In November 2020, leftwing president Evo Morales returned to Bolivia after being expelled by right-wing opponents with the aid of the United States. The Organization of American States (OAS), which has served as an appendage of U.S. imperial aspirations in South America for decades, conducted an audit of the vote tallies and deemed Bolivia’s election of Morales in 2019 illegitimate, forcing him to flee the country. The OAS’s assessment of the election aligned with the U.S. government’s unofficial position that Morales threatened its regional geopolitical interests. There were problems, however. The statistical analysis used in OAS’s 2019 report was “flawed,” according to The New York Times. Even so, U.S. criticisms emboldened Morales’s opposition and led to “a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history.”
JOSHUA FRANK is the managing editor of CounterPunch. He is the author of the new book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, published by Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Twitter @joshua__frank.
