After the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the “big lie” of mass election fraud undermined faith in our democracy, wasted taxpayer funds in states across the country, sowed skepticism in the rule of law, and fueled violence and loss of life, most notably during the Jan. 6 riot. Over the past several weeks, the hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack have cemented just how systemic and far-reaching the attempted coup really was.
Remarkably, efforts to overturn presidential election results based on false claims of electoral fraud have not been unique to the United States in this era. Just a year prior, in Bolivia, unfounded claims of fraud following a national election were spread by an unlikely source: the leadership of the Organization of American States (OAS), which had been invited to observe the election.
OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro and other senior officials at the organization falsely alleged fraud in the 2019 Bolivian national elections, lending fuel and legitimacy to deadly insurrectionary violence. Less than a month after the vote, a military-backed coup ejected the elected government and installed Sen. Jeanine Áñez as president. The unelected Áñez regime would go on to rule the country for a year — committing mass human rights violations and targeting indigenous communities, labor organizers, journalists, and any and all critics of state power. As in the Jan. 6 attack in the United States, white supremacist and other extremist...
"Anura brother (elder sibling), making a system change," reads a Sinhala-language Facebook post shared on April 27, 2026, referring to Dissanayake. The post includes an image that appears to show ...