Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. MIT research found no reason to suspect fraud

[Judi Lynn]

4. Have loved the Mint Press a long time. They are tremendous:

Months After Supporting a Deadly Coup, WaPo Admits Bolivia’s Elections Were Clean
Democracy in Bolivia did not die in darkness, it died to the applause of the Washington Post.

February 28th, 2020
By Alan Macleod

The Washington Post published an op-ed yesterday from a research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showing that there was no fraud in the October elections in Bolivia after all. The Post had for months claimed that President Evo Morales won the election fraudulently, thus justifying the U.S.-backed coup that ousted him weeks later. There simply “isn’t statistical support for the claims of vote fraud,” the research team concluded.

While the Post deserves some credit for publishing the findings at all and for accurately using the word “coup” to describe the events – something much of the media refused to do – there are still a number of glaring errors and omissions with the new Post line. For one, the article frames the events leading to Morales’ ouster as “protests” that police joined. A more honest framing would be that the powerful right-wing opposition conducted a campaign of terrorist violence that included burning down the houses of and kidnapping elected officials from Morales’ Movement to Socialism (MAS) party. For example, Patricia Arce, Mayor of the town of Vinto, was kidnapped, had her cut her hair off and her body painted red, and was publicly dragged through the streets and abused, with her captors forcing her to commit to leaving office. Morales made clear he was only stepping down due to the threat of increased violence.

The Post story also presents the Organization of America States (OAS) as an honest neutral body raising genuine concerns over the election, rather than a politically biased group that is majority funded by the Trump administration. Indeed, in justifying its continued funding, USAID argued that the OAS is a crucial tool in “promoting U.S. interests in the Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-U.S. countries” like Bolivia. It also describes the dozens of people protesting the upheaval of democracy murdered by security forces in well-documented massacres as merely people dying in “post-electoral conflict,” effectively whitewashing the new government’s actions.

The article also fails to mention the salience of their findings, particularly the American government’s full support of the coup, and glosses over the media’s overwhelming endorsement of events. Thus, the entire article is presented as an interesting anomaly, rather than evidence of a major international crime.

More:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/after-supporting-coup-washington-post-admits-bolivia-elections-clean/265334/

Additional Mint Press story at the same link:

The New York Times’ Long History of Endorsing US-Backed Coups
The New York Times Editorial Board, it seems, rarely meets a coup backed by the US government that it doesn’t approve of.

by Alan Macleod

November 27th, 2019

By Alan Macleod

Bolivian President Evo Morales was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup d’état earlier this month after Bolivian army generals appeared on television demanding his resignation. As Morales fled to Mexico, the army appointed right-wing Senator Jeanine Añez as his successor. Añez, a Christian conservative who has described Bolivia’s indigenous majority as “satanic”, arrived at the presidential palace holding an oversized Bible, declaring that Christianity was re-entering the government. She immediately announced she would “take all measures necessary” to “pacify” the indigenous resistance to her takeover.

This included pre-exonerating the country’s notorious security services of all future crimes in their “re-establishment of order,” leading to massacres of dozens of mostly indigenous people.

The New York Times, the United States’ most influential newspaper, immediately applauded the events, its editorial board refusing to use the word “coup” to describe the overthrow, claiming instead that Morales had “resigned,” leaving a “vacuum of power” into which Añez was forced to move. The Times presented the deposed president as an “arrogant” and “increasingly autocratic” populist tyrant “brazenly abusing” power, “stuffing” the Supreme Court with his loyalists, “crushing any institution” standing in his way, and presiding over a “highly fishy” vote.

This, for democratic-minded Bolivians, was “the last straw” and forcing him out “became the only remaining option,” the Times extolled. It expressed relief that the country was now in the hands of “more responsible leaders” and stated emphatically that the whole situation was his fault; “There can be little doubt who was responsible for the chaos: newly resigned president Evo Morales,” the editorial board stated in the first paragraph of one article.

More:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/long-history-new-york-times-endorsing-us-backed-coups/263059/

~ ~ ~

Mint Press has their numbers. What a shame such famous "newspapers" have fallen so low and are delivering disinformation regarding countries current administrations dislike, isn't it? Integrity is nowhere in evidence. They betray their profession. Shameful.

Thanks for your post. It's good for people to learn there are journalists out there actually doing the work.