Evo Morales to Return from Exile to Bolivia Immediately after New Government Inauguration

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Evo Morales intends to leave his exile in Argentina and return to Bolivia on November 9th, one day after his party colleague Luis Arce is sworn in as president of the Andean country.

The indigenous leader and head of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) hopes that his return will be a “popularity shower” on his image. He will enter Bolivia by land, crossing the Argentinean border, will spend two days in several villages in the south of the country and will reach the Cochabamba coca-growing area in the center of the country on November 11th.

It was in that same area and on the same date, a year ago, that a Mexican plane picked him up to fly him to exile. “I am asked by the farmers to come back on November 11th, because I left on November 11th. It’s very symbolic,” declared the ex-president.

Andrónico Rodríguez, an elected senator and coca-grower, announced the date of Evo Morales’ trip; earlier he had said that after Arce’s inauguration on November 8th, the MAS would assess Morales’ return to Bolivia with “great ease”. But the ex-president was in a hurry to return on November 11th, a date on which speculation had already been made, due to its symbolism.

During his stay in Argentina, Morales dictated a book of memoirs of the last year of his life, titled ‘We Will Be Millions Again’. The work exposes a great nostalgia for Bolivia. A source near Morales’ bunker in Buenos Aires told EL PAÍS that the ex-president was following Bolivian news by the minute, calling his colleagues in the country constantly and was anxious to learn the results of the election and thus to be able to return. An article by two Bolivian journalists about his life in Buenos Aires, based on police interceptions of his phone calls, displayed Morales often eating tambaqui barbecue, a fish present in the jungles of northern Bolivia, where he will return now.

Since Arce’s election victory, Morales has not ceased to be a co-protagonist of his party’s triumph, of which he has been the undisputed leader since its foundation in the late 1990s. He acknowledged the compliments sent by world left-wing leaders and representatives of several national sectors, asked for the resignation of the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, who last year accused him of committing electoral fraud, expressed ideas on foreign policy and, in a move that caused considerable restlessness in Bolivia, traveled to Venezuela for a few days to meet with Nicolás Maduro and discuss matters that until now have been kept secret.

Arce said in an interview with EL PAÍS that he does not expect Morales to change his flamboyant personality. “He is an undisputed and historic leader of the change process. He is an international leader. He won’t change. And we don’t intend him to change either. It’s just going to be like that. But the fact is that he has no participation in the government. He has his role as MAS president, which is very important,” he said. During his year in exile, most opposition candidates used Morales’ return as a scare tactic to discourage the electorate from voting for the leftist party. His popularity is still high, but his rejection in some sectors of the population is also very strong.

Judicial Independence

The prospect of Morales’ return to Bolivia was confirmed on October 26th when a judge suspended the detention order that had been issued months earlier against him. Morales must face dozens of lawsuits, all of them begun by Jeanine Áñez’s interim government, for crimes ranging from terrorism to rape. The MAS spokespeople stressed that he will defend himself as an ordinary citizen, with no privileges.

However, the suspension of the arrest warrant against him was perceived in Bolivia as a first glimpse of a predictable subordination of justice to the new government. The lack of judicial independence in all periods of contemporary Bolivian history is pointed out by Human Rights Watch as one of Bolivia’s main failures in the field of human rights.

At the end of the legislature, the Parliament in which the MAS holds two-thirds, is preparing two lawsuits against President Áñez and her Cabinet. In parallel, it is changing parliamentary rules so that some future statutes will not require the approval of two-thirds of the House, but rather a simple majority, which is what the MAS will hold in this new legislature.

Source: El País