Evo Morales’s party names its candidates
At the end of a meeting of leaders of the Movement to Socialism (MAS), the political party of the deposed Bolivian president Evo Morales, the nomination of the candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency of the nation was announced,...
...which would represent this MAS slate in the elections to be held on May 3. The date has been set by the renewed Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) after the elections of October 20 were canceled, due to allegations of electoral fraud corroborated by an external audit by a team of OAS experts, and of a massive mobilization of the people that demanded and provoked the resignation of President Evo Morales, additionally assisted by police mutiny and the “suggestion” of the high military command.
The meeting was called by Morales and was held in the Argentine capital, a country where he is a refugee. Attendance, as is natural due to the cost and distance, was reduced to a limited number of members of his party, with the participation of some of the candidates, their supporters and the leaders of the so-called “hard wing of the MAS,” composed of the most faithful followers of the deposed president.
The nomination of the mass candidates, in practice and as expected, was imposed by Evo Morales, maintaining the authoritarian style with which Bolivia ruled in his last presidential periods, and fell to the former ministers who accompanied him the longest in his long almost fourteen years of government: Luis Arce Catacora for president and David Choquehuanca for vice president. Arce, an economist with a master's degree from the British University of Warwic, was Minister of Economy and Finance and is considered the architect of the “economic miracle” that kept Bolivia at the highest levels of economic growth in the region during the MAS government and which represents, according to Morales, the guarantee for the continuity of the socalled "process of change" with technical capacity and economic stability. Choquehuanca, with Aymara roots and broad support from the rural communities of the Andean area, was Minister of Foreign Affairs for most of the long mass government.
The reactions by important sectors of the MAS have been felt immediately, showing the cracking of the once monolithic ruling party. On the one hand, the conservative and loyal sectors of the former president, especially the Chapare coca growers, of whom Morales is still president of the six federations of coca growers, have stated that they respect and support the decision of their mentor, and, although reluctantly, they nominated their new main leader, the young unionist Andrónico Rodríguez, who was ruled out by Morales. On the other hand, the broad sectors that promote the maintenance of the country’s fragile peace and that support the original ideological principles of respect for the democratic and community mechanisms of election of the leaders of the party, have expressed their rejection of the formula approved in Buenos Aires, which has ignored the nominations proposed by the so-called “unity agreement” put forward by the Choquehuanca Rodríguez duo. In this wing are the peasant union federations of the Andean area, mining unions, the Bolivian Workers Central and especially, the president of the Senate Eva Copa, who has already stated that the election of candidates from Buenos Aires is nothing more than a proposal to conside, and in his opinion the majority of the members of the Legislative Assembly are added.
Meanwhile, and with less than four months to go before the national elections, numerous new candidates appear, the majority of the traditional right and the emerging extreme right led by the former civic leader and now presidential candidate Luis Fernando Camacho and the interim president Jeanine Áñez. (La Semana)