Bolivia election

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has been ridiculed, slathered with contempt, and repeatedly branded a ‘liar’, as well as an existential threat to democracy in the United States, by the biggest media outlets in the country. This is in response to his attempts to reverse the results of the US presidential election, and claiming – without evidence – that it was stolen. He still clings to these allegations, but he will be leaving the White House on January 20.

But just over a year ago, a similar effort was launched in Bolivia, and it actually prevailed. The country’s democratically elected president, Evo Morales, was toppled three weeks after the October 20 vote, before his term was finished. He left the country after the military ‘asked’ him to resign.

The similarities are remarkable. Leaders of the Bolivian opposition indicated before the votes were counted, as Trump did, that they would not accept the result if they lost. Like Trump, they had no evidence for their allegations of fraud when the votes were counted. And as with Trump, the falseness of their charges was obvious from day one.

Some readers may question the relevance of the comparison with a developing country whose democratic institutions have a shorter history, and are in important ways weaker than those in the US government. But the Bolivian right would not have succeeded, where Trump has failed, if not for another important difference: the Bolivian right had powerful help from outside the country in pulling off their coup.

Not surprisingly some of this help came from the Trump administration, which stated the day after the coup that “Morales’s departure preserves democracy and paves the way for the Bolivian people to have their voices heard.”

Even more important help came from the Organization of American States (OAS), which, not coincidentally, gets 60 percent of its funding from the United States. The OAS also currently has a leader, Luis Almagro, who at the time of Bolivia’s election needed the support of Trump and his allied right-wing governments in the Americas in order to be reelected as the head of the organization. The OAS issued a statement the day after the election, expressing “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results.”

Excerpted: ‘A Tale of Two Elections: U.S. and Bolivia’

Counterpunch.org