RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Tension has grown in recent months in Bolivia as court cases pile up on charges against opposition leaders, including the governor of Santa Cruz, for their alleged participation in the 2019 movement that overthrew former President Evo Morales, of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party, which brands the ouster a coup d’état.
The leader of the main Bolivian labor union said that Tuesday’s march in support of President Arce in Santa Cruz, historic opposition bastion during Morales’ governments (2006-2019), will serve to reject “attempts at destabilization and a new coup d’état by the right-wing” and demand “respect for democracy and patriotic symbols.”
Executive secretary of the federation of labor unions Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) Juan Carlos Huarachi said that the decision to hold the rally in Santa Cruz, which will replace planned protests against the so-called discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, was taken when opposition Santa Cruz civic committees announced their strike tomorrow.
“To us it is absolutely clear that the right-wing wants to repeat the 2019 coup and we will not allow it, because the coup plotters have not only broken democracy but have taken advantage of the pandemic to steal and loot the State,” the union leader said.
Santa Cruz is where “destabilization is being created,” he added.
The two leaders the COB sees as the main instigators of destabilization of the Arce government are the president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee Rómulo Calvo and Santa Cruz governor Luis Fernando Camacho, the same one who walked with a bible in his hand alongside then de facto president Jeanine Áñez into the Quemado presidential palace in 2019 when the coup against Morales was consummated.
Both Calvo and Camacho made an effort in recent days to establish the idea that this is not an opposition strike, but rather “pro-democracy,” which explains the intensification of the political conflict.
Both the government -assumed last November- and its allies as well as the opposition are alerting that democracy is under threat, a warning that in Bolivia preceded its darkest and most difficult moments.
And it is not only the most radical opposition.
Monday’s strike was decided at a meeting attended by civic committees from several departments, ex-presidents Carlos Mesa (2003-2005) and Jorge Quiroga (2001-2002) and representatives of other anti-MAS groups.
The opposition profile was very similar to the one that in 2019 supported the massive protests against the Morales government for considering that there had been fraud in the October 2019 elections, in which the ex-president was proclaimed the winner.
The protests were the harbinger of the ouster. Later, some independent experts and the Bolivian judiciary ruled out that there had been electoral fraud.
In addition, the political scenario is becoming increasingly complex with multiple fronts of dispute.
On the one hand, there are judicial proceedings against several of the political figures involved in the 2019 coup, the subsequent de facto government and the human rights violations committed during that year-long administration, who have been charged, summoned for questioning and, in some cases, even arrested.
The defendants and their allies argue that these proceedings are part of “political persecution” by the government.
On the other hand, the Legislative Assembly of Santa Cruz set off alarms in La Paz when it passed a law assigning it the power to draw up shortlists for the appointment of authorities such as the departmental prosecutor, representatives of the Ombudsman’s Office, the Comptroller’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office, electoral and judicial officials and an anti-corruption director.
The Arce government denounced that the only competent authority to define these appointments is the national Legislative and accused the Santa Cruz assembly and the governor who promulgated it of “evidence of the crime of separatism.”
For the time being, the Plurinational Constitutional Court, all appointees of Morales and Arce, upheld an injunction requested by the head of the national Senate, MAS senator Andrónico Rodríguez, and temporarily halted the Santa Cruz law.
And finally, the opposition rejects the bill Against the Legitimization of Illicit Profits, which has been passed by the lower house and whose approval in the Senate Rodríguez decided to postpone, given the escalation of threats and political mobilization, in order to enable rounds of dialogue with the opposition benches and “explain the text thoroughly.
The bill seeks to guarantee the oversight of money, financial instruments and goods obtained from profits and their control when entering and leaving the country, granting more powers to the Financial Investigations Unit (UIF), the Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General’s Office.
The opposition and the business sector rejected the measure because they consider that it will grant “extraordinary powers” to state institutions which, according to them, are “politically orientated.”