Analysis of Bolivia and How Evo Could *Truly* Win

We heard some fas­ci­nat­ing polit­i­cal and legal analy­sis on cur­rent events from a top-notch spe­cial­ist in Bolivian law. I’m not nam­ing him here sim­ply because I didn’t get his express per­mis­sion to do so. Kindly, deal with it. I’m post­ing the analy­sis, and then we can all go about research­ing it as we wish.

Prior to the Ambush in the Pando, Evo expelled almost all of the press. That is a sig­nif­i­cantly con­tribut­ing fac­tor as to why we have so lit­tle vis­i­ble evi­dence and sound accounts of what really happened.

Earlier today on a radio sta­tion in Cochabamba it was announced that evi­dence had been found and con­firmed that all indi­vid­u­als who fired weapons at the vio­lent clash were Venezuelan troops. This is believ­able, because it is well known that the Bolivian mil­i­tary is fiercely uncom­fort­able with attack­ing other Bolivians. (This matches an arti­cle I saw yes­ter­day. I’ll add a link to that here soon. Need to track it down again.)

Legal Consequences of the Pando Conflict:

After the attack in the Pando, the Pando gov­ern­ment was dis­banded and Martial Law was insti­gated in that depart­ment. Martial Law is lim­ited by the cur­rent Constitution of Bolivia to last no more than 90 days. Under Martial Law, no arrests or charges can be made.

Also under the cur­rent Bolivian Constitution, no offi­cial can be arrested under any cir­cum­stances. Let’s back­track and define this. Until rel­a­tively recently, the Constitution defined Prefects of Departments as being mem­bers of the President’s cab­i­net, gov­ern­ment offi­cials, whom the President per­son­ally selected. Under President Mesa, how­ever, the Constitution was legally amended so that the Prefects are elected by the peo­ple of the depart­ments. The def­i­n­i­tion of a Prefect remained the same: Prefects are gov­ern­ment offi­cials and mem­bers of the President’s cabinet.

Current con­text:

The Prefect of Pando has been detained by the national author­i­ties under Evo’s lead­er­ship. He has not been arrested or charged. He is infor­mally accused, but legally he is only under armed/guarded con­fine­ment. He is not at lib­erty to leave. When a Bolivian cit­i­zen is under con­fine­ment, the nor­mal response is a writ of habeas cor­pus. He has not been arrested or charged, how­ever, so habeas cor­pus does not apply. But! In sit­u­a­tions in which a con­fine­ment has been ini­ti­ated but no arrests/charges have been made, the Bolivian Constitution offers a pro­tec­tion: an auto­matic visa to leave the country.

The legal Constitution of Bolivia promises the Prefect of Pando an auto­matic visa to leave Bolivia. That’s Latin American legal sys­tems at work if I’ve ever seen it. His fam­ily have today filed the case to have that visa processed.

Evo’s team is argu­ing that because the Prefect was in rebel­lion, he can­not be con­sid­ered an “offi­cial of the gov­ern­ment”. However, this doesn’t hold up legally:

• The Constitution has no pro­vi­sions for sit­u­a­tions of rebel­lion. That sta­tus does not legally exist.
• The Prefect was elected by the peo­ple of the Pando. Therefore, he is an offi­cial of the gov­ern­ment of Bolivia as des­ig­nated by the peo­ple of his department.
• The Prefect is legally a mem­ber of the President’s cab­i­net, but is not sub­ject to the President’s selec­tion or pref­er­ence (reserved by the depart­ment, as shown in point 2). The Prefect is as much of an offi­cial of the Bolivian gov­ern­ment as every other mem­ber of the President’s cabinet.

Unfortunately for Evo, by plac­ing the Prefect of Pando under con­fine­ment he has given him a free exit from the coun­try and from pos­si­ble pros­e­cu­tion. This is what hap­pens when peo­ple do not respect their own laws enough to know their own laws. If you make a law and/or if you claim the author­ity of a law, then you need to know that law and fol­low that law. Evo’s team does not, and that’s a sig­nif­i­cant weak­ness for his lead­er­ship and his factions.

Evo can con­tinue this fight against the Prefect. Attempting to keep the Prefect in the coun­try by deny­ing his con­sti­tu­tional claim to an exit visa forces a case into con­sti­tu­tional courts. In Bolivia, cases can take months and some­times years. Consitutional cases will get heard much faster than civil cases, but they can take just as long… and that’s a long time. IF this case goes before the con­sti­tu­tional courts, then due to its high pro­file the new Constitution pro­posed by Evo, which has not yet been approved and put into place by the peo­ple of Bolivia, can­not be approved. Evo can fight to keep the Prefect, but his Constitution will be delayed inevitably, and with it his polit­i­cal ideals.

Ouch.

International Support and the Limits thereof:

We keep hear­ing about the over­whelm­ing sol­i­dar­ity of the con­ti­nent, rep­re­sented now by UNASUR and the OAS, for Evo Morales. That may well be an exager­ra­tion, and the inclu­sion of inter­na­tional author­i­ties may prove to be Evo’s polit­i­cal downfall.

Evo set the sched­ule for nego­ti­at­ing with the oppo­si­tion lead­ers in Bolivia. He picked the dates. At the last minute, Evo attempted to change the nego­ti­a­tions for one day ear­lier than planned. This would have caused the oppo­si­tion lead­ers to be unpre­pared. UNASUR and OAS said, emphat­i­cally, “No.” The sched­ule had been set, it was not appro­pri­ate to change it.

August Referendum — Bogus?

In addi­tion, the inter­na­tional agen­cies are going through the elec­tion results from August with a fine-tooth comb. They are being extremely strict. Under these strict count­ing pro­ce­dures, Evo’s “man­date” is adding up to be approx­i­mately 32% — that is 35% lower than the 67% claimed by the Bolivian gov­ern­ment. A more mod­er­ate count­ing which allows for a rea­son­able amount of casual error sug­gests that Evo would have earned the nec­es­sary 52% to stay in office, but only just, and cer­tainly not a 2/3 mandate.

A more obvi­ous lim­i­ta­tion to the secu­rity of the elec­tion, espe­cially valu­able for those of us who are dis­trust­ful of even third-party agen­cies count­ing votes (it’s scary, when you think about how eas­ily shaded our count­ing sys­tems are, regard­less of nation!), is that in a nor­mal elec­tion every polling loca­tion is mon­i­tored by a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of every sin­gle party in the elec­tion. In those sit­u­a­tions, if any of those rep­re­sen­ta­tives point out a pos­si­ble prob­lem, then the whole polling table in ques­tion is shut down! In August, how­ever, the ref­er­en­dum did not involve spe­cific par­ties and a selec­tion between can­di­dates — it was a sim­ple Yes / No vote. Representatives from mul­ti­ple par­ties were not present at the polling places, thus elim­i­nat­ing one of the more sig­nif­i­cant pro­tec­tions of the elec­toral sys­tem in Bolivia.

The inter­na­tional agen­cies are going through the records and find­ing thou­sands upon thou­sands of vot­ers listed as “Mama AAA”, “Papa BBB”, and so on — clearly fraud­u­lent names. Reports are also being sub­mit­ted of cit­i­zens who appeared at their polling loca­tion to vote but were informed that some­one had already voted that day in their name! Awkward. Now, be ratio­nal, guys. In the United States of America wwe have elec­tions upon which the entire world looks because our elec­tions affect the entire world… and yet, we still have dead guys vot­ing in Chicago. Election fraud in Bolivia? Believable.

The Compromise:

UNASUR and the OAS, how­ever, are not demand­ing that the August elec­tion be thrown out. They’re going much deeper than that. Now that they’ve been invited in, they’re stay­ing. Evo’s “man­date” will stand, but on their con­di­tions. UNASUR and the OAS are demand­ing that all vot­ers re-register. From now all, every voter must present their car­net (ID) and give their thumbprint in order to vote. That data will cor­re­spond with the data in the brand new voter reg­is­tra­tion database.

The rest of the con­ti­nent really doesn’t want to deal with a coun­try fir­ing its legally and con­sti­tu­tion­ally elected President — and Evo’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion was legal and valid. But forc­ing a just and account­able sys­tem of voter reg­is­tra­tion? That could solve a ton of future headaches.

The Bolivian Economy:

Bolivia’s national bank has been delib­er­ately sup­press­ing the U.S. Dollar. We’ve all seen this. When the dol­lar was going down, so did the exchange rate — obvi­ously! When the dol­lar went back up, how­ever, the exchange rate did not rise in turn… it even went down fur­ther. The Bolivian econ­omy is still too tied to the dol­lar to play these games, and games they are. The econ­omy is in a mess!

Worse still is that Evo was depend­ing on high oil prices, circa $140/barrel, to pay for sev­eral of his major projects. He banked on being able to sell Bolivian oil for those prices. Unfortunately for him, oil has dropped back down to circa $100/barrel.

People aren’t exactly thrilled about all of this.

Evo’s Path to Success:

Please note: the fol­low­ing is not my idea! This, too, is com­ing from the bril­liant legal advi­sor. He’s thought of two very sim­ple and, shock­ingly, obvi­ous answers to almost all of Evo’s problems.

First, regard­less of which option he selects, he needs to give the oppo­si­tion what they want. All of it. Halt the new Constitution. Give them “auton­omy”. Stop inter­fer­ing with rev­enues. All of it.

Then, he has two strate­gic options:

• One month prior to the next elec­tion, Evo could resign as pres­i­dent of Bolivia. His vice pres­i­dent would become pres­i­dent. Evo would be legally free to run for re-election.
• Alternatively, he could have made all of his con­ces­sions to the oppo­si­tion con­di­tional on an amend­ment to the cur­rent Constitution which would allow him to run for re-election. That’s it.

Why would these work? Because peo­ple are dead tired of the con­flict. The oppo­si­tion will not ever be thrilled with Evo, MAS, or any other social­ist regime. They will be con­tent, how­ever, if they are given what they want — and that’s a return to nor­mal with­out the demands of the new Constitution, the stolen rev­enues, etc. The mod­er­ates within Bolivia (who likely out­num­ber either fac­tion) and the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity will praise Evo for his com­pas­sion, his wis­dom, and his com­mit­ment to peace. His pop­u­lar­ity will sky­rocket. Due to the new voter reg­is­tra­tion sys­tems, there would be no rea­son­able ques­tion of the valid­ity of his elec­tion and demo­c­ra­tic man­date. He would be elected by a huge major­ity, and he would have the polit­i­cal back­ing in his sec­ond term to force through the new Constitution (or at the very least a slightly milder ver­sion) with­out sig­nif­i­cant problem.

The strat­egy is bril­liant. Appease the oppo­si­tion. Get legally re-elected under the cur­rent legal sys­tem. Earn the love and respect of mil­lions. THEN drive in the nails of reforms. The prob­lem with all of this, though, is that it inter­feres with pride. Evo is far too proud to make the tem­po­rary, and frankly super­fi­cial, con­ces­sions. He’ll never do it.

So what will hap­pen instead? Evo can­not take Sant Cruz and cause it to fall as it did Pando. The new Constitution will prob­a­bly fail. Evo will stay in office, but he won’t be re-elected. He’ll be done, noth­ing foun­da­tional will be solved, and both sides — the indige­nous peo­ple who expe­ri­ence dis­crim­i­na­tion and cul­tural abuse, and the property-owners who have to bat­tle to keep their rights — will con­tinue to suf­fer. A very bor­ing, but very pre­dictable, stalemate.