[ad_1]
In a decision indicating what their attitude towards the new government of Bolivia will be, the “civic” leaders of the Bolivian region of Santa Cruz do not recognize Luis Arce’s victory in the presidential elections and plan a 24-hour disruption to next Friday. The presidents demand that justice stop the Arce oath, scheduled for November 8, and that a check be made on the reliability of the elections. They suspect that these were fraudulent, although they have not shown evidence to support this presumption.
The president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, Salvador Romero, said that the process “is over” and that the credentials that legalize their status have already been handed over to the leaders. He recalled that all the observation missions, including that of the Organization of American States, which the civic community intends to hold responsible for the audit, have expressed a favorable opinion on the cleaning up of what was carried out on 18 October. Arce got 55% of the votes, 26 percentage points more than his immediate follower, Carlos Mesa.
The Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee, which in 2019 led the protests that led to the resignation of then-president Evo Morales, declared a strike under pressure from radical youth groups that have been agitated and mobilized since it became known that the candidate of Morales had won and the Movement for Socialism (MAS) would once again lead the country’s march. Some sections of the population, generally middle-class, who live in the wealthiest neighborhoods of the cities and are the majority in Santa Cruz, passionately reject MAS and Morales. They are accused of committing fraud in the 2019 election and many other crimes. The most radical representatives of these sectors insisted that the MAS could not participate in the new elections, but they failed. Now they harshly scold the Electoral Tribunal and the center-right parties who opposed the veto and postulated the democratic need to beat the MAS at the polls.
A few hundred people gathered around the police barracks to call for a coup that would free Bolivia from the return of the MAS. In 2019, the police revolted, contributing to the ouster of Morales. These protesters joined the speeches addressed to the men in uniform with prayers on the street, on their knees and with their hands outstretched towards the sky.
Both Santa Cruz Governor Rubén Costas and former candidate Luis Fernando Camacho, the most voted in this region, support the call for an audit. Camacho also did not recognize Arce’s victory, although his party’s MPs are holding the posts for which they were elected.
The leaders of the Civic Committee were held hostage for a few hours by the radical groups, until the police intervened in their offices and rescued them. The young people asked to declare the interruption of work indefinitely, as this institution did last year after rejecting the elections at that time.
The president of the Committee, Rómulo Calvo, told the press that he could not put the Committee at the service of the interests of the party, which he did not identify. Thus he granted only one day of unemployment in the interior of the region and another, Friday, in the capital, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Unlike last year, this time some Santa Cruz citizens rejected the idea of going back on strike, especially when they came across the roadblocks that activists have been carrying out for several days. Bolivia is going through a very serious economic situation. Since October 2019 she has not been able to work normally for more than three months, first hit by the political crisis and then by the pandemic. For this Luis Arce tweeted: “After almost a year of economic and social crisis, it is time to rebuild the homeland”, and concluded: “The mobilizations only delay reactivation, the generation of jobs and income”.
Source link
