Bolivian President Evo Morales is resigning

[flying_wahini]

Source: CNN

Bolivian President Evo Morales resigned Sunday amid growing opposition after an international audit found the results of last month's election could not be validated due to "serious irregularities."
Morales said he was stepping down "for the good of the country," which has been roiled by protests in the days following the October 20 election.
Tensions boil over in Bolivia as protesters claim presidential election was rigged

Demonstrators and the Bolivian opposition had accused electoral authorities of manipulating the vote count in favor of Morales, the country's longtime socialist leader. Morales denied the allegations, but declared himself the winner.

If Pompeo approves it must be bad news.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/10/americas/bolivia-new-election-audit/index.html

[flying_wahini]

1. Many cabinet ministers are resigning, people are out marching in the streets!

He was due to be in power until 2025.

This mentioned, too; US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commended the OAS audit and said the US supported the new election and the installation of a new electoral council.

[mathematic]

3. People have been marching since Morales stole the election weeks ago

They're marching in opposition to him, not in support. This is in the CNN link but I'd figure I'd add it to the comments here because nobody clicks on links and your comment could be misinterpreted as "people are marching in response to the resignation".

[alwaysinasnit]

2. I thought Morales was one of the good guys. I don't know what I am missing here.

Oh, and BTW, if Pompeo approves, there has got to be some shady shit going on.

[flying_wahini]

6. That was my first thought.

Wonder who is (was) paying the protesters?

[Judi Lynn]

4. Anyone who doesn't understand who is pulling the strings in this coup

has missed a vast amount of information regarding this country, its overwhelming majority of indigenous people, and the very small group of powerful, wealthy elite white fascists who have been controlling everything there until the election of the indigenous President, Evo Morales, and the numerous attempts to murder him, the continuing hatred and abuse of the majority of Bolivians by the filthy, treacherous fascist core of elites fighting 24/7 to wrest control back into their own deadly hands and strip away the life-saving progress created by the indigenous President up until today.

It may not be US citizens' fault for being ignorant of all of Latin American history up to a point, but it IS wrong to cast about, repeating information you neither understand or should trust which is pumped out daily until US policy changes and allows the truth to be told by corporate media to the taxpayers.

You have everything to gain by starting to go looking for the truth. You should realize by now you just may not have a clue if you have never tried to penetrate the fog of propaganda concerning ALL countries with dark complected majority populations which have always been controlled by white Europeans. The pattern never varies. It's time to put in the time and effort doing the homework necessary to break through the lies, but you have to do it yourself by looking for the truth. Research. Wake up.

People have been posting artcicles at D.U. from close to the very beginning concerning ALL of Latin America events, as much as time has allowed them. There's a ton to learn, as it took so many people to steal the lives and freedom of the innocent humans of the Americans and operate policy to the point so many people have bought the lies without question.

[iluvtennis]

10. Thanks Judi Lynn for helping to start my education on the state of things in Bolivia politics. Want

to learn more and will start to.

[Judi Lynn]

12. Here's an early monster you would want to know about, Hugo Banzer.

There are very abbreviated descriptions of these dictators in this article to familiarize people with their names, after which they can start doing research to learn the rest. This is a great model to show the way Bolivia has been going all this time before the indigenous President was named:

COLONEL HUGO BANZER
President of Bolivia
In 1970, in Bolivia, when then-President Juan Jose Torres nationalized Gulf Oil properties and tin mines owned by US interests, and tried to establish friendly relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union, he was playing with fire. The coup to overthrow Torres, led by US-trained officer and Gulf Oil beneficiary Hugo Banzer, had direct support from Washington. When Banzer's forces had a breakdown in radio communications, US Air Force radio was placed at their disposal. Once in power, Banzer began a reign of terror. Schools were shut down as hotbeds of political subversive activity. Within two years, 2,000 people were arrested and tortured without trial. As in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, the native Indians were ordered off their land and deprived of tribal identity. Tens-of-thousands of white South Africans were enticed to immigrate with promises of the land stolen from the Indians, with a goal of creating a white Bolivia. When Catholic clergy tried to aid the Indians, the regime, with CIA help, launched terrorist attacks against them, and this "Banzer Plan" became a model for similar anti-Catholic actions throughout Latin America.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html

Hugo Banzer, right, standing next to Chile's bloody dictator, General Augusto Pinochet

New Documents Bring to Light the U.S. Role in One of Bolivia’s Bloodiest Dictatorships
The Democracy Center Staff
August 21, 2010
Approx. 6 minutes

This week marks the anniversary in Bolivia (August 22, 1971) of the coming to power of one of the nation’s most brutal dictatorial regimes – the coup led by General Hugo Banzer.

Abroad the coup is a little known event, a blip in a blurry history of a nation that famously suffered so many coups and counter coups for a time that some Presidents never finished out a whole day in office. But it is important to remember that basically everyone here over the age of forty has a living memory of what it means to live under a brutal dictatorship marked by killings, disappearances, and torture. It is impossible to truly understand the political currents that run through this country without understanding that.

Last year a friend of mine here, Ismael Saavedra, assembled a chilling re-creation of the torture facility where he had been held in agony as a student. As I walked through the Cochabamba exhibit with another Bolivian friend, a respected academic, he haltingly revealed to me for the first time that he too had been treated to the inhumanities that took place under Banzer.

For years Bolivians have debated the specific role in that explosion of dictatorship played by the U.S. government at the time (the Nixon administration), in the face of decades of official U.S. denial. A few months ago that debate became moot, with the declassification of new documents including official transcripts of conversations between Nixon and his chief foreign policy architect, Henry Kissinger. The top leaders in the U.S. government provoked, supported, and financed the Banzer coup with no regard whatsoever for the suffering they would unleash on the Bolivian people. Bolivia, as it turned out, would be a dry run for the more famous U.S. backed coup that brought the barbarous Pinochet regime to power in Chile two years later (The two dictators ushered into power by the U.S. are pictured together above).

More:
https://democracyctr.org/new-documents-bring-to-light-the-u-s-role-in-one-of-bolivias-bloodiest-dictatorships/

After the article above was written, Banzer ran for the Presidency again and won (wanted to mention indigenous Bolivians were not allowed to vote at all until after a lot of them were killed in a revolution in 1952. They were also not allowed to walk on the sidewalks with the white European descended people before that time) and he privatized Bolivia's water, which put simple drinking water OUT OF REACH for many Native Bolivians.








- Sorry, the video is no longer available -

Water Rights in Bolivia: The Consequences of Neoliberal Economics in Bolivia

By Ahmad Aref / July 28, 2015 / Human Rights Dossier / Leave a comment

In the early days of September, 1999 the President of Bolivia Hugo Banzer signed a contract with the Bechtel Corporation. This contract privatized the water supply of the Bolivian city of Cochabamba under the ownership of Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the Bechtel Corporation. President Banzer and Bechtel representative Geoffrey Thorpe were at a party celebrating the signing of the contract when protesters from Cochabamba arrived outside and began chanting in protest to the agreement. Upon hearing the protests, President Banzer said to Geoffrey “I’m used to that background music.” In the early 1950’s, the workers, miners, and farm laborers of Bolivia united under the National Revolutionary Movement Party (MNR). In 1951 they ran Victor Paz Estenssoro as their candidate and won a decisive victory. The military at this point stepped in and placed General Hugo Ballivian as Dictator of Bolivia. In April of the next year, the MNR had armed themselves and in a three day struggle, took control of the government and put Estenssoro in power as he should have been based off of the vote. The workers of Bolivia called for the nationalization of the mines, universal suffrage that included the indigenous population, and agrarian reform as well. This movement to push Estenssoro to implement these reforms was put forward by a grassroots campaign in Bolivia that involved large-scale mobilizations of the masses. In 1952 the MNR sought to put the wealth of Bolivia into the hands of the masses. This did not happen. President Estenssoro, on May 14, 1953 began to implement policies pushed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). At this point large-scale privatizations were not included but they would later be introduced. These reforms led to a dramatic increase in inflation which tripled the cost of living in Bolivia. Throughout the decades that followed, International economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank pushed neoliberal economic policies onto the Bolivian Government which included the privatization of state-owned industries such as the mines, the gas industry, and, as we will see in Cochabamba, the Nation’s water supply. The privatization of Cochabamba’s water supply was a substantial violation of the right of the Bolivian people to have access to clean drinking water which, after all, is more valuable than any oil well or goldmine.

This video shows Maude Barlow speaking about the Water War in Cochabamba at the International Forum on Globalization. The video also includes graphic footage of the violent clashes between the protesters and the riot police during which multiple people were arrested and wounded and one seventeen year old boy was killed.

In November of 1999, what became known as the Water War began as protesters in Cochabamba clashed with government riot police and soldiers. This clash involved policemen in riot gear firing tear gas at protesters who retaliated with rocks and in some cases Molotov cocktails. This conflict started in 1996 when the World Bank strong-armed the Bolivian government into signing an agreement with the Bechtel Corporation by threatening to withhold $600 million of debt relief funds. This deal was finalized in 1999 and gave ownership of Cochabamba’s water supply for forty years and provided guarantees that they would make a sixteen percent profit annually. Aguas del Tunari gained control of the irrigation systems and community wells in the rural areas. This was despite the fact that most of these systems and wells had been designed, built, and financed by the locals that lived there. Aguas would even bill people for collecting rainwater or drinking from their own wells. Shortly after the deal was finalized, Aguas raised the rates that people had to pay for their water services. Sometimes this raise was as much as 200% in some areas. Water costs in Cochabamba ended up being around $15-$20 per month. Considering that the minimuCochabambaBarricadem wage in Cochabamba was $60 per month, this left the city’s poor paying 25%-33% of their income just on water alone. All of this was done by the Bechtel Corporation with specific objective being to maximize their profit while the well-being of the people was relegated to the back seat. The Bolivian people responded with a grassroots campaign to push the Bechtel Corporation out of their water supply and their right to clean water at an affordable cost.

More:
https://derechoslatinamerica.com/2015/07/28/water-rights-in-bolivia-the-consequences-of-neoliberal-economics-in-bolivia/

Also, from earlier times at D.U., this article:

Bolivia this week inaugurated museum of Banzer's torture chambers

Bolivians rounded up during the first dictatorship of Hugo Banzer.

Bolivia Turns Old Torture Chambers into Museums
martes, 23 de agosto de 2011

23 de agosto de 2011, 15:31La Paz, Aug 23 (Prensa Latina)

Minister of Government of Bolivia, Sacha Llorenti, stressed on Tuesday the initiative to turn into museums old torture chambers of military dictatorships.

Llorenti said that this is one of the most heartfelt tributes to the victims of the actions of Hugo Banzer (1971-1978) and to the desire to rescue the historical memory.

Many people were harassed and humiliated in these torture chambers, which were discovered in the basement of the Ministry of Government, recalled Llorenti.

Ministers of Mining and Cultures, José Pimentel and Elizabeth Salguero, respectively, and human rights activists and the Association of Relatives of the Disappeared and Martyrs for National Liberation (Asofand) participated in the inauguration of the new exhibition.

The opening was also attended by former government minister Alfredo Rada, who had the initiative in setting up this museum to honor the martyrs who gave their lives for a Bolivia with dignity and sovereignty.

Emotional testimony was also offered by the current deputy interior minister, Marcos Farfán, one of the survivors of the tortures of military regimes.

mh/as/gpm-lac/Ga

------------------------

The Bush Doctrine in Latin America, edited by Gary Prevost and Carlos Oliva Campos, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 272 pp., $22.95 paperback

In a 1998 commencement speech at Texas A&M University, Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, an alumnus of the school and then the vice president of Bolivia under the former dictator General Hugo Banzer, told the graduates, “I can tell you that was the best U.S. president Bolivia has ever had.”

Tuto’s enthusiasm for Bush was no accident. In 1991, Bolivia became one of the first countries to accept the conditional aid and debt relief of George H.W. Bush’s Enterprise of the Americas Initiative (EAI), a set of policies designed to encourage trade, private investment and structural adjustment in Latin America.

The EAI’s conditionality, which included massive privatizations, consolidated the neoliberal reforms in Bolivia that were first promoted in the early1980s by Northern economists like Jeffrey Sachs and implemented in 1985 by the government’s planning minister, Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada.

The history is now familiar—the privatizations that led to the Water War in Cochabamba were negotiated and announced almost exactly one year after Tuto’s speech in Texas—and the consequences of these policies are now clear. The “best U.S. President Bolivia ever had” was instrumental in promoting and consolidating the policies that led to the massive mobilizations that have changed the course of Bolivian, and perhaps Latin American, history.

----

(The Cochabamba Water War -- Bechtel raised water rates threefold, and imposed a tax on RAINWATER. Protests (with heavy loss of life) drove the company out, as well as then President Sanchez de Lozada, who is now living comfortably in Maryland, just outside Washington. Bolivia has asked for his extradition for the massacre, but Clinton, dubya and now Obama have ignored it.)

https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x55329

[iluvtennis]

13. Thank you for my new reading assignment - got a lot to learn

Indigenous ppl the world over have been taken advantage of/ abused. It’s sickening.

[Judi Lynn]

15. The subject sticks in your mind, once you have approached it, and it sustains a very long search.

The reason so much information has been completely omitted from the nation's news for decades is because what has happened is deeply shameful, and brutal, and would draw opposition by humane U.S. Americans who have bothered to lose the racist indoctrination, realizing how stupid and wrong it is.

"US citizens have been treated by their government as if they were mushrooms: fed manure and kept in the dark" while financing these covert wars upon indigenous people.

Your comment is so painfully true. Glad you are one of the awakened people!

[dalton99a]

16. +1

[Imperialism Inc.]

5. The OAS/Trump/Pompeo/Rubio story line about "irregularities" was bogus from the start,

as Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research showed.

The latest OAS "audit", repeats a major falsehood from their previous reports, pretending that there was an "unusual" jump in Evo's vote margin towards the end of the quick count. But the change was in fact gradual, as later-reporting areas were more pro-Evo than earlier ones:

Link to tweet

You can read his analysis here: http://cepr.net/publications/reports/bolivia-elections-2019-11

[flying_wahini]

7. So there were No irregularities?

So am I supposed to feel good about that?

[Judi Lynn]

9. You'd feel far better if you grasp what has happened. That takes a personal investment. n/t

[Imperialism Inc.]

11. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz do.

Bolivia: Audios Linking Civic, Ex-Military and US in Coup Plans
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bolivia-Audios-Linking-Civic-Ex-Military-and-US-in-Coup-Plans-20191105-0001.html

Opposition politicians held talks with U.S. senators to destabilize Bolivia and organize a general strike after Evo Morales' victory.

The Radio Education Network of Bolivia (Erbol) leaked 16 audios involving opposition leaders who are calling for a coup d'etat against the government of President Evo Morales, a political action which would have been coordinated from the U.S. embassy in the Andean country .

Among those mentioned in the audios are the U.S. senators Marco Rubio, Bob Menendez and Ted Cruz, who have would maintained contact with the Bolivian opposition in order to achieve a possible regime change in the South American country.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The audios also reveal participation in the political conspiracy of the former prefect of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa, who was accused of corruption in 2009 and fled Bolivia to seek asylum in the U.S., where he is currently living.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In fairness his running by itself is a little irregular. He held a referendum about whether he could run for a fourth term and narrowly lost. Then the supreme court ruled that term limits were all abolished and he ran. So there are some legitimate complaints against him. As far as the vote goes though it seems to be a case of repeating something enough until it becomes "true". There was no question he had the most votes. The only question was whether there would need to be a run-off.

Still, the people that will be taking over aren't anyone I'm happy to see taking over. The military has shut down the public television, arrested the heads of the electoral body, their version of MAGAs are burning the indigenous flag in the streets (indigenous is an officially recognized nationality due to Morales), they've raided his home, and set fires outside of his sisters house. Not great people.

Hopefully they find peace soon.

Bolivia: President Evo Morales Resigns Amid Right-Wing Coup
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bolivia-President-Evo-Morales-Resigns-Amid-Right-Wing-Coup-20191110-0006.html

“I decided to resign from my position so that Carlos Mesa and Luis Camacho stop abusing and harming thousands of brothers ... I have the obligation to seek peace and it hurts a lot that we face Bolivians, for this reason, so I will send my letter of resignation to the Plurinational Assembly of Bolivia,” the former president of Bolivia said in a press release.

Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera also said that he was resigning from his position. The two leaders said that they would be handing their resignation letters to the country's National Assembly.

Since both President and Vice President resigned, the president of the Senate, a position held by Adriana Salvatierra of the MAS party was supposed to assume the post but she later issued her resignation as well as the president of the Chamber of Deputies.

Currently, the line of succession is broken in Bolivia.

[Judi Lynn]

8. It's more deception from the OAS, which has always purported to seek the best for Latin America,

while always taking direction from Washington, D.C.

Thank you for the information. It will all be known, with time, hope it won't be long.

[Imperialism Inc.]

14. Thought I'd leave a link to a two part twitter thread.

It reiterates a lot of stuff from my first post but maybe in a more digestible form. The OAS "quick count" recommendation seems either extremely dumb or outright designed to create confusion.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1193703918624108544.html

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1193704154520178689.html

[brooklynite]

17. We could swap Venezuela for Bolivia in this thread, and all participants could continue merrily on.

[EX500rider]

18. Exactly...ignore term limits and rig elections....OK if you are on the left side of the spectrum. nt

[ripcord]

19. The EU observers want to know why the governement suspended the vote count for 24 hours

Nothing but silence on the 24 hour vote suspension, there has also been a high amount of data manipulation found by EU and OAS observers, would you accept the results of such an election knowing this?

[Imperialism Inc.]

20. It is literally explained three posts above you in my threadreader links.

The official vote count was never stopped. The OAS recommends two counts. One called the quick count, is just for informational purposes and isn't official, and always stops before reaching 100%. Read them for all the intricate details of what happened. The vote tally matched 5 of 6 pre-election polls. Were those rigged too?