Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
April 24, 2019
(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) The international community has put an end to the simulation of democracy that Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s vote-catching dictatorships had cloaked their regimes with, but it continues to maintain the façade for Bolivia. Today, there is no doubt that Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua are dictators who concentrate and hold all power by force, violating human rights and individual basic freedoms. Evo Morales who is doing the exact same thing in Bolivia, however, is accorded deference and his electorally fraudulent agenda to cover up his Organized Crime’s dictatorship comprised by Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, is still accepted. It is high time to acknowledge that Bolivia is in the same dictatorial spiraling downfall of Venezuela and Nicaragua.
In his column entitled “Trump denounces Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, but forgets about Bolivia”, Andres Oppenheimer, a distinguished journalist, expert on Latin American affairs, has just written to rebuke the United States and urgently call on its government and the international community to steer their attention and their actions to Evo Morales’ regime that, once again, is undertaking in Bolivia a process of simulation of democracy that -for years- has been carried out in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and in Bolivia itself, as well.
Reflecting on a generalized observation, Oppenheimer points out that “Trump’s government has adopted the term of the Tyranny’s Troika to refer to the regimes from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, but seldom does he refer to the dismantling of democracy by the narcissist-Leninist President of Bolivia, Evo Morales”.
After summarizing facts and falsehoods with which the regime pretends to simulate democracy in Bolivia, Oppenheimer’s conclusions are just as dramatic as they are true: “If Morales declares himself the winner in October, he will be sworn-in at the beginning of 2020 as an illegitimate president. In other words, in January of 2020, Bolivia will be in the same situation that Venezuela was in on January of 2019, when Maduro was sworn-in and several countries denied recognizing him”.
Another way to look at this is that only in January of 2020, in another nine (9) months, will we have Bolivia formally included in the group of dictatorships from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, thus allowing Morales ample time to consummate the recurrence of his crimes against the Bolivian people. In deeds, Bolivia is a dictatorship since -at least- the supplanting of its Constitution and the elimination of the Republic perpetrated through bloody massacres within 2006 and 2009.
Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s crisis, are the result of consecutive years of violations of human rights and individual basic freedoms to the point of destroying the “rule of law” and supplanting it by a set of “despicable laws” that institutionalize the dictatorship. These are public processes of progressive accumulation of power that destroy the separation and independence of the branches of government, leaving the citizenry, the leadership of political, social, and democratic organizations, totally unprotected.
The now recognized dictatorships from Venezuela and Nicaragua have gone through a spiral of oppression, corruption, and crime, so recurrent for so often and so many times, that have resulted in an intolerable threat to the international community. It is this same spiral and the same agenda that Evo Morales has gone through in Bolivia and that he now wants to repeat to seek -for a fourth time- an election repudiated by 72% of the Bolivian people who, in recent polls, affirm that in the upcoming elections of October of this year “there will be electoral fraud”.
Massacres, assassinations, repression, political prisoners, exiles, humanitarian crisis, narcotics’ trafficking, and organized crime in the government, have forced the United States, the region, and the whole world to understand that Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s regimes are dictatorships organized and orchestrated by Cuba and that they constitute a real threat that must be fought and be defeated, thus helping the nations to regain their freedom and democracy. This is about the same thing happening in Bolivia that in the 13 years of Evo Morales’ regime, there have been more than 20 bloody massacres, dozens of political prisoners, over 1,200 political exiles, there is no freedom of the press, with the same dependence and relationships -publicly evidenced- with Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
The criminal acts, violations of human rights, the agenda of simulating democracy, the arguments and procedures to destroy democracy that Evo Morales has used, and still uses, in Bolivia are all the same. A replicate of those used in Venezuela and Nicaragua. The same “Castroist Chavist model”, the same provocateurs and owners of this discourse; Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, the same “anti-imperialist” rhetoric, the same Cuban intervention, the same context and verbiage in their “despicable laws”, the same scheme to construct “narco-states”, in sum; the same dictatorial spiral of the same group of Transnational Organized Crime.
Published in Spanish by Infobae.com on Sunday, April 21st. 2019
Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators’ Association, ATA # 234680.