Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/19/a-year-after-coup-evo-morales-party-returns-to-power-in-bolivia-elections.html
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Rob doesn’t generally shoop cool people.
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I dunno enough about this guy to say if he is a good leader or not.
But just because people re-voted someone back into office doesn’t mean they weren’t bad to begin with. People have done it in the past.
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Yeah I don’t think coup means what you think it means.
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Clearly the US election is tying up the CIA and associated organizations if MAS could win.
It’s getting harder and harder to make a good coup stick.
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Bolivia gets better leaders and Elon Musk and his company are getting resoundingly dunked on thanks to it? Today’s been a good day!
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Is there any figleaf too small for Yasha Mounck to hide under?
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It was a coup, fret you not.
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True, but Evo really was a very successful president by all economic and social metrics. If he and the majority of the country had had whiter skin, he’d be hailed a hero by most of the world for Bolivia’s rising.
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Yeah it’s been awhile since police sci classes but I forgot a coup could include demonstrations to step down after a questionable election and where the head of state got the country’s highest court to hand wave away constitutional term limits by citing the human right to happiness or work.
All the questions are stained Trump orange.
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Im going to copy paste because I’m on my phone and lazy.
Like how the OAS uncovered multiple irregularities, including failures in the chain of custody for ballots, alteration and forgery of electoral material, redirection of data to unauthorized servers and data manipulation.
These included that an outside user who controlled a Linux AMI appliance with “root privileges” — conferring the ability to alter results – accessed the official vote-counting server during the counting and that in a sample of 4,692 returns from polling stations around the country, 226 showed multiple signatures by the same person for different voting booths, a violation of electoral law. On those returns, 91 percent of votes went to MAS, approximately double the rate recorded elsewhere.[52]
On 21 December, the Technical Mission of Electoral Experts sent by the European Union published a 67-page report that concluded that the election day “passed peacefully and with a high voter turnout” but “a large number of electoral records showed irregularities, which could be due to deficiencies in the training of jurors or deliberate manipulations”.[53][[54]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_p olitical_crisis#cite_note-54)
Accepting CEPR’s conclusion, which is mainly that the electoral outcome was statistically probable, there were enough irregularities that another election was frankly the best thing. Taking into account that Morales had already hit his term limits.
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An anarcho-communist assessment of Bolivia
And a reminder that not everyone who opposed the coup was a MAS/Morales supporter
I have heard that supporters of the coup also attacked trans people as well as indigenous people, but I’m still looking for reports on that.
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I think it’s a little astounding the broader context that you are leaving out. A referendum was held to decide if Morales would even be allowed to run, as he was constitutionally term-limited. The Will Of The Voters let that stand. A court, not the people, overturned that and allowed him to run. One can legitimately debate whether term-limits are anti-democratic or a bulwark against the sort of elected-dictator-for-life that much of the world suffers from, but it’s more complicated than “the people have spoken”.
I also would hope that someone who lives and pays attention here in the US would know that spinning the selection of any particular candidate or party as reflecting a democratic will is a fool’s errand at best and dishonest at worst. Anyone trying to divine a collective will when you’re given a limited set of shitty choices filtered through flawed human beings is trying to do alchemy.
When we were there in 2016 the anecdotal word in the wind was that Morales had been liked and done a lot of good but he had showed himself to be as corrupt as everyone else and it was time for him to go and I think even pushing for the 4th term was seen as bad form even among some supporters. Mostly I got a sense that they weren’t soured on socialism so much as his cult of personality, and this election matches that impression.
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I’m sure those opposing Morales are terrible people. Doesn’t make it a coup.
18th Brumaire, Year VIII
The Directory was “persuaded” by the French army to resign. This is almost universally considered to be a bloodless coup
18th Brumaire, Year CXXVIII (!)
Evo Morales was “persuaded” by the Bolivian military and police to resign. 
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A single historical similarity 100 percent means the exact same thing happened! I’m sure every single anti-government demonstrator is also funded by an outside force because that happened before too.
I’m sure police and military, after weeks of suppressing demonstrations didn’t turn and ask him to resign because of all the electoral shenanigans in the audit report.
OK.
Explain to me how it wasn’t a coup, in terms that do not mean that historically accepted coups are excluded from the definition.
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There was a referendum to allow Morales to run for a third term, which was rejected and then overturned by Bolivia’s highest court citing the human right to participate in government. After the election that involved a period where vote counts stopped being reported and then Morales won by just enough to not go to a runoff, there were weeks of demonstrations that got violent and were suppressed by military and police. Once an independent audit, fully supported by the Bolivian government, revealed some weird election chicanery, the military and police said, the demonstrators have a political solution and we’re not going to act against them anymore and maybe you should step aside because this situation has gotten too intense and volatile.
But maybe you’re of the opinion that Morales should have ordered the military to suppress the demonstrators even more forcefully?
Maybe Hosni Mubarak was also overthrown in a coup because the military said, “please step aside these political demonstrations are getting too violent”?
