CEPR experts have furthermore warned that changes made to the electoral process by Bolivia's unelected transitional administration threaten to make the upcoming 2020 vote much less transparent than the 2019 election.
Supporters of Bolivia's far-right candidate Camacho in Santa Cruz threaten electoral monitorsMost of the threats targeting international observers and journalists have emanated from Bolivia's commercial hub, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The richest city in the country, Santa Cruz is the power base of the Bolivian right wing, which has a long history of racism against the nation's indigenous majority.
Santa Cruz was instrumental in the November 2019 coup, in which Bolivia's democratically elected President Evo Morales was forced to resign by his own military. Since then, Bolivia has been run by an unelected right-wing regime that is not recognized by neighbors such as Argentina, but which enjoys staunch support from the United States.
As The Grayzone electoral observers arrived in Santa Cruz on October 14, we saw a rally held by supporters of Luis Fernando Camacho, a major figure in the 2019 coup, who is now the far-right candidate in the upcoming election, running against both the MAS and the center-right candidate Carlos Mesa. (State Department cables published by WikiLeaks show that Mesa has coordinated closely with the US government for more than a decade.)
Camacho was the leader of a powerful right-wing group called the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee, which was co-founded by Croatian Nazi collaborators who fled to Bolivia after WWII, and whose young followers are infamous for fascist-style salutes and anti-indigenous violence.
After the Camacho march, we saw his supporters mingling in central Santa Cruz with distinctive white t-shirts reading "Creemos," or "We Believe," the name of the far-right candidate's political party.
It was some of these fanatical Camacho supporters who took to social media to whip up an intimidation campaign against international electoral observers.
Smearing independent observers as "terrorists," inciting violenceOn social media platforms, Bolivian extremists smeared The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal as a "terrorist" and supposed "propagandist," who purportedly came to "burn the entire country."
Many of these fanatical users tagged the US State Department, the US embassy in Bolivia, and officials from the unelected transitional regime, including the far-right Minister of Government Murillo, in their incendiary and often libelous commentary.
A far-right Bolivian activist and coup supporter, Nadia Beller, published photos on Facebook and Twitter of The Grayzone electoral observers. The images make it clear that we were being closely monitored while in the airport in Chile. Photos of Blumenthal as he boarded the airplane in Santiago were also published online.
Beller shared the itinerary of when our flight was due to arrive in Santa Cruz, implicitly encouraging her followers to come to the airport to threaten election monitors.
She also falsely smeared Max Blumenthal as a "disinformation expert from RT."
These stalker photos were subsequently amplified by prominent right-wing Bolivian media personalities, such as Agustà n Zambrana Arze.
Other extremists called for creating groups and stalking Blumenthal, following and "supervising" him, filming everything he does.
A fanatic living in Virginia threatened the safety of electoral observers by falsely calling them a "terrorist threat in Santa Cruz."
This US-based user, Teddy Rivero, libeled Blumenthal with a series of outrageous slander, claiming he "is one of the most infuriating enemies of Bolivia's democracy, very close to pro-Cuba-Chavista drug trafficking."
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