After several weeks of instability, with continued protests following the October 20th questioned elections that declared Evo Morales a winner, Bolivia’s president resigned on Sunday. The trigger for his resignation was a report from the Organization of American States on the October 20th elections. The top command of the Bolivian Army gave the final push.
Evo Morales had been in power for almost 14 years. The country’s vice-president, the president of Congress and the president of the Senate resigned after him. It is not known at this hour who will assume the temporary presidency of Bolivia, nor is Morales’ whereabouts. The Mexican government offered asylums to the resigning officials and the former president.
The OAS report, which resulted from an audit that began on October 31st, was published just hours before the former president’s resignation. The technicians found that:
- The system for transmitting the results and the computations were flawed and that it was not possible to give certainty to those results.
- Signatures were falsified and 23% of electoral records were altered in the sample that they reviewed. “It is important to warn, likewise, that the analysis of the original electoral records in the departments of Potosí, Chuquisaca and Santa Cruz has not been possible, due to the fact that part of the documentation was burned. It is foreseeable that having more time to process more documentation would result in an even greater number of irregularities,” says the report.
- There was a deficient chain of custody of the electoral material. “Given that in Bolivia there is no possibility of recounting votes, the safeguarding of the electoral records is a critical aspect to give guarantees to the electoral process. The control of who handles the records and where they are at any given moment is fundamental.”
- The calculation presented of the last 5% of the vote count presented a curve in favor of Morales “very unusual” and “highly improbable”.
The report therefore concluded that there were irregularities “ranging from very serious to indicative”. “This leads the technical audit team to question the integrity of the results of the October 20 election”.
Evo Morales reacted rapidly to the report with an announcement of his willingness to go to new elections. The military and police leadership asked for his resignation anyway and Morales left office hours later.
The secretary general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, told BBC Mundo that “the call for elections is necessary” in that country. BBC Mundo doesn’t report any other statement on Almagro’s behalf.
In his Twitter profile, Almagro gave his opinion along the lines of the European Union, whose High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs said that the EU continued to support Bolivia in strengthening its democratic institutions.
Almagro reiterated the EU’s official message and added: “We subscribe and reiterate the call for constitutional, civic and peaceful solutions in Bolivia in accordance with the @eu_eaas statement of support for the process.”
Suscribimos y reiteramos el llamado a soluciones constitucionales, cívicas y pacíficas en Bolivia conforme al comunicado de @eu_eaas de apoyo al proceso https://t.co/XV1etWl32l
— Luis Almagro (@Almagro_OEA2015) November 10, 2019
The reactions from Latin American governments
Through a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Colombian government requested the OAS to summon its Permanent Council “urgently”, “in order to seek solutions to the complex institutional situation in the Plurinational State of Bolivia.”
In another statement the government of Perú expressed its desire for Bolivia to hold elections “with due guarantees of transparency.”
For its part, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Guatemala stated they “make votes for a peaceful transition that guarantees a transparent electoral process that will allow the prompt return to democracy in that country, respects the will of the Bolivian people, and at the same time calls on all political and social actors in that country to stop the violence.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile, a country currently in full social and political instability, expressed its “concern for the interruption of the electoral process to democratically elect the president and for the crisis that Bolivian society is going through” and also expressed its hope for “a prompt, peaceful and democratic solution, within the framework of the Constitution and the laws of the Plurinational State of Bolivia”.
The governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba spoke of a coup d’état in Bolivia. The president-elect of Argentina, Alberto Fernandez, aligned with that opinion. Fernández will assume the presidency of his country this December.
The president of Mexico tweeted that he recognizes “the responsible attitude of the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, who preferred to resign than exposing his people to violence. Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, also tweeted that in Bolivia “there is an ongoing military operation, we reject it (…). Mexico will maintain its position of respect for democracy and institutions. No coup.” And he announced that the Mexican government will grant asylum to 20 Bolivian executive and legislative officials at the Mexican embassy in La Paz. “Ff decided to do so, we would also offer asylum to Evo Morales.”
Impact in the region?
The replicas of Bolivia’s current situation are in full development in the rest of the region, currently shaken by other political and social upheavals that are all based on discontent with the leadership of their countries and their institutions, regardless of the political sign of their governments.
Francesco Manetto, an experienced Latin American correspondent for El País, interprets the resignation of Evo Morales as “the symptom of the exhaustion of a model that had generated a strong social response and at the same time the worrying demonstration that power in Latin America still depends on the Armed Forces.”
Roy Campos, a Mexican political scientist interviewed by La Tercera, believes that “the fall of Evo is the failure of a policy and a democracy. The flags with which he arrived were perverted. We are living a reconfiguration not of left and right, but the failure of traditional models of government.”
For the average person it may be evident to think of Venezuela with Morales’ resignation, although Maduro’s regime is fundamentally military ruled and, therefore, it is shielded by the High Command of the Armed Forces.
The complexities of the two countries differ.
RCN Radio interviewed international analyst Jairo Libreros, who perceives differences in the two government’s reactions to the reports of key multinational organizations. The OAS report about Bolivia, he says, had decisive effects only 12 hours after it was presented, while the report of Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on serious human rights violations in Venezuela, has not generated any reaction that points to a similar direction in Maduro’s regime.
“There are analogies, especially at the ideological level, but there are also differences in their implementation,” Francisco Manetto adds. “And the mere fact that in these elections there was an OAS observation mission and that its audit resulted in a new call for elections marks an important distance between the two governments, even if they had a similar project,” he writes.
“What has been seen is a symptom of their weakening, the social unrest that they have encouraged, sometimes with violence, and the impulse of an all-or-nothing policy within the opposition, which also contributes to the instability of the system,” he concluded.