True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 109: Bolivia: Day of the Soldado
Aired: 2020-10-19
Duration: 01:17:27


=== Election Week Excitement (03:52) ===

[00:00:00]  Well, it's election week here at Truinon.
[00:00:03]  Mm-hmm.
[00:00:04]  That's right.
[00:00:04]  I've got my little newspaper hat on and I am in prison for exposing myself.
[00:00:12]  That's the election week promise.
[00:00:14]  Oh my God.
[00:00:15]  I am so excited about this election.
[00:00:18]  I can't wait.
[00:00:18]  I can't wait.
[00:00:19]  I'm going to be watching this so close on Twitter, looking at everyone's like, you know, what everyone's saying.
[00:00:27]  What is the news?
[00:00:28]  What's the buzz?
[00:00:29]  You know, what's going on at the polls?
[00:00:31]  I can't wait.
[00:00:32]  What's the youth vote like?
[00:00:34]  I'm always concerned what the youth vote is like.
[00:00:37]  Yeah.
[00:00:37]  Are they voting or are they just smoking weed?
[00:00:41]  It's tough to tell.
[00:00:43]  Yeah, no, this is this is, you know, they say that you can't vote fascism out of power.
[00:00:50]  But we're about to see that in action.
[00:00:53]  Right.
[00:00:54]  Oh, shit.
[00:00:55]  We're not talking about America.
[00:00:57]  No.
[00:00:57]  Yeah, we don't talk shit about the American elections.
[00:01:00]  Who gives a fuck?
[00:01:01]  Yeah, both those guys can suck my penis, both Howie Hawkins and Joe Jorgensen.
[00:01:06]  Can fuck off.
[00:01:09]  I'm not familiar with the other people running.
[00:01:10]  Wait, which one's Joe Jorgensen?
[00:01:12]  She is the libertarian candidate.
[00:01:15]  Wow, it's a lady libertarian.
[00:01:17]  Yeah, can you, Young Chomsky, can you play the Libertarian song?
[00:01:27]  Ah, there we go.
[00:01:28]  Love that.
[00:01:29]  I can't believe they made that their anthem in 2016.
[00:01:31]  That's really just a bold move.
[00:01:33]  All right.
[00:01:34]  No, we aren't talking about American elections, are we?
[00:01:36]  No, we are going down to Serenio America.
[00:01:41]  What?
[00:01:43]  South.
[00:01:43]  Does that mean South?
[00:01:46]  No, I don't think so.
[00:01:48]  well I fucked up there We're going down to South America.
[00:01:53]  We're still going down there.
[00:01:54]  Man, this isn't really a cold open.
[00:01:56]  We usually do a joke or something.
[00:02:03]  Okay, yeah, well, this one's kind of, okay, yeah, I'll do it.
[00:02:06]  I'll do it.
[00:02:06]  I'll do it.
[00:02:06]  Oh, God.
[00:02:08]  But it's, I'm going to do it.
[00:02:09]  Can you just promise not to get mad at me?
[00:02:12]  You have to promise me.
[00:02:13]  You have to promise me.
[00:02:14]  Look me in the eyes and promise me.
[00:02:16]  Please.
[00:02:17]  Okay, I promise.
[00:02:18]  Okay, thank God.
[00:02:19]  All right.
[00:02:20]  So St. Peter's hanging out at the Pearly Gates, right?
[00:02:23]  And he's like, you know, he's hanging out there.
[00:02:25]  He's playing dice to the guys.
[00:02:26]  He's fucking, he's in heaven.
[00:02:27]  He's got his wings.
[00:02:28]  He's flapping around.
[00:02:29]  And all of a sudden, for the first time in human history, a couple of Polish people show up.
[00:02:34]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:35]  They're wearing the little cabby hats.
[00:02:37]  They've got the collars up.
[00:02:38]  One of them's wearing just a full-on track suit.
[00:02:40]  He's from New York, doesn't speak a word of English, only racial slurs and like gold chains and stuff like that.
[00:02:47]  Fucked me.
[00:02:47]  St. Peter's like, what the fuck are you guys doing here?
[00:02:51]  Like, are you guys good?
[00:02:52]  And they're like, we got into heaven.
[00:02:54]  And St. Peter's like, what?
[00:02:55]  He's like, yeah, we got into heaven.
[00:02:58]  And St. Peter's like, he looks down a list, he sees their names.
[00:03:02]  He's like, Jesus Christ, so many Z's and Vs. Okay.
[00:03:06]  And he opens the gates and he goes back.
[00:03:08]  He's like, I got to check with the big man real quick.
[00:03:09]  So he goes up, he goes back to the manager's office, which is God.
[00:03:14]  And he says, God, there's some Polish people outside.
[00:03:18]  And God's like, yeah, I know.
[00:03:20]  I put them on the list.
[00:03:22]  He's like, well, he's like, yeah, they've been pretty good.
[00:03:24]  Let them in.
[00:03:25]  And St. Peter's like, Jesus, are you sure?
[00:03:27]  He's like, yeah, yeah, I'm sure.
[00:03:28]  I'm sure.
[00:03:29]  Go let him in.
[00:03:30]  So God's sitting there.
[00:03:31]  He's like, God, this guy, what is he?
[00:03:32]  Fucking, Jesus Christ.
[00:03:33]  He might as well be German.
[00:03:34]  He's such a prick to them or a British restaurant owner.
[00:03:38]  And all of a sudden, St. Peter comes running back and he's like, God, God, they're gone.
[00:03:44]  And God's like, what?
[00:03:46]  Where'd they go?
[00:03:47]  He's like, no, no, no, no.
[00:03:49]  The Pearly Gates.
[00:03:51]  Brace.

=== Setting the Stage for Change (10:31) ===

[00:03:53]  Guess what?
[00:03:53]  I had my fingers crossed.
[00:03:55]  So, boom, mad at you.
[00:04:20]  Well, like I said, it's election week.
[00:04:23]  And by that, I mean single election episode about not the American election.
[00:04:28]  Which, by the way, we're following up dog fucker week with election week.
[00:04:32]  So we've got, I guess we're doing the week theme now.
[00:04:35]  They're really the same if you think about it.
[00:04:37]  Yeah, yeah, true.
[00:04:39]  Hey, hey, check this out.
[00:04:41]  In this case, everybody's screwing the pooch.
[00:04:44]  There you go.
[00:04:44]  That was very cute.
[00:04:45]  That was good, huh?
[00:04:46]  Let's introduce ourselves.
[00:04:47]  Let's introduce the junta that's in charge of this podcast.
[00:04:50]  All right.
[00:04:51]  Well, hello.
[00:04:51]  I'm Liz.
[00:04:52]  My name is Commandante Field Marshal Hugo Bound.
[00:04:59]  No, that's a real guy, Brace Belden.
[00:05:01]  And we are joined by my lackey, who I get to head the secret police and do all of my biddings, conduct foreign assassinations and that stuff.
[00:05:11]  We've got Young Chomsky.
[00:05:13]  And then, of course, we've also got my paramilitary that is helping me record.
[00:05:18]  Yeah, okay.
[00:05:19]  Well, yeah, this is true, Non.
[00:05:20]  Hello.
[00:05:21]  So like we said at the beginning of the episode, which we don't usually do, but we messed it up.
[00:05:28]  We, huh?
[00:05:29]  Yeah.
[00:05:30]  Well, you know, yes, we.
[00:05:33]  No.
[00:05:34]  No, we're talking about the Bolivian election this week, which is happening.
[00:05:38]  If you're listening to this episode, the day it comes out, it's happening right now.
[00:05:44]  And it's actually a really, really big deal.
[00:05:47]  For people who maybe aren't following South American politics, Brace, can you give a little rundown of what we're talking about?
[00:05:53]  Absolutely.
[00:05:54]  So last October, there was an election.
[00:05:56]  And we'll go into this more in the episode, but just to sort of set the stage, last October, there was an election in Bolivia.
[00:06:02]  Evo Morales was running for his fourth term, which was judged legal by the Supreme Court there.
[00:06:08]  During that election, there was some very loud sort of claims of fraud by a group called the Organization of American States.
[00:06:16]  This was followed by right-wing riots and stuff on election day.
[00:06:21]  Evo Morales ends up winning the vote outright at 10%, so there wouldn't be a runoff because they have a system where if you don't win, we'll go into that more anyways.
[00:06:29]  He won.
[00:06:30]  That is followed by about 20 days of heightened social unrest, particularly among the middle classes in the cities.
[00:06:38]  There are riots, there are loud demonstrations, and there's condemnation from a lot of governments that already dislike Evo Morales and his sort of brand of Bolivian indigenous socialism.
[00:06:50]  On November 10th, Morales says, okay, we'll hold new elections, obviously under a great amount of pressure from foreign governments and from some social pressure within his own country.
[00:07:02]  And that same day, the police and military essentially announced that he has to leave the country.
[00:07:06]  We later found out they very much tell him he has to leave the country or they'll arrest him, probably shoot him.
[00:07:12]  He splits to, I believe, Mexico.
[00:07:14]  They ransack his house, kill his dog, destroy all his things, and charge him with terrorism.
[00:07:19]  There is a word for that where I come from.
[00:07:24]  That is a coup.
[00:07:25]  When the military makes a leader a democratically elected leader, or even a non-democratically elected leader, which is not the case here, but it would still be the case.
[00:07:34]  When the military removes a president from power, that is, whether you like it or not, a coup.
[00:07:39]  Yeah, so I want to just, we don't, the one thing we don't get into this episode, and I think is important for people to understand, is kind of like why this coup happened.
[00:07:48]  And it's not just that, like, I mean, you know, it's not just that like neoliberal capitalist powers like hate socialism in a broad sense.
[00:08:00]  Like, Morales really achieved some pretty incredible economic growth and prosperity over the past, what?
[00:08:10]  He's been in, he was in power 14 years, I think.
[00:08:13]  Yeah.
[00:08:14]  And, you know, he took over in like 2005.
[00:08:17]  To give you guys some perspective, when he took over in 2005, the GDP of Bolivia was $9.5 billion.
[00:08:25]  And in January of last year, it was $42 billion.
[00:08:30]  So that's the kind of growth that he's achieved in basically nationalizing all of Bolivia's natural resources, achieving like rapid and aggressive industrialization, you know, reducing, like massively reducing inequality and poverty.
[00:08:49]  Yeah, extreme poverty there was something like The mid to high 30% and he cut it by like 15, 20% during his tenure.
[00:08:57]  Yeah.
[00:08:58]  And so like the big things that he's nationalized, by the way, you know, is like water, gas, oil, you know, same thing.
[00:09:05]  And of course, something that we try to talk about a lot on the show, but also, you know, the lithium mines, right?
[00:09:15]  Many people may have seen a viral tweet from Elon Musk where he like half jokingly admitted to being part of a coup in order to have access to what are very plentiful rare mineral resources in Bolivia.
[00:09:34]  It was like, you know, pretty much like everything Elon Musk's, Musk touches, like really fucking disgusting.
[00:09:41]  Even if it was like a half joke or not real, I don't know.
[00:09:44]  But basically in the past, you know, in the last, you know, in the months since Morales has been in exile, a woman, Janine Agnes, has been kind of the interim leader of Bolivia.
[00:09:59]  She's a real girl boss, real hashtag girl boss out there.
[00:10:03]  And to like, it's hard to, I mean, she's been moving quick because she knows that she doesn't have a lot of time to kind of do what needs to be done in order to kind of destabilize much of Bolivia's prosperity.
[00:10:18]  And I think they, you know, frankly, I think they understand that the backlash to what, to the coup that they achieved, you know, it might not secure them power come next election, which is one of the reasons why they kept delaying the elections and using COVID as an excuse.
[00:10:35]  But in the, you know, in these like last months, what she's done is basically she's taken out multiple IMF loans.
[00:10:42]  She has privatized almost everything that was nationally owned.
[00:10:50]  She like basically is reducing the Bolivian state to a regulatory apparatus rather than what it was, which was like a very, you know, large state with robust investment in public industry and infrastructure, which is what led to its REPFID growth.
[00:11:08]  Now, that is opposed to the, you know, overlords at the IMF and the global capitalist power.
[00:11:16]  That is not what they want, right?
[00:11:17]  And they need access.
[00:11:18]  How are we going to do the Davos reset if there's nothing to reset?
[00:11:22]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:11:23]  Yeah, we got to do an episode about that.
[00:11:25]  You know, I think it's, you know, you guys to understand like something that brought Morales to power was, you know, he was a trade unionist and there were these really contentious fights in Bolivia over the privatization of oil and before that water that people really rallied.
[00:11:49]  I mean, real popular revolts, to the point they called them wars that lasted years over the nationalization of these public resources.
[00:11:58]  And I think the big thing that really happened during what we call the oil wars, which is right before Morales came to power, is that like basically these companies were setting up funnels into like into Chile of Bolivia's oil.
[00:12:17]  They were like sending it into Chile, like Chilean territory.
[00:12:21]  And then from there, they were sending it to California.
[00:12:24]  So almost all of Bolivia's oil at the time was going to the United States, right?
[00:12:29]  So I just kind of want to set the stage here of like what, you know, why this is happening.
[00:12:35]  And, you know, like, it's a really, you know, it's, these are serious guys and this is a real big deal.
[00:12:41]  And this is what they hate.
[00:12:42]  They hate prosperity for the poor.
[00:12:44]  They hate workers in power.
[00:12:46]  They hate anything that, you know, basically says fuck you to the IMF and any kind of, any of those global, you know, disgusting, yeah, just World Bank, IMF, Davos, you name them, all of them.
[00:13:03]  And, you know, to the fucking United States, giving a big fuck you to the United States.
[00:13:07]  And we should say too, I do want to say, sorry, I'm going long, but, you know, I want to give a special shout out to Barack Hussein Obama, who in his, you know, eight years in power did a lot to destabilize what were the kind of like South American alliances between different South American nations, you know, Bolivia, Brazil in particular,
[00:13:35]  to destabilize those, really, you know, and really fund right-wing paramilitaries and also right-wing kind of capitalist groups in order to undermine those like development, like cooperation and development like organizations that were that were thriving.
[00:13:56]  Yeah, I think that like there's also this impression that Trump maybe broke with the foreign policy consensus of the Obama years and stuff like that.
[00:14:04]  In some ways he has.
[00:14:06]  But there's also this sort of, I guess, thing that people mean themselves into believing where the Trump government and the State Department does not engage in the same sort of like, you know, globalist sort of expansionist interventions that have marked American history.

=== Jack Reacher's Return (02:26) ===

[00:14:24]  But like what you're witnessing in Bolivia and what you witnessed last year in the elections in Bolivia is that same thing.
[00:14:31]  Like this is warfare upon these countries, you know?
[00:14:34]  I mean, with Allende, you know, they didn't have to land troops to take them out.
[00:14:39]  You know, they famously talked about making the economy scream, destabilizing the political system.
[00:14:44]  And that's just what Pompeo and his fucking his cadre of freaks and lunatics were up to with this.
[00:14:54]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:55]  So without, you know, we've gone long.
[00:14:58]  As someone on Twitter said, you always go long, which so let's just get into it, right?
[00:15:07]  Yeah, let's start.
[00:15:12]  Yeah, I do.
[00:15:13]  Wait, Brace, I think we should start.
[00:15:14]  No, I hit it.
[00:15:18]  We already did that bit.
[00:15:19]  It was a very cute bit.
[00:15:21]  It was a very cute bit.
[00:15:24]  Let's get to the internet.
[00:15:25]  Let's go.
[00:15:25]  Let's start the show.
[00:15:40]  Well, good afternoon, folks.
[00:15:42]  We have a very special guest for you today.
[00:15:44]  We have Jack Reacher of the Central Intelligence Agency, an experienced South American hand, really had a lot of time in Caracas, and he's coming back to tell us his experiences there.
[00:15:56]  I'm just kidding.
[00:15:56]  Now, we have Jack Williams, the better Jack, a researcher at MIT Elections Data and Science Lab.
[00:16:02]  You might know him because every Bolivian bot on the internet wants his head on a pike.
[00:16:08]  But we are talking about both the elections that happened last year in Bolivia, where that resulted in a coup against Eva Morales, and Sunday's upcoming, or I mean, by the time this is out, probably today's elections happening in Bolivia, where there is quite a lot at stake.
[00:16:26]  And yeah, welcome, Jack.
[00:16:28]  How you doing?
[00:16:29]  Doing good.
[00:16:30]  Actually, funnily enough, full name Jack Ryan Williams named after me.
[00:16:34]  No way.
[00:16:34]  Jack Ryan.
[00:16:37]  I fucked it up in the first place because it's Jack Ryan, not Jack Reacher.
[00:16:40]  God damn it.
[00:16:41]  No, Reacher.
[00:16:42]  It's worse.
[00:16:42]  It's worse.
[00:16:43]  Yeah.
[00:16:43]  No, I think they're both CIA ops or whatever.
[00:16:46]  But yeah, no.
[00:16:48]  But yeah, nice to see y'all.
[00:16:50]  Excited to talk about this.

=== Referendum Results Disputes (16:05) ===

[00:16:51]  It's really surprised that y'all can get this turned around so quickly.
[00:16:56]  Oh, yeah.
[00:16:57]  Well, we employ like a team of animators in South Korea to do it for like a cheaper price.
[00:17:02]  So yeah, it's no problem for us.
[00:17:05]  So let's talk about Bolivia.
[00:17:09]  I'm sure that many of the people listening to the show will remember a somewhat contentious and confusing election that happened last October that resulted in in November, I believe November 10th, the military, let's say, politely asking Eva Morales to leave the Bolivia and then killing his dog and ransacking his house.
[00:17:29]  Eva Morales has since been in exile.
[00:17:31]  And yeah, it has been quite a year since then.
[00:17:36]  Yeah, no, it's been a pretty crazy time.
[00:17:39]  And if you're listening to what all the experts have to say, you know, this was, there was just fraud and it was easy.
[00:17:46]  Evo shouldn't have, like, you know, shouldn't have held that referendum and then actually ran it in the election and then, you know, win the election.
[00:17:55]  Yeah, it's been an insane year.
[00:17:56]  Like the current, like, I feel like it's been harder and harder to believe like kind of the progression of events.
[00:18:05]  Like, even though this seems like incredibly like falls within what we know about coups.
[00:18:11]  We know about coups in Latin America and the way that they operate, but it's also happening within, you know, COVID-19.
[00:18:16]  So there's been quite a few things that have occurred that have like, I think people have thought, you know, this is, you know, this is, oh, they're going to hold the election or they're just going to postpone it indefinitely.
[00:18:29]  But now we've reached a point where an election's actually going to happen, but a lot of other things have had kind of time to unfold and whether, you know, there's going to be any transparency, the amount of control that they were able to get over the electoral processes in Bolivia and, you know, already having issues with the contractors and changing over the unofficial reporting system.
[00:18:50]  It's who knows what's going to happen.
[00:18:52]  Like it's, well, you could kind of predict it, you kind of not predict, but there's a lot of unknown things right now.
[00:18:58]  Yeah, so maybe just to start, we should go over just some of the details about the election in last October, just for people that maybe weren't paying attention.
[00:19:06]  We should say that Morales was seeking his, I think it's his fourth, it was his fourth term, correct?
[00:19:12]  FDR style, baby.
[00:19:14]  Yeah, and he was also looking, I mean, what a lot of Western politicians latched on to because it was sort of an easy excuse for them was that he was also seeking to abolish the term limits that were in the, I think, 2009 constitution.
[00:19:30]  And that is what, yeah, like, you know, a lot of Western, you know, specifically American politicians used as an excuse to say that the kind of right-wing forces, you know, ousting him were correct because he was, you know, that he was leading a kind of anti-democratic movement.
[00:19:53]  But that's not at all the case, right?
[00:19:56]  Yeah.
[00:19:57]  So I guess, yeah, there's multiple things here.
[00:20:00]  So leading up to the election, it was essentially, you know, it was obvious that it was going to be a two-person race.
[00:20:05]  It was going to be Carlos Mesa from Civic Community, who was previously president from, I believe, like 2002.
[00:20:14]  I think he was president until 2005 when Morales took over, but he was the president that oversaw the mining protests and the protests over specifically the sale of the national oil company.
[00:20:28]  Yeah, what we call the guest wars.
[00:20:31]  Yeah.
[00:20:32]  And then you had the Movement for Socialism's Evo Morales, who people have probably heard of now.
[00:20:39]  And in this upcoming to the election, it was pretty clear that Morales was going to win, but it was probably not going to be at the same margin that he won in the previous election, especially since previously he actually failed in the referendum to extend his term limit, which he was only able to run because the Supreme Court of Bolivia basically ruled that he was allowed to run.
[00:21:05]  This is something to say that he clearly had enough support.
[00:21:10]  I guess there was some political motivation on whether they thought another candidate could win or whether a lot of people were uniting around Evo specifically because he did a good job of uniting both the indigenous community of Bolivia with the workers' community to make sure that they kind of vote in that singular block.
[00:21:27]  And so the election was coming up.
[00:21:29]  It was looking like Morales was going to win, but it also looked like it wasn't going to be as large of a margin that he had won in previous years.
[00:21:36]  Yeah, I think he'd won at 62% in 2009, which is pretty fucking high.
[00:21:41]  Yeah, no, it was a complete blowout.
[00:21:43]  Even his first election was a blowout as well.
[00:21:46]  But the referendum, we also have to remember that in Bolivian politics, it's not just like plurality wins or even necessarily like majority wins in a lot of cases.
[00:21:57]  So there needs to be a 10-point margin in presidential elections.
[00:22:01]  So the person who wins either needs a majority of votes or a 10% margin higher than the next candidate, which makes sense in a multi-party system where you might have some random fascist dude getting like 5% of the vote.
[00:22:16]  And if you don't meet that, then it goes to a runoff between the top two candidates, correct?
[00:22:21]  Exactly.
[00:22:22]  And then in that case, the majority candidate would win because it would just be a two-person race.
[00:22:27]  Additionally, it's worth mentioning that in the referendum that a lot of people cite Morales is losing, he won like 48% of the vote, which is higher than what he got in this election where he got around like 47% of the vote because he still had a 10-point margin, but hit 47% of the vote.
[00:22:46]  But he lost the referendum because there's only two choices on the referendum.
[00:22:50]  So like a lot of that kind of came back when people were trying to make the case that he was waning in popularity and that's why he lost, rather than the fact that it is a little understandable given that he didn't maybe mobilize his base in that election.
[00:23:05]  And then also there's actually just similar like kind of turnout statistics between the 2016 election and the 2019 election with the 2016 referendum.
[00:23:14]  So just real quick, I think we should sort of give a rundown maybe of like the social forces at play in Bolivia because they're sort of different.
[00:23:22]  They're certainly different than the ones in America.
[00:23:24]  But from what I understand, there is a huge sort of indigenous rural population that is the base of the movement for socialism.
[00:23:33]  And then many of the cities like in La Paz and Santa Cruz, there's a sort of liberal middle class and also like a very far right wing middle and upper class, which are represented in the two other candidates besides the Maas candidate in the upcoming election.
[00:23:51]  But from what I understand, that is generally the layout of it.
[00:23:55]  Maas has like huge trade union and indigenous support.
[00:23:58]  And then the sort of like neoliberal and then the far right parties have mostly like less indigenous and more like middle class sort of like Spaniard type support.
[00:24:12]  Yeah.
[00:24:13]  Yeah.
[00:24:14]  So I guess there's kind of two things here.
[00:24:16]  So like according to like demographic data, like Bolivia is like around like half or over half like indigenous.
[00:24:22]  So it's kind of a weird comparison even compared to a lot of these other countries.
[00:24:26]  But like other countries, there was like European migration, both in, you know, the original migration and colonization.
[00:24:34]  I guess, yeah, migration is a little weird way of phrasing it, but there was definitely migration also within the 20th century of Europeans.
[00:24:40]  You even have the cases of like, we talk about like in Brazil where there was like, you know, like Nazis going to Brazil or whatever.
[00:24:46]  There was also Nazis going to Bolivia and a lot of these other places.
[00:24:50]  So I think I forget the name of the guy, but there was a very specific Frenchman.
[00:24:56]  Yeah, Klaus Barbie specifically.
[00:24:57]  He basically ran Bolivia at one point.
[00:25:00]  I mean, he was the butcher of Lyon.
[00:25:01]  And he was part of a group called, I believe, the Fiancés of Death in Bolivia that ran cocaine, Zieghild, and death squads against left-wingers, supported directly by the CIA.
[00:25:18]  I heard a really interesting thing about him where essentially if someone were to insult Hitler in his presence, he would absolutely freak out.
[00:25:27]  Not a hidden thing.
[00:25:28]  Also was like, I'm pretty sure hired by German intelligence, which is basically funneling U.S. intelligence at that point.
[00:25:35]  So yeah, very interesting time.
[00:25:37]  But I guess getting back to social movements in Bolivia, so there's actually something really significant is there's a thing called the COB, which is essentially the workers' union in Bolivia, a very large group of trade unionists who have really organized around previous elections and have historically in Bolivia played a really large portion of their politics.
[00:26:01]  Throughout history, you can kind of look at some of the tactics that they took on blocking roads that we're also seeing during the coronavirus and around the suspension of elections.
[00:26:10]  We saw a lot of these things in the past.
[00:26:12]  And then it is also what brought Evo Morales into power initially is that these really discontented trade unionists who had seen worsening conditions because of the export of resources to other countries,
[00:26:25]  like essentially just selling off resources from the country and taking on huge loans from these international groups, like that they had kind of gotten the short deal throughout Bolivia's history and that Evo Morales presented an opportunity for the first time for them to take a good amount of power alongside there's a large amount of indigenous peoples in these union in these unions.
[00:26:45]  And even though Evo Morales is kind of like a mixture of both groups that have a lot of overlap, but also there is kind of the issue of like Evo Morales did have indigenous people like oppose him at some points.
[00:27:00]  Like there was there was issues with like the extraction stuff that was occurring and the building of roads for like the extraction of materials when he was trying to keep the economy of like I can't say too much of what his motivation was, but rather like,
[00:27:15]  you know, he reduced poverty in half while he was in power like pretty well and increased the economy pretty largely and paid off debts, which is kind of normally something that you just can't do and also like do a lot of these things that I think people would want to see from a like left-wing leader.
[00:27:33]  But in addition, like he did have his like opposition from indigenous people and from kind of not doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing and also kind of going back on some promises.
[00:27:43]  But overall, like I doubt that they would prefer Añez.
[00:27:49]  And I think that the interesting thing now with this upcoming election is that we're actually seeing more unity around indigenous groups that have like leaders who have previously been very critical of Moss now supporting Moss and coming out in support of him.
[00:28:04]  We should talk about exactly what happened.
[00:28:07]  When we say that a coup happened in 2019, can you give us a play-by-play of what actually occurred?
[00:28:14]  Yeah, a little bit of a dirty word coup there because people really freaked out about saying the word coup around this.
[00:28:22]  Except for Elon Musk a little like a couple months later.
[00:28:25]  He was fine with saying it just a couple months later.
[00:28:28]  Yeah, we could say extrajudicial removal from power.
[00:28:33]  Extrajudicial request to leave from power from the military.
[00:28:38]  But yeah, no, there was, so essentially leading up to the election, you know, Evo Morales was seeing not as high of support, but still like, you know, high support and was clearly beating out Carlos Mesa.
[00:28:49]  And when the results were coming in, there was, you know, initially, actually, Carlos Mesa had like the lead very early on in the reporting system.
[00:28:59]  But we also have to remember that reporting is not like uniform.
[00:29:02]  It's not all in at once, fully representative sample of what the entire country looks like, right?
[00:29:07]  Like this is going to come from disparate parts and different places are going to have different reporting methods, different levels of like education of poll workers.
[00:29:14]  We see this in the United States where, well, we have multiple time zones, but we also have places that, you know, close, close polls later.
[00:29:21]  We have reasons that, you know, certain places take much longer to process polls than others.
[00:29:25]  Like if you, you know, look at Florida, like, or look at many of these other places that have, you know, serious, I guess.
[00:29:33]  Problems with like the chains of custody and issues with counting ballots and under like being under-resourced in general.
[00:29:39]  But in the case of Bolivia, there was actually a stoppage not necessarily even related to that, around 84%, 83.5% of the vote count, where Morales had around a seven-point lead, which would have put him at a runoff because he requires 10%, a 10-point lead to be able to avoid runoff.
[00:30:00]  But he had a seven-point lead, and then there was a stoppage in the unofficial vote count, which is distinct because there are two vote counts.
[00:30:07]  There's one official and one unofficial.
[00:30:09]  And I can kind of get to that later.
[00:30:10]  But the unofficial vote count is kind of like what AP does or like what the New York Times or like all these other groups kind of do.
[00:30:17]  It's basically the only thing that people see when they look at election results.
[00:30:22]  So it's not like the official election statistics.
[00:30:25]  It's like it's like, well, it's the unofficial ones, essentially.
[00:30:29]  Yeah.
[00:30:30]  So these things called ACTAs, which are essentially the poll workers all sign off on results and then they take a picture of it.
[00:30:37]  And that picture is what is entered into the unofficial vote count.
[00:30:41]  But it has to be physically delivered and then reviewed to make sure that like, you know, the addition was correct and that there weren't any mistakes, which mistakes happen on these like always.
[00:30:52]  Like in every country, you'll see mistakes with like how poll workers calculate things, especially if they're doing calculations by hand.
[00:31:00]  But they have to be physically delivered to the electoral authority prior to actually being put into the official count.
[00:31:09]  So in the United States, we'll even see discrepancies between the final results on election night.
[00:31:13]  They even have the thing called blue shift, which liberals are all talking about right now, which I can kind of talk about later.
[00:31:18]  But so in this case, there was a cutoff in the unofficial vote count.
[00:31:22]  The unofficial vote count kind of ran at 84% and there was a stoppage and then that went into multiple days later where by the time the count resumed, which was at around 90 something percent or maybe in the high 80s.
[00:31:39]  I don't remember where it resumed.
[00:31:40]  I remember where it stopped.
[00:31:42]  But when it resumed, Morales had gotten the 10-point margin that he needed to win.
[00:31:47]  So basically the narrative formed out of that was like, oh, wow, seven-point lead.
[00:31:52]  It's impossible that that would jump to 10% or to a 10-point margin at the end of counting.
[00:32:00]  And so immediately the Organization of American States, which we could also talk about later, said that they were concerned about the results and concerned about a trend that was not explainable based on the previous information.
[00:32:14]  And then they said this really early on.
[00:32:16]  They said this, I think, on October 21st or whatever.
[00:32:20]  So very early on into the counting, that there was a disturbing trend and like the change of the vote share for Morales.
[00:32:29]  And that kind of pushed forward this narrative that he was illegitimate.
[00:32:33]  And there was, of course, the protests that followed with the burning of ballots at, I think specifically in Santa Cruz, they burned a good amount of ballots.
[00:32:42]  Yeah, I saw that.
[00:32:44]  It sort of reminded me of the Venezuela protests where the opposition actually tends to do these things to just discredit the election in itself, which we also could see sometimes in America as well.

=== DDoS Attacks and Election Discredit (15:03) ===

[00:32:56]  Well, yeah, because ultimately, who does authority fall back on when there is discontent and not a clear election?
[00:33:06]  It's going to be to the military in that case, which probably the opposition would prefer rather than any other forces within the country.
[00:33:14]  So basically, just to kind of like, like sum up what you just said.
[00:33:18]  So basically there was, so you keep saying they stopped the unofficial count.
[00:33:26]  Can you explain who they is in that sentence really quick?
[00:33:30]  Like who decided to stop it?
[00:33:33]  So there's an electoral authority in Bolivia who manages the elections and the reporting of results.
[00:33:38]  And so the committee is actually appointed by the people who had it appointed by the Bolivian Congress.
[00:33:45]  And then also the president gets a single appointment and that appointment becomes like president of like the TSE or whatever.
[00:33:51]  And they oversee like the management of elections.
[00:33:54]  In this case, they also contract out a good amount of like the processes to be able to do like the unofficial vote counts.
[00:34:01]  So they don't know specifically how to manage servers.
[00:34:04]  So they need a contractor to be able to do this.
[00:34:06]  So in this case, they had two contractors.
[00:34:09]  They had Neotech, which is a firm that handles the reporting of results and has done that for, yeah.
[00:34:13]  Yeah, I think they might be Panamanian or the security one is Panamanian.
[00:34:17]  I don't remember.
[00:34:18]  But I'll be able to do that.
[00:34:23]  So essentially, yeah, there's a cybersecurity firm that was called, I don't remember that.
[00:34:28]  It's ethical hacking was the name of it.
[00:34:30]  It's yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:34:32]  Ethical hacking, which just sounds like something from the corner.
[00:34:35]  Wait, it's really called ethical hacking?
[00:34:38]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:34:38]  But they're protecting you from the hackers.
[00:34:40]  They know how to hack it.
[00:34:41]  Of course.
[00:34:42]  And they were also, I guess, gauging the system.
[00:34:44]  They did like cybersecurity prior to the election.
[00:34:46]  This Neotech firm that was handling it was essentially this guy who had done reporting for years for the Bolivian election.
[00:34:55]  So this was something that he was used to.
[00:34:58]  The one issue is that this was probably the first time he was being like really monitored like super closely while doing this.
[00:35:03]  So it turns out that what happened was a test server ended up being run as a production server.
[00:35:09]  And I guess a production server didn't end up getting run.
[00:35:12]  So that they said that there was an external server accessing data.
[00:35:17]  And because of a large amount of requests, the firm that was ethical hacking notified Neotech of basically high alert, you're getting a DDOS attack because there was a certain amount of requests.
[00:35:31]  And because of this amount of requests, they were like, essentially, we have to shut down these results.
[00:35:36]  We're getting too many requests at this like short period of time, which ended up kind of being really bad in the long term.
[00:35:46]  I guess that they stopped the results.
[00:35:48]  Yeah, so basically a DDoS attack, which I think everyone kind of knows what that is, that's like a, you know, that's the classic hacker move.
[00:35:58]  Attributed denial of service.
[00:36:00]  Yeah.
[00:36:01]  So a DDoS attack is what stopped the unofficial vote count from happening, right?
[00:36:07]  Basically.
[00:36:08]  Whether it happened is kind of like also unknown.
[00:36:13]  So there's kind of a dispute between people who say that there was a DDoS attack, which triggered, you know, them getting a red alert and being told to essentially shut it down.
[00:36:22]  There's also the claim that they did it for no reason.
[00:36:24]  And then there's also the claim that essentially says that the cybersecurity firm notified the DDoS attack on what was like considered to them like normal behavior of around, I think, like 30,000 requests in three seconds is like the figure that they gave or something like that.
[00:36:39]  Which is, you know, all these small precincts and like and places where people are voting, like these polling locations, like sending results separately in like multiple iterations to a singular like application or to an application which like transfers it over to the unofficial account.
[00:36:58]  And then to fix it, he actually like did an SQL command immediately in it, but he says that it was logged in the Linux code and then also in the SQL code.
[00:37:07]  So to say that actually he didn't make a mistake, you could observe this.
[00:37:11]  And even in ethical hacking's report, they like reviewed like what was on like the second server.
[00:37:15]  And I guess like they should know like what commands he specifically did, but they say that there's a realm of uncertainty, which means that it could potentially have been, you know, there could have been foul play.
[00:37:26]  It also doesn't make sense.
[00:37:27]  And like we could talk about the overall narrative of fraud.
[00:37:29]  Like where was fraud occurring?
[00:37:30]  Were they stuffing ballots?
[00:37:32]  Were they hacking the system?
[00:37:34]  Where was the fraud occurring?
[00:37:36]  But yeah.
[00:37:36]  That's kind of what I want to get into too.
[00:37:38]  So like, I think the popular narrative around the elections in Bolivia, because there was all these protests from sort of these middle class groups in the cities leading up to the election.
[00:37:48]  And then when the election itself happened, there was this thing that tends to occur when elections happen in, let's say, countries that are less than close to the United States, where there becomes this sort of media narrative and this narrative on Twitter and this sort of narrative among certain journalists in their social media presence of like a popular uprising against whatever leader sort of is in the crosshairs.
[00:38:15]  That seemed to be the case with this as well.
[00:38:19]  And there's all these sort of unsourced and unverified photos of, there's sort of like, I guess we can call them voting atrocity photos.
[00:38:28]  Like somebody burning ballots, somebody standing in front of a box of filled-out ballots, you know, whatever, sort of sort of photographed ballot tampering that we don't actually know usually who's in the picture or what they're doing in the picture or where the picture is even from most of the time.
[00:38:45]  But it all serves to build this narrative in this case that Moss is engaging in not only election tampering, but like heavy-handed, you know, not just electronic tampering, but actually like physical tampering with the actual ballots themselves.
[00:39:01]  Yeah.
[00:39:02]  If you want to see any of these videos, just go onto Twitter and say there was no fraud in the Bolivian election.
[00:39:07]  And then you should get like 10 videos in your comments like showing you these videos that these people are putting forward.
[00:39:16]  But these, yeah, like to at least the researchers, the big concern is like fraud like happens in elections.
[00:39:23]  And there's like dumb fraud and then there's kind of like, you know, an actual, I guess, conspiracy to commit fraud among a political party and institutions that are able to actually like implement that type of fraud that's mentioned.
[00:39:35]  And in the OAS report and then also in like, you know, subsequent reports and subsequent explanations of how fraud is occurring, there's been very little to actually go through and say like where this fraud was occurring and how it was occurring.
[00:39:48]  Instead, they kind of scattershot and said like every little small, like either like poor practice that was implemented in the election or like thing that just went wrong or wasn't done quite right was somehow evidence of like mass fraud that was able to be able, like, that was able to see that, I guess, at one point that they were winning the election and then say, oh, we have to fix this, stopped it, and then somehow, you know, manufactured ballots and like was prepared to like, I guess,
[00:40:17]  like boost results by 3% to the three-point margin.
[00:40:22]  Like the what I will say this narrative itself too was set essentially by the Organization of American States.
[00:40:29]  And listeners might not be super familiar with them.
[00:40:32]  I think that really the most they've been in the news lately is from the Bolivian elections.
[00:40:36]  But they certainly had, just to back up a little bit, they are a continental organization that's essentially like, I believe just like all both North and South America that is run by the USA and funded, as far as I understand, mostly by the United States.
[00:40:56]  And certainly their actions in the past, I'm thinking especially of Haiti and their just like incredible tampering in the Haitian election, serves the goals of the people who pay the bills.
[00:41:11]  They are run by, I can't remember the guy's name, but a sort of right-wing guy or a guy who's even drifted more and more right-wing as time has gone on.
[00:41:21]  Almagro, yes.
[00:41:23]  And have essentially like positioned themselves against the pink tide governments and really against left-wing, any sort of left-wing government in the Americas.
[00:41:35]  And so the OAS really like sprung into action in the 2019 elections and like put out these press releases and put out all this stuff that essentially was accusing the Morales government of mass fraud.
[00:41:49]  And that culminated in eventually a report.
[00:41:52]  But I think it was just, it was sort of a step, because the OAS often focuses on election moderny.
[00:41:57]  Personally, if it was me, probably wouldn't let them in the country.
[00:42:02]  And they were able to, from that, really set this narrative of fraud and tampering and that Morales' government was totally illegitimate.
[00:42:12]  Yeah, okay.
[00:42:12]  So first, I think it's really important to mention in terms of like proving fraud, that even if fraud occurs, like you have to prove that fraud actually changes the outcome of an election.
[00:42:21]  And what the OAS did that was kind of novel here was that they, you know, well, there was a few things that were a little strange.
[00:42:27]  Like the OAS was originally founded to oppose communism.
[00:42:31]  Like it was fully an anti-communist organization that switched over to observing democratic elections in like, I believe, like probably like around the 70s and 80s and 90s.
[00:42:42]  Like I think it was the 80s.
[00:42:44]  But the democratic nature of the OAS has pretty much been normally like, you know, kind of a checkpoint on it.
[00:42:52]  Like famously, I think at the Venezuelan election that was in the early 2000s, they observed and didn't actually say anything, even though they kind of were like tacitly opposed to Chavez's re-election.
[00:43:06]  Like they didn't really say anything because they didn't have evidence or really enough to like make a case for like fraud.
[00:43:12]  It wasn't until the 2017 Honduras election that they really actually like, you know, presented a case where fraud was occurring.
[00:43:21]  And it's like pretty much that's normally the case study that people use for like fraud in an election.
[00:43:28]  But in this election, the OAS really quickly said that they were concerned about the change in the trend in the trap.
[00:43:37]  I don't think that they did any statistical analysis at that point.
[00:43:40]  I think that they knew that there was a stoppage in the trap.
[00:43:42]  And no matter how it was going to come out, if it was coming out more in favor of MOS, they were probably going to say that fraud occurred.
[00:43:49]  And then later on, they went through kind of the steps to attempt to justify it.
[00:43:53]  If you look at the original report, they have these discontinuity graphs, which are almost comical in how badly they're formed and how badly the argument really is.
[00:44:03]  And in later revisions of the.
[00:44:05]  What's a discontinuity graph?
[00:44:07]  So, okay, so a discontinuity plot is what you're doing is you're trying to show that a discrepancy happened at a certain point.
[00:44:13]  So you're trying to find if there are breaks in this plot to show that a trend is going in a specific way and then something happens and shows that something else is that something else changed.
[00:44:23]  And you try to control these to essentially say, was there other forces at play or was something else happening?
[00:44:28]  But if there are two differences between the two sides of these plots, and I can show an actual picture of it, but that probably doesn't help a podcast.
[00:44:36]  But essentially, if there's a noticeable difference between the trend before and the trend after, you'll see a break.
[00:44:45]  And it essentially is shown as a, and if you look at either of all the OAS's reports, their entire argument is built around these breaks, is built around the idea that there is cutoff points, whether they actually occurred where the cutoff actually occurred or whether they occurred at the 95% point.
[00:45:03]  Or now, literally recently today, the author of the OAS report is trying to say that there was a discontinuity at the 91% point now, literally just scattershotting that there is some inexplainable break in a trend of reporting election results that he hasn't really considered that any other factors in that, which is like, what about geography?
[00:45:25]  Like, what about any other explanation of why people would vote later than others?
[00:45:30]  Do people with different economic backgrounds vote at different times of the day?
[00:45:33]  There's a lot of things that people ask when studying like American elections and the changes that occur in absentee and provisional voting.
[00:45:40]  So provisional voting that happens on election day with a person who doesn't have a registration record, gets counted afterwards.
[00:45:46]  But they tend to find that those go much more in favor of Democratic candidates.
[00:45:51]  Exactly.
[00:45:52]  In San Francisco, there's a lot of people, not a lot of people, but a good amount of people vote by mail or vote and turn in their ballots early.
[00:46:01]  And overwhelmingly, that population that does that votes for the more moderate or conservative candidates.
[00:46:07]  And so at the beginning of elections, there's always this big dump of ballots.
[00:46:12]  And all the conservative and moderate candidates usually get a big boost.
[00:46:15]  And in fact, you can kind of guess that if a more left-wing candidate gets a lot of votes during that period, that they're probably going to win because the actual poll voters generally favor them a lot.
[00:46:27]  And so I imagine that same thing plays out, except in Bolivia, you have like mountainous and jungle zones and stuff like that.
[00:46:36]  And so it's like, it's even more like, obviously there would be, it's not as like cut and dry as organizing an election in like an urban neighborhood or something.
[00:46:45]  Yeah.
[00:46:46]  Well, there's a lot of things that play there.
[00:46:48]  Like there's the level of education of poll workers.
[00:46:50]  So poll workers are chosen randomly in Bolivia.
[00:46:53]  So like people who are selected to be like poll workers are essentially sampled from the population and then chosen to be poll workers.
[00:46:59]  So they could literally just be like, you know, any person who has, you know, maybe like a first grade education.
[00:47:05]  Some of these people might not even be literate.
[00:47:07]  There's an issue that they pointed out with signatures and kind of these inconsistencies of signatures in moss supporting regions.
[00:47:14]  And one of the kind of things that they cite is the fact that like there's kind of these irregular, like not real signatures, as they kind of put it.
[00:47:20]  And they're just like lines or whatever.
[00:47:22]  But this is kind of a known thing for people who are illiterate.
[00:47:24]  They don't have like kind of a standardized signature that they can use.
[00:47:27]  The classic X.
[00:47:29]  Yeah, the classic X.
[00:47:30]  Yeah.
[00:47:30]  And that's what they cited as a reason is that poll workers were using X's instead of an actual like signature, I guess, as they would put it.
[00:47:38]  And the issue with this is that, you know, this is, it's clearly just a scattershot.
[00:47:41]  Like, I don't think they thought that like that would be the largest reason, but they just had to give enough reasons and then also like to just legitimize the way that things were going to go.
[00:47:49]  It wasn't that.
[00:47:50]  It was like, they didn't have to convince like a majority of people at any point.
[00:47:53]  They just had to convince like, I guess, to put a like, they just say fraud happens.
[00:47:58]  How many people are actually going to look into it?

=== Election Frauds and X's (10:42) ===

[00:48:00]  What reason do they need to justify it?
[00:48:02]  I think was kind of their way of looking at it.
[00:48:03]  Because when you actually looked at the data that they provided, you could predict the results.
[00:48:08]  And then multiple people have said that since, which is incredibly wild.
[00:48:13]  Yeah, I think that that's like a key point.
[00:48:15]  Because I want to say like, you know, to our listeners, like, if you didn't catch all the intricacies that Jack just laid out, like, don't worry, because also our politicians didn't even actually look into any of this shit.
[00:48:25]  Like, that's the whole thing that is so wild is that the OAS literally just came out and said all this stuff.
[00:48:32]  And everyone was like, oh, well, if the OAS said it, and we don't really know who they are, but sounds official sounding.
[00:48:38]  So let's go with them.
[00:48:41]  A narrative starts swelling, like you mentioned, on Twitter, which, you know, I won't get into that.
[00:48:50]  You know, starts swelling on Twitter.
[00:48:52]  Politicians pick it up.
[00:48:53]  Mainstream media picks it up.
[00:48:54]  This is how news cycles work.
[00:48:56]  And bam, you've got Western politicians saying, oh, this is a completely fraudulent election.
[00:49:05]  You know, Morales didn't win.
[00:49:07]  This is insane.
[00:49:08]  What's going on?
[00:49:10]  You know, we need to make sure that, I mean, even, you know, left-leaning liberal politicians saying like, we need to make sure that Bolivia holds like free, fair, democratic elections, all based off of this, like this one body making these kind of, like you say, scattershot assertions that no one's really bothering to look into because it's kind of boring and messy.
[00:49:34]  But I think what's key here is that, you know, at this, well, not at this point, but soon after, like you actually, you yourself enter this story.
[00:49:45]  Like, Jack is actually part of this kind of long story that we're trying to lay out.
[00:49:51]  And I think that that's what's so fascinating because you actually did look into all this data and you reported on it and it upset a lot of people what you kind of found out and laid out.
[00:50:02]  Yeah, I think I can generally express that initially as results were coming in, like being kind of, well, like initially when I saw the election, I thought like things were already kind of insane.
[00:50:14]  And I think I was following it as much as other people were really following it and seeing like, oh, wow, you know, they're trying to make a case that, you know, there's fraud and they're just saying fraud, fraud, fraud.
[00:50:24]  And then you have what happened on like November 10th.
[00:50:26]  And then I was completely dumbfounded that, you know, what had been made the case to that point was what they were trying to say.
[00:50:33]  And so like previously, like I primarily focused on American elections, but there's a trend within American elections post-2016 really to look into kind of the security of American elections, but it's kind of with a different flavor than it's done with these international observers.
[00:50:48]  So in the United States, a lot of election like observation and research is built around, and the funding is definitely built around building trust in American elections.
[00:50:58]  They are looking in and doing like smelt tests of particular tactics and ways of measuring things that are either bad, like we don't do in the United States, look at exit polls and compare those to official results, right?
[00:51:11]  Like that, that is something that I think people were trying to do in the primary with like kind of the irregularities around Iowa reporting.
[00:51:20]  Right, right, right.
[00:51:21]  I guess.
[00:51:22]  But it's just something that like kind of we as like academics have said like, oh, wow, you know, there are serious issues with the way that exit polls are conducted and that there are biases that are kind of known That make you know predicting things incredibly difficult.
[00:51:36]  Like you can you can do these things and there's a level of accuracy in predicting like the outcome, but that's an A or B outcome.
[00:51:42]  In this case, you're trying to predict a percentage whether like that threshold was met or whether that threshold wasn't, not kind of the two, the two different choices there.
[00:51:54]  So I guess what's what's really interesting is that like what people have been doing in the United States and basically how you can say an election is fraudulent or not, especially because so post-2016, everyone's saying that there was fraud.
[00:52:07]  Trump only won because of fraud.
[00:52:09]  All these like, you know, random people who were just like, you know, the only way that a racist man can win in the United States is clearly because a Russian bot said vote for Trump.
[00:52:18]  Because the memes with Bernie Sanders without his shirt on, which made me vote for Donald Trump because I figured he's also just a guy who could take his shirt off.
[00:52:27]  Yeah, it's the reason my polling place shut down was because of that.
[00:52:31]  But yeah, so a lot of organizations became very concerned with the trust in American elections and came up with kind of ways of doing, there's a thing called risk limbing audits.
[00:52:41]  So auditing an election, looking at ballots, the chain of custody to see how those, if we like sample those results, how do they compare to the overall results?
[00:52:49]  That doesn't exist in a lot of places, even in American elections.
[00:52:52]  And we've kind of come to the conclusion to say like, oh, well, just because you can't predict the outcome in a lot of these different places doesn't mean that there's like automatically fraud occurring, right?
[00:53:01]  Like just because like, I think like Broward County, Florida would have like, you know, a bunch of ballots found in someone's car or something like that.
[00:53:08]  Famous, famously great county for counting elections, Broward.
[00:53:12]  It turns out that people actually were just giving oxycontin at the polls instead of the.
[00:53:17]  And so essentially, I was like, oh, wow, damn.
[00:53:20]  Imagine if someone did this for our elections.
[00:53:22]  Like, they would be able to come up with all sorts of issues, especially because nearly every single state and in some cases, counties have their own ways of implementing elections and ways of counting.
[00:53:32]  I mean, remember, remember in the 2016 primary that shit that happened in Las Vegas, where they just declared for Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders?
[00:53:43]  And it was like this insane outrage.
[00:53:45]  But like, you know, if that had happened anywhere else, if there was like someone in front of a room full of people voting the opposite way that declared the incorrect winner, I mean, there would be, you know, tons of outrage and op-eds and this or that newspaper.
[00:54:00]  But it's just, it's definitely not the case.
[00:54:03]  Not even that, though.
[00:54:04]  It's like, imagine if literally any, you know, like election watch body looked at just the like the amount of security flaws in any given, like these state contracted digital voting booths or whatever are insane.
[00:54:22]  I want to specifically shout out the one in Los Angeles County.
[00:54:26]  It's called like Vera.
[00:54:27]  I can't remember what it's called.
[00:54:28]  Vera vote or something.
[00:54:30]  It is a really, really insane system.
[00:54:33]  And if I, I mean, I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure, doesn't Bolivia use hand-counted paper ballots?
[00:54:40]  Yeah, which is funny because that's what everyone in the America in the United States wants.
[00:54:43]  Like now, we kind of have gotten to a point where like a lot of those machines are getting phased out because post-2000, because of the butterfly ballot, and people were like, whoa, we got to get rid of these like archaic ways.
[00:54:55]  I have an idea.
[00:54:56]  Let's like, you know, create a voting machine with Wi-Fi.
[00:54:59]  Like, that would be dope.
[00:55:00]  Like, and then they're just like, oh, wow, these are incredibly double-like.
[00:55:05]  By like insane companies that are completely, completely, you know, double.
[00:55:12]  Yeah.
[00:55:13]  No, but it's true.
[00:55:14]  It's like, and then you've got in Bolivia, like literally like the safest way to count votes, which is why the United States will never fucking do it.
[00:55:20]  And also it doesn't involve any contract, you know, any private contracting, which is basically probably the main reason why the United States will never do it, is hand-counted paper ballots out in the open, right?
[00:55:33]  That is the safest fucking way, which is why they'll never fucking do it.
[00:55:36]  So it's like, you know, for, you know, any, anyway, my point is that it wouldn't even need to be, like, I think that's what's key for people to understand.
[00:55:44]  Like, it's not even like the, I mean, the example of in 2016 is like completely insane, the one that you brought up, Brie.
[00:55:52]  But like any like third-party election watch body could find any number of vulnerabilities in our, like, in our election system that aren't even, like, that don't even like look like outright fraud or outrightly problematic because there's just so many points that can be compromised.
[00:56:13]  Yeah.
[00:56:14]  And so in the case of Bolivia, like, I guess kind of doing that smell check myself, I was just like, I guess I've said that multiple times, but looking at this and being like, hey, like, I know how people like talk about these sorts of things in the United States.
[00:56:27]  This uses an excuse that like, you know, there should be some, that, that the results of the unofficial vote count should reflect somehow perfectly what the end result would be at every point on the graph.
[00:56:39]  So imagine like, essentially, there should be no change in election results at any point of the sampling of results when they get sent in.
[00:56:46]  Which is just insane.
[00:56:47]  That's absurd.
[00:56:49]  Yeah, because it makes the assumption that there's no like additional factors, I guess.
[00:56:53]  Like there's no, there's no geography or there's no like income or these other things that could affect it.
[00:56:58]  So immediately I was like, you know, this is extremely problematic.
[00:57:01]  And then the people at the Center for Economic and Policy Research reached out specifically because I think I like angrily said something about it initially.
[00:57:10]  And then they asked if we, if I could take a look at their report.
[00:57:13]  And I, you know, they had, I had already seen it, funnily enough.
[00:57:18]  But I took a look at it and it was, you know, I thought it was, you know, nearly like dispositive.
[00:57:25]  Nearly completely disproved all the points that were made in the OAS report, like at least the statistical evidence that was provided at the end.
[00:57:33]  It took, you know, multiple reports since then to kind of, and also the OAS changing its narrative multiple times since then, um, to get to the point where, you know, we're actually like, uh, where we are now, right?
[00:57:46]  Where we know that, like, this is this is like awful.
[00:57:50]  This was an awful way of phrasing it.
[00:57:51]  And they like, who knows whether they knew what would happen in those like upcoming days.
[00:57:56]  Like, I certainly have my own views on that, but like, the, the like strategic, I guess, uh, like, uh, putting like, I guess the statement that they made initially in the election saying that there was a disturbing trend really, really affected things in the future.
[00:58:13]  I think that they even hired a statistician after that to prove essentially what they needed already.
[00:58:18]  I don't, I don't necessarily think that they had the results in that moment.
[00:58:21]  Or, well, they definitely didn't have enough information at the point that they made the statement.
[00:58:24]  Yeah, they hired some mercenary statistician.
[00:58:27]  Yeah, yeah, Irfan New Ruddin.
[00:58:29]  I feel safe saying his name here because he is a very mean person and like a very like he just he did a hack job and also is still defending his point even though he's proven wrong.

=== Concerning MAS Elections (15:12) ===

[00:58:42]  And like, I guess, you know, there's still, you know, who knows what happens.
[00:58:48]  But in this case, like he made clear mistakes and is not willing to fess up to his own mistakes.
[00:58:53]  I guess he said sorry, but he still believes his conclusions.
[00:58:55]  That's what he, that's what he said today.
[00:59:14]  So we've got, you know, just to sort of, you know, move through the history a little quickly, November 10th, like we mentioned, Ivo Morales is essentially kicked out of the country by the by the military and the police.
[00:59:27]  There are, of course, mass protests by Maas.
[00:59:31]  That's kind of a weird way to construct that sentence.
[00:59:34]  A right-wing woman from a very unpopular political party named Agnes is put into power who swears in on like a giant goofy oversized Bible.
[00:59:47]  A ton of MAS politicians are forced to resign, leave the country.
[00:59:51]  They are charged with sedition and terrorism.
[00:59:55]  Supporters are cracked down upon across the country.
[00:59:59]  And when they put the barricades up, they are fired upon.
[01:00:02]  Funnily enough, during COVID-19, MAS supporters and indigenous people put up barricades.
[01:00:09]  I can't remember around what city.
[01:00:11]  They put up barricades around one city in a protest.
[01:00:14]  And the Agnes coup government, which by the way, is a government with like literally 2% supported party.
[01:00:22]  It's like if your neighbor was president or something, like it's incredible.
[01:00:26]  But they actually are trying to file human rights violation charges against Moss in the International Criminal Court because Moss was holding protests.
[01:00:36]  The crackdown has been significant.
[01:00:39]  It has been tacitly supported essentially by all American politicians.
[01:00:43]  Agnes has opened up relationships very well, or excuse me, widely with Israel and other countries that Bolivia had previously not been close to, immediately took IMF loans and essentially does exactly what everybody in her position would do.
[01:00:58]  A coup government acts the way a coup government acts, and it serves the people that put it into power.
[01:01:05]  The thing is, there's also supposed to be elections soon.
[01:01:08]  So I think we've got a little time left.
[01:01:11]  I think we should kind of go over what's come up with those because those elections have been delayed three times, ostensibly, I believe, because of COVID.
[01:01:18]  I think a lot of people, including myself, believed it was just not going to happen.
[01:01:22]  Evo Morales is forbidden from running.
[01:01:25]  A bunch of his supporters are in prison or facing charges.
[01:01:29]  They actually tried to charge Morales with pedophilia for taking a picture with his, I believe, like assistant's daughter and just like a normal picture you'd take with somebody else.
[01:01:39]  That didn't really take off, but it really, the Bolivian tabloids really went with it.
[01:01:44]  Does not pass the Truanon smell test.
[01:01:47]  And so we've got a new election coming up.
[01:01:50]  Coming up, I believe the day this episode should be out.
[01:01:53]  And we've got three candidates.
[01:01:55]  We've got Luis Arce, or I never know how to pronounce that, but Arcee?
[01:01:59]  Arce?
[01:02:01]  Who's a former official in Morales' government, an economist for he's the candidate for MAS.
[01:02:06]  We've got Carlos Mesa, the former president of Bolivia that Jack mentioned earlier, neoliberal guy, exactly what you'd expect.
[01:02:12]  And then you've got Luis Camacho, who was the well, he is a scumbag, but he was the former president of the civic committees of Santa Cruz, which is like a racist, far-right, I believe, Catholic organization called the Bolsonaro of Brazil.
[01:02:27]  And he's very close to a guy named Branco.
[01:02:29]  I don't know how to pronounce this guy's last name, although I've talked about him before on the show.
[01:02:32]  Jovichevic, who's a Croatian Bolivian.
[01:02:36]  And just like Germans, if a Croatian guy came to South America after the 1940s, I would be a little suspicious.
[01:02:43]  This guy's parents did.
[01:02:47]  And he was involved in a plot to assassinate Evo Morales in 2009 with other far-right forces.
[01:02:52]  And so there are, Agnes announced she is not going to run for president, I think, in an announcement.
[01:02:58]  I think sort of shocked a lot of people because people who are hoping that Moss returns to power are hoping that the right-wing vote is split.
[01:03:06]  And so far, we've got Luis Arce and then two sort of right-wing center, right-wing center-right candidates.
[01:03:14]  And so, what sort of lay down to me is sort of the lay of the land of this upcoming election.
[01:03:21]  Yeah, so I think people were definitely shocked that like that she dropped out, but they were definitely not shocked that she wasn't going to win.
[01:03:29]  She was polling incredibly badly was, you know, the person in power who was nearly polling at what Camacho's numbers are, and he's, you know, far right and has like a very small group of support within the country, especially not among, you know, I guess the elite class that really wants that wants Carlos Mesa in power.
[01:03:48]  In terms of this upcoming election, there's like a lot of really, I guess, concerning things that the current coup regime has been able to set up prior to it.
[01:03:57]  Like, so first, like, there have been electoral reforms that kind of really got pushed through quickly.
[01:04:03]  The person that was appointed by Janine Añez to the position of like the president of the TSE was Salvador Romero, who previously tried to get, you know, Morales in trouble for fraud early into his tenure.
[01:04:19]  And as I think even is in some WikiLeak leak.
[01:04:23]  So he is somewhere on WikiLeaks about like, I think, specifically working with some sort of like, you know, I forget, some foreign consul or something like that to be able to.
[01:04:34]  Shocking.
[01:04:36]  But he, so as part of these electoral reforms, is first, they contracted with a new group of people that's not neotech to be able to implement the unofficial vote count.
[01:04:45]  But this unofficial vote count is going to be done extremely slowly from the looks of it.
[01:04:49]  Like they're estimating that we might not know who actually wins the election until Wednesday, which is extremely concerning considering like a small pause in the vote count is what legitimized fraud here.
[01:05:00]  And now we might see a multi-day pause in the results getting handed out to people.
[01:05:05]  And then secondly, they're not going to publish the images of the ACTAs.
[01:05:11]  So the ACTAs are these vote tallies that are done at the polling station level.
[01:05:15]  And so these polling results are signed off by all the people who are poll workers at an individual place.
[01:05:21]  I've seen that in America.
[01:05:22]  It's like during the primaries, people would count out how many people were in there.
[01:05:28]  Or they would basically send a piece of paper with a vote count on it.
[01:05:32]  Yeah, it's actually similar to what the Iowa caucuses did on Leonardo.
[01:05:36]  Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
[01:05:38]  I believe they sent images, and that's the way that their application worked.
[01:05:41]  Very similar to what happened in Bolivia.
[01:05:42]  So Bolivia, they sent images of it.
[01:05:44]  And now they're actually not going to be publishing images of what's on the ACTAs, which is really strange considering the regime that came to power came on these coup charges or came on these fraud charges that essentially said that like, you know, these actors were evidence of manipulation, how they sampled a group of actors in pro-Moss areas and they just happened to be unbelievable before and after the cutoff.
[01:06:11]  It's extremely strange that they would do that, I guess.
[01:06:16]  It seems inexplainable.
[01:06:17]  And Moss even, I believe, came out today and said that they were concerned about the lack of publishing on it.
[01:06:22]  Morales had already expressed concerned, I think, earlier.
[01:06:25]  But yeah, like we're, you know, there's very few observers even there already.
[01:06:31]  There's like a few freelance people in terms of actual organizations.
[01:06:35]  The EU sent less people.
[01:06:36]  I think they have six people there.
[01:06:39]  They said six people?
[01:06:40]  I think six to eight people.
[01:06:42]  So they're going to switch team, the crack team that were there.
[01:06:46]  Jesus Christ.
[01:06:47]  The Carter Center is doing a virtual.
[01:06:50]  So they are.
[01:06:50]  How do they do virtual?
[01:06:52]  Oh my God.
[01:06:52]  Zooming in.
[01:06:54]  Are you doing fraud?
[01:06:55]  They're like, no.
[01:06:56]  It's like, all right, well, it sounds like it's pretty good to me.
[01:07:00]  And then the OAS is even sending, I think, less people.
[01:07:02]  I think they had 40-something people there, and they're sending around 30-something people this time to observe the election.
[01:07:08]  But, you know, that doesn't matter as much to me.
[01:07:11]  But I don't think that would necessarily help.
[01:07:14]  But in the case of, yeah, there's way less in these like, I guess, international observers really going.
[01:07:20]  And largely the excuse tends to be around COVID and concerns about people getting it.
[01:07:24]  Bolivia had like the worst COVID transition rate for a while.
[01:07:29]  It was really a disaster there.
[01:07:32]  And yeah, it was an excuse, I guess, postpone elections to this point already.
[01:07:38]  But it's also being an excuse to postpone when votes are reported to people.
[01:07:42]  And it's really being handed to this regime, especially like Anya specifically, so she doesn't get in trouble.
[01:07:50]  And a lot of these actors don't get in trouble once they would hope that Mesa would win because I think that they think they would get in trouble with Moss, like if Moss came into power.
[01:07:59]  Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
[01:08:01]  So from what I understand, Luis Arce is polling pretty well.
[01:08:07]  And if sort of the election was held, I've read some articles, like if the election was held today, he would win today.
[01:08:13]  Because like we were saying, it's a runoff election.
[01:08:15]  And so he needs to beat both of these guys outright by like 10% over whoever else is the highest vote getter, which would be Mesa.
[01:08:25]  I just personally have a little bit of a feeling.
[01:08:27]  You know, I'm a spiritual guy.
[01:08:28]  And, you know, I was consulting the stars.
[01:08:31]  And I have a feeling that things will be a little sketchy when it comes to how Bolivians were polled versus how the vote totals might come out.
[01:08:41]  But do you see, like, what are sort of some ways that this election could go?
[01:08:46]  Either in terms of voting or in terms of sort of tampering?
[01:08:50]  Yeah, I guess, so first, there's like, I guess the easy option, which is just somehow, like, you know, RSA wins a 10-point margin.
[01:08:58]  Like, this is after, you know, nearly, you know, like a year of like mass protests.
[01:09:06]  Like, the demands for like the election not getting postponed any further were like pretty amazing to watch.
[01:09:13]  They were blocking off roads.
[01:09:14]  And it was reminding, I think, people of a lot of these demonstrations that brought Evo Morales into power or brought concessions from a previous coup regime or under the oligarchic leaders back in the 50s.
[01:09:29]  So there's a possibility, I guess, of that just happening.
[01:09:32]  I would want to be optimistic about that.
[01:09:35]  But really, I think what they want to do in the short term is force a run, like force a runoff anyway.
[01:09:41]  Which requires not much.
[01:09:42]  It doesn't even require like Mesa winning a majority.
[01:09:45]  It just requires him not to lose by more than 10 points, which he was unable to do in the previous election, even though it was basically, it was a two-way race there as well.
[01:09:55]  And we're kind of getting a lot of similar polls that we got in that election where RSA won, except now we know that there was political mobilization from Arce's base for the last year and also people who previously opposed Arce who are indigenous against the current regime.
[01:10:11]  So I guess that's definitely something to watch out for.
[01:10:15]  But then I guess additionally, what's really concerning is that the same thing could happen, right?
[01:10:21]  Like if they cause enough unrest, if right-wing forces in the country cause enough unrest, who is there to like step into power?
[01:10:27]  The military just intervenes and says, you know, oh, you know, ballots are being burned, right?
[01:10:31]  Like they're going into polling places and burning down ballots.
[01:10:34]  You know, we can't declare a winner.
[01:10:35]  We need to, you know, postpone this further.
[01:10:37]  Like this is, this is a real issue.
[01:10:38]  Government of national unity.
[01:10:40]  Yeah.
[01:10:40]  Exactly.
[01:10:42]  And then there's the other one of where, like, yeah, I guess where they just try to bring Mesa up to the point where he doesn't lose, right?
[01:10:50]  And I think the amount that this is really shrouded, like we don't, it's a black box, right?
[01:10:56]  Like we have no way of observing this.
[01:10:57]  And the people, the eyes that we have into this box are the OAS.
[01:11:00]  And that is not, it doesn't make me really confident that we're really going to know like what's going on if they're not publishing these things like publicly and giving a way for people to check it.
[01:11:10]  No matter what, like people are going to be looking into it and watching the unofficial results as they come in.
[01:11:15]  But we're in uncharted territory as far as COVID goes.
[01:11:21]  And I imagine that liberals are going to be using COVID as an excuse for diminished turnout if it just so happens that all these places that seem like they're mobilized to vote for MAS just don't turn out.
[01:11:34]  If they just have decreased turnout, oh, it just must be COVID.
[01:11:37]  Or it could have been the political repression that they now admit happens, but rather, you know, it happened though, right?
[01:11:44]  Like that seems to be the way that they treated it because they seem to have had a more positive opinion of like Morales and everything now.
[01:11:51]  But it's kind of because this is treated as like history rather than happening within the last year.
[01:11:57]  Yeah.
[01:11:58]  Well, I hope that, you know, if you're listening to this right when it came out, the election, you should tune in to, I don't know, that's not the right way to say that, but I will.
[01:12:09]  Tune in.
[01:12:10]  Bolivia News Network.
[01:12:12]  You know, tune in to, I don't know, I mean, you know, watch out for incoming results from the Bolivian election because this is a really big deal, what's happening.
[01:12:23]  And like you say, it's concerning how few people are down there to kind of observe what's going on.
[01:12:30]  And so trying to get a read in the country is pretty difficult.
[01:12:34]  But yeah, it's a big election.
[01:12:39]  I don't know.
[01:12:40]  I'm nervous.
[01:12:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:43]  I mean, it's just, it's one of those things that's like the left in South America, just like everywhere, has suffered so many tremendous setbacks in the past, well, entire history of its existence.
[01:12:55]  But like, you know, this sort of like right-wing resurgence or this, you know, right-wing, it's a traditional way it's done pretty much everywhere, this right-wing resurgence allied with this sort of neoliberalism is concerning.
[01:13:08]  And the thing is, Bolivia does have these sort of different demographics that really affect things than a lot of other states, maybe with similar political, you know, battles.
[01:13:19]  But it's also like, you know, the Bolivian, you know, indigenous population is very poor.
[01:13:24]  It's not like there isn't like this really like, it's different than in a lot of cases.
[01:13:30]  And they don't really have much of a voice.
[01:13:32]  And they certainly don't have much of an evident international voice.
[01:13:34]  And so there is basically one side of this story that is heard.
[01:13:38]  And that is the side of the OAS.
[01:13:40]  That is the side of the La Paz, you know, middle classes and upper classes.
[01:13:44]  That is the side of sort of the liberals and the far right.
[01:13:50]  And so it's difficult to find good stuff about this.

=== One Side Of The Story (03:32) ===

[01:13:55]  I would encourage you to follow Jack's Twitter account.
[01:13:57]  Jack, what is, I can't remember the exact letters in it.
[01:14:00]  It is, it is, it's, it's really bad.
[01:14:03]  Master of Null, but instead of an O, it's a zero.
[01:14:07]  It was not created to be followed.
[01:14:11]  I also, I tend to follow Ollie Vargas.
[01:14:14]  That's O-V-A-R-G-A-S-52 on Twitter.
[01:14:18]  And okay, I'm going to fuck this up really bad, and please forgive me.
[01:14:23]  Believe me, I just have pure purity in my heart.
[01:14:26]  Kausachin News.
[01:14:27]  That's K-A-W-S-A-C-H-U-N News.
[01:14:32]  And that's really a good source of information for the, I guess, less exposed side of things in Bolivia.
[01:14:42]  Yeah, I've heard it pronounced correctly, and I know I'm saying it wrong, but whenever I see it, I just keep saying, like, Kausuchin, right?
[01:14:48]  Like, that's...
[01:14:48]  Yeah.
[01:14:49]  It's...
[01:14:49]  Well, it's because it feels like I'm saying the name of a town in Ohio or something.
[01:14:53]  Yeah, or like Chagoda.
[01:14:55]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:14:58]  Well, Jack, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:15:00]  We'll link to Jack's Jack's piece in the Washington Post and his report on the OAS in the description here.
[01:15:06]  It has been a pleasure.
[01:15:07]  Hey, it's been a pleasure.
[01:15:08]  Thanks.
[01:15:09]  Thank you so much.
[01:15:21]  Yeah, so I'm just going to say it.
[01:15:25]  I'm pretty sure that there's going to be a runoff.
[01:15:28]  Me too.
[01:15:29]  That is the Belden Prediction machine at work, which Liz actually copied my idea of it.
[01:15:34]  Yeah, well, I mean, it seems, yeah, I don't know.
[01:15:39]  I feel like they're going to delay it a couple days and then they're going to say, you know, in that, just like they did last time in the interim narrative forms.
[01:15:48]  I mean, that seems to be kind of a, you know, kind of go-to move by people that want to influence electoral narratives for gaining popular legitimacy.
[01:16:02]  I'm reminded of a not unrelated person to this kind of cabal, we'll say, Mayor Pete in Iowa announcing his, you know, it's a very Guido move.
[01:16:16]  Oh, yeah.
[01:16:17]  It was, it was amazing.
[01:16:18]  Where's like, I won.
[01:16:20]  Yeah, and that was the narrative.
[01:16:22]  Exactly.
[01:16:22]  It was very successful.
[01:16:24]  Yeah.
[01:16:24]  So be careful of that in the future, guys.
[01:16:28]  Yeah.
[01:16:28]  Like we're always saying on True Anon, challenge the popular narrative.
[01:16:33]  Well, I'm actually always saying, if you can beat me in a push-up contest, I'll give you $800 fucking dollars.
[01:16:40]  Yeah, you are always saying that.
[01:16:42]  You got to stop saying that.
[01:16:43]  I know, but it caught on so much that the t-shirts sell really well, and I've made a lot of money doing it.
[01:16:50]  All right.
[01:16:50]  Well, on that note, I'm Liz.
[01:16:52]  My name is Push-Up, and we are joined by young Chomsky.
[01:16:57]  And the podcast name is TrueAnon.
[01:17:00]  That's T-R-U-E, and then same word, A-N-O-N.
[01:17:04]  I don't have a magic person named Push-Up.
[01:17:07]  It's kind of a cute name for a bulldog.
[01:17:10]  I knew, I knew, oh, that is, that is.
[01:17:11]  I knew a guy named, well, I was called Showbiz, which is, you know, I've mentioned that before.
[01:17:17]  I knew a pigskin, Danzler.
[01:17:21]  I knew a lot of guys with like one word, one word nicknames I liked.
[01:17:26]  All right, we'll see you next time.