Reelection
Today's headline in La Razon reads "MAS will suggest that the President can be reelected". They are talking of the Constitutional Assembly (CA), of course. The rationale behind it is continuity: MAS say that if the president can be reelected, there will be continuity to the government's policies.
This should be a wake-up call for those that say that the CA is not an attempt to gain unconstrained power. This reelection issue is what the CA is all about. The rest is just decoration, to give the public something to discuss about while democracy is being buried. Once the CA starts, chances are that while everybody discusses something else, this particular bit will be approved.
Once reelection is approved, Evo will be eager to keep pulling a Chavez: He will call for new elections and argue that the new elections are his first constitutional mandate and not the reelection, because what happened under the previous constitution does not count. It would not be surprising if Bolivia receives Venezuelan aid in the guise of Smartmatic machines 'to modernize the electoral process'.
Evo also said that he did not want a system based on majority voting, because that is an imported and imposed model (!). He said he wanted a political model based on consensus, just like Aymaran communities. This comes out as a warning: you better agree with him.
Future generations of Bolivians, when MAS is (hopefully) long gone, will judge us and unanimously agree our stupidity. After all, we have had all possible warnings. We have seen what happened in Venezuela and we can be sure Evo is nothing but a puppet. We could also have resorted to our own history, when decades of dictatorships and left-wing governments destroyed the country's economic apparatus. But no, we did not hear anything, we remembered nothing. Lame excuses will probably mushroom all over the place -"we didn't know", "we didn't think it would be like this", etc. But do not get confused. Evo never hid his intentions. We knew. We just chose to look the other way until it was too late.
So, does reelection come as a front-page news? Obviously not. This is what MAS wanted all along. In fact, I would be surprised if MAS had any plans for the CA besides this one.
Bolivia, Bolivien, Evo, Evo Morales
This should be a wake-up call for those that say that the CA is not an attempt to gain unconstrained power. This reelection issue is what the CA is all about. The rest is just decoration, to give the public something to discuss about while democracy is being buried. Once the CA starts, chances are that while everybody discusses something else, this particular bit will be approved.
Once reelection is approved, Evo will be eager to keep pulling a Chavez: He will call for new elections and argue that the new elections are his first constitutional mandate and not the reelection, because what happened under the previous constitution does not count. It would not be surprising if Bolivia receives Venezuelan aid in the guise of Smartmatic machines 'to modernize the electoral process'.
Evo also said that he did not want a system based on majority voting, because that is an imported and imposed model (!). He said he wanted a political model based on consensus, just like Aymaran communities. This comes out as a warning: you better agree with him.
Future generations of Bolivians, when MAS is (hopefully) long gone, will judge us and unanimously agree our stupidity. After all, we have had all possible warnings. We have seen what happened in Venezuela and we can be sure Evo is nothing but a puppet. We could also have resorted to our own history, when decades of dictatorships and left-wing governments destroyed the country's economic apparatus. But no, we did not hear anything, we remembered nothing. Lame excuses will probably mushroom all over the place -"we didn't know", "we didn't think it would be like this", etc. But do not get confused. Evo never hid his intentions. We knew. We just chose to look the other way until it was too late.
So, does reelection come as a front-page news? Obviously not. This is what MAS wanted all along. In fact, I would be surprised if MAS had any plans for the CA besides this one.
Bolivia, Bolivien, Evo, Evo Morales
posted by Alvaro Ruiz-Navajas at 5/24/2006
2 Comments:
I totally agree with you, and i´m not surprised I must add. Evo has showed and talked about his dictatorial intentions long ago.
I have recorded his first speech as a president and all this things have been anounced, of course we all were distracted with evo's jersey and silly details.
Now... I think we are a little bit late.
Hi Candiaman! It seems the jersey really did the trick. No surpirses there.
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