It is sad and lamentable to find that the art of a good historian that Loris Zapatta has cultivated in the past has deteriorated to the point of making him a propagandist. How else could we characterize the most recent intervention of the Italian historian with respect to the tragic happenings under way in Bolivia? [1]. His article, published in one of the principal morning newspapers of Buenos Aires, is a compendium of falsehoods and fancies that claim to pass for a rigorous interpretation, in which he seeks to demonstrate the irredeemable malignity of Evo Morales and, according to Zanatta, his mentor: Pope Francis. In this brief note, I will limit myself to pointing out the most gross errors of his intervention. I will leave to my readers the scarcely agreeable task of examining the others, which are many.

Zanatta, as a good conservative, has a particular aversion to Pope Francis, and in consequence, for the person who, according to him, is the leader most loved by the Pontiff: Evo Morales. Starting from this supposed fact, the Italian historian digs into the underworld of his obsessions and most deep-rooted hatred. He asks, once installed in that chaos of his prejudice “what democracy can there be where politics is a crusade against the faithless, the pathway to the redemption of ‘the chosen people’”?  But is he speaking of the United States, whose leaders and a great part of its population really believe that they are the people elected by the Lord to sow justice and democracy in the world? No, he is speaking of Bolivia, of the humble Bolivia of the many-skirted women, of a people that was exploited, oppressed and insulted for centuries, first by Spanish colonialism and later by the United States and who, when they attempted to make themselves masters of their own destiny, brought on themselves the wrath of the inferno based in Washington, D.C. In Evo’s Bolivia, there was no crusade against the infidels, they governed to empower the people, support their rights, bring them out of poverty and to prevent the white supremacists, the sanguinary racists of the Eastern Half Moon, from carrying out once and for all the genocide that would wipe from the face of Bolivia these obscure native people who shame them before the world. Which is what, with the support of Zanatta, or his complicit silence –which is the same thing–, they are doing today.

Roused by the intoxicating breath of his discourse, Zanatta delves resolutely into the terrain of political delirium, for example, when he speaks of the “obsession (of Evo) to remain eternally in power like a Catholic King.” That is for having committed the unpardonable transgression of seeking a new re-election if the people were to decide so. It is astounding that, being so sensitive to this type of initiative of self-perpetuation in power, he has failed to refer to what seems to be an identical obsession of Angela Merkel or Benjamin Netanyahu, not to mention Helmut Kohl or Felipe González, or the Italian Christian Democracy that was over forty years in government without raising the least concern over the desire to “perpetuate themselves in power” of these leaders from Europe or the neo-fascist Israel. Or when, with absolute irresponsibility, he states that “electoral fraud to avoid the triumph of the ‘colonial classes’ is not (only) the fruit of a mad ego; it is the logical result of an ideology in which ‘the people of God’ will not bend their knee before the ‘people of the Constitution’.” The latter no doubt refers to that represented by Luis Fernando ‘Macho’ Camacho who burst into the Palacio Quemado (presidential palace) carrying a Bible to exorcise the heretical presence of the Pachamama; or to that personified in the little known Senator who proclaimed herself President of the Plurinational State in a Legislative Assembly session without even a quorum, and whose past tweets, now conveniently erased, revealed an intense racial hatred against the original native peoples of Bolivia. Or perhaps this “people of the Constitution” so exalted by Zanatta refers to those virtuous republicans who burned and urinated on the Wiphala, the flag of the native peoples of the whole Andean region; or the one that expressed pre-electoral threats by the highly praised Carlos Mesa when, exhibiting the democratic qualities that Zanatta finds so seductive, he threatened to refuse any electoral result other than his own victory.

It is hard to believe that a professional historian could ignore so many research reports that refute his erroneous (and badly intentioned) thesis on the supposed “electoral fraud” of Evo. First of all, even the report of the OAS does not employ the expression “fraud” and much less speaks of a scam, as was reliably demonstrated by research of the Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica (CELAG). According to this study, the OAS report “brings no proof at all that could demonstrate the supposed fraud.” [2] Secondly, Zanatta also ignores the results of the report of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) of Washington, whose authors ratify the results announced by the Superior Electoral Tribunal, since they “did not find any evidence of irregularities or fraud that affects the official result that gave President Evo Morales a victory in the first round.” [3] Thirdly, the 36-page report emitted by the most competent department of political science in the United States in the question of electoral studies, the University of Michigan, agrees that there was no fraud whatsoever in the Bolivian elections and that Evo won correctly. [4] Professor Walter R. Melbane, Jr., an expert of world-wide fame in the study of electoral fraud, states that in the Bolivian elections there were “statistical irregularities that could indicate fraud in only 274 of the 34.551 voting booths and that this was not much different from patterns seen in other elections in Honduras, Turkey, Russia, Austria and Wisconsin. Even removing the fraudulent votes, the MAS has an advantage superior to the ten per cent”, (needed to win in the first round), as he sentenced at the end of his extensive research report.

If he had taken into account any of the mentioned reports, the Italian historian could hardly been able to write an affirmation as ridiculous as the following: if “regular elections had been celebrated, it is probable that the winner would have been Carlos Mesa, a man who guaranteed a government with respect for pluralism and democracy. On the other hand, by manipulating the ballot boxes, Morales unleashed a religious war and ‘the enemy’ was elected: to cause the radicalization of the conflict, he made an ‘enemy’ emerge that, like him, invokes God above the Constitution, the ‘people’ above democracy”. The problem for the professor from Bologna is that there really were regular elections, in which the ballot boxes were not manipulated and that if there was someone who unleashed a religious war, an explosion of racism and religious fanaticism, it was neither Evo nor MAS (his party) but the much admired Carlos Mesa, an irresponsible politician whom the prejudices – or the convenience – of the Italian brought him to see as a man “who respects pluralism and democracy” in spite of the fact that before the elections he denounced the fraud that would surely be committed, which unleashed the worst sentiments and prejudices of the Bolivian middle class to commit every kind of barbarity before, during and after the elections, including –what a surprise! – burning down the offices of the departmental headquarters of the Superior Electoral Tribunal in Sucre, Potosí, Santa Cruz and Tarija and the destruction of the electoral documentation that might have been able to prove the “fraud” committed by Morales.

We could go into other considerations on the article of Zanatta that mark an irreversible turning point in his conversion from a serious historian of Catholicism into a vulgar propagandist who offers his pen to the service of the right and imperialism. He speaks, in his article, of “a country that was in flames” and that this made the military Coup inevitable, but he refrains from saying who were those that started the fire. He insinuates that Brazil could have been among them, but he omits any mention of the United States, sweeping under the carpet all the evidence of the active participation of Washington in the overthrow of Morales. Does he perhaps ignore that the infamous Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of Bolivia, Williams Kalimán, resigned from his post as soon as the overthrow of Morales was completed and took up residence in the United States?  Had he not heard what is vox populi in La Paz, that for his republican courage in “suggesting” to Evo that he should resign, he was remunerated by the United States with a million dollars, thanks to a gesture undertaken personally by Bruce Williamson, chargé d’affaires of the US embassy? [5] And that there are suspicions that other generals received a similar quantity and several police chiefs some five hundred thousand dollars each, for promoting their timely mutiny? What about the trip made in September of this year by Ivanka Trump to Jujuy, the Argentine province bordering on Bolivia, where she was received by the Governor and some Bolivian politicians who acquired notoriety during the destitution offensive?

Trivialities – what is important for Zanatta is to repeat the refrain dictated from Washington: Evo wanted to prolong his stay in power indefinitely, he committed fraud and the tragedy that resulted was his fault. And democracy could be reborn from this Coup. The plan was very conscientiously elaborated by the many specialists in the United States who promote “regime changes”, “colored springs” or the simple and straightforward lynching of bothersome leaders, as they did with Gadhafi in Libya. Bolivia was an objective long coveted by the White House. All of us know their addiction to certain natural resources such as oil or, in the present case, lithium that, for the Financial Times of London is the equivalent of what oil was in the twentieth century and is a necessary ingredient for the military machine of the United States. And Evo and his government of social movements were unassailable obstacles, who could not be removed through electoral means, trying to create “civil society” leaders or penetrating in popular culture with the tentacles of their NGOs.  Therefore they had to throw out any legal purism, leave aside the perverse sophistication of “soft Coups” and “lawfare” and turn without reserve or guilt to a military Coup of the old style, preceded by disturbances of a hired lumpen that could sow chaos in the principal cities of Bolivia thanks to the fact that the police forces, bought up by the empire, left the streets free for them to create a socially unstable situation and a justification for the Coup d’État.

Zanatta could not have been ignorant of all that. For this reason, his position is scandalous. The thirty or so dead, hundreds wounded and imprisoned, disappearances, the police tear-gassing relatives carrying the coffins of their loved ones to the cemeteries, the burnt-out government offices, the intimidations and cowardly threats to families and officials of the MAS so that they would betray Evo, all this fear, all this upturned democratic order and social peace, roll off the sealskin back of the Italian historian, to apply to him a metaphor that he himself insolently dedicated to Evo in his libel. It’s necessary to lie, they told him, for the good of the empire and the civilization of the capital. Finish off Evo and the MAS and, in passing, undermine the authority of Francis. And the former historian throws his old prestige to the dogs and gladly obeys the order. What a shame and embarrassment.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

Notas

[1] Cf. “De cruzadas redentoras, golpes y fraudes”, in Clarín, November 23 2019.

[2] See https://www.celag.org/sobre-la-oea-y-las-elecciones-en-bolivia/

[3] Cf. http://cepr.net/publicaciones/spanish-reports/que-sucedio-en-el-recuento-de-votos-de-las-elecciones-de-bolivia-de-2019

[4] “Evidence Against Fraudulent Votes Being Decisive in the Bolivia 2019 Election”, available in http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/Bolivia2019.pdf

[5] See https://www.prensa-latina.cu/index.php?o=rn&id=322108&SEO=responsabilizan-a-ee.uu.-de-financiar-golpe-de-estado-en-bolivia

25/11/2019

- Dr. Atilio A. Boron, Director of the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación Floreal Gorini (PLED), Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received the Libertador al Pensamiento Crítico prize, in 2013.

Blog: www.atilioboron.com.ar

Twitter: http://twitter.com/atilioboron

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=596730002