Bolivian coup officials and supporters stalk international election
observers, launch violent incitement campaign
BEN NORTON·OCTOBER 15, 2020
BOLIVIA
By the time a team of electoral observers arrived in Bolivia including
members of The Grayzone right-wingers had already published a flood of
online threats, smearing them as terrorists and circulating photos
captured while stalking them in the airport.
By Ben Norton
SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA A group of The Grayzone reporters including this
reporter, Max Blumenthal, and Anya Parampil traveled from the United States
to Bolivia in order to join a delegation of independent international
observers of the countrys October 18th presidential election the first
vote since a November 2019 US-backed military coup removed the countrys
elected president.
Little known to this reporter and his colleagues, however, was that we were
being stalked on the way. A number of Bolivians covertly took photos of us
as we waited for a connecting flight in the airport in Chile, snapped more
as we boarded the plane, and published the images on social media, along
with our personal information and a flight itinerary showing when we would
arrive to Bolivia. The incitement campaign has led to a wave of physical
threats and calls for harassment.
It remains unknown whether those who stalked and photographed us were
private citizens or members of the intelligence apparatus surrounding the
hardline Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo Prijic, who is considered
the enforcer of Interim President Jeanine Anezs coup administration.
Hours after photographs of us were published on social media, Murillo issued
a thinly veiled threat. Our elections will be a democratic celebration, the
more observers there are, the better for everyone. We warn agitators and
people who seek to generate violence, they are not welcome. We will put them
on a plane or behind bars. Behave, we know who you are and where you are.
Bolivias Director General of Migration, Marcel Rivas, escalated the
incitement, tweeting, The [Supreme Electoral Court] sent invitations to
monitor the elections to 4 well-known extreme left agitators linked to the
criminal Maduro regime. The Ministry of Migration will enforce law 370:
those who violate the determined purpose of their stated objective will
suffer the consequences.
By the time we arrived in Santa Cruz, an eastern city that serves as the
power base of the Bolivian right-wing, an online network of Bolivian
far-right activists had unleashed a deluge of threats, outlandishly libeling
us as drug-linked terrorists and supposed paid disinformation agents,
inciting violence against international electoral observers officially
recognized by the government of Anez.
The Grayzone has obtained official letters of invitation from Bolivias
Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) / Plurinational Electoral Organ (OEP). The
Grayzone electoral observers Blumenthal, Parampil, and this reporter are
part of a US delegation organized by the human rights group CODEPINK: Women
for Peace.
While we have our own personal political views, we arrived in Bolivia as
independent electoral monitors following the guidelines presented to us by
Bolivias electoral court, and outlined by the United Nations.
Bolivia Grayzone Max Blumenthal election observer invitation OEP
The flood of threats that greeted us is just one example of the suffocating
atmosphere of right-wing intimidation in Bolivia on the eve of the election.
The campaign of menacing has targeted not only the Movement Toward Socialism
(MAS) party of former elected President Evo Morales, which is leading in all
major polling, but even international electoral observers approved by the
government of Anez.
Amid the atmosphere of intimidation, the unelected de facto government has
arrested and banned numerous MAS candidates. Meanwhile, the Western-backed
Bolivian NGO Ríos de Pie, which played a leading role in the coup to remove
Morales, has threatened journalists, including TeleSUR reporter and US
citizen Camila Escalante.
The OAS arrives after sanctioning a coup
In addition to allowing the entry of a small team of electoral observers
from CODEPINK, Bolivias unelected transitional administration signed an
agreement to allow the Organization of American States (OAS) to oversee the
October 18 election.
This pact was deeply controversial, given that the OAS and its avowedly
partisan, coup-supporting Secretary-General Luis Almagro played a key role
in the 2019 putsch.
The OAS spread unsubstantiated claims accusing the leftist government of
President Morales of electoral fraud. These accusations have since been
debunked by leading international experts, including scholars from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Washington, DC-based
Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
CEPR experts have furthermore warned that changes made to the electoral
process by Bolivias unelected transitional administration threaten to make
the upcoming 2020 vote much less transparent than the 2019 election.
Supporters of Bolivias far-right candidate Camacho in Santa Cruz threaten
electoral monitors
Most of the threats targeting international observers and journalists have
emanated from Bolivias commercial hub, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The richest
city in the country, Santa Cruz is the power base of the Bolivian right
wing, which has a long history of racism against the nations indigenous
majority.
Santa Cruz was instrumental in the November 2019 coup, in which Bolivias
democratically elected President Evo Morales was forced to resign by his own
military. Since then, Bolivia has been run by an unelected right-wing regime
that is not recognized by neighbors such as Argentina, but which enjoys
staunch support from the United States.
As The Grayzone electoral observers arrived in Santa Cruz on October 14, we
saw a rally held by supporters of Luis Fernando Camacho, a major figure in
the 2019 coup, who is now the far-right candidate in the upcoming election,
running against both the MAS and the center-right candidate Carlos Mesa.
(State Department cables published by WikiLeaks show that Mesa has
coordinated closely with the US government for more than a decade.)
Camacho was the leader of a powerful right-wing group called the Pro-Santa
Cruz Civic Committee, which was co-founded by Croatian Nazi collaborators
who fled to Bolivia after WWII, and whose young followers are infamous for
fascist-style salutes and anti-indigenous violence.
After the Camacho march, we saw his supporters mingling in central Santa
Cruz with distinctive white t-shirts reading Creemos, or We Believe, the
name of the far-right candidates political party.
It was some of these fanatical Camacho supporters who took to social media
to whip up an intimidation campaign against international electoral
observers.
Smearing independent observers as terrorists, inciting violence
On social media platforms, Bolivian extremists smeared The Grayzone editor
Max Blumenthal as a terrorist and supposed propagandist, who purportedly
came to burn the entire country.
Many of these fanatical users tagged the US State Department, the US embassy
in Bolivia, and officials from the unelected transitional regime, including
the far-right Minister of Government Murillo, in their incendiary and often
libelous commentary.
A far-right Bolivian activist and coup supporter, Nadia Beller, published
photos on Facebook and Twitter of The Grayzone electoral observers. The
images make it clear that we were being closely monitored while in the
airport in Chile. Photos of Blumenthal as he boarded the airplane in
Santiago were also published online.
Beller shared the itinerary of when our flight was due to arrive in Santa
Cruz, implicitly encouraging her followers to come to the airport to
threaten election monitors.
She also falsely smeared Max Blumenthal as a disinformation expert from
RT.
These stalker photos were subsequently amplified by prominent right-wing
Bolivian media personalities, such as Agustín Zambrana Arze.
Other extremists called for creating groups and stalking Blumenthal,
following and supervising him, filming everything he does.
A fanatic living in Virginia threatened the safety of electoral observers by
falsely calling them a terrorist threat in Santa Cruz.
This US-based user, Teddy Rivero, libeled Blumenthal with a series of
outrageous slander, claiming he is one of the most infuriating enemies of
Bolivias democracy, very close to pro-Cuba-Chavista drug trafficking.
American regime-change lobbyists also contributed to the campaign to
endanger The Grayzone electoral observers. Democratic Party activist Kareem
Rifai, who co-founded the group Students for Biden at Michigan, re-posted
the photos of The Grayzone electoral observers at the Chilean airport and
falsely tried to link Blumenthal to Russia and Venezuela, claiming they will
be working in overdrive to incite bloodshed in an already crippled
Bolivia.
Rifai has also worked in 2019 as a lobbyist intern at the Syrian American
Council, a neoconservative group that has lobbied for direct US military
intervention in Syria, and hosted an opposition extremist who called for the
genocide of Syrias Alawite religious minority, while also campaigning to
censor Blumenthals book The Management of Savagery.
In reality, numerous reports and our personal testimony on the ground shows
that it is Bolivias right-wing political forces that have been inciting
bloodshed, by threatening international electoral observers, journalists,
indigenous activists, and MAS party candidates and supporters.
Top Bolivian officials have themselves stoked these threats. The de facto
governments representative to the OAS, Jaime Aparicio Otero, a staunch
right-wing activist and supporter of the coup, publicly attacked electoral
observers from the Progressive International and Puebla Group. Aparicio
falsely smeared these independent monitors as activists from MAS who have
supposedly come to provoke.
The Progressive Internationals request for observer status was initially
rejected by Bolivias Supreme Electoral Court, but this decision was later
overturned, following public backlash.
In response to Aparicios inflammatory remarks, a Bolivian right-wing
activist posted a photo of Blumenthal and claimed he is an instigator who
is supposedly spreading false information.
Aparicio Otero has himself expressed extremist views. In November 2019, days
after the coup, Aparicio tweeted from Maryland that, For the intolerant
international left, being Catholic and of European descent has become a
crime. He accused the left of crucifying Camacho, and insisted, That
left is what has sunk Latin America.
Another Bolivian right-wing extremist falsely implied that Evo Morales or
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was paying Blumenthal, linking to a
photo of when he carried out a strictly journalistic interview with Maduro.
She threatened, Bolivia will be watching you, every single step that you
make.
Other far-right activists also falsely accused The Grayzone electoral
observers of being paid by Morales, calling Blumenthal a parasite who
is in our country to cause disturbances.
The Grayzone is a completely independent media outlet with no fiscal
relationship with any government.
This fact did not deter a horde of Bolivian right-wingers from claiming that
Blumenthal is a terrorist who works for the communists, who came to
produce chaos.
One wrote ominously, Bolivians will be watching you, in Bolivia the
socialists do not last
Do not misbehave.
Other fanatics tagged the US embassy, claiming the electoral observer
Blumenthal is in Bolivia preparing to burn the entire country.
This environment of threats and intimidation has made it clear that
supporters of Bolivias unelected coup regime are not open to holding a free
and fair election on October 18, one in which international observers, yet
alone candidates from the left-wing MAS party, are able to exercise their
fundamental democratic rights. Whether leaders of that regime will allow a
fair vote to proceed remains to be seen.
BOLIVIALUIS FERNANDO CAMACHOPRO-SANTA CRUZ COMMITTEESANTA CRUZ
