Bolivia’s Coup And Ours

On 3/13/2021, former right-wing President of Bolivia Jeanine Áñez was arrested on charges of sedition, terrorism, and conspiracy. For those unaware, Áñez was a major player in Bolivia’s 2019 coup against former President Evo Morales, who was forced to leave office after a manufactured political crisis that same year. Well, now Bolivia has Luis Arce — a member of the same party Morales was — as President, and he’s decided not to seek unity with politicians who broke the law, but instead to punish them. What the politicians in the United States are afraid to do, the politicians of Bolivia are doing, and it’s glorious.

Want to know the funniest thing? The entire political crisis that resulted in Morales being removed was over false-accusations of election fraud. After the election, the Organization Of American States published a report arguing that Morales had engaged in wide-spread election fraud against his political opposition. The evidence for their claim came down to a misunderstanding of how elections in Bolivia work, with them using fairly standard operations (such as projected vote-counts used by media not being the exact same as official vote counts later on) as evidence of something sinister. Despite the fact that Morales was willing to hold another election (something a guilty man would likely not do) he still lost the support of the military and police, who installed Áñez with consent that of the people that was entirely manufactured.

After the election, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published the following in The Washington Post on 2/27/2020:

[T]there is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find — the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’s margin all appear legitimate. All in all, the OAS’s statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed.

Meaning there was no basis for Morales to resign. However, he did, and the right-wing Áñez took power and ruled for a year, until Arce was inaugurated at the end of 2020.

Mind you, there seems to be nothing the Organization Of American States loves doing more than making up claims of rigged elections in South America. It was their reporting that also helped fuel the claim that Nicolás Maduro rigged the 2019 Venezuela election — once again, under rather shaky evidence. (This also helped escalate terrorism in the region done by Maduro’s opposition — but it was terrorism against socialism so I guess it’s okay.)

Now, I don’t know much about Luis Arce — I hear he’s a socialist, and I don’t like that — but I do know this, he will serve the rest of his term. Do you know who I can’t say that about? Joe Biden.

On 1/6/2021, a bunch of Trump supporters, rallied by accusations of a rigged election, entered the US capitol and attempted to hold a coup, resulting in the death of one police officer. The United States then looked for any other reason the police officer might have died, asked “attempted coup? I mean seriously now what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize in attempted Chemistry?”, and made taking away the Twitter accounts of those involved a subject of controversy.

That is not the attitude of an administration who’s going to serve an entire term, that’s the attitude of an administration that believes it being overthrown is inevitable and does not care. According to Q-Anon, Trump is still controlling the Executive Branch — and you’d believe it given how Biden has been treating Republicans. Biden has been talking non-stop about “bipartisanship” and “unity,” even playing into Republican talking points on issues like school reopenings — and what has he gotten out of it? Not a single Republican voted in favor of Biden’s Stimulus Package, and Republicans have slowed down the process of getting Biden’s cabinet confirmed.

Biden needs to start taking advice from that Bolivia guy, maybe that guy can be Biden’s Attorney General even, he seems to understand how to remain in power after a coup — but the question is, does Biden?