Foreign secretary lambasts Labour leader for saying Evo Morales was forced out by coup

This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary, has accused Jeremy Corbyn of putting Marxist solidarity ahead of democracy after the Labour leader said Evo Morales had been forced to resign as Bolivia’s president due to a military coup.

Morales stood down on Sunday after 14 years in power following a report by the Organization of American States found that “clear manipulations” of the voting system in the first round of elections on 20 October had occurred. The findings prompted the military and civilian police to call on him to stand aside.

Corbyn, a strong ally of leftwing Latin American leaders, tweeted: “To see @evosepueblo who along with a powerful movement that has brought so much social progress forced from office by the military is appalling. I condemn the coup against the Bolivian people and stand with them for democracy, social justice and independence.”

The foreign secretary tweeted back: “Unbelievable. The Organisation of American States refused to certify the Bolivian election because of systemic flaws. The people are protesting and striking on an unprecedented scale. But Jeremy Corbyn puts Marxist solidarity ahead of democracy.”

Both the Mexican and Russian foreign ministries also called Morales’s exit part of an orchestrated coup d’etat.

Morales avoided the need for a run-off in October when an electoral board decreed he was more than 10% ahead of his nearest rival.

The Organization of American States in a preliminary report published on Sunday said there had been widespread computer manipulation of the result, explaining: “In the four elements reviewed (technology, chain of custody, the integrity of the minutes and statistical projections) irregularities were found, ranging from very serious to indicative. This leads the audit technical team to question the integrity of the results of the election”.

Defenders of the 60-year-old Morales said the OAS was a discredited organisation led by rightwing governments. They added Morales had offered to run the elections again and pointed to alternative reports by a leftwing thinktank claiming no electoral fraud had occurred.

Critics of Morales said the OAS had been asked by the Bolivian government itself to investigate the fraud.

The OAS auditors revealed that at least one of the system’s servers, initially set aside to serve as a database for the electoral authorities, “was not used for the purpose on which the team was notified” and that the data of the system were diverted to an external server, outside the official network.

Defenders of Morales claim late-reporting areas were pro-Morales, and so showed a surge in support for him.

However, the OAS said it was possible that Morales won first place, but “improbable that he had obtained the 10% advantage to avoid a second round”.

The OAS called for fresh elections run by new electoral authorities.

The OAS findings led the military and civilian police to urge Morales to stand down. The country’s main labour union, Central Obrera Boliviana, (COB) also urged Morales to resign to avoid further bloodshed.

Morales and his senior officials denounced the pressure as an effective coup orchestrated by his rightwing challenger, former president Carlos Mesa, and other opposition leaders. Late on Sunday, Morales tweeted that a police official had publicly called for his detention. “The coup mongers are destroying the rule of law,” Morales wrote.

Protesters ransacked and burned the homes of senior members of Morales’s Movement for Socialism party and, in at least one instance, kidnapped a relative.