Dear Sir:
On October 20, 2019, general elections took place in Bolivia. The incumbent, pro-Venezuela and pro-Cuba Evo Morales, was a candidate after ignoring a national referendum that voted not to allow him to run for a third term or be indefinitely re-elected.
Morales resorted to the government-controlled constitutional courts to annul the will of the referendum and ran for a third term. The argument was that Morales’ first term took place under a different constitution [during Morales’ first term, a new constitution was approved by a constituting assembly]. Therefore, it was claimed that Morales’ first term didn’t count as such. Of course, this was all a matter of nonsense applied to enable Morales to stay in power.
As the votes were counted, it looked like Morales didn’t have enough votes to prevent a runoff, and because of this, he proceeded to shut down the counting. The morning after, Morales was declared the winner with no need for a runoff.
It was pretty clear that the vote had been rigged. During the initial count, it was apparent that Morales had lost the election. Then the official election body called for a 24-hour halt in the vote count. When the count resumed, it showed a massive shift in favor of Morales. The election body was heavily criticized after the unexplained 24-hour halt in the vote count on October 20. The stoppage fed accusations of fraud and prompted an audit of the vote by the Organization of American States [OAS]. That generated mass protests that denounced the elections as fraudulent.
The OAS audit showed fraud and declared that Morales should resign. The majority of the people rose up and demanded Morales should give the presidency to the opposition leader, but Morales demanded a new election. The police and army were ordered by Morales to quell the uprising by the people. The police and the military refused to fire on or attack the people demonstrating, and many police and armed forces members joined the peoples’ demonstrations.
What happened from there? The people became more violent and started destroying government property and that of the president’s political party colleagues and family homes. Commander-in-Chief of the Bolivarian armed forces William Kaliman requested the resignation of the president to re-establish order in the country.
The Bolivian Workers’ Organization (COB), the largest trade union in the country, and an ally of Morales also requested the resignation of Morales.
This has been [conveniently] grossly misinterpreted by certain people inside and outside of Bolivia.
The world’s political left is enraged and seething; all those leaders are describing the event as “a coup d’état.” Among those enraged are all the ALBA membership leaders, particularly Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez and Ralph E Gonsalves prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Other international 21st Century Socialist, Morales supporters, such as labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain, Alberto Fernandez in Argentina, former Brazilian president Lula Da Silva, and even the extreme left-wing Minnesota US representative Ilhan Omar in the United States, called it “a coup d’état.”
Commander-in-Chief Kaliman called on the Bolivian population to abstain from acts of violence
On November 12, 2019, Morales ran, left the country on a private jet, and arrived in Mexico where he was granted political asylum. He never took any of his legislative colleagues who were abandoned to the wrath of the people. It was a matter of saving his hide. At the time of his winging it to Mexico, Morales had been in power for 14 years.
Despite the left-wing claims, this was not a coup; it was a popular uprising of the people who, in general, wanted to reinstall democracy to the country.
In 2016, Morales created the Anti-Imperialist Command School. He also facilitated the ALBA military school, which opened for business in 2011, 50 miles north from a small town called Santa Cruz. Iran funded and manned the defense academy in Bolivia; in doing so, Tehran deepened its ties with its Latin ally and the whole of the ALBA membership.
Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) at the invitation of Morales under the supervision of the Cubans established a presence in Bolivia, training “soldiers of the revolution” in both Bolivian and Venezuelan camps, and; designed, built and manned the ALBA Military Academy, the military training camp in Bolivia. The school’s primary purpose is to ideologically indoctrinate soldiers and police [in Marxism and communism] and strengthen the bonds between the armed forces and the new Latin American revolutions. The ALBA membership was able to send their police and military to the academy for training [even some politicians have benefited].
Peter Binose wrote an article published by I Witness News in 2012 -https://www.iwnsvg.com/2012/06/27/alba-under-threat-in-bolivia-opinion/
The Iranians have also been mining uranium in the country. Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained by The Associated Press.
Like most of these South American communist leaders, they come to power with good intentions, but once they become soaked in the immense power and taste the source of untold personal wealth, they change and want to stay in office forever. The same thing happened in Venezuela, but because the country’s wealth is in the hands of the military, the same kind of uprising will not happen without the people being slaughtered by the military [under Cuban supervision of course].
The ‘Anti-imperialist meeting of Solidarity, for Democracy and against Neoliberalism’ took place in Havana from November 1 – 3, 2019, organized by the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), Central Organization of Cuban Trade Unions (CTC), along with the Cuban Chapter of Social Movements and the Continental Conference for Democracy and against Neoliberalism. Among the topics was the crisis in Bolivia.
In his intervention in Panel No. 2 of the event, St Vincent’s prime minister, Ralph Gonsalves blamed the USA for all the ailments that 21st Century Socialism has in the Americas and the Caribbean. He said, “The growing hostility against Cuba and other countries in the region, the judicial persecution of progressive leaders, the imposition of recycled neoliberalism, are distinctive features of the current North American policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean that awaken the fighting capacity of Latin American and Caribbean peoples.”
This appeared to be war talk against the US on the part of Gonsalves. Let’s hope not, because little Saint Vincent [the rotten apple] has been appointed a place on the UN Security Council Committee from January 2020. But what is relatively sure is that Gonsalves is still very anti-US and wastes no time in condemning them at every opportunity.
Prime minister Gonsalves once more, swore allegiance to Cuba when he expressed his profound solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, the government, and the Cuban people in the face of threats to their independence, their sovereignty, and their legitimate right to do whatever they wish in pursuit of their development.
Venezuela’s president by fraud, Nicholas Maduro, spoke about Bolivia saying, “Evo Morales is going to resist and triumph over the fascist threat of the Bolivian Right. The deadline of the opposition was not set just against Morales but the Bolivian people.”
Then following president Maduro, Cuban president Miguel Diaz Canel spoke using more anti-US diatribe. He described the discourse of president Donald Trump “as aggressive and dismissive of all those who do not share his approach. The decisions that he makes affect millions on Twitter with the most abhorrent behavior. He talks about socialism without the slightest idea of what it means. And orders the end of any process or political program that intends to overcome prevailing injustice, as if he held the course of history in his hands.”
There were delegates there from the US who were they?
Another chink in the wall
Stop Press: The Cubans have 750 medical personnel [doctors and nurses] in Bolivia, they have been agitating in the villages and towns to encourage the people to protest on behalf of Morales. They have been asked to leave.
Peter Binose
