The OAS ignored requests for its data and explanation of its methods, but there were two red flags suggesting that its analysis suffered from serious errors. Upon inauguration, Áñez would officially become the President of Bolivia. [60] At a police station near the presidential palace, officers climbed onto the roofs and chanted "The Police with the People". She stated that she would assume the office once the Senate had formally recognized the previous day's resignations. one of the best electoral statisticians in the world, “Bolivia’s Coup President Will End up Fleeing the Palace in a Helicopter”, Bolivians Are in Revolt Against Their Illegitimate Coup Regime, Bolivia’s Coup Government Is Looking for Excuses to Avoid Elections, Bolivia’s Coup Government Just Suspended Elections for the Third Time, Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity, Issue 35: From Socialism to Populism and Back. Facebook said these were fake accounts used to secretly manipulate politics in Bolivia, Venezuela and Mexico in violation of Facebook's prohibition on foreign interference. In other ways, the situation is even worse for Bolivian democracy. Regardless, the upward trend in Nooruddin’s data was predictable based on the earlier data, because his late tally sheets came from areas that had overwhelmingly shown strong support for Morales. Ever since Morales’s election victory almost exactly one year ago today, Bolivians never stopped marching, protesting, risking their liberty and their lives — even in the middle of a pandemic — to demand their rights of democracy and self-governance. Western officials, media outlets, and think tank writers invoked the standard Orwellian inversion of heralding a coup of any democratically elected leader they do not like as a “victory for democracy.” In this warped formula, it is not the U.S.-supported coup plotters but the overthrown democratically elected leader who is the “threat to democracy.”. This has since been established repeatedly by a slew of expert statistical studies. I congratulate the winners and ask them to govern with Bolivia and democracy in mind.”, Luis Arce, center, Bolivian presidential candidate for the Movement Toward Socialism Party, or MAS, and running mate David Choquehuanca, second right, celebrate during a press conference where they claim victory after general elections in La Paz, Bolivia, on Oct. 19, 2020. [122] On 30 Dec, Eva Copa, MAS head of the Senate, stated that a report had been filed with Arturo Murillo to give an account of the deaths in Sacaba and Senkata after the Assembly recess in the new year. [116] The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) condemned Áñez's government for issuing the decree. The OAS presented no actual evidence that even a single vote was altered. Already on our list? That is why Morales’ lead increased when the last 16% of votes came in, just as it had been increasing throughout the preliminary count. The two chambers congress were expected to debate the bill which would annul 20 October election and appoint a new electoral board within 15 days of its passage, paving the way for a new vote. Even as Facebook staff work from home, the content moderators were forced to return to the office amid pandemic fears. The OAS Helped Facilitate Last Year’s Coup Against Evo Morales. 4078, granting total impunity to the armed forces to quell protestors. Morales was the first indigenous president of Bolivia, which has the largest percentage of indigenous population of any country in the Americas. And the Trump administration’s support has been overt: the White House promoted the “fraud” narrative, and its Orwellian statement following the coup praised the overthrow: “Morales’s departure preserves democracy and paves the way for the Bolivian people to have their voices heard.”, Senator Marco Rubio is one of the most important influences on the Trump administration’s policy in Latin America. The OAS Helped Facilitate Last Year’s Coup Against Evo Morales. The OAS secretary general has caught even the attention of the Washington Office on Latin America, which has long been critical of many of Latin America’s left-leaning governments. [111], In the face of protests against the interim government, Áñez called for police to restore order and, on 14 November, issued a decree that would exempt the military from any type of criminal responsibility when maintaining order, when acting in a "legitimate defense or state of necessity. [35], By 24 October, Morales began describing the actions taken against him as a coup. And they continued for many months following the coup. In this case, he got in on the action even before the first OAS press release: “In #Bolivia all credible indications are Evo Morales failed to secure necessary margin to avoid second round in Presidential election,” he wrote the day after the vote, and there was “some concern he will tamper with the results or process to avoid this.”, According to the Los Angeles Times, “Carlos Trujillo, the U.S. ambassador to the OAS, had steered the group’s election-monitoring team to report widespread fraud and pushed the Trump administration to support the ouster of Morales.”, This week, US Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Chuy Garcia called for the US Congress to “investigate the role of the OAS in Bolivia over the past year, and ensure that taxpayers’ dollars do not contribute to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, civil conflict, or human rights violations.”. As sometimes happens when numbers become the subject of political controversy, the statistical studies were needed mainly to refute other ― in this case, often bogus ― statistical analyses. De facto president Jeanine Áñez — a candidate herself until recently, when she withdrew due to low support — has presided over a shameful campaign of political persecution and human rights violations,  including massacres by security forces, that seriously jeopardize her government’s standing to conduct elections. [148][149] Morales's first cabinet was majority indigenous (14 out of 16 positions), though this number decreased over the course of his tenure as president. Bolivia's Congress Censors and Dismisses Interior Minister The October 18 elections in Bolivia are going through an extremely difficult and sensitive time. [83] Mexico's foreign minister declared that twenty members of Bolivia's executive and legislative branches were at the official Mexican residence in the capital seeking asylum following the resignation. But Nooruddin’s analyses reflect no real-world understanding of the order in which tally sheets were counted. Even Morales’s long-time close Brazilian ally, former President Lula da Silva — who correctly predicted in a 2019 interview with me that “you can be certain that if Evo Morales runs for president, he’ll win in Bolivia” — nonetheless called Morales’s pursuit of a fourth term a “mistake.”, But none of those criticisms changed a central, unavoidable fact: More Bolivians voted for Morales to be their president in 2019 than any other candidate. [27] At 9:25 pm, President Morales declared himself the winner, stating that rural areas would guarantee his victory. [19] Morales had performed multiple actions that had offended officers within the armed forces, including glorifying Che Guevara after his guerrillas killed 59 Bolivian troops during their insurgency in the 1960s and forcing officers to attend the Anti-Imperialist Military Academy that was led by a convicted former rebel. In Bolivia, the electoral authorities report a preliminary vote count, which is unofficial and does not determine the result, while the votes are being counted. After the arrest and the discovery of the microchips, the interim government accused the men of participating in "violent acts" in the country, and transferred them to the Bolivian Special Crime Fighting Forces to conduct a preliminary investigation. International politicians, scholars and journalists are divided between describing the event as a coup or popular uprising. That month was “the second-deadliest month, in terms of civilian deaths committed by state forces, since Bolivia became a democracy nearly 40 years ago,” according to a study by Harvard Law School’s (HLS) International Human Rights Clinic and the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR) released a month ago. To be sure, security surrounding Bolivia’s election was insufficient. [43] They added that it was statistically unlikely that Morales had secured the 10-percentage-point margin of victory needed to win outright, saying that election should be annulled after it had found "clear manipulations" of the voting system, and that "The manipulations to the computer systems are of such magnitude that they must be deeply investigated by the Bolivian State to get to the bottom of and assign responsibility in this serious case. Leading up to the election, the coup regime and right-wing factions in the military were menacingly vowing — in response to polls universally showing MAS likely to win — that they would do anything to prevent the return to power of Morales’s party. [53][54], On 3 January 2020, at a meeting of the Committee for Latin America of Socialist International, it was declared that they accepted the findings of the OAS and that Morales was not a victim of a coup. Preelection polling suggests a comparable level of uncertainty on election night, with Luis Arce, the candidate from Morales’s party, close to a first-round win over Carlos Mesa, who lost in the first round to Morales in 2019.