By Katu Arkonada on November 7, 2020
The Movement toward Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of all Peoples Party (MAS-IPSP) got 3,394,052 votes in this past election. This was 55.11% of the total votes and more than 8% more and half a million votes more than MAS got in the 2019 election. Conversely, Carlos Mesa got 8% less (he went from 36.51% to 28.83%) and almost half a million votes less than in 2019, with a 2020 total of 1,775,953.) There is no exact correspondence of votes lost and gained between Carlos Mesa and Luis Arce, but it is, at least, curious to note that the MAS got many more votes a year later in the middle of the coup d’etat and repression against processes of change than they did back in 2019 in a supposedly fraudulent election with all the governmental machinery in their favor.
If we analyze the vote Department by Department (Bolivia is divided into 9 Departamentos – government divisions approximately equivalent to states), we find that the majority of the increase in the votes came from three regions: La Paz, Cochabamba, and Oruro. These are the region of the Andes and valleys, where people who identify as Aymara and Quechua are concentrated, the hard core of the process of change, the Indigenous/Original Peoples/Campesino Movement.
In Santa Cruz, MAS was second in the vote, but it’s important to point out that right wing Camacho’s insisting on remaining a candidate when coup leaders Tuto Quiroga and Jeanine Añez had withdrawn to leave the field clear for Mesa. This was a decisive factor in preventing a unity candidate on the right, and helped give the victory to Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca in the first round, but at the same time it allowed Camacho to consolidate a block of his own that places him in a position of strength in Santa Cruz, leading the traditional elites embodied in the “democrats” of Ruben Costas – who until the coup was forming coalitions with Evo’s MAS – and promotes his objective of becoming a national political power.
There are three reasons that led to the fact that this is probably the first time in history that a coup d’etat has been defeated in an election in the space of 12 months.
In the first place, the poor management by those who carried out the coup contributed greatly. Just as during 2019, and especially in the period between the October 20 election and the coup on November 10, the government management of the crisis was bad, the coup promoters, once they took power, did not know how to manage the government. In a hasty and clumsy manner, they wanted to deliver the natural resources into private hands and privatize everything they could, and in the process they ended up repressing and killing those who protested, and robbed public money in a crude way, even that money meant for purchase of ventilators needed in the pandemic. The proximity to the U.S. elections meant that the directing center – the U.S. Embassy – of this
political opposition transformed into government dropped the reins, causing internal chaos.
In the second place, the bad management of the economy, which was not only because the crisis of the pandemic. The decrease of 11% in the Gross National Product and the increase in unemployment, which went from 4% to 30%, meant that the urban middle class, which organized to justify the coup in 2019, went on not to vote for Mesa in 2020, and even, though in smaller percentages, to vote for the MAS.
And, finally, as the most important element, the power of the people, deployed in the decade of the 90’s with marches of Indigenous Peoples in defense of their territories and in the decade of the 2000’s in defense of natural resources, which had been withdrawn during the first months of the coup and repression, returned to take the streets, making the coup leaders retreat from their intention to postpone the elections until 2021, and creating an insurrection at the polls.
This will not be an easy scenario. From this point on, Luis Arce will have to recover the economy, governing while balancing the two confronting forces that represent the Bolivian process of change. On one side, the ex-Chancellor and current Vice-President David Choquehuanca, who is probably looking toward 2025 when it will be possible to have control, without middle class participation, of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, over which he now will preside. On the other hand, Evo Morales, who returns to Bolivia as the political head of the MAS-IPSP, and who has maintained communication and control with a major part of the mid-level cadres of the process, as well as having close relations with the new Senate President, political scientist and campesino leader Andronico Rodriguez, who is Quechua from the Tropic of Cochabamba, Evo’s coca workers’ base.
The Indigenous/Original Peoples/Campesino Movement will be fundamental for sustaining the new government of Luis Arce and pushing it toward the left. Luis Arce will need to depend permanently on the support of David Choquehuanca and Evo Morales to be the driving force behind the changes that need to be made.
Among these, it is essential not only to recover the economy and move forward in the still pending changes in process in the areas of healthcare, education, and judicial system reform, but also to construct a media system that belongs to the people, not the coup instigators, and a structure of political training in defense of the process of change, without forgetting to think about reform of the police and armed forces to eliminate, once and for all, their coup-supporting impulses.
And after all this, putting those responsible for the coup, both on the ground and behind the scenes, behind bars for all the sisters and brothers who fell in Senkata, Sacaba, Pedregal, Rio Abajo, and Betanzos; for all the women and men, the comrades, who had to leave their homes and go into exile or take refuge in embassies, with the desire that justice may be done.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau