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Washington Post, March 7, 2020 at 6:30 a.m. EST
The OAS helped undermine, not restore, democracy in Bolivia
By Gabriel Hetland
It is difficult to imagine that Evo Morales would have left office when
and how he did — in a civic-military coup — if the Organization of
American States had not found that Bolivia’s Oct. 20 election was
fraudulent. To be sure, the OAS did not single-handedly bring down
Morales. In the weeks before the coup, Morales faced large protests and
a devastating police mutiny.
The protests did not focus solely on the election. Many were upset
Morales was allowed to run at all after losing a 2016 referendum asking
voters to approve his bid to seek a fourth term. The police mutiny
centered on officers’ disgruntlement over pay and being asked to contain
the protests. And the Bolivian right had declared that Morales could win
the October election only through fraud for months before the vote,
i.e., well before the OAS stepped into the fray.
Yet, the OAS actions were undoubtedly important in creating a climate
within which a coup could not only succeed, but be applauded as a
necessary step toward restoring Bolivian democracy, as the U.S.
government and mainstream media did. In fact, the opposite has occurred.
Following Morales’s ouster, Bolivia has come under the control of a
right-wing authoritarian regime that has killed dozens of unarmed
protesters, detained hundreds, blocked international human rights
investigators, systematically repressed political opponents, threatened
journalists and media outlets, embraced racism, and enacted a far-right
agenda for which it has no electoral mandate nor constitutional legitimacy.
The question of whether the OAS was justified in declaring the October
election fraudulent looms large. In a recent article published in The
Post, John Curiel and Jack R. Williams, researchers with MIT’s Election
Data and Science Lab, conclude the answer is no. Curiel and Williams
used statistical analysis to analyze a central claim made by the OAS —
initially in an Oct. 21, 2019, news release — that there was a “drastic
and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results”
following an election-night suspension of the unofficial rapid vote
count. According to the OAS, this is one of numerous pieces of evidence
showing fraud. Curiel and Williams unequivocally reject this, writing:
“As specialists in election integrity, we find that the statistical
evidence does not support the claim of fraud in Bolivia’s October election.”
Curiel and Williams’s findings corroborate those of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which has forcefully challenged the
OAS’s charge of fraud since it was made. Curiel and Williams were, in
fact, contracted by CEPR to test the organization’s own statistical
findings that the OAS failed to prove fraud, though there is no reason
to think CEPR influenced the MIT researchers. The OAS responded to
Curiel and Williams by defending its work, including its statistical
analysis. The OAS also took Curiel and Williams to task for not engaging
with the non-statistical claims made in the OAS’s final report on election.
Does the OAS have a leg to stand on? A careful reading of the evidence
shows that the answer is no. The OAS is entirely unjustified in its
declarations that it has proved the existence of fraud and intentional
manipulation of the vote. To be clear: this does not mean CEPR and
Curiel and Williams have proven the Oct. 20 election was clean. Yet they
have convincingly shown that the OAS’s claim of fraud is
unsubstantiated. Through independent statistical analyses, CEPR and
Curiel and Williams both show that there was not a drastic or
hard-to-explain change in the voting trend. The increase in Morales’s
vote over time can be explained based on his receiving higher support in
votes counted late in the process. And it is not surprising that this
would be the case, as Morales tended to do well in rural and poorer
urban areas that typically are slower to report voting results.
It’s clear that the OAS acted in an unjustified and reckless manner in
Bolivia, helping to undermine, not restore, democracy. Why would an
organization publicly committed to upholding democracy do this? The
words and actions of OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro provide a clue.
Instead of condemning Bolivia’s flagrant human-rights abuses and
antidemocratic practices, Almagro recognized its de facto regime.
Almagro has also made alarming, Trump-esque statements about Venezuela.
In September of 2018, Almagro said, “With respect to a military
intervention to overthrow Nicolás Maduro’s regime, I don’t think any
option should be ruled out.” This makes it difficult to avoid the
following conclusion: under Almagro, the OAS has shed any pretense of
being a neutral arbiter of democracy and human rights, and has instead
become an all-but-open servant of the Trump administration and some of
Latin America’s most far-right political actors
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