Re: <nettime> Evo Morales

[Hanns Holger Rutz <contact@sciss.de>]

Maduro come next, to end the repressive regime in Venezuela. No tear for
Morales from me and thirty million others. Have fun in your European
armchair+cocktail "socialism".


On 11/11/2019 23:49, Menno Grootveld wrote:
> Hi there! This is not so much lazy reporting as incredibly overt
> disinformation.
> 
> You better read this:
> 
> https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/11/global-condemnation-appalling-coup-bolivia-military-forces-socialist-president-evo
> 
> 
> Op 11-11-19 om 22:10 schreef Felix Stalder:
>> [I don't know much about the situation in Bolivia, but reporting in the
>> Western media seems incredibly lazy, portraying the situation as a
>> liberal uprising against an anti-democratic leader.
>>
>> There is obviously much more context than that. Some of it is mentioned
>> in the below interview. Another aspect is that just a week ago, Bolivia
>> cancelled a very large project to produce lithium with a German company
>> after local protests again the project. Though that also is probably
>> more complex, because the German won the initial contract because they
>> were they only ones willing to refine the Lithium locally, rather than
>> simply export the raw material. Perhaps somebody with more direct
>> knowledge can add more information. Felix ]
>>
>>
>>
>> https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/11/evo_morales_bolivia_protests_military_coup
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Evo Morales was Bolivia’s first indigenous leader, was credited with
>> lifting nearly a fifth of Bolivia’s population out of poverty since he
>> took office in 2006. But he faced criticism from some of his former
>> supporters for running for a third and then a fourth term. Evo Morales’s
>> whereabouts are unknown. His home was ransacked Sunday. Mexico has
>> offered Morales asylum. Hours before resigning, Morales had agreed to
>> call for new elections, after the Organization of American States issued
>> a report claiming there was, quote, “clear manipulation” in last month’s
>> election results. According to the official results of last month’s
>> election, Morales won 47% of the vote and just narrowly avoided a runoff
>> election. But the OAS immediately questioned the election process,
>> sparking mass street protests. Critics of the OAS say the global body
>> did not provide any evidence of actual vote rigging.
>>
>> We go now to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Mark Weisbrot,
>> co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, his latest
>> piece for The Nation headlined “The Trump Administration Is Undercutting
>> Democracy in Bolivia.” Talk about the latest developments, the
>> resignation of President Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of
>> Bolivia.
>>
>> MARK WEISBROT: Well, this is a military coup. There’s no doubt about it
>> now, after the head of the military told the president and vice
>> president to resign and then they did. And I think it’s really terrible
>> the way it’s been presented, because, from the beginning, you had that
>> OAS press release, the day after the election, which hinted — or
>> implied, actually, very strongly — that there was something wrong with
>> the vote count, and they never presented any evidence at all. They
>> didn’t presented it in that release. They didn’t present it in their
>> next release. They didn’t present it in their preliminary report. And
>> there’s really nothing in this latest so-called preliminary audit that
>> shows that there was any fraud in this election. But it was repeated
>> over and over again in all the media, and so it became kind of true.
>> And, you know, if you look at the media, you don’t see anybody — you
>> don’t see any experts, for example, saying that there was something
>> wrong with the vote count. It’s really just that OAS observation
>> mission, which was under a lot of pressure, of course, from Senator
>> Rubio and the Trump administration to do this, because they wanted —
>> they’ve wanted for some time to get rid of this government.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: And explain how the election went — Morales stopping the
>> election count, resuming it — and then what kind of majority he needed
>> to avoid a runoff.
>>
>> MARK WEISBROT: OK. So, this is very important, because this has been
>> very badly described, I think, in most of the media. You have a quick
>> count, which is not even the official count of the election, and it’s
>> not binding. It’s not what determines the result. It’s just something
>> that is done while the votes are being counted to let people know what’s
>> going on at that time. And so, the quick count was interrupted, and when
>> it resumed — and it was interrupted with Evo leading by about 7
>> percentage points. And when it came back, his margin increased. And if
>> you read the press here, any of the articles, it’s reported as though
>> something terribly suspicious happened. He didn’t have enough votes — he
>> needed a 10-point margin in order to — a 10-point lead over the next
>> runner-up in order to win in the first round, and he didn’t have that
>> when the vote count, this quick count, was interrupted — or, the
>> reporting was interrupted, I should say. And then, you know, he got it
>> in the last 14 — last 16% of the votes counted. He reached 10%. But if
>> you look at what was really — so, this was reported as a very suspicious
>> thing. And this is what’s reported over and over again to make it look
>> like something was wrong.
>>
>> But if you look at it, actually — actually, the whole vote count — you
>> see there was a steady trend of Evo’s margin increasing almost from the
>> beginning. And it didn’t change in the last 16%; it just continued
>> because — and you can look at the areas that were coming in — these were
>> rural and poor areas where Evo Morales had more support. That’s all that
>> happened. This happens in elections. You can see this if you watch
>> election returns in the U.S. So, there was never anything there.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: Several Latin American leaders have criticized the ouster
>> of Evo Morales in Bolivia. This is Argentina’s President-elect Alberto
>> Fernández.
>>
>>      PRESIDENT-ELECT ALBERTO FERNÁNDEZ: [translated] What’s happening in
>> Bolivia is that there’s a dominant class that will not resign themselves
>> to losing power to the hands of a president who is the first Bolivian
>> president that looks like Bolivians. That’s what’s happening.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: And British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted Sunday, “To
>> see @evoespueble who, along with a powerful movement, has brought so
>> much social progress forced from office by the military is appalling. I
>> condemn this coup against the Bolivian people and stand with them for
>> democracy, social justice and independence. So, if you can talk, Mark
>> Weisbrot, about the role of the Bolivian military? And what about the
>> Trump administration?
>>
>> MARK WEISBROT: Well, I think the most — you know, the Bolivian military
>> very clearly said — I mean, before they did that, they said they weren’t
>> going to intervene, in terms of the protests. But they very clearly —
>> the head of the armed forces said that Evo should resign, right before
>> he did that. And so it was a military coup. And Evo Morales is calling
>> it that, of course. And there isn’t any doubt about it. The media hasn’t
>> really mentioned it as much as a military coup, but it definitely is.
>>
>> In terms of the Trump administration, you can look at tweets and
>> statements from Marco Rubio right before the votes were even counted,
>> saying that there was going to be fraud, and, you know, making it clear
>> that they didn’t want this government to be there. And so, yeah, I think
>> that — I mean, it’s very obvious that they supported this coup. And it’s
>> very obvious that they pressured the OAS, where the United States
>> supplies 60% of the budget.
>>
>> And, you know, this is the problem. The media treats this OAS as though
>> it’s really an independent arbiter here. And they do have electoral
>> missions, and most of the time they’re clean, but they are not always.
>> You know, in Haiti in 2011, for example, they reversed the results of a
>> first-round presidential election without any statistical test, recount
>> or any reason. It was completely political. And in 2000, they reversed
>> their position, their report on the election, when the United States, as
>> you know and you’ve reported on this show, wanted to cut off all
>> international aid to Haiti and spent four years preparing for the coup
>> of 2004. So, the OAS played a major role in that by changing their
>> report on the election in Haiti. And so, I think this is a kind of a
>> classic military coup supported by the United States.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: So, Mark Weisbrot, you have the CIA involvement in coups in
>> Bolivia in 1952, in 1964, 1970, 1980. Would you add 2019 to that list?
>>
>> MARK WEISBROT: I would add it to the list. I mean, we don’t have the
>> hard evidence of what they did. You know, it’s not like 2009 in
>> Honduras, where Hillary Clinton wrote in her memoirs that she worked in
>> the OAS, too, to prevent the elected president, who you’ve had on this
>> show, from coming back to the country and to the presidency. But I think
>> we’ll probably find out more later. But it’s just — it is very obvious
>> that they supported this coup.
>>
>>
>>
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