In this town of just 3 thousand inhabitants, its closest ones have built a fort to protect it. So far the police cannot arrive thanks to the rotary security cords that have established, at the tip of shields and artisanal spears, to prevent the authorities from taking their leader, who has an arrest warrant. The former president is accused of having a child with a minor when he was president and is being investigated for human trafficking, an unfounded accusation and product of revenge, Morales has denounced.
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The ex -president is entrenched and continues to demand that he be allowed to apply, again, to the Presidency even though the Constitution prevents it. His fratricidal fight with which he still president Luis Arce, who was his Minister of Economy, resulted in his separation from the MAS, the historic party that helped to found, and still fails to constitute his own, whom he wants to call Evo Pueblo.
But, although the campaign runs without him and with the surveys pointing out that the first places are now disputed by the right -wing candidates, such as Samuel Doria Medina and Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga, Morales remains a key factor because he still loads an electoral mattress that is not negligible.
An irreplaceable leader?
In five years, President Arce managed to deflate a party as preponderant as the MAS, which had an electoral flow that touched 55%, to almost scratch 2% in this campaign. The economic crisis, the lack of dollars, the shortage of fuel in a gas country and the internal struggles between the president and Morales led the debacle to a government and a movement that, at the time, was consolidated as the claim party of the Bolivian popular classes. The most was hegemonic for two decades, but now it is close to losing legal status.
“That day, the Supreme Electoral Court and the Government, instead of counting votes, will count dead. On August 17 there can be no choice without the participation of the popular class”
For these elections, the Bolivian left is divided into different candidates: Andrónico Rodríguez, president of the Senate, once Delfín de Morales and who now calls “traitor”; Eva Cup, mayor of El Alto, with her brunette movement also integrated by former allies of the ex -president; and former Minister Eduardo del Castillo, the official applicant of the MAS. In the surveys, everyone adds 10% support, a ridiculous figure for everything it represented.
However, Morales’s absence could give a lot of meaning to these numbers. According to the latest survey prepared for the newspaper El duty, the white, null and undecided vote reaches almost 24%, more than Doria Medina has, which is first with 21%.
“Evo continues to have an important influence, but it is a bit difficult to measure it. Some surveys point out that if he were a candidate, he could even obtain 30% of the vote, that is, he would go on the second round. At the same time, he is the most rejected politician in the country,” the Bolivian journalist Raúl Peñaranda, director of the Digital Brump portal, who points out that despite this the figure of Morales has already begun to overshate.
Besides…
51% is the sum of votes of the three main opposition candidates: Samuel Doria Medina, Jorge Quiroga and Manfred Reyes Villa, so a second round is presumed without the presence of the Bolivian left.
The unconditional cordon in El Chapare has been established in a specific area of Cochabamba, and when Morales wanted to take his protests to La Paz a few months ago he did not get the popular revolt he was looking for. “Bolivia is a caudillista and Morales country is super megalomaniac. The only way that could become president is through a coup d’etat and that is already impossible, because in addition our elections are always peaceful. A good part of the Evo base is likely to vote for Andrónic Peñaranda
From a different opinion is the journalist Rafael Archondo, who considers that it is a historical mistake to marginalize Morales: “At this time there are no conditions for the replacement of Evo Morales leadership. In these years when Luis Arce has faced he has faced, and in which Arce has taken everything, Evo has not been able to be replaced within the specific universe of this electorate.”
Archondo considers that Morales is seeing a nearby weak government that will have it difficult in the midst of the economic situation and the adjustments that it will have to start. “He is already thinking if the next government will endure. That threat shows that Morales could be the head of the opposition despite not being in a parliament. That is, the opposition that one has to consider more, the one that has the greatest capacity for action. So, excluding Evo Morales is a serious mistake of Bolivian democracy, because having it outside is much more dangerous.”
Peñaranda agrees that the next government will be weak, but will have to put together a coalition to be able to govern at a stage where the most does not enter the equation: “After 20 years, I think a new cycle begins. The candidates who are contrary to what has meant the most are, at least two thirds, and in that context I do not see how Evo will recover relevance.”
Ruasur’s threat
This August 2 and 3, Evo Morales intends to hold a Ruasur meeting, the block of Latin American leftist social organizations that has been promoted by the former president for four years, and who is seen with a lot of suspicion in both Bolivia and Peru.
According to the ex -president, the meeting will be held “on the occasion of the Bicentennial” of the Independence of Bolivia in the town of Ivirgarzama, in Cochabamba, in order to “deepen the plurinational state”. Given this, the opposition deputy Janira Román has firmly asked the Government of Arce to prevent this meeting of this “subversive group” and “avoid entering the country of foreign groups.”
It should be remembered that during the government of Pedro Castillo, Morales tried to integrate Puno into the Runasur project, so he was declared a personan Non pleasant by the Peruvian Congress and was prohibited from entering the country.
