The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    Months After Supporting a Deadly Coup, WaPo Admits Bolivia’s Elections Were Clean Archived Message

    Posted by Gerard on February 28, 2020, 9:18 pm

    "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." Go to: https://www.mintpressnews.com/after-supporting-coup-washington-post-admits-bolivia-elections-clean/265334/ for full article.

    Message Thread:

    • Months After Supporting a Deadly Coup, WaPo Admits Bolivia’s Elections Were Clean - Gerard February 28, 2020, 9:18 pm