Bolivia says OAS audit on the 2019 elections was “unilateral and “biased”

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Bolivian government said this Monday that the audit conducted by the Organization of American States (OAS) of the canceled elections of 2019 in the country was “one-sided”, biased” and ratifies the validity of the expert opinion in Spain, due to which they consider the case called “electoral fraud” closed.

The Bolivian Foreign Ministry issued a statement Monday after learning of a bulletin from the Secretariat for the Strengthening of Democracy of the OAS that ratified the findings of the report presented in 2019 that detected “irregularities” in that electoral process and criticized the expert review conducted in Spain commissioned by the Bolivian Prosecutor’s Office.

Read also: Check out our coverage on Bolivia

“It ratifies the validity and importance of the expertise required by the Attorney General’s Office to the University of Salamanca carried out within a judicial process that sovereignly carries forward the Bolivian State,” says the Bolivian Foreign Ministry’s statement.

“The audit defended by the Secretary-General was carried out without complying with the agreement signed with the Bolivian State and ended up being a unilateral and biased process with erroneous and forced conclusions,” the bulletin continues.

The statement points out that the Bolivian State signed a good faith agreement with the OAS to audit the annulled 2019 elections and that the country “fully complied” until the OAS Secretary General, Luis Almagro, “violated it by making unilateral statements on results, without having concluded the audit,” “issuing a preliminary report” and “having seriously forced the truth to produce a constitutional breakdown.”

It also indicates that Almagro’s words constitute an “act of interference” that questions a criminal investigation carried out by the Bolivian judiciary and rejects the OAS communiqué that “seems to be aimed again at coordinating destabilization processes in the country.”

“It is warned that a new attempt of destabilizing actions will not be allowed and the international community is put on alert,” reads the statement of the Foreign Ministry.

The Bolivian government considered that Almagro’s “opinions” are an “outrage to the sovereignty of the Plurinational State” and that it “takes note of this new irrational and illegal attitude” of the Secretary-General and that it will be “denounced” before “the pertinent instances of the organization”.

THE OAS COMMUNIQUÉ

This morning (10) the OAS issued a statement indicating that, of all the elections observed in the last decade, the 2019 elections in Bolivia were “the worst” and called for honoring the agreements that established a binding outcome of the report.

The bulletin lambasted the expert report conducted by the Bisite Deep Tech Lab Research Group of the General Foundation of the University of Salamanca in Spain that concludes that “there was no manipulation” of the results of the 2019 elections.

Based on that report, the Bolivian Attorney General’s Office decided to close the “electoral fraud” case that investigated the events that occurred in the annulled elections of that year.

The statement also argued that attempting to validate the irregularities and manipulations allegedly committed during those elections through “extemporaneous studies” and with “profound deficiencies” constitutes a “serious affront” to democracy.

On November 10, 2019, the OAS published its audit result that detected “severe” irregularities such as manipulation in the computer system of transmission and computation of results, and therefore recommended new elections.

This situation resulted in a social and political crisis, in addition to the resignation of Evo Morales to the Presidency, denouncing that he was forced out by an alleged coup d’état.