Bolivia: accommodating opposition gives oxygen to Arce

The challenge for the almost immediate future of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) is not recent, but the onset of the economic crisis has already started to mark that path more clearly this year.

The way things are going, thinking about what could happen until the end of the year might not be so helpful since uncertainty is growing.

At any moment, any problem unbearable for the Arce regime and the MAS could happen.

However, their next test of acceptance will come when they undergo the Judicial Elections that, although not yet called, are scheduled to occur at the end of 2023.

It is worth rehearsing the base scenario of the campaign, which has already started.

The first element to highlight is that MAS has increasing internal divisions between the followers of Evo Morales and Arce’s renovating wing.

Moreover, these divisions are accompanied by increasingly violent confrontations and reckless accusations of corruption and cooperation with drug trafficking at different levels of party affiliation.

There has even been a recent major political rift between Morales and García Linera.

Only a few days ago, Alvaro García Linera, former vice-president of Evo Morales for 13 years, stated that although he has a very special attachment to him, he would like to see another Evo, one with a more national and less localist vision as the one he has now, but, fortunately, there are other indigenous leaders such as Andronico Rodriguez and David Choquehuanca.

The reaction of the cocalero wing has been virulent.

In a meeting of Morales with his followers, Héctor Arce, assemblyman of the party, has harshly described García Linera as “lukewarm, disloyal and undefined” with the coca growers’ leader, who finds himself more and more isolated.

Luis Arce has given the luxury in his most recent visit to Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to celebrate the anniversary of the death of Hugo Chávez, that he seeks the unity of the party and that he is willing to support the candidate chosen by the bases for the next general elections in 2025.

Likewise, in an interview with the media, the MAS congressman of the renovating wing, Rolando Cuellar, accused the administration of State companies of influence trafficking, such as Boliviana de Aviación, and of interfering in all the bids with companies such as CAMC, where Gabriela Zapata, under the explicit consent of Morales, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for illicit enrichment, although today she is free.

THE FRAGILE MEMORY OF THE PUBLIC AND THE INFAMOUS FUNCTIONAL POSTURE OF THE OPPOSITION

In this scenario, one would assume that the opposition is getting stronger and is preparing to take power soon.

However, and to make matters worse, the opposition as a whole, but even more so Carlos Mesa and his improvised political grouping in the Legislative Assembly, seem to be preparing a new lifeline for the MAS and its pretension to remain in power indefinitely, as has happened on several occasions at least since the former vice-president assisted the overthrow of Sanchez de Lozada in October 2003 with his pronouncement and hasty resignation.

Undoubtedly, one of the most critical oxygen balls with which Mesa has assisted the radical left in the country has been to have presented himself to the 2019 general elections, not only after promising that he would not do so but knowing that he would be endorsing the illegal and illegitimate candidacy of Morales, after the referendum he lost in 2016 to remain in power prevented him from doing so.

Mesa was the first to present his candidacy, then all the others followed.

Later, in the 2020 elections, when facing Arce Catacora, Mesa did not ensure or demand that the electoral roll with which Morales committed fraud in 2019 be first subjected to an audit with the most significant possible rigor.

Then he suspiciously and hastily recognized Arce’s victory based on exit polls and not on the official results of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE).

As if that was not enough, the president of the TSE in the last elections, Salvador Romero, who collaborated with the return of narco-communism to power in Bolivia, is, coincidentally, Carlos Mesa’s godson.

Perhaps there is a particular interest of Mesa in the fact that the former member of the same electoral body, Rosario Baptista, now in exile due to the harassment and political persecution that her denunciations have implied, is ignored.

Why has Mesa not ordered his assembly members to investigate the matter?

In this way, and with honorable exceptions, Mesa, his group, and all the representatives of the opposition vote in the Legislative Assembly are preparing to endorse the Judicial Elections at the end of the year without first questioning any element of an electoral process that, for sure, will be rigged again with the objective of the MAS to reaffirm itself in power in its worst political moment so far, given the different fronts of the national crisis.

The fact is that Mesa and his political grouping do not demand that no elections be held as long as the TSE remains under the control of Arce and the MAS, as it is known to happen at least since Baptista’s case.

Mesa has not spoken again about the politically persecuted – Añez, Pumari, Camacho, among the most emblematic – and the systematic violation of Human Rights, nor about working on their cause.

On the contrary, he ignores them and limits himself to proposing a Law of Guarantees so that the Judiciary elections at the end of the year are annulled if the white and null votes are a majority, a detail of form and not of substance, which for the blue party would not be a problem at all.

In reality, the interesting thing would be that Mesa and his improvised grouping in the ALP would work on a program with clear objectives to systematically expose the enormous electoral, judicial, and economic fraud machinery with which Morales, Arce, and the MAS have subjected the country for 17 years.

But their assembly members dedicate themselves to playing Pokémon Go or watching pornography in the Parliamentary Chamber.

They have even reached the point of humiliating themselves by apologizing to the population for their ineptitude.

It so happens, then, that under the structure of the Plurinational State that the MAS has set up with the help of several others, such as Mesa, at least since the Constituent Assembly of 2006, there is no Rule of Law in Bolivia.

Therefore, to call for a referendum to reform the Judicial System, as also proposed by someone like Juan del Granado, the first ally of the MAS to approve the Plurinational Constitution forcibly, constitutes one more deception – an ordinary show – like the many others they have subjected the population for so many years.

The only thing that will start the path towards the recovery of the Rule of Law in Bolivia is to bury the Plurinational State and the Political Constitution of the State in force and liberalization of the economy.

To make matters worse, these functional opponents are already beginning to invoke again the spurious political unity of the opposition to face the elections of 2025.

Who needs to protect themselves from Arce, Morales, and the MAS when they have opponents of this caliber?

With information from LGI