Bolivia
Denounce Foreign-Inspired Coup d'État in Bolivia
On November 10, after a series of brutal attacks by the
foreign-inspired opposition, Bolivian President Evo Morales and his
vice-president announced their resignation which hands over the reins
of government to the National Assembly. TML Weekly denounces the
serious acts of wanton violence, arson, hijacking and other activities
against ministers of the Evo Morales government, his family and the
families of government ministers, as well as leaders of the workers'
and
peasants' mass organizations. The entire coup is instigated by
the U.S., Canada and other countries which are committing the wanton
attacks on the democratic institutions in the name of democracy, human
rights and other treacherous claims. TML
Weekly denounces the utterly
racist stand of the government of Canada which claims to support
Indigenous rights but does everything to undermine the first Indigenous
president who has restored the dignity of the First Nations and all the
oppressed. It shows that these representatives of the
international
financial oligarchy and narrow private mining interests will not
tolerate people's empowerment and that their talk about rule of law and
defence of the democratic order is purely self serving and
counter-revolutionary.
Earlier in the day, President Evo Morales had announced that he would
call
a new presidential election after a night of vandalism and violence in
different parts of the country by right-wing opposition forces in what
the Bolivian government called a coup attempt.
The houses of two governors as well as of the
minister of
mining and President Morales' sister were burned down and people
associated with the governing Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)
party were physically attacked. Violent opposition protestors also
took over two state media outlets and threatened their staff. The
signal of Bolivia TV was taken off air for more than eight hours.
Meanwhile, social movements and other supporters of President
Morales, popularly known as Evo, took to the streets in different
cities to defend the country's democratic processes and the
constitution against the wrecking of the coup forces.
Speaking at a press conference in La Paz, Evo said
he would
also replace the country's Supreme Electoral Tribunal with a new
one made up of members elected by the legislature. He called for
calm and respect for private property, for authorities and
between families, saying, "We all have the obligation to make
Bolivia peaceful."
Standing beside Juan Carlos Guarachi, leader of
the Bolivian
Workers' Federation and Segundina Flores, executive secretary of
the Bartolina Sisa National Federation of Campesino, Indigenous,
and Native Women, Evo said his decision came after consulting with
different social movements in the country.
His announcement followed the issue November 9
by the
Organization of American States (OAS) of the report of its audit
of the October 20 elections in which it recommended the holding a new
election "as soon as conditions are in place to
guarantee it being able to go ahead, including a newly composed
electoral body."
Carlos Mesa, leader of the opposition Citizens'
Community
Party, who came second to Evo in the election and who declared even
before the election that opposition forces would launch a coup if
Evo won, said Evo and his running mate vice-president Alvaro
García Linera, should not run in the new election.
Results of October 20 Election
Demonstrations in support of Evo Morales re-election, October 29, 2019
Bolivia's electoral law requires that a candidate
receive 50 per
cent of the votes plus one, or 40 per cent and a 10-point
advantage over their nearest rival, to be declared the winner on
the first round. Otherwise a second round is required. When the
Supreme Electoral Tribunal reported the final results of the
election, Evo was declared the winner with 47.07 per cent of the
vote to Mesa's 36.51 per cent. In third place was Chi Hyun Chung
of the Christian Democratic Party with 8.78 per cent.
Well before all the results had been received and
tabulated
however, the OAS election observer mission was questioning what
it called "irregularities" in the vote count, without credible
evidence to back up the allegation and ignoring known differences
in voting trends and the speed with which results are typically
transmitted from urban and more remote, rural parts of the
country where support for Morales is traditionally strong.
Referring to this, Morales said in an interview October
24
that historically, in colonial times, Indigenous movements were
threatened with extermination, and "[n]ow when the elections come
again, they do not recognize the Indigenous movements just like
in the past, so we see history repeating itself." He denounced that
Mesa and other extreme right-wing politicians
were instigating hatred, contempt and discrimination by presuming
to disregard the rural vote and calling on the population to rise
up against the results that favoured MAS. A native Aymara from
Bolivia's highlands, Evo became the country' first Indigenous
president in 2006 and handily won two more elections after that.
His aim in running for a fourth term was to deepen the social and
economic transformations achieved since he has been in
office.
Before and after the results had been announced,
opposition
leader Carlos Mesa and other members of the Bolivian oligarchy
and wealthy business people, most of them based in and around the
Santa Cruz area, attempted to make good on their threatened coup.
Following the model set by other foreign-backed coup forces in
Venezuela and Nicaragua, they burned down seven regional
elections offices, engaged in other acts of vandalism and
violence around the country and called on the military and police
forces to mutiny.
In an attempt to deflect the coup forces and avoid
bloodshed,
Evo and the MAS eventually agreed to the OAS doing a technical
audit of the results and said they would abide by its
recommendations, including if it called for a second round of
voting based on its findings.
Canada's Interfering Role
Well before the OAS had performed its audit, on
October 29, Canada
cited the "serious irregularities" referred to in the hastily issued
"preliminary conclusions" of the original OAS observer mission,
which "found that the electoral process did not comply with
international standards" and said there was serious doubt about
the legitimacy of the results making it impossible to accept the
outcome under the circumstances. It then joined the U.S. and a
handful of other lackey "Lima Group" governments and the EU in
illegitimately calling for a second round of elections -- despite
Bolivian electoral authorities declaring Evo elected in keeping
with the country's own electoral law -- thus providing support to the
the head of the OAS elections interference mission, who had
earlier declared that even if after 100 per cent of the votes
were counted and the margin of difference exceeded the 10-point
threshold "statistically," it was still advisable to convene a
second round due to "the context and the problems evidenced in
this electoral process."
In this way Canada, the self-proclaimed paragon of
"democracy"
and a "rules-based international order" is showing its
hypocritical face once again, participating with the U.S. and
other lackey governments in the Lima Group in the interfering
activity of the OAS against independent-minded governments
targeted for destabilization and regime change by U.S.
imperialism.
In contrast, at a meeting of the OAS Permanent
Council called
October 24 to consider the situation in Bolivia, Mexico's
representative Luz Elena Baños addressed the
obvious
lack of impartiality of the OAS electoral mission: "We demand
respect for sovereign processes and condemn the fallacious claims
of some member states of this organization that, despite [their
countries] being under major social and political upheavals, want
to be the judges and monitors of democracy in other countries of
the region. We call for the sovereignty and institutionality of
the Plurinational State [of Bolivia] to be respected and for the
OAS not to insist on becoming an accrediting agency for political
processes and governments." She added that it was Mexico's desire
that the elections in Bolivia conclude in keeping with what their
own laws dictate, without external interference.
This article was published in
Volume 49 Number 26 - November 10, 2019
Article Link:
Bolivia: Denounce Foreign-Inspired Coup d'État in Bolivia
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
|
