speeches by Democratic Party leaders” won't be enough. “You have to organize and take to the streets.”



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Reese Erlich’s Foreign Correspondent column appears every two weeks. Erlich is an adjunct professor in International Studies at the University of San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter, @ReeseErlich; friend him on Facebook; and visit his webpage.

Foreign Correspondent: What’s Next For Bolivia After Military Coup?

Morales was the glue that held everything together

-by Reese Erlich

In 2005, I sat in a lounge off the Senate chamber in La Paz, Bolivia, waiting for an interview. I was wearing my best coat and tie. With my thinning hair and grey mustache, I could pass for a Bolivian of European descent. In fact, numerous people smiled and said “buenos días,” as if I was a familiar face.

The senators were mostly white men, reflecting the makeup of Bolivia’s political elite at that time. But that changed just a few months later with the election of Evo Morales and his party, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS).

Morales’s government nationalized natural gas and electric companies, defying both the U.S. and the Bolivian oligarchy. So it’s not surprising that those forces now denounce Morales as a dictator and cheer his overthrow.

Bolivia held elections on October 20 this year. Opposition leaders, claiming vote fraud, organized mass, anti-government demonstrations. Sectors of the military and police sided with the opposition. Morales, his vice president and other top government leaders resigned under military pressure. Some went into exile in Mexico.

While the Trump Administration and mainstream media characterized the events as a popular uprising, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, correctly called it a coup.

“It was the military who intervened in that process and asked him to leave,” Sanders said during the Democratic Party debate in Atlanta on November 20. “When the military intervenes, in my view, that’s called a coup.”

Some recent history

In 2005, I reported from Bolivia on the popular movements opposed to then President Carlos Mesa. The rich elite who ran Bolivia in those days followed US-inspired neoliberal economic policies by privatizing government-owned companies, even those providing drinking water and sewage lines.

The privatized water utility was owned by a French multinational corporation. It raised the sewage hook-up charge to $450, roughly eight times the typical monthly income in El Alto, a working-class city located above La Paz.

The people of El Alto sought Mesa’s resignation through mass protests. “We used force because this is an issue facing us and our children,” street vendor Alejandra Arteaga told me when I was writing for the Dallas Morning News. “When there was a strike or a blockade, we went up to participate.”

In June 2005, a new round of mass demonstrations forced Mesa to resign, and by December, Bolivians elected Morales president. He served three terms.

Poverty alleviation and indigenous rights

At a time when most Latin American economies were slowing, Bolivia under Morales and MAS reduced poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). In 2008, unemployment was cut in half, from 7.7 to 4.4 percent.

MAS made these advances because Bolivia defied conventional U.S. economic prescriptions, according to Guillaume Long, a senior policy analyst at CEPR. “MAS opposed the neoliberal agenda and nationalized resources such as gas,” he told me in a phone interview.

The country’s indigenous groups, including Aymara and Quechua, saw significant gains under the MAS government, according to Bret Gustafson, an anthropology professor and Bolivia expert at the Washington University in St. Louis.

“The government passed anti-racism legislation,” he said in a phone interview. “Indigenous people were included in the highest level of the government and military. Indigenous languages and culture were celebrated under Evo.”

But those gains are in serious danger if the right wing stays in power.

Controversy: Morales runs again

Under Bolivia’s constitution, a newly elected president may serve two terms. In 2016, by a narrow margin, Bolivians voted down a referendum that would have eliminated presidential term limits. But in 2017, Bolivia’s Constitutional Court ruled that term limits were in violation of the OAS treaty on human rights, clearing the way for Morales to run again.

The conservative opposition angrily denounced the ruling, saying the court was packed with Morales supporters. But Gustafson says even some liberal and leftist Bolivians have a “deep memory of past dictatorial governments.” Moreover, Morales had not groomed a successor who could maintain party unity. “Morales was the glue that held everything together,” Gustafson says.

In the October 20 election, a dozen candidates vied for the presidency, including former President Carlos Mesa and Evo Morales. Under Bolivian law, a candidate can win by gaining just 40 percent of the vote if it is 10 percent more than the second-place opponent. After the final count, Morales won with 47 percent compared to Mesa’s 36.5 percent. MAS also won a majority in both legislatures.

The Organization of American States and the Trump Administration immediately alleged vote fraud. They claimed the vote count was halted when it seemed Morales would be forced into a runoff and then suspiciously re-opened with a Morales victory.

As explained in an exhaustive election analysis by CEPR, the official vote count never stopped. The unofficial “quick count” did stop, as planned beforehand, after tabulating 83 percent of the votes. The official count, which is the only binding result, continued uninterrupted until officials announced the results.

The last votes to be tabulated, which the OAS claims were suspiciously favorable to Morales, were in fact consistent with votes from areas traditionally supportive of MAS.

From both the quick count and final count, “You could easily determine that Morales won,” says CEPR’s Long, who was also an OAS observer in the 2017 Bolivian elections.

In short, there was no voter fraud that propelled Morales into power. But the misinformation, along with genuine anger from those opposed to Morales running at all, led to large demonstrations.

The U.S. role

Bolivia is a major source of natural gas and minerals such as lithium, making it of great importance to multinational corporations. The U.S. in the past supported military coups in Bolivia when civilian governments didn’t follow pro-Washington policies.

The U.S. has a long history of training Bolivian police and military leaders. One of the leaders of the recent coup attended a course at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly known as the School of the Americas) at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For many years, USAID has funded projects to promote businesses in conservative, eastern Bolivia, pitting them against the movements of workers and peasant farmers.

Washington has the means and the will to instigate a coup in Bolivia. In the months and years ahead, more information will emerge revealing the extent of direct US involvement. But there’s no doubt the coup serves US interests and has full U.S. support.

What lies ahead?

After the military forced Morales and other leaders to leave Bolivia, Senator Jeanine Añez, a little known ultra-right winger, declared herself president based on her position as second vice president of the Senate. Her initial cabinet had only one indigenous member and reporters quickly discovered racist tweets in her Twitter account.

Widespread looting broke out. MAS supporters mobilized against the coup, blockading highways leading to many cities.  On November 20, six indigenous men were shot and killed in El Alto, in an act that protesters attributed to the military. To date more than thirty people have died and dozens have been injured.

In late November, demonstrations were halted in some MAS strongholds but continued in others as protestors demanded release of demonstrators arrested in previous protests. On November 24, MAS legislative leaders and Añez agreed to legislation calling for new presidential and legislative elections in April 2020, while prohibiting Morales from running.

From his exile in Mexico, Morales reluctantly agreed with the compromise. “In the name of peace, sacrifices have to be made and I am sacrificing my candidacy even though I have every right to it,” he told The Guardian.

“It was a practical recognition of the balance of power,” Gustafson says. “Evo still has widespread support. But any effort to bring him back would galvanize rightwingers, some military officers, and some moderates.”

Bolivia remains deeply divided. The right wing is split among several factions. While Morales can’t run, MAS will field another candidate for president in April, along with veteran legislators from both houses.

“Morales has a lot of personal appeal, but MAS also has popular support,” says analyst Long. “MAS remains a force to be reckoned with.

From Bolivia To Wall Street, Accountability Is Just For The Little People

I'm reading Chris Hayes' spectacular new book now, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. I'm only partially finished but so far he hasn't mentioned Bolivia. Brazil and Argentina, yes... but no Bolivia. What he does talk a lot about, however, is how for social cohesion to work in a democracy, the concept of fairness for all classes and groups has got to be believed in. And here in the U.S., only an idiot still clings to that belief. Early on he describes a thoroughly corrupted society:

It would be a society with extremely high and rising inequality yet little circulation of elites. A society in which the pillar institutions were populated by and presided over by a group of hypereducated and ambitious overachievers who enjoyed tremendous monetary rewards as well as unparalleled political power and prestige and yet who managed to insulate themselves from sanction, competition, and accountability, a group of people who could more or less rest assured that now that they have achieved their status, now that they have scaled to the top of the pyramid, they, their peers, and their progeny will stay there.

Such a ruling class would have all the competitive ferocity inculcated by the ceaseless jockeying within the institutions that produce meritocratic elites, but face no actual sanctions for failing at their duties or succumbing to the temptations of corruption. It would reflexively protect its worst members, it would operate with a wide gulf between performance and reward, and would be shot through with corruption, rule-breaking, and self-dealing as those on top pursued the outsized rewards promised for superstars. ... It would, in other words, look a lot like the American elite circa 2012.

Hayes is using that set up for a discussion of moral hazards and to discuss "a society in which cheaters, shirkers, and incompetents face no sanction, where bad behavior meets reward." As we are all painfully aware, the titans of Wall Street-- cheaters, shirkers, and incompetents-- remain unpunished, in fact richly rewarded, for the behavior that nearly brought on another Great Depression and did destroy the lives of millions of people. So what does this have to do with Bolivia?

Glenn Greenwald, like Hayes, also writes a lot about the world our elites have constructed for themselves where they face no consequences for bad action, not even for really bad action. In Sunday's Guardian he took on the outrageous decision of the U.S. Justice Department to grant de facto asylum to brutal Bolivian dictator Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, despite requests by Bolivia's democratic government to extradite him so he can be tried for a spate of criminal activities, including genocide, mass murder and crimes against humanity.

In October 2003, the intensely pro-US president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, sent his security forces to suppress growing popular protests against the government's energy and globalization policies. Using high-powered rifles and machine guns, his military forces killed 67 men, women and children, and injured 400 more, almost all of whom were poor and from the nation's indigenous Aymara communities. Dozens of protesters had been killed by government forces in the prior months when troops were sent to suppress them.

The resulting outrage over what became known as "the Gas Wars" drove Sanchez de Lozada from office and then into exile in the United States, where he was welcomed by his close allies in the Bush administration. He has lived under a shield of asylum in the US ever since.

...The view that Sánchez de Lozada must be extradited from the US to stand trial is a political consensus in Bolivia, shared by the government and the main opposition party alike. But on Friday night, the Bolivian government revealed that it had just been notified by the Obama administration that the US government has refused Bolivia's extradition request.

Take a wild guess which Bolivian president the U.S. is sheltering from Justice

The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales has termed the U.S. a "refuge for criminals," and it isn't just Bush he's referring to. Governments and people throughout Latin America see this decision by the Obama Administration as "yet another display of the US government's double moral standard." Aside from being a columnist for The Guardian, Greenwald is a respected civil rights attorney. He took a closer look at what's behind this travesty.

Sánchez de Lozada was exactly the type of America-revering-and-obeying leader the US has always wanted for other nations, especially smaller ones with important energy resources. When he was driven into exile in October 2003, the New York Times described him as "Washington's most stalwart ally in South America."

The former leader-- a multimillionaire mining executive who, having been educated in the US, spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent-- was a loyal partner in America's drug war in the region. More importantly, the former leader himself was a vehement proponent and relentless crusader for free trade and free market policies favored by the US: policies that the nation's indigenous poor long believed (with substantial basis) resulted in their impoverishment while enriching Bolivia's small Europeanized elite.

It was Sánchez de Lozada's forced exile that ultimately led to the 2006 election and 2009 landslide re-election of Morales, a figure the New York Times in October 2003 described as one "regarded by Washington as its main enemy." Morales has been as vehement an opponent of globalization and free trade as Sánchez de Lozada was a proponent, and has constantly opposed US interference in his region and elsewhere (in 2011, Morales called for the revocation of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize as a result of the intervention in Libya).

So, this extradition refusal is, in one sense, a classic and common case of the US exploiting pretenses of law and justice to protect its own leaders and those of its key allies from the rule of law, even when faced with allegations of the most egregious wrongdoing. If the Obama DOJ so aggressively shielded accused Bush war criminals from all forms of accountability, it is hardly surprising that it does the same for loyal US puppets. That a government that defies US dictates is thwarted and angered in the process is just an added bonus. That, too, is par for the course.

But there's another important aspect of this case that distinguishes it from the standard immunity Washington gifts to itself and its friends. When he ran for president in 2002, Sánchez de Lozada was deeply unpopular among the vast majority of Bolivians as a result of his prior four-year term as president in the 1990s. To find a way to win despite this, he hired the consulting firm owned and operated by three of Washington's most well-connected Democratic party operatives: James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum. He asked them to import the tactics of American politics into Bolivia to ensure his election victory.

As detailed by a 2006 New York Times review of a film about the Democratic operatives' involvement in Bolivia's election, their strategy was two-fold: first, destroy the reputations of his two opponents so as to depress the enthusiasm of Bolivia's poor for either of them; and then mobilize Sánchez de Lozada's base of elites to ensure he wins by a tiny margin. That strategy worked, as he was elected with a paltry 22.5% of the popular vote. From the Times review:

"'[The film] asks a more probing question: whether Mr Carville and company, in selling a pro-globalization, pro-American candidate, can export American-style campaigning and values to a country so fundamentally different from the United States …

"'It's a very explosive film in Bolivia because it shows close up a very deliberate strategy,' said Jim Shultz, an American political analyst in Bolivia who recently saw the film with a group of friends. 'The film is especially explosive because it's about a candidate-- so identified with the United States and so hated by so many Bolivians-- being put into office by the political manipulations of US consultants.'

"Mauro Quispe, 33, a cabdriver in La Paz, said he saw slices of the film on the television news, and it raised his ire. 'I was stunned,' he said. 'He was being advised by the Americans, and everything they said was in English.'"

There's no evidence, at least of which I'm aware, that any of these Democratic operatives intervened on behalf of their former client in his extradition pleas to the Obama administration, but it rather obviously did not hurt. At the very least, shielding a former leader deposed by his own people from standing trial for allegedly gunning down unarmed civilians takes on an even uglier image when that former leader had recently had leading US Democratic operatives on his payroll.

...Then there's the amazing fact that Democrats, who understandably scorn Mitt Romney for piling up massive personal wealth while he advocates policies harmful to the poor, continue in general to revere these types of Clintonites who, arguably to a lesser extent, have done the same. Indeed, Democrats spent all last week wildly praising Bill Clinton, who has made close to $100m in speaking fees alone by traveling the globe, speaking to hedge funds, and advocating globalization and free trade.

In this case, one finds both the prevailing rules and the prevailing orthodoxies of American justice. High-level leaders in the US government and those who serve their interests are exempt from the rule of law (even when accused of heinous acts of terrorism); only leaders who run afoul of US dictates should be held accountable.

Even in the civil case against him, an appellate court ultimately ruled that he was immune from damages or civil lawsuits, overturning a lower court ruling that there were sufficient allegations of genocide and war crimes against him to allow the suit to proceed. As usual, US federal courts are the leaders in ensuring that the most politically well-connected are shielded from the consequences of their acts.

Relatedly, we find the prevailing sentiment that asylum is something that is only to be granted by the US and its western allies against unfriendly governments. The notion that one may need asylum from the US or the west-- or that small Latin American countries unfavorable to the US can grant it rather than have it granted against them-- is offensive and perverse to all good and decent western citizens, who know that political persecution is something that happens only far away from them.

The protection of this accused former leader will likely generate little controversy in the US because it was the by-product of the actions of both the Bush and Obama administrations, and because it comports so fully with how American justice functions. The only surprising thing would have been if there had been a different outcome.