The OAS Helped Facilitate Last Year's Coup Against Evo Morales. Now It's Observing Today's Bolivian
The OAS Helped Facilitate Last Year’s Coup Against Evo Morales. Now It’s Observing Today’s Bolivian Elections.
BY
KEVIN CASHMAN
The Organization of American States, a supposedly neutral election observer, helped legitimate last year’s coup in Bolivia by falsely claiming Evo Morales had committed election fraud. And now it’s observing today’s elections — a fundamental threat to the prospects for democracy in the country.
Today, nearly one year after Evo Morales was ousted in a coup facilitated by the Organization of American States (OAS), Bolivia will finally vote in new elections. With Luis Arce, the candidate of Morales’s Movement for Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS) party leading in polls, the OAS and the right-wing opposition are laying the groundwork to yet again claim fraud and reject the results.
To understand the threat from the OAS and its accomplices, it’s first necessary to rewind to last year.
On October 20, 2019, Bolivia held presidential and parliamentary elections, with then president Evo Morales seeking a fourth term. The next day, the OAS, which oversaw an observation mission for the elections, issued a press release “express[ing] its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results.” The OAS did not provide any evidence for its claims. Protests erupted in a country that was already polarized.
Later, Morales — who had won the contest in the first round based on the official tally — agreed to a binding audit of the election results, carried out by the OAS, to avoid an escalation in violence. On November 10, the OAS released those results, reiterating its statistical claims (which could not be replicated) and detailing technical and procedural problems with the election that are present in virtually every electoral system (while failing to demonstrate how these were exploited by any actor). Nonetheless, Morales immediately agreed to new elections. Then, on November 10, after the military “suggested” he step down, Morales resigned in an attempt to prevent further violence against his supporters and their families.
More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/oas-evo-morales-bolivia-presidential-elections-fraud-mas
