Latin America
Related: About this forumBolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. MIT research found no reason to suspect fraud
As Bolivia gears up for a do-over election on May 3, the country remains in unrest following the Nov. 10 military-backed coup against incumbent President Evo Morales.
A quick recap: Morales claimed victory in Octobers election - but the opposition protested about what it called electoral fraud.
A Nov. 10 report from the Organization of American States (OAS) noted election irregularities. Police then joined the protests and Morales sought asylum in Mexico.
The military-installed government charged Morales with sedition and terrorism. A European Union (EU) monitoring report noted that some 40 former electoral officials have been arrested, and 35 people have died in the post-electoral conflict.
The media has largely reported the allegations of fraud as fact. And many commentators have justified the coup.
However, as specialists in election integrity, we find that the statistical evidence does not support the claim of fraud in Bolivias October election.
At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/26/bolivia-dismissed-its-october-elections-fraudulent-our-research-found-no-reason-suspect-fraud/
Deposed Bolivian President Evo Morales and his party's nominee for elections this May, former Economy Minister Luis Arce.
Bolivia's military forced Morales to resign in November after the right-wing opposition and the U.S.-dominated OAS loudly alleged electoral fraud - but statistical models by the MIT and other researchers found no such proof.
Arce, the current-front-runner, has denounced a campaign to stymie his own candidacy this year by the far-right Jeanine Áñez dictatorship.
SamKnause
(13,110 posts)Judi Lynn
(160,620 posts)There should be no question of the credibility of those people at MIT in their own study. This information needs to have as many readers and speakers as possible.
There is NO way this malicious dirty sneaky, dishonest thievery of entire governments should continue to happen simply because no one could stop it before it happened. Get the filthy sociopaths out of government everywhere. In time, it will happen. They are clearly wildly outnumbered.
LessAspin
(1,156 posts)That the record is being corrected. Typically in this new Fox/Trump world we rarely see corrections like this.
Although I won't hold my breath until Evo Morales is rightfully re-instated.
Link to tweet
Judi Lynn
(160,620 posts)Months After Supporting a Deadly Coup, WaPo Admits Bolivias 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 isnt 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 governments actions.
The article also fails to mention the salience of their findings, particularly the American governments full support of the coup, and glosses over the medias 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 doesnt approve of.
by Alan Macleod
November 27th, 2019
By Alan Macleod
Bolivian President Evo Morales was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup détat 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 Bolivias 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 countrys 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.
LessAspin
(1,156 posts)Judi Lynn
(160,620 posts)for so long on leftist leaders in the Americas, it's almost as rare as getting struck by lightning when they admit they have published untruthful material, isn't it?
This is late in coming but most surely appropriate.
It was good to see this quote from Greenwald:
Thank you.
Judi Lynn
(160,620 posts)New York Times and New Report Confirm CEPR Analysis Refuting OAS Claims of Flawed Bolivian Election Results
JUNE 07, 2020
Washington, DC Nearly eight months after incumbent Bolivian president Evo Morales was ousted in a coup detat amid allegations of electoral fraud, The New York Times reports that the Organization of American States (OAS) claims of fraud in the November 2019 general elections relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques.
The Times article focuses on a new report from Nicolás Idrobo, Dorothy Kronick, and Francisco Rodríguez. The report, which uses detailed electoral data previously unavailable to researchers outside of the OAS, refutes OAS claims that fraud altered the election results. For months, the OAS has resisted calls for it to release its data and methodology. The authors show that they were able to predict the final outcome of the election within three one-hundredths of a percentage point, using data from prior elections and votes counted before an election night interruption of the vote.
For those paying close attention to the 2019 election, there was never any doubt that the OAS claims of fraud were bogus, said Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Research Associate Jake Johnston, coauthor of an 82-page report on the Bolivian election and the OAS audit of that election. Just days after the election, a high-level official inside the OAS privately acknowledged to me that there had been no inexplicable change in the trend, yet the organization continued to repeat its false assertions for many months with little to no pushback or accountability.
CEPR analysts, using publicly accessible electoral data, came to similar conclusions regarding the false nature of the OASs claims in reports published in November 2019 and March 2020. On October 21, 2019, just one day after Bolivias election, the OAS denounced without providing any evidence a drastic and inexplicable change in the trend of the vote count following an interruption of the transmission of the election results. At the time, CEPR was quick to note that the data simply did not back up the OAS claims. Nevertheless, on November 10 the day the OAS released an audit of the election reiterating its claims of an inexplicable change in the trend the Bolivian military called on Morales to resign, and the president sought asylum in Mexico. An unelected government remains in power today with the strong support of the countrys military. The militarys repression of anti-coup protests resulted in dozens of deaths and scores of arrests.
More:
https://cepr.net/press-release/new-york-times-and-new-report-confirm-cepr-analysis-refuting-oas-claims-of-flawed-bolivian-election-results-2/
Judi Lynn
(160,620 posts)Published on
Monday, June 08, 2020
by Common Dreams
'It WasThen as NowClearly a Coup': NYT Finally Gets Around to Reporting OAS Fraud Election Claims in Bolivia Were Bogus
"For those paying close attention to the 2019 election, there was never any doubt that the OAS' claims of fraud were bogus."
by Eoin Higgins, staff writer
More than seven months after claims of fraudulent elections sparked an undemocratic coup that led to the ouster of Bolivian President Evo Morales, the New York Times late Sunday reported on new research showing the U.S.-led Organization of American States used flawed data and analysis to support its widely cited contention the voting was rigged.
"It was clear from the start, but now even the NYT is admitting: what happened in Bolivia was nothing short of a coup by the U.S. and its OAS puppet, deposing one of the most successful democratically elected leaders in modern Latin American history," tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald in response to the tTimes reportin.
Link to tweet
As Common Dreams reported in November, U.S. officials cited the OAS report on the election as a justification for backing the coup that deposed Morales, the left-wing Indigenous former president.
Despite reporting from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) casting doubt on those claims within 24 hours of the OAS making them, the Times only covered the problems with the U.S.-dominated organization's analysis after a study (pdf) from three independent researchers found the same results.
More:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/08/it-was-then-now-clearly-coup-nyt-finally-gets-around-reporting-oas-fraud-election