All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, guys, I got Dave DeCamp on the line.
He is our Assistant News Editor at antiwar.com.
That means you can find him at news.antiwar.com there with Jason Ditz, of course.
But you can also find him at original.antiwar.com slash Dave underscore DeCamp.
It really should just be slash Dave.
We're going to have to fix that.
Anyway, slash Dave.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, bud?
Good, Scott.
How you doing?
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us here.
And everybody already knew this with their brains, but now you come in here with the more proof MIT study finds no evidence of fraud in Bolivian election that resulted in coup that would be the October coup of last year, 2019.
So go ahead, refresh our memory a little bit about the ouster of Evo Morales.
And then let's get into this new study.
Yes.
So Evo Morales, he was running for reelection in October 2019.
And during the election, as the votes were coming in through a quick count system that Bolivia has, the votes were paused after 80 percent.
And during that time, the OAS and some U.S. senators like Marco Rubio were making claims that during this pause there was manipulations going on, there was fraud.
And then when the count continued the next day, Evo Morales had a 10 percent lead on Carlos Mesa, his closest competitor.
And the Bolivia election requires the over a 10 percent lead to avoid a runoff election, which would mean another election between the two closest competitors.
So the claim was that during this 24 hour pause, votes were manipulated to give Morales that lead to prevent the runoff.
On November 10th or November 9th, the OAS, they released a preliminary report on this election and they concluded that there are manipulations in the vote.
And Morales conceded and he agreed to hold a new election.
But that wasn't good enough.
And the military and police called for him to step down.
And he resigned and he had to flee the country.
His vice president also had to resign and the head of the Senate.
So it left a vacuum for the office.
And Janine Ania is a right winger senator.
She is now the interim president of Bolivia.
So that's where we're at today.
Okay.
So now.
All right.
So, I mean, let's get into the discrepancy here between the OAS, the Organization of American States report, and then this follow up by the guy or two professors.
Who are they at MIT here?
Yes.
So, like I said, the OAS claim was during the pause, there was manipulations.
And when the OAS released a report, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, headed by Mark Weisbrot, they released their own report and said that that the victory, the 10 percent victory was consistent with the areas that needed to be tallied after the pause, which were largely supported Morales.
It was indigenous rural areas, which is where he gets most of his support.
And the MIT study that was just released last week, it came to the same conclusion that there is no basis for the OAS's claims and that the data showed, they studied the data, they ran simulations, that after that pause, those areas, they would have likely voted for Morales.
And the pause was also, it was expected, electoral officials said after 80 percent of this quick count, they're going to release that much and then they're going to pause it and go into the final tallying, which takes about five days.
And this quick count system, Bolivia added it to their elections at the request of the OAS because they thought their tallying took too long.
And if you look at this, this is all from the study that they had a judicial election in 2017 and they had a 2016 nationwide constitutional referendum.
And after 80 percent of the votes were counted by this quick count, it was paused and then the final tallying began.
So it's entirely consistent with their electoral system for this pause to happen, which is pretty important to keep in mind.
Yeah.
All right.
And so going back to the coup in October, I mean, there was real violence when he was forced out.
I know there were, you know, I don't know a lot about it, but I know there were attacks on some of his party members and what his sister's house was burned down and this kind of thing.
And then there were big protest movements that broke out among, right, like the Indians out in the countryside, essentially, right, his supporters.
And then, so what happened was that, were people killed in that?
Yeah, people, the numbers around 35 protesters were shot and killed, over 700 injured.
And it was mostly his, his supporters in the rural areas, coca farmers and stuff.
So yeah, it was a violent, it was a violent coup.
Like you said, his sister's house was stormed by protesters, Morales' house was stormed by protesters.
They wanted to arrest him and so he fled.
And keep in mind that he was the president at the time and this was an election.
And after an election, you know, power doesn't just change the next day.
His term was due to end in January of this year, January 2020.
So that kind of reveals, because the OAS, they released a more detailed report.
I think it came out in December of 2019.
I mean, everything was based on that pause, but they have, they're claiming that they have evidence of tallies being manipulated and stuff.
But just the fact that Morales had to flee the country before his term was up, after conceding to new elections and firing electoral board members that were accused of this fraud, he still had to leave.
And a lot of members of his party were arrested based on this electoral fraud.
And if you look at Jeanine Añez, the senator who took power, her party, Democratic Social Movement, they only got 4% of the vote during the election.
So yeah, I mean, it's really just revealing that he couldn't even finish out his term and he had to get out of the country.
And now what was the involvement of the CIA and the NED in this thing, do you know?
Well, you know, it's tough to say exactly what the involvement was.
In my piece, I go over some of the U.S. interference in the region.
So you mentioned the USAID.
So Morales kicked out USAID in 2013.
And of course, you know, it was portrayed as, you know, paranoia.
USAID, they came out with a statement like, oh, we provide such great aid to the country.
It's a shame for the people of Bolivia that their president is kicking us out.
He's a damn fool for ever letting them in the first place.
But anyway.
Yeah.
But documents came out in 2009.
I think it was through a FOIA that revealed USAID programs in the country.
Since he was a presidential candidate in 2004, they were looking to sabotage him and they focused on decentralization in eastern Bolivia, where people don't really support him.
It's not really his base.
So so he kicked out USAID in 2013, which, you know, seems like he could move.
The NED is still in the country.
And and if you look at their website in 2019, they spent this is just according to what's on the website, so they could have spent much more money.
But if you add up all the programs, it's somewhere around a million dollars.
And and the programs are called Monitoring the National Election Process, Promoting an Informed Electorate, Providing Independent News and Election Information.
So it's very focused on this this election stuff.
And as was revealed in a great report from the Gray Zone, a lot of the coup plotters, senior military officials in Bolivia were graduates of the School of the Americas.
This was before Morales took power.
Most of them, it looked like around like early 2000s, they attended the School of the Americas, which is a notorious training ground for coup plotters and of Latin America.
The example I used in the piece was the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador when U.S. backed death squads massacred civilians in a small El Salvador town that killed around 800 to 900 people.
So Morales, actually, he banned his his military and police from attending the school in 2008.
But there was a leaked, leaked audio came out.
I think it was between the election and the time that Morales was thrown out of it was mostly former Bolivian, Bolivian military officials, some people based in the U.S., you know, kind of plotting the coup.
And one of the things that they said was that they had the support of Rubio, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, that if Morales stayed in power, they would put sanctions on Bolivia or which isn't surprising.
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the funniest things, right, was the lady who declared herself president in the Senate there.
And the first thing she did was recognize Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
Come on, lady.
I mean, you really need to play that card in public.
Can't you just make a phone call and reassure people whose side you're on?
You got to do it like that is ridiculous.
And then Juan Guaido said, oh, she thinks she is Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah.
And Juan Guaido, you know, responded, Oh, I recognize you, too.
Oh, yeah, I recognize you, too.
That's great.
So but and yeah, so the OAS, the Organization of American States, it's a 35 member state organization.
But the one state that provides the majority of its funding, nearly 60 percent, is the United States.
So, of course, they, you know, promote the U.S. foreign policy and regime change in South America.
So, yeah, that's the situation.
And like with a lot of these coups, much doesn't get revealed right away.
Usually a few years later, you find out that the U.S. had much more of a hand in the coup or ignored it.
Like if you look at the 2009 coup in Honduras of Manuel Zelaya, that was under the watch of Hillary Clinton.
WikiLeaks cables that were released, I think it was that 2010, the State Department cables were released.
They show the U.S. embassy, the people there in Honduras, they said there's no doubt that this was a military coup, you know, in plain black and white English.
And if a democratically elected leader is overthrown, the U.S. is supposed to suspend their aid to that country, which Hillary Clinton's State Department didn't do.
And if you look at Honduras, the murder rates went up, the police were pretty brutal.
And that's part of the reason why a lot of the migrants on our border are from Honduras.
So now, I mean, hopefully things shake up a little better in Bolivia, but you can't be surprised if it becomes, if we get a high migrant rate from there now.
Yep.
And on that one, Obama started to say, and I think the Organization of American States started to say, oh, well, yeah, we're going to say, and Hillary Clinton contradicted him.
It's like, no, we support this.
This is fine.
And made the OAS back down.
Yeah.
And something that I discovered while I was researching for this piece, Trump, this was pretty quietly, he he waved, there's there's like a ban on aid for Bolivia right now within the U.S. government.
And Trump waved that.
So right now we can give aid, you know, USAID can go back into Bolivia is pretty much what that means.
Yeah.
And, you know, the template here is pretty obvious.
It's the same thing as the color coded revolutions.
I don't think they needed really a color and a big street revolt here.
But oftentimes a pretended disputed election is the pretext to go ahead and seize power and blame it on the other guy.
And then whether you're telling the truth or not is just depends on whether the U.S. government at the time is on your side or not.
Yeah, exactly.
And now with these countries in Latin America, all their neighbors are against them for the most part.
You know, one thing that I mentioned in the piece, too, was that Morales election was controversial.
It was it would have been his fourth term.
And under the 2009 constitution that he ratified, it had a two term limit.
So but he was able to serve two terms after that, and then he was running for his fourth term, which under the constitution was illegal.
They had a referendum and it was a close vote.
But the Bolivian people voted against him, against lifting term limits.
And then the Bolivia Supreme Court reversed that decision to allow him to run.
So there's certainly debate whether or not this was a legitimate bid for president.
But that's a debate for people in Bolivia to have.
And the U.S. intervention into it, the U.S. taking a side just delegitimizes any real opposition to and any real democratic opposition to Morales.
Yeah.
And you know what?
I mean, define term limits and all that.
There ain't nothing admirable about that.
But it's not like he was a strong man waging a police state against the people, that country or anything other than just, you know, the IRS.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, people, you know, the economy of Bolivia, it's it's done pretty well under him.
So people he has a lot of support, but he couldn't hold on to the support of the military and police for whatever reason.
And.
Yeah, all right, well, now, listen, so for people who want to look this up, first of all, again, the article is antiwar.com, MIT study finds no evidence of fraud in the Bolivian election too late now.
Wait, where's Morales now?
He's in Argentina.
All right.
So that's just one more thing.
He.
So they're they're doing a presidential election on May 3rd.
They're redoing it.
And this senator that declared herself president first, she said she wasn't going to take part in it.
But now apparently she is.
And there.
Yeah, the person leading the polls was from Morales's M.A.S. party, and he's just been charged with some like flimsy corruption claims.
And I think they're trying to keep them off the ballot because they still have the most support.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens, you know, on May 3rd when these elections happen again.
Yeah, that's funny that they're being that blatant about it.
But, you know, I guess I'd be interested to know what's the demographic map and what's the, you know, political what's the temperature like on the Indian peasants of the countryside side?
Because, yeah, I'd be willing to bet that they're all going to vote this time.
They're going to make sure they must be reacting to this.
And this is their chance to set it back the other way.
But of course, if all their candidates are locked up or exiled, it makes it difficult.
Yeah, but.
Yeah.
All right, well, and then, yeah, as you mentioned, we should again highlight that piece at the Gray Zone about the ties to the School of the Americas and all of that.
And I'm pretty sure I interviewed Max Blumenthal about that, didn't I?
I think that you interviewed Jeb Sprague, I think his name was, the author.
Yeah.
Thank you.
That's what I found out about him, he's from here.
And I just, I got what Joe Biden's got over here, man, I can't deal.
Yeah.
But yes, you're right.
It was Jeb Sprague.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you for that.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here for Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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Okay, now let's talk about this other news.
Oh, also from the gray zone.
We're just poaching these guys today.
I tried to get Aaron on the show, but he was just too goddang busy.
They got this whole new report over there about an update on the OPCW whistleblowers.
And it's again, the gray zone, the grayzone.com exclusive OPCW whistleblowers confront leadership's attacks cover up of Duma deception.
And by the way, did I remember to run this on antiwar.com today or yesterday?
Yeah, it's up on today's page.
Oh, good.
It's a spotlight today.
Good old Kyle.
Yeah.
Okay, everybody holding down my for it for me here.
Thank goodness.
Yeah.
All right.
Go ahead, sir.
This is a big deal, huh?
Yeah, it certainly is a big deal.
I've gone over these letters.
I'm going to give them another read through and I'll probably write something up on it this weekend.
But really, the key takeaway that this was the Duma whistleblowers response to the OPCW investigation into the leaks.
And really, the big takeaway here is something that they pointed out that this investigation was into the breaches of confidentiality, mainly a leaked engineering assessment.
And that concluded the two cylinders that were found in Duma were likely more likely manually placed and dropped from an aircraft.
If they were dropped from an aircraft, it would point the blame to the Syrian government.
Manually placed obviously points it to staging by the by Jaysh al-Islam, the group that controlled Duma at the time.
And the OPCW investigation concluded that both Ian Henderson and Inspector B, who wishes to still remain anonymous, did not disseminate this report to the working group on Syria media and propaganda where it was published.
So they point they both point out in their letters to the director general, Fernando Arias, that this was an investigation into the breaches of confidentiality and it concluded that we didn't we didn't leak this assessment.
So why are you smearing our character?
Why are you trying to smear our work?
It has nothing to do with the investigation.
Which is interesting, because my response to this, which I wrote a piece for, was that the OPCW investigation, they try to smear these two guys instead of addressing the claims in the leaks.
But the whole point of this was to find out who leaked this engineering assessment and it concluded that they didn't.
So why did they have to say all these things like, oh, these are just two individuals disgruntled that their views did not get included in the final report?
When that wasn't the point of the investigation at all, and they're usually kept very low key, according to Inspector B, his letter said, in the history of the OPCW, these investigations are kind of kept in house.
They're not they don't do press conferences about it like they did here.
So, yeah, it's it's pretty interesting.
And then the only like new information that I see in here, I mean, I've read a lot of this stuff over the past few months, I don't I don't recall seeing any anything about this was Ian Henderson, the author of the leaked engineering assessment, he said that, I'm sorry, I'm just looking at my notes here, but he said that the OPCW did not leak the engineering assessment.
I'm just looking over my notes here, that the drafters of the final FFM report appear to have accepted that victims throughout the apartment block at location two, location two was a cylinder was found on the roof and the idea was that it punched the hole in the roof and the gas fell to the basement and killed about 40 people where 40 people were dead that there's pictures of them.
But Henderson is saying that this is puzzling because the the upper parts of the building in the basement were not connected.
So he's saying the gas had to exit the building and reenter the basement door.
And that's a detail I don't think I've seen in any of the reports.
Yeah, I wondered about that.
I mean, that wasn't in the claims.
I just don't remember exactly whether they had an excuse for that or what.
Yeah, yeah, I don't think so.
I don't think so.
Well, yeah, it was also notable in there, too, where they essentially are saying, you know, I guess this is kind of Ian Henderson has made this point before, though.
Hey, don't call me a whistleblower.
I'm from here.
I mean, this is my thing.
I'm, you know, okay, don't he sees that as like marginalizing him in a way where he's saying, no, I'm just doing my job that I'm supposed to be doing is all.
And it seems kind of weird the way you guys are trying to marginalize me when Jesus spent my whole career here.
And why are you trying to make it sound like I'm from the outside when I'm not in this kind of thing?
You know, which all that rings pretty honest.
It's sort of like the guy who was allegedly, although seemingly, provenly sexually assaulted by a cop that we covered on the show earlier today that like, geez, why would he make that up?
You know what I mean?
He could have just said they hit him.
Same kind of thing here where, you know, it doesn't sound like a very good lie when he goes on kind of complaining about how his feelings are hurt that he's been kind of marginalized in this way, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, they both say, I mean, together, combined, they have about 30 years of service with those PCW.
They were there when it's the organization started in 1997.
And they're, you know, why would they go rogue, as they put it, and do this?
Like, what reason would there?
How does this benefit them at all?
As Inspector B put it, they're both in the autumn of their careers.
Well, and for anybody tuning in late, I mean, look, the obvious politics here going on are that the international community needed the OPCW to come up with a preconceived conclusion.
And when their investigators were concluding something differently, they had to just kick them out and rewrite their story and put it out their way because that's the business that they're in.
That's what happened here.
And everybody can see it.
And sure would make sense, too, that the third major sarin attack in Syria by the Assad government would also be a hoax like the first two, huh?
Yeah.
And another thing that Henderson pointed out in the OPCW's investigation, they said that Henderson and Inspector B, they were both rehired because they left the organization, they were rehired.
At a lower level.
But apparently the level that they were at doesn't exist anymore in the organization.
And that's the only reason why they were technically hired at a lower level.
But then they spun that as though they had been demoted for some legitimate cause or something like that.
Yeah, because it said that they were promoted to team leader, then they left and they're hired at a lower level.
And I remember I just Googled Ian Henderson, team leader, and it said in 2018 in an OPCW document from February 2018 that he was a team leader.
And yeah, according to these guys, it was just a position that doesn't exist anymore for whatever reason.
I'm sorry.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I was just going to say Peter Hitchens.
He published the response from them on his blog, the Mail on Sunday, which is pretty good, too.
And it's kind of a similar thing, but it's a good read.
I'm going to write something up on both of these.
That'll probably be up on Monday's page on Anywhere.com.
Great.
Yeah.
OK, perfect.
I'm sorry I'm late.
I got to go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Do you appreciate it?
Yes, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
OK, guys, that is Dave DeCamp.
He is our assistant news editor at Antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com and original.antiwar.com as well, of course.
And find his latest.
It's right there on the margin on the front page there.
MIT study finds no evidence of fraud in Bolivian election that resulted in a coup.
And then keep your eye on that space for his follow up on this report in the gray zone.
OPCW whistleblowers confront leadership's attacks.
Cover up of Duma deception.
That's by our friend Aaron Mattei over there at the grayzone.com.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
