Cambridge Analytica was the English company that with the “data mining” of (US) American Facebook users, constructed digital messages, based on fears and desires, and bombarded US Facebookers to convince them that Donald Trump was “the Messiah that the USA and the world were hoping for”.

When it was discovered that this tall story was founded on lies and manipulation of data from Face Book users, the workers of that company denounced it and quit. The business was taken to court and dissolved. The story is narrated in the documental titled The Great Hack.

This past October 20, Bolivia also underwent the impact of their own “Cambridge Analytica”. From the niches of the traditional middle class, financed by certain national and foreign oligarchic figures, taking advantage of the “providentialist” idiosyncrasy still present in most of the Bolivian population and the short memory of young voters, they invented “anti Evo Morales” slogans (without arguments or foundations), and bombarded the electorate with them, through direct channels of social networks and the traditional media, to the point where these fallacies or half-truths came to be considered absolute truths.

Foreign influencers and youtubers even came to Bolivia to activate the “pro-animal sentiments” among Bolivian carnivores and smear Morales (as the pyromaniac of the Chiquitania region). This in spite of the fact that the world recognized Bolivia’s (and Morales’) capacity to resolve the previously mentioned “environmental disaster” with their own resources.

University deans, intellectuals, NGO representatives, opinion makers in the corporate media collaborated with fake news items such as “Morales has millions of dollars in the Vatican Bank”. Or fallacies such as “Evo is a dictator, a drug trafficker”. “Bolivia is living the greatest corruption in its history”. “He wants to convert Bolivia into Venezuela”…

So the voters, especially the urban ones, went to the ballot boxes with “anger to punish the corrupt pyromaniac Morales”. If Evo were mestizo or white, this bestiality of the artillery would not have made much impact in the as yet colonized imagination of the Bolivian electorate.

The Election Day was calm and participative, but the sentiments and emotions of the voters were strongly manipulated, especially the nearly 40% who voted for the candidate Carlos Mesa (as “the only person capable of removing Morales from power”).  There were no any debates on proposals, ideas, programs of government during the campaign.

As part of this perverse strategy, the irresponsible “anti-Evo” cyber-activists are now trying to install in the Bolivarian imagination “the reality of a second electoral round” as a given fact. This, in spite of the fact that, according to the preliminary report of the Supreme Plurinational Electoral Tribunal, between the votes for Evo Morales and Carlos Mesa there are 7% in favour of the first, without counting the results of the votes in the exterior (nearly 5% of the total) nor the votes of the rural areas.[1]

It would appear that the ontological racism that makes up the “Bolivian identity” was only varnished over during these 13 years of “plurinational discourse. What right do they have to deny the votes of Bolivians from rural areas and those of Bolivians abroad?

In the case of Cambridge Analytica, their workers, after realizing they had committed an anti-democratic crime, resigned and brought the leader of that company to trial, but they still feel guilty of the massacres that Donald Trump is now undertaking. In the Bolivian case, the “anti-Evo” voters, if they succeed in bringing to the presidency the faint-hearted and neoliberal Carlos Mesa, will have to support or suffer the consequences of the social convulsion that will be reedited by the indo-peasant majorities of the country.

21/10/2019

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Ollantay Itzamná, Latin American defender of the Rights of Mother Earth and of human rights.

https://ollantayitzamna.wordpress.com/

@JubenalQ