Career Diplomat, former Bolivian Ambassador to the United States
24 October 2021
The failed spectacle of the MAS at the OAS
A curious fauna of colorful characters: nostalgic for Che Guevara, statistical scholars under a contract of a radical NGO, compulsive liars, and a North American activist defender of the coca leaf to whom the wise phrase of Oscar Wilde applies that “every time a person says something completely stupid, it is always for the noblest reasons,” were summoned to the headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS), by the permanent missions of the populist regimes of Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico, in order to evaluate the fraudulent Bolivian elections of 2019.
In this event, some actors have put on the table their resentments, their visceral hatred towards liberal democracies and their ghosts about conspiracies, alleged arms trafficking from Argentina and Ecuador to Bolivia in a non-existent new Condor Plan, fictions about plots of the financial capitalism to destroy them, imaginary schemes attributed to Luis Almagro to destabilize them and other fantasies to collectively victimize themselves in a group therapy session.
Statistical experts, authors of reports that were already rejected by the OAS two years ago, were not well trained and were unable to deny the breaks in the voting trend after the cut-off of the data transmission from the Transmission of Preliminary Electoral Results (TREP), but they limited themselves to merely justify them. But what effectively invalidates all their analysis is that they only analyzed graphs and statistics, and left aside the evidence provided by the OAS on the innumerable electoral crimes that irreversibly contaminated the election.
This spectacle by the Puebla Group, aimed at discrediting the Report and the binding Audit of the OAS on the presidential elections in Bolivia, meant a new diplomatic setback for the Government of Luis Arce, which insists on trying to hide the electoral crimes duly proven by the OAS audit, as well as the shameful escape of Evo Morales to Mexico. However, the intention of the delegations of Argentina, Mexico, and Nicaragua to dismantle and weaken the electoral observation system of the OAS, the most solid, independent, and professional in the world, along with that of the European Union, is still worrying. That fact and that attitude is the one that should concern the international community the most. The Electoral Observation Missions (EOMs) of the OAS, which are the only guarantee that elections in the region are credible and transparent.
The strategy of using international events for circumstantial domestic policy purposes never favors the objective of a professional foreign policy, which is the defense and promotion of the permanent interests of a State. Proof of this improvisation is that they have chosen the OAS headquarters to organize a political event aimed at victimizing Evo Morales, discrediting the OAS electoral observation missions, and personally attacking the OAS Secretary-General. None of these objectives has been achieved: First, because the presentation did not have a significant audience and even Bolivians who wanted to participate were not allowed to enter. Second, the limited virtual participation was overwhelmingly from the opposition and forced the moderator to cancel the questions. Third, the political speeches left no doubt that it was a gathering between representatives of Latin American populism for the purposes of propaganda and spreading false narratives. The Argentine Representative, a dilettante of radical Kirchnerism, punished the audience with accusations of conspiracy against the former Argentine President, Mauricio Macri, and a speech from the sixties that confirms the idea of how dangerous it is to leave the destiny of our freedom in the hands of noisy demagogues.
Another dangerous element that reveals the true objective of the event is a phenomenon that transcends the very issue of the Bolivian elections and is that of the increasingly widespread practice of misrepresenting the truth. Populists presume that, currently, it is not the facts that matter but who dominates the narrative with which they acquire meaning. Under this vision, they try to impose their narrative using the lie repeated and disseminated countless times through different media. This practice generates what the Oxford Dictionary considered the word of the year for 2016: The “post-truth” or false narratives that prevail in the current global information system.
One of those gears of post-truth in the region is that of the Puebla Group and its machinery that, with the support of extra-continental powers and other obscure financings, uses propaganda for the dissemination of false narratives, actions, and coordinated speeches among its operators in governments, the international press, certain NGOs, some human rights organizations, organic intellectuals, bureaucrats, the Cuban intelligence service, whose objective is to consolidate a hegemonic power project of mafia populism in Latin America. These strategies, both left-wing and right-wing, are nourished by the methods of 20th-century European fascism and Cuban Castroism. It is not a fantasy that the ghost of that fascism is once again threatening our societies and the reality is that liberal democracies in the region are at risk of becoming their opposite: democracies of masses deprived of democratic behaviors.
Source: https://publico.bo/internacional/el-fallido-espectaculo-del-mas-en-la-oea/
