A recent article in The Intercept, documents an effort by the U.S. Department of Justice to intimidate MIT researchers who demonstrated that Evo Morales won the 2019 election. It is interesting as well to consider the impact the New York Times editorial page had on coup leaders Bolivia and how eagerly the OAS jumped on the coup bandwagon in order to drive Morales from power. Here is an “Interpreter” column of the Times.
“The line between coups and revolts can be blurry, even nonexistent,” wrote Max Fisher for the New York Times. He cited what political scientist Jay Ulfelder calls “Schrödinger’s coup”— those cases which “exist in a perpetual state of ambiguity, simultaneously coup and not-coup”— and dismissed the distinction as “old binaries” now considered “outdated” by scholars.
Democracy, we have to understand, does not really exist in the post colonial world. The difference between a coup and a legitimate government is, it turns out, undecidable. But when the states of the OAS say coup, then that meant that Morales had to go, maintained the Times editorial board.
After the Organization of American States declared on Sunday that there was “clear manipulation” of the voting in October, Mr. Morales was left with no choice but to resign, bitterly tweeting from an unknown location that “The world and patriotic Bolivians will repudiate this coup.
What mattered more than the facts of the election and the manner in which Morales cleared the 50% threshold to eliminate a runoff with late counted votes in pro-Morales sections of the country was the fact that Morales was a power hungry populist. The alleged electoral irregularities were just a culmination of a long developing pattern of anti-democratic conduct, with the Times eager to underscore in its self appointed role as a guardian of democracy.
In Bolivia, the political right refused to concede defeat and mobilized its supporters to attack the MAS government. The police and army sided with the political right, leaving Morales increasingly isolated. But the findings from MIT that Morales had clearly won the election emboldened MAS supporters and pressured the interim government to hold a new election that MAS won. Upon winning, the new MAS government issued a warrant for interim president’s Anez’s arrest, prompting the Washington Post editorial board to worry about Bolivia’s “lawless” course of action. Immune to the facts of the election, the Post continues to insist that
Mr. Morales lost power because of his own attempt to subvert the 2019 election — which Organization of American States (OAS) observers confirmed at the time — and the Bolivian people’s massive rejection of it in the streets. Ms. Áñez succeeded to the presidency under a tenuous but constitutionally prescribed emergency process; and, to her credit, she peacefully ceded power to Mr. Arce when he won last year.
While the Post ignored reality, the Trump DOJ attempted to intimidate researchers that disproved the allegations of the electoral fraud in Bolivia, which is an interesting example of DOJ becoming an agent of the Trump administration and initiating a politically motivated investigation. The investigation seems to have been instigated by the interim government in Bolivia in an effort to discredit the MIT researchers. In this regard, the Intercept reports that:
Earlier in 2020, the U.S. government-funded media organization Voz de América, the Spanish-language complement to Voice of America, singled out the same two researchers by name in an article. The story implied that they could be taken to court over their study.
“Bolivia roundly rejected the supposed study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, by its English initials), which assured that there had been no electoral fraud in Bolivia,” begins the story dated March 5, 2020, by Yuvinka Gozalvez Avilés.
Avilés writes that Karen Longaric, then Bolivia’s minister of foreign affairs, “dismissed the idea of pressing charges against the two people who published the article,” and warned that there are harsher sanctions than a judicial investigation, namely to be professionally discredited.
Another claim tossed out by Longaric and conveyed through Voz de America was that the MIT researchers were in league with the Maduro government in Venezuela, so obviously they had bad intentions. Politically, what was at stake in all of this was control of the narrative about Bolivia, which is also a narrative about the relationship between democracy and populism, which struggles to keep democracy contained within a neoliberal frame of reference and is willing to pathologize political conflicts that exceed it.
The point about ontological dependency is that Bolivia is unable to produce its own reality - or, at least, to have that reality accepted in the metropole. The metropole insists on imposing its narrative and that narrative lends credence to U.S. clients. This might be considered as part of the struggle to maintain neoliberal hegemony in the global South or merely to impose acceptable leaders who will carry out the writ of the metropole - in this case, dismantling a developmental regime centered on taxing multinationals at much higher rates and activating state corporations as key players in resource development.
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