As often happens when an elite-driven coup leads to US-endorsed regime change, there are powerful attempts to disguise its real character. A recurrent method is to blame the coup on its victim. Of this, the November 10, 2019 coup in Bolivia is a textbook example. The narrative went as follows. Bolivian president Evo Morales, eager to perpetuate himself in power, orchestrated a fraudulent election. His people saw this as deceitful and authoritarian. A popular uprising ensued, eventually leading to Morales’s resignation and exile.
How such a storyline could have prospered, despite the absence of any solid evidence regarding election rigging, raises questions about the media and its role. It also sounds the alarm as to the part played by the institution that generated this narrative in the first place: The Organization of American States (OAS).
On October 21, the day after Bolivia’s presidential elections, the OAS Mission of Electoral Observers in Bolivia issued a press release expressing “its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls”. Two days later, the Mission’s preliminary report reiterated this claim and expressed its concern that the quick count “had been interrupted”. The OAS report called for a second round of voting, in contrast to the official results that put Morales on 47.07 percent and afforded him the ten-point lead he needed over his closest contender Carlos Mesa, on 36.51 percent, to avoid a runoff.
