February 05, 2020
Mark Weisbrot
Latin America Advisor (Inter-American Dialogue), February 5, 2020
The Trump administration’s current and future behavior in Bolivia can best be forecast by its strong support for the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Evo Morales on November 10. And no one disputes that Morales was democratically elected to his term that began in 2015.
But there’s more: the Organization of American States (OAS), whose leadership under Secretary General Luis Almagro is strongly influenced by Trump and Senator Marco Rubio, played a leading role in the coup that brought this violent, repressive, racist, anti-indigenous government to power. The OAS did this by repeatedly claiming, falsely, or implying, that the Morales government committed fraud in the October 20 election.
One hundred and thirty-six economists and statisticians said the OAS charges were false. Members of the US Congress demanded answers from the OAS for their false accusations. Journalists have also tried to ask questions. All have gone unanswered for more than three months. Why? Because the OAS is lying and cannot defend its accusations.
The treatment of these transparent falsehoods — only eighth-grade arithmetic is necessary to understand them — by many US-based NGOs that claim to support “human rights” and “democracy,” is disgraceful. The same goes for most of the US media, including the editorial board of The New York Times, which for the first time in 17 years supported a military coup — provoking an angry response from more than 300 academic experts. The truth will come out.
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of “Failed: What the ‘Experts’ Got Wrong About the Global Economy” (2015, Oxford University Press).
