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Military coup in Bolivia removes president Morales.

SuburbanTurkey said:
Just waiting to see what rationalization the "interim" government gives when they decide to postpone the election, prevent the MAS from running a candidate, or otherwise improperly entrench a right wing president.
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Right now the problem is the national board of elections is tainted by people who faked the previous election and the MAS majority in the parliament refuses to accept new ones.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-11/19/c_138566401.htm

You can't run an election without electoral authorities and you can't run a democratic election when the electoral authorities blatantly favor one side. Yet, MAS is adamant nothing can be changed.

Bolivia's top electoral authority announced on Sunday night that Morales had won with 45.3% of the votes, with his closest rival, former President Carlos Mesa, coming in second with 38.2%. Morales fell short of clearing a 10-percentage-point difference with Mesa to avoid a runoff.

But on Monday, vote counting was suspended. Some 24 hours later, the electoral body said that Morales now led with 46.41% to Mesa's 37.06%, with 95% of the votes counted.

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-extremely-concerned-over-bolivia-vote/a-50939495

The discrepancy went unaddressed. Clearly the electoral body must be replaced before any new elections.

I'm sure MAS will carry no blame with the 'sources' you and CE cite. "All they want is to win the election again, using the same corrupt methods they did to win all their elections. It's democracy, because their side wins." or something to that effect.

McHrozni
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Just waiting to see what rationalization the "interim" government gives when they decide to postpone the election, prevent the MAS from running a candidate, or otherwise improperly entrench a right wing president.
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Let's condemn them if/when they do that. Let's not condemn them beforehand because they might.

And BTW, Morales shouldn't even have been a candidate anymore. Bolivia has term limits, but a friendly Supreme Court ruled that they don't apply to him because he's got to have the right to run.
 
timhau said:
Let's condemn them if/when they do that. Let's not condemn them beforehand because they might.

And BTW, Morales shouldn't even have been a candidate anymore. Bolivia has term limits, but a friendly Supreme Court ruled that they don't apply to him because he's got to have the right to run.
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No they ruled that the term he was in office when the constitution was written didn't count toward the limits, rather like the 22 amendment didn't apply to Truman's first term, like it would apply if the same events happened later.

Then he had the law changed to permit more terms as president.

"Bolivia’s constitution, drawn up under Morales, sets a two-term limit. His first election victory was discounted from the tally, because it came under the previous constitution, allowing him to run successfully for a third term. Soon after, he tried clearing the way for another run at high office, with a 2016 referendum to abolish presidential term limits."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/17/bolivia-more-volatile-than-ever-as-president-flees-and-leaders-denounce-a-coup
 
dudalb said:
Wow, Coup in a unstable Latin American Country. That never happened before....
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You know what happens if you give free housing and other goodies to the people. Because you played Tropico. No, wait, likely you never tried and never won (winning is equal to being a good head of state for 50 years in Tropico, without being overthrown by the people, the US or the USSR). Evo managed about 13. And I win all the time.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
An opinion piece on why this should be considered a coup:

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/11/coup-bolivia-history-evo-morales-jeanine-anez
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Right off the bat, we see this:

Morales was elected to his third term in 2014 by the highest percentage of votes — 63 percent — of any free election since universal suffrage

Repeat after me. The fact Morales won in 2014 does not mean his 'reelection' in 2019 was free or fair.

Got that? Let's try this again. The fact Morales won in 2014 does not mean his 'reelection' in 2019 was free or fair.

At this point I can make a prediction: It's a coup because a guy they support lost. He then goes on to quote CEPR as an source of independent analysis.

http://cepr.net/press-center/press-...ularities-or-fraud-statistical-analysis-shows

CEPR is not known for being independent or unbiased.

http://cepr.net/publications/report...s-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela
http://cepr.net/blogs/the-americas-blog/venezuela-response-to-trolls

CEPR a propaganda mouthpiece for the Latin American left, financed by Venezuelan oil and other vested interests. Yet the author of the opinion piece cites the propaganda rag as 'independent analysis'. It is neither. Most of the remainder is about a coup in Bolivia that happened in 1964. The reasoning goes: there was a coup in Bolivia in 1964, therefore the events in Bolivia in 2019 are also a coup.

In other words, my initial prediction has borne out and then some. The Jacobin is a just another propaganda rag, nothing more.

Furthermore, if you believe Trump's administration is capable of carrying out a coup against a popular president I have a bridge to sell you.

McHrozni
 
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Childlike Empress said:
You know what happens if you give free housing and other goodies to the people. Because you played Tropico. No, wait, likely you never tried and never won (winning is equal to being a good head of state for 50 years in Tropico, without being overthrown by the people, the US or the USSR). Evo managed about 13. And I win all the time.
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If you play beyond those 50 years you can see why free housing and other goodies are a bad idea in the long run. However leftlist activists somehow convinced themselves the world remains static and once those issues have been taken care of no problems remain to be solved. It's almost as if they thought Tropico was a fair and accurate simulator of a proper state, not a game meant to entertain, with inherent limits to the programming.

McHrozni
 
theprestige said:
Why is calling it a coup so important to you? Is there some aspect of this discussion that changes significantly, if we agree that it's a coup? Some crucial piece of information that's missing, if we don't call it a coup in so many words?
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Mostly because there has been a campaign to deny that it is a coup.

It's not a trivial distinction. A coup government is not a legitimate government and could affect how the rest of the world engages in diplomacy with Bolivia.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Mostly because there has been a campaign to deny that it is a coup.

It's not a trivial distinction. A coup government is not a legitimate government and could affect how the rest of the world engages in diplomacy with Bolivia.
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It's common among left-wing propagandists to denounce every change of power to someone they don't like as a "coup". By now they've successfully dilluted the meaning of the word to the point of irrelevance.

What is happening in Bolivia is a very strange electoral procedure with opaque and unexplainable results with their electoral authorities. The legislators show no interest in either exploring the strange results or restoring faith in elections and prefer to push "it's a coup!!1" narrative.

Any comparison with the narrative of the GOP regarding impeachment of Trump is not at all coincidential.

McHrozni
 
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