Morales Won’t Run in Bolivia’s Next Election, Deputy Says

EFE. November 21, 2019

MEXICO CITY – Bolivia’s former vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera told EFE on Thursday that while neither he nor erstwhile president Evo Morales will run in elections expected early next year, they will insist on being allowed to return to the country for the campaign.

“It’s clear that Evo and Alvaro will not be candidates so as not to generate opposition from the coup forces,” Garcia Linera said in Mexico City, where he and Morales arrived on Nov. 12 after the Bolivian military forced them to resign.

The interim government in La Paz “is prepared to continue killing Bolivians” to keep the deposed president and vice president off the ballot, Garcia Linera said.

Both Morales’ leftist MAS party and the leader of the interim government, right-wing Sen. Jeanine Añez, have presented legislation to enable fresh elections.

Bolivians just went to the polls on Oct. 20, but the opposition refused to accept results showing a victory for Morales, claiming fraud, and weeks of unrest culminated in the ouster of the country’s first indigenous president.

Garcia Linera, 57, demanded that Añez allow for a transparent electoral process open to participation by all of the Andean nation’s political forces.

“We won’t be candidates, but we have the right to speak, to opine, to think, to propose, to support someone. It is our constitutional right,” the ex-vice president said.

“If they are free elections, with respect for constitutional guarantees, we have to recognize the result, whoever wins,” he said when asked about a possible victory for the right.

Garcia Linera, who took office along with Morales in 2006, acknowledged that MAS underestimated the reaction from the right to their decision to seek a fourth term in last month’s balloting.

“We did not calculate this highly racialized and fascist awakening of the comfortable sectors of the middle and upper classes against the indigenous people,” he said.

Echoing sentiments he expressed in an interview with EFE in 2016, Garcia Linera said that he initially didn’t want to accompany Morales on the ballot this year, but felt obliged to run when urged to do so by Bolivia’s main labor federation.

Three years ago, Garcia Linera told EFE that he had already made up his mind to leave office in 2019 and return to civil society to wage an “ideological struggle” in defense of the process of change begun by Morales.

Even so, he said on Thursday that he had no regrets about running with the 61-year-old Morales.

The elections were clean, Garcia Linera said, and the elected judges of Bolivia’s Constitutional Court upheld Morales’ right to seek another term.

Asked about Añez’s claims that Morales was instigating road blockades in Bolivia with the intent to create food shortages, Garcia Linera said that mobilizations against the interim government “are not organized by telephone, or by WhatsApp, or by Skype.”

“The magnitude of the mobilization, especially in the city of El Alto, is a matter that has nothing to do with leaders close to us. It’s an explosion that comes from below,” he said.

“When they kill you, what can you do to defend yourself?” Garcia Linera asked, alluding to the deaths of at least 29 people during protests against the interim government.

As he was talking to EFE in Mexico, Bolivian police were using tear gas to break up a procession of thousands of people carrying the coffins of the eight activists who died in an encounter with security forces earlier this week in El Alto.

The march from El Alto reached the center of nearby La Paz just before 2:30 pm and participants had paused on the edge of Plaza San Francisco square when police launched tear gas canisters, sending people scurrying down side streets to escape.

Simultaneously, motorcycle-mounted riot cops plowed into the multitude, made up overwhelmingly of members of Bolivia’s indigenous majority.

The day after the Oct. 20 vote, the Organization of American States (OAS) said that Morales and former head of state Carlos Mesa had appeared to be headed for a runoff before an “inexplicable change” in the trend of the vote count occurred.

Morales maintained that his late surge in the balloting came after votes from remote rural areas were counted. Yet he agreed to an OAS audit of the votes against a backdrop of violent protests.

The OAS released its findings Nov. 10, saying that there had been a “clear manipulation” of the process and calling for a new election.

Morales responded to the OAS statement by immediately agreeing to a new vote. But the armed forces commanders appeared on television to “suggest” that the president step down.

Hours later, amid a wave of mob violence that included an arson attack on the home of the president’s sister and the abduction of family members of MAS officeholders, Morales and Garcia Linera announced their resignations in a video posted online.