dumbassrights replied to your post “After the election fraud that happened in Bolivia was uncovered and…”
hey! are you bolivian? can you explain bolivians situation right now? everything i see is outsiders opinions and i know that i can’t really trust that. if you can’t, thats fine, thank you!
Hello! Yes I am Bolivian, though I currently live in a different South American country, but I’ve been keeping in touch with my family with WhatsApp and I try to keep up with the basic news from back home, so I think I can explain the basics.
The basic start is with Evo Morales, a cocalero (coca leaf grower) who became a politician and came to power as president in 2006. He’s the first indigenous president of Bolivia (he is Aymara), and when he came to power was widely seen as a game changer, destroying the oligarchical, upper white class hold on Bolivian politics. He was received with much fanfare, including from white leftists, who were keen on a president who would enact social reform and change and concentrate on helping reduce poverty and racism. I was too young to vote back then, but the majority of my family voted for Evo. He was… he was hope. It’s hard to explain. We thought it was the turning point. Finally, an indigenous president, someone who knew discrimination first hand and would be able to listen to the many indigenous peoples of our country. Someone who would fight imperialism, and the scars of colonialism.
He managed to do some good things. If I remember correctly, education spending and welfare spending increased, he increased the taxes on many companies, such as hydrocarbons, allowing the state to invest more and have less of a deficit. Bolivia also received an economic boom unrelated to his actions and policies (it had more to do with the price of minerals, since Bolivia is a mining country, and so on and so forth), so for a while poverty did reduce and the middle class grew. He also increased the number of indigenous and campesino (farmer/rural lands) representatives and their influence in politics.
However, as time went on, Evo’s party began to systematically remove any opposition they could, with many political leaders jailed for charges of tax evasion and the like. There is a lot of shady stuff going around that topic, and it’s too much to get into in a short explanation. It turned out that the party sought to remove any rising leadership, even within their party, that could threaten Evo’s dominance. His party also began to stack the legislative branch and pushing new judges through, setting up people who’d be grateful to him and thus legislate in his favor. While this was happening, MAS, the party’s social base, expanded their power and influence in other ways.
Now, the actual constitutional fuckery that angered a lot of leftists. He had the constitution rewritten in 2008 and it was approved in 2009, which had really mixed opinions from people, though I personally liked that he changed the name of “Republic of Bolivia” to “Plurinational State of Bolivia” to recognize the indigenous nations of Bolivia. The constitution maintained its two term limit for the presidency, but the thing was, he claimed that since there was a new constitution, his first mandate/government no longer counted, and he got it approved legally that he could run two more times again, which he did. Which like. What the fuck?
In the process, we began seeing cracks in his pro-indigenous, pro-environmental discourse. For example, he ignored and overulled the indigenous peoples of TIPNIS, a national park and indigenous territory, when they legally stated that they did not want a highway built through their lands, because it would bring in deforestation and cocaleros who are known for deforestation. He basically steamrollered over this, despite indigenous peoples of the TIPNIS walking all the way to the city of La Paz to make protests. He began to approve infrastructure projects that would destroy natural spaces, including hydroelectric dams that can and will flood Madidi, one of the most important national parks and biodeverse areas of Bolivia. And so on and so forth, he began to act in such a way that was at odds with the platform he ran, betraying indigenous peoples and Pachamama (mother earth) at every turn. He also never took any reasonable criticism in stride, blaming it all on American Imperialism.
However, because of MAS’ stronghold and no unity among the opposition, Evo ran two more terms after his first (including the third which really shouldn’t have been legally recognized), and he stated that after his third he wouldn’t stay in power.
If you guessed that he changed his mind or was lying, you’re right.
He called for a national referendum in 2016 for whether he should be allowed to run for a fourth term, but he lost the referendum, which voted “No”, though it was a narrow margin. And instead of respecting the will of the Bolivian people, he ignored it and pushed himself forward as a candidate for the next (these) elections, to the point that he pushed so that the Supreme Tribunal of Justice would rule that the constitution was inconstitutional (wtf) because it did not respect his right to reelection (wtf) and decided that no public office would have a term limit. I hope I don’t have to explain why that is just. A horrible decision for democracy. Term limits exist for a reason. It’s so no one person can get a stranglehold on power. After this it became clear to us that he had become enamoured with power, and was mainly seeking to establish himself in power indefinitely, which well, it pissed a lot of us off. It was heartbreaking too. To see someone we’d pinned our hopes on becoming… a dictator.
This finally brings us to three weeks ago, when the general elections were held. Now, in Bolivia, we have it so that any winner of the presidential elections has to have at least 10% points more than the guy in second place, or we go into a second round of elections between the higher scoring candidates. And as the official electoral authority reported throughout most of the counting process as results came in, Evo didn’t have the 10% lead needed to avoid a second round, and statistically even if the remaining votes were majority Evo, he wouldn’t be able to get the 10% needed. Also, the remaining votes were City votes, and the cities are in general, not Evo supporters anymore. Until at around 80% of all votes counted, the website and reporting of the electoral authority just. Stopped. It cut off. It cut off for 24 hours, during which the government first claimed that oh, it’d had some technical difficulties, and then (this part I actually don’t understand, so I’m paraphrasing what I maybe undersood) claimed that because some voting places had finished counting already, so they wouldn’t have two places reporting results, they stopped the main authority. Which like.
That’s really fucking fishy.
So people were really suspicious, and when the authority began reporting again those 24 hours later, reporting that oh, actually, Evo had won with the required 10%, a lot of people didn’t believe it. This smelled like electoral fraud. So people began gathering to protest because Evo shouldn’t have been running in the first place and now he wanted us to take this lie and swallow it.
Evidence came out over the next few days about electoral fraud: non-Evo vote ballots were found in trash bins, and the official databases of the electoral authority were found to have “irregularities” that all favoured Evo. People got pissed even as Evo claimed that it was imperialist forces and that the counts were all valid and legit and transparent. But the damage was done. Bolivians took to the streets in big numbers to protest and froze the cities, stopping transport and literally putting the cities in a standstill, only letting emergency services and food trucks coming to the supermarkets through so people could live. The protesters in the cities began to get threats, because Evo began trying to sell these protests as “the racist cities trying to stamp the rural vote”, from Evo supporters, that they’d shut the water supplies to the city off. Counter protesters began massing too. Clashes happened. Evo supporters were pushed out of the city of Cochabamba, but they set fire to the grasses around a city landmark and place of pride because they wanted to give a last fuck you. MAS supporters attacked hospitals that had protesters and even the doctors and nurses who weren’t supporting MAS. Photo and video evidence, and people coming forward, showed that the government was paying people to counter protest. The protesters were mostly non-violent, but there were clashes when the police wasn’t able to keep people separated. One mayor near Cochabamba was found to have paid two thugs to beat up protesters, to the point that one young man of 18ish was thought to be dead, and her hair was cut off and she was sprayed red - supposedly by protesters, but now there are cliams of people from her town that it was her own people that did it to make the protesters look bad. (My opinion? It could be either at this point, I don’t know). The protesters wore the Bolivian flag and called for democracy to be respected. The Evo supporters primarily wore the party flag, and got their hands on dynamite that they set off on streets to intimidate protesters. Protesters have died at the hands of Evo supporters - I haven’t heard of one case of dead Evo supporters. The police started to get unhappy, because they didn’t want to throw tear gas at the people protesting. To try and sweeten them, the goverment paid a bonus… but it turned out the bonus money was taken from the police officer’s pension. Police departments began to … not sure if mutiny is the right word, but to defy the government, in several cities.
At first, people were pushing for a second round of elections, but when we realized that actually, legally, when there is fraud of a significant impact the elections have to be annuled and new ones held, and the people who did the fraud jailed, the movements began to call for new elections completely, with a new electoral authority that could be trusted.
In the meantime, the military was quiet and not sent out to repress anything even after the police began to rebel, with military subordinates presenting letters that they would not repress the people, while it was known that military high command is pro Evo.
While this was going on, the OEA, The Organization of American States, had issued from the start of the 24 hour blackout from the electoral authority that they had concerns about the election process. Evo ended up accepting an audit from OEA representatives, and said that he’d stand by their resolution. When they finally came out with a report saying there were serious irregularities in the election that cast it into doubt, he called it politically motivated, but did call for new elections…
Then the high commander of the military said Evo should resign so that the country can be peaceful again. And a few hours ago Evo presented his resignation to the presidency.
It’s not over by a long shot - we need to establish a transparent, trustworthy electoral process in record time and hold new elections, and people are afraid that Evo will take back his resignation, and Evo incited his supporters in his resignation speech - but we’ve managed to get this far after three weeks of non spot protests.
There’s a lot more going on, a lot of context I’ve skipped, on Evo, on the political opposition - including Camacho, a religious right wing religionalism whose gotten a worrying amount of support with the protests in reaction to Evo’s excesses - but so far, I am proud of Bolivia. We’ve not let a wanna-be dictator establish himself. Now we just need a good left wing leader to help build us up to the promise that Evo gave us, and to stand strong against right wing pendulum reactionaries.
I leave you with the protest chants that spread in Bolivia these past three weeks
Quien se cansa? Who gets tired?
NADIES SE CANSA! NOBODY GETS TIRED!
Quien se rinde? Who gives up?
NADIES SE RINDE! NOBODY GIVES UP!
Evo de nuevo? Evo again?
HUEVO CARAJO! [Pun involving the word egg, which sounds like Evo, and a swear word that doesn’t have a translation]
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