Haiti president requests US humanitarian aid amid protests

AP. October 28, 2019

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haiti’s president said Monday that he has asked the U.S. government for humanitarian assistance as protesters demanding his resignation took to the streets in the seventh week of demonstrations that have shuttered many schools and businesses across the country.

President Jovenel Moïse also said during an interview with Radio Metropole that Haiti can turn the crisis into an opportunity as he renewed a call for dialogue with opposition leaders organizing the protests.

“We’re in a very difficult moment,” he said. He didn’t specify what sort of aid he was seeking.

Shortly after he spoke, thousands of protesters once again marched through parts of Port-au-Prince, expressing anger over corruption, high inflation and a lack of basic goods, including fuel. Religious and business leaders also have asked that Moïse step down, and on Sunday, hundreds of police officers joined the protest.

More than 2 million children have not been able to attend school for nearly two months as a result of protests in which more than 20 people have been killed and more than 100 injured. Gang violence also has increased in certain areas amid the unrest, with five men recently killed and dismembered in the Artibonite region north of the capital, according to Jean Castro Prévil, who oversees the region’s police department.

The U.S. Embassy announced it would only be providing emergency services on Monday as a result of the violence.

Lawyer: Honduran Government Could Be Behind Prison Murder

AP. October 28, 2019

MEXICO CITY — The brutal murder of an alleged Honduran drug trafficker with a potentially critical piece of evidence against the president has the Central American nation's government pointing the finger at other drug traffickers for his death, while the man's lawyers suggest the government may have been responsible.

A maximum security prison's surveillance camera captured the savage killing of Nery Orlando López Sanabria Saturday morning while he stood in a hallway chatting with the prison's director.

López — who had changed his identity to Magdaleno Meza Fúnes and once faked his own death — gained attention earlier this month when the contents of ledgers he was carrying in a secret compartment with guns, grenades and cash were made public in a New York federal courtroom at the drug trafficking trial of Juan Antonio "Tony" Hernández.

The ledgers included entries logging cocaine shipments for Hernández, a former Honduran congressman, and the initials of his brother, President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is known throughout Honduras as JOH. The president has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged.

At trial, U.S. prosecutor Amanda Houle called the ledgers "devastating evidence of the defendant's guilt." Tony Hernández was convicted this month in a conspiracy prosecutors described as "state sponsored drug trafficking."

López's lawyer, Carlos Chajtur, said Monday that the involvement of the Honduran government in his client's murder "is a hypothesis that we can in no way discard because of the way in which he died."

Chajtur had been trying unsuccessfully for a year to get his client transferred to a military base because he had received death threats. The lawyer said there had also been an attempted poisoning of his client and that a gang member transferred into the prison earlier this year was found to have secreted a grenade in his rectum that was intended to kill López.

On Sunday, deputy security secretary Luis Suazo put out another hypothesis via Twitter. He suggested that López's lawyers had said their client would deny the authenticity of the ledgers in exchange for a transfer out of the prison and that other drug traffickers may have had him killed.

But Chajtur said Monday that was false.

"It was the authorities who initiated a possible deal in which he would deny the content of the ledgers and in exchange he would be transferred," said Chajtur, who refers to his client as Magdaleno Meza Fúnes. "The ledgers are authentic and were seized with Magdaleno Meza Fúnes."

The lawyer said that when you analyze the video of the death in prison of López "it's evident that there is a plot by the penitentiary authorities and maybe higher level authorities."

"It makes us think that there may have been direct participation by the state," he said.

The video depicts an efficient and certain assassination that unfolds in the span of about 40 seconds.

In what appears to be a hallway of the prison, López is standing in the center speaking to two prison officials. Chajtur said the man directly in front of his client was the prison director. Another prisoner and two guards are to one side.

One guard, his face covered by a mask, walks to a red sliding door at the other side of the hall while López continues talking with the officials.

As soon as the guard slides open the door, men in white t-shirts burst in, one firing a pistol directly at López's head.

He has time to just turn his head toward the attackers and then falls with his first step away from them. The guards and officials all scatter, along with the other prisoner. The man with the pistol moves closer to the facedown López and empties his clip into his head.

Five men accompanying the shooter brandish knives at the cowering guards and one stabs the inert López repeatedly in the back with a long knife before handing the shooter a new clip. The shooter then proceeds to empty that entire clip into López's head while the man with the long knife hacks at his ankles. Another man then comes and stabs López in the side.

All six attackers then exit through the same door they entered, even sliding it shut.

López had been arrested June 6, 2018 on money laundering and weapons charges by military police and an antidrug unit. His vehicle had a secret compartment holding the ledgers, cash, guns, a pair of grenades and jewelry.

Several years ago, López faked his own death. Photographs circulated of López in a coffin. Local media have reported that he underwent cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance.

In June, Chajtur was in the Florida offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration. There was an open Justice Department investigation into López - also known as Meza Fúnes — and during that visit Chajtur said he was made aware that the DEA had written a letter to support an extradition request to the Honduran government.

López could have been a key witness at the Hernández trial. U.S. prosecutors put a Honduran detective on the stand who testified about the seizure of the ledgers. Chajtur said the existence of the ledgers hadn't been made public in Honduras and it was only after U.S. authorities were tipped off and made a specific request to the Honduran government that their contents were shared.

Chajtur said Monday he doesn't know if the extradition request was made to the Honduran government and kept quiet or if it hadn't happened yet.

But it was made clear to him at that meeting "that the extradition request was going to come sooner rather than later."

Salvadorans to get extension of temporary protected status in the United States

Abigail Hauslohner and Maria Sacchetti. Washington Post. October 28, 2019

The Trump administration said Monday that it will extend the temporary work permits of 200,000 Salvadorans living in the United States, reversing course on President Trump’s earlier vow to deport them.

U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Ronald Johnson and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said that the United States is extending El Salvador’s temporary protected status, a provisional residency granted to thousands of Salvadorans after the country was ravaged by an earthquake in 2001. The status had been renewed on an 18-month basis since, until the Trump administration announced its termination in 2018, saying TPS was no longer warranted for nationals of El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan and Nicaragua.

A federal judge stalled the deportations last year, ordering the government to uphold TPS for those nationals until the litigation is resolved.

“We are very happy to be able to announce that today in Washington, D.C., we have reached an agreement to extend TPS for Salvadorans in the United States for one more year,” Johnson said in Spanish on Monday, appearing in a video alongside Bukele, which each sent out on Twitter. “This is a recognition of the achievements and good work of President Nayib Bukele’s government.”

Congress created TPS in 1990 to give nationals of countries upended by natural disasters, armed conflict or other major turmoil temporary relief from deportation out of the United States. The secretary of homeland security can renew the status if the conditions that necessitated TPS have not improved or if a country is unable to absorb returnees.

Going home after half a lifetime

About 500,000 people have been allowed to stay in the United States as a result of the protected status, and Salvadorans are the largest group, according to federal data.

The Trump administration has pushed to limit the use of the program, arguing that disasters that occurred years ago should not be grounds for temporary residency now. The administration regularly deports people to some TPS-designated countries.

Trump has sought to end TPS for nearly all of the 10 nationalities that are protected, while also working to reduce the avenues to asylum and legal permanent residency.

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the administration to challenge its efforts to end TPS protections, accusing it of discrimination. Federal judges have issued preliminary injunctions to halt the deportation of the Salvadorans, Haitians, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans, whose TPS the administration has tried to terminate. The Trump administration has appealed that decision, and advocates expect an appellate court ruling soon.

The largest number of Salvadorans with TPS live in the Washington, D.C., area, followed by Los Angeles, New York and Houston.

Many Salvadorans fear returning to a country that ranks among the most dangerous in the world, a nation that long has experienced high rates of poverty, corruption and gang violence. Salvadorans also send home billions of dollars a year to relatives, a critical infusion that helps keep the economy afloat.

In a statement, DHS said it arrived at its revised decision on TPS for Salvadorans after considering the possible consequences of mass deportations.

“The administration’s goal is to create an orderly and responsible process to repatriate Salvadorans and help them return home; however, a sudden inflow of 250,000 individuals to El Salvador could spark another mass migration to the U.S. and reinvigorate the crisis at the southern border,” the agency said in the statement. “Taking into account these concerns, we have decided to provide additional time to work out that plan. We cannot allow the progress the president has made the past several months to be negated.”

The agency said Salvadorans who have TPS protection would have their work permits extended through Jan. 4, 2021, and that the government is providing Salvadorans with TPS an additional year after the conclusion of the TPS-related lawsuits to repatriate back to their home country.

Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, disputed the U.S. ambassador’s description of the arrangement as a TPS extension.

“Some reporting has spoken of ‘extending TPS,’ ” Cuccinelli tweeted. “That has important legal meaning, and that’s not what happened w/the agreements. Rather, work permits for Salvadorans will be extended for 1 year past resolution of litigation for an orderly wind down period.”

DHS framed the TPS decision as part of a larger collaborative security package the United States and El Salvador signed Monday in Washington.

Under the new arrangement, DHS officials will deploy to El Salvador “to advise and mentor” their police and immigration counterparts, and El Salvador and the United States will “enhance cooperation to prevent and combat crime and other threats to public security through the expansion of biometric data collection and information sharing,” DHS officials said.

The U.S. government typically provides public justification for TPS extensions by explaining the conditions within a country that make it too dangerous for nationals to return, but the Trump administration offered no such explanation Monday.

The Trump administration in September signed a separate deal with El Salvador that allows the U.S. government to divert asylum seekers from the southern border to El Salvador as part of a broader strategy to discourage would-be immigrants from seeking refuge in the United States.

Immigrant rights advocates celebrated the reprieve from deportation but criticized what they saw as the administration’s leveraging the safety of hundreds of thousands of immigrants as part of a “trade” to keep new asylum seekers out of the United States.

“That is totally unacceptable,” Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA, an immigrant rights group, told reporters Monday.

Trump administration to begin sending asylum seekers to Guatemala as soon as this week

Nick Miroff. Washington Post. October 28, 2019

The Trump administration is preparing to finalize an agreement this week to begin sending asylum seekers from the U.S. border to Guatemala, implementing a deal the two countries reached in July, according to three people with knowledge of the plan.

The pact gives the Department of Homeland Security the ability to send asylum seekers to Guatemala if they do not seek protection there while transiting through the country en route to the U.S. border. It could mean that migrants from numerous countries will make the dangerous journey to the United States only to be sent back to Central America upon reaching U.S. territory.

Homeland Security officials plan to start sending Hondurans and Salvadorans to Guatemala soon after the implementation of the deal, according to the three people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue.

Guatemala’s highest court initially ruled that the asylum accord could not go forward without the approval of Guatemala’s congress, but a subsequent decision left open the possibility that outgoing President Jimmy Morales could implement the deal without lawmakers’ approval.

President Trump says he will unfreeze some aid to Central America

Morales is due to leave office in January. Guatemala’s president-elect, Alejandro Giammattei, has criticized the deal, but Trump officials reiterated this month that the United States will slash government assistance if Guatemala backs out.

Kevin McAleenan, who plans to step down as acting DHS secretary as soon as Thursday, has secured similar agreements with Honduras and El Salvador, but those deals have not been implemented. Mc­Aleenan has said the agreements will be implemented gradually to avoid overwhelming Central American nations that until now have typically received few asylum applications from those fleeing persecution.

McAleenan has argued that vulnerable migrants should not have to travel all the way to the United States to find safety, and that the U.S. immigration system has been overwhelmed in recent years amid a flood of applications from Central American economic migrants making humanitarian claims to avoid deportation.

Critics of the accords say it is unrealistic to expect weak Central American governments to safely resettle vulnerable groups when they already struggle with widespread poverty and some of the world’s highest homicide rates.

The Trump administration has pledged at least $47 million to build up Guatemala’s asylum system with help from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

President Trump suspended aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador this spring amid a record surge of families from those nations traveling to the border in large groups and caravans. He announced that he would restore some of the assistance this month after the three countries agreed to accept U.S. asylum seekers.

“Guatemala, Honduras & El Salvador have all signed historic Asylum Cooperation Agreements and are working to end the scourge of human smuggling,” Trump tweeted.

U.S. authorities took nearly 1 million migrants into custody along the Mexico border during the 2019 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the highest total since 2007. Unauthorized border crossings peaked at more than 144,000 in May but have since declined by two-thirds. Migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador has fallen by more than 80 percent, according to the latest statistics.

Two administration officials with knowledge of the Guatemala accord said Homeland Security probably would start sending some asylum seekers from Honduras and El Salvador back to Guatemala, beginning with single adults rather than families.

Trump has referred to the asylum agreements and other new deterrent policies as a “beautiful puzzle” with the overarching goal of discouraging migrants from trying to reach the United States in the first place.

Trump administration has acquired little of the private land it needs for border barrier

DHS officials also have been requiring asylum seekers to remain outside U.S. territory while they await immigration court hearings under a program — known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” — that has sent more than 50,000 people back to Mexican border cities while their U.S. claims are pending.

Another emergency measure gives U.S. authorities the ability to disqualify and deport asylum seekers who decline to seek protection in other countries while en route to the United States.

Both policies are being challenged in federal court, and a ruling on the protocols program in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is expected soon.

Mexican president to congratulate Argentina's Fernandez, Bolivia's Morales

Reuters. October 28, 2019

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Monday he planned to call Argentina’s Alberto Fernandez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales later in the day to congratulate them for winning recent presidential elections.

Speaking at a regular government news conference, Lopez Obrador was asked whether he would hold meetings with Fernandez and Morales soon. He said it was likely he would meet with the presidents of Argentina and Bolivia.

In the case of Argentina, he appeared to be referring to Fernandez as the country’s incoming president. Morales is already president of Bolivia.

These women say they were forcibly sterilized in the 1990s. Now they want justice

LEILA MILLER. Los Angeles Times. October 29, 2019

LIMA, Peru — The first time nurses visited Gloria Basilio, she told them she wasn’t interested in sterilization surgery. She already had three children but wanted more.

The nurses kept returning to her home in the remote Peruvian countryside. They told her the president himself had ordered the procedure for women with large families — women who they said “reproduced like rabbits.”

With her husband away, Basilio finally conceded.

She changed her mind in the operating room the next day, but nurses tied her arms and legs to a bed and blindfolded her.

Basilio is one of untold thousands of women — mostly poor, rural and indigenous — who were sterilized against their will under a family planning program that operated from 1996 to 2000 under the government of then-President Alberto Fujimori.

The government has said more than 272,000 women and 22,000 men received sterilizations. As of September, nearly 7,500 people — 96% of them women — had joined a government registry claiming they never consented.

“My husband never stopped blaming me,” said Basilio, now 46. “He also wanted more children. Whenever I complained about the pain, he told me, ‘Why did you do that to yourself? Why did you get the operation?’”

Now, after nearly two decades of sputtering attempts at justice, Fujimori and three of his former health ministers are facing prosecution on charges of human rights violations.

The criminal complaint, which was filed last year on behalf of more than 1,300 alleged victims, including five women who prosecutors say died as a result of complications from the procedure, has reached a critical juncture. A court specializing in high-level corruption is scheduled to hear evidence in early December and decide whether the case can proceed.

Basilio said she also wants a public apology — “even from Fujimori.”

His government’s family planning program was once hailed as a way to reduce widespread poverty by ensuring that low-income and less educated families would receive the same access to birth control as higher-income families.

“Peruvian women should be the owners of their destiny!” Fujimori declared in a 1995 speech to congress.

But prosecutors allege that the campaign emphasized sterilization over other contraceptive measures and that healthcare workers were pressured to meet quotas.

They say that the president participated in meetings with health ministers that focused on sterilization and that he received written updates on the alleged campaign to operate on women.

The doctors “obeyed a scale of orders that were controlled by the highest level of the country,” said Milton Campos, an attorney at a Peruvian women’s rights group representing alleged victims.

Almost from the beginning, the family program was dogged by complaints that women were being coerced.

Forced sterilizations are considered a crime against humanity under international law, and various probes by the government and activists eventually led to a criminal investigation, which has been opened and closed several times over the years.

The most significant upshot was a 2003 settlement before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in which Peru agreed to pay compensation to the family of a woman who died after being forcibly sterilized.

Fujimori, who resigned the presidency in 2000 following corruption scandals involving his former spy chief, is serving a 25-year prison sentence for ordering massacres during his government’s fight against Maoist rebels.

But his political allies — known as fujimoristas — continued to maintain considerable power as well as a populist image.

The sterilization case “complicates the fujimorista narrative — that they are in favor of the people, in favor of the poor,” said Jo-Marie Burt, a political scientist and Peru expert at George Mason University.

Then in 2016, the Justice Ministry began registering alleged victims in hopes of providing them psychological, medical and legal assistance, as well as determining the scope of the sterilization campaign.

Melissa Goytizolo, a Peruvian journalist who has gathered accounts of more than 100 alleged victims, reported that some were sterilized while unconscious following a caesarean section.

Others said they were told they were being treated for malaria, then anesthetized and sterilized. Some women caved to threats that resisting the surgery would send their husbands to jail.

In other cases, indigenous women signed consent forms they didn’t understand — because they couldn’t read Spanish.

The 2018 complaint describes fairs held to gather large groups of people who would be good candidates for sterilization. Potential targets were offered food and clothes as incentives.

Other details have come from Hernando Cevallos, a former congressman and one of the few doctors to speak out about the program. He was head of the medical federation in Peru’s Piura region in 1997 when a group of doctors alleged that health officials had ordered them to perform 250 sterilizations in four days.

To meet quotas, personnel at medical facilities — down to the cleaning staff — would be mobilized to bring in patients, Cevallos said.

“There was a lot of fear among doctors because these were orders from the state,” he said. “You knew it was wrong, you knew it increased the risk, but you did it, because if not, you could be dismissed.... It was really like a sterilization factory.”

The accused and their allies have denied the existence of a sterilization campaign.

Cesar Nakazaki, Fujimori’s attorney, said the president was not involved in running the program and that while in some instances doctors did not get consent, that doesn’t mean it was government policy.

“A high percentage of children in the Andes die every year from the cold,” he said. “Does that mean that there’s a health policy for those children to die? No.”

In a 2015 speech at Harvard, the former president’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, said that the forced sterilizations were the “personal responsibility of doctors who did not respect the protocols.”

Marino Costa Bauer, one of the former health ministers facing charges, called the family planning campaign an “excellent” program that reduced the maternal mortality rate.

“Could there have been some cases where there wasn’t adequate consent? Surely,” he said. “The program had very clear regulation. If it wasn’t followed, that wasn’t the fault of the minister or of the ministry, but of the ones who didn’t comply.”

Costa Bauer has argued that the case has gone on too long and is waiting on Peru’s top court to rule on a petition seeking to close it.

Victims of the sterilization campaign were often abandoned by their husbands, who viewed them as useless.

“It’s difficult for them to find another partner because they are already stigmatized as a woman who cannot have children,” said Alejandra Ballon, who wrote a book in 2014 on the sterilizations. “In the Andean or Amazonian culture, where the more children you have the better, it’s very difficult for them.”

That was the case for Maria Elena Carbajal, who said that hours after giving birth in 1996 she relented to pressure from doctors at the hospital and was sterilized.

She said that when her husband learned what had happened, he accused her of having the operation so she could have another sexual partner.

“My husband abandoned me from that day,” said Carbajal, now 49. “He forgot about me and my children.”

Carbajal was tasked with supporting her four children on her own. She eventually found a new partner, but said their relationship eventually ended because she could not provide him children.

Today she leads a victims’ association in Lima that meets monthly and offers group therapy.

One member, Florentina Loayza, who was allegedly sterilized at 19 after being held down and anesthetized, said that before receiving therapy, she would feel a deep sadness whenever she saw children.

“I went to the market and the first thing I saw was baby clothes or I saw a child and I wanted to have a child,” said Loayza, who is now 40. “I don’t have that longing anymore.”

Advocates for victims say most receive little or no help.

Raquel Reynoso, who helps lead an association seeking reparations, said there is a shortage of psychologists at the health centers in the far-off areas where many of the women live.

“They don’t even receive adequate medical attention, which is the most basic thing they ask for,” she said.

The Ministry of Health and the Ministry of the Women and Vulnerable Populations, both tasked with helping the victims, did not answer requests for comment.

Meanwhile, growth of the registry of victims has slowed considerably. The justice ministry works with victims’ associations to arrange multi-day visits to communities in search of more cases.

Joshua Calderon, a justice official who coordinates legal assistance for victims, said his team has focused on the regions where there have been reports of forced sterilizations.

“It’s logical that there could be a number of citizens that have still not registered, and with more money for this service we could reach a higher number,” he said.

Goytizolo, the journalist, blamed the government for investing too little in the effort. Several years ago, she and Ballon, the author, demonstrated how it could be done.

In Pucallpa, a city in the Amazonian rainforest, they bought a call-out on local radio instructing women who felt they had been tricked into sterilization to contact the station. It led them to dozens of alleged victims.

“This program affected women who were farmworkers, the poorest, with the least education, and that’s why the state doesn’t help them,” Goytizolo said. “I think these are the most forgotten women in Peru.”

Former President Tries to Turn the Tables on Powerful Bolivian Leader

John Otis. Wall Street Journal. October 28, 2019

LA PAZ, Bolivia—The politician leading the opposition against Bolivian President Evo Morales is well-schooled in the power of protest.

Carlos Mesa himself was forced to resign as president in the face of protests in 2005. That time, the one leading the marchers in the streets was Mr. Morales, who was elected in a landslide six months later.

“It was a very educational experience,” Mr. Mesa said.

Now he is attempting to use similar street tactics and international pressure to force Mr. Morales, one of the longest serving leaders in Latin America and a fierce critic of U.S. policy, to face him in a December runoff. The incumbent is claiming he won a fourth term in the first round of voting on Oct. 20, though electoral monitors say the process was shot through with irregularities.

Mr. Mesa has a steep hill to climb. The ruling party, Movement Toward Socialism, controls all branches of government, including the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which counted the votes.

Pressure from Washington, Europe and the Organization of American States has made little difference in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Honduras where presidents have clung to power through fraud-marred balloting, said Eduardo Gamarra, an expert on Latin American elections at Florida International University.

“Where there has been fraud, the outcomes are always basically frozen,” he said.

Tall and bespectacled, Mr. Mesa, a 66-year-old historian who has written books on everything from Bolivian cinema to soccer, seems more at ease behind a desk than on a stage whipping up crowds.

“He’s more a man of letters than a politician,” Gonzalo Mendieta, a lawyer and newspaper columnist in La Paz, said of Mr. Mesa.

Mr. Morales, by contrast, grew up herding llamas in the Andes mountains. He was an outspoken union leader before jumping into politics. An Aymara Indian in a nation with a huge indigenous population, Mr. Morales says that white, upper-class politicians like Mr. Mesa have misruled Bolivia for centuries.

Mr. Mesa was elected vice president in 2002 but broke with then-President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada after he ordered a deadly crackdown on protests led, in part, by Mr. Morales. When the president resigned in October 2003, Mr. Mesa was sworn in as head of state.

Mr. Morales continued to organize strikes to demand the nationalization of Bolivia’s natural-gas industry. Unwilling to use force to break them up and with the country paralyzed, Mr. Mesa announced after just 18 months in office that he, too, was stepping down.

“This is as far as I can go,” he said in his resignation speech.

Ironically, it was Mr. Morales who resuscitated Mr. Mesa’s political career.

In 2015 he asked Mr. Mesa to represent Bolivia in a case before the International Court of Justice. In a dispute dating back to the 19th century, landlocked Bolivia wanted neighboring Chile to grant it access to the Pacific Ocean. Bolivia lost the case, but Mr. Mesa’s arguments were seen as passionate and patriotic.

That caught the attention of Bolivia’s opposition, which had lost at least three straight elections to Mr. Morales. Mr. Mesa was recruited to run against him.

At first “he didn’t want to be a candidate and would wake up at night sweating” over the decision, said Diego Ayo, who briefly served as Mr. Mesa’s spokesman.

Once he launched his campaign, Mr. Mesa faced new challenges. The Morales government, which controls many TV and radio stations, saturated the airwaves with campaign ads and vastly outspent Mr. Mesa’s bootstrap operation, according to Mr. Ayo.

The opposition failed to unite behind Mr. Mesa, with the most radical sectors chastising him for assisting the Morales government in the case against Chile. As a result, Mr. Mesa was just one among eight opposition candidates on the ballot. Some who voted for him did so with little enthusiasm.

“It was more about stopping Morales,” said Iván Arias, a community organizer in La Paz, who cast his ballot for Mr. Mesa.

Still, early returns as well as an independent quick count indicated he would receive enough votes to force a runoff against Mr. Morales. That is when the Supreme Electoral Tribunal suddenly stopped publishing results for nearly 24 hours.

When the vote-counting resumed, the president’s lead gradually increased to 10 percentage points, the amount needed for outright victory. OAS observers questioned this sudden shift in the voting trend and recommended that the winner be decided in a runoff.

Since then, Mr. Mesa has grown more impassioned—and indignant. Flanked by more than a dozen opposition figures in front of a large Bolivian flag, a frowning Mr. Mesa on Thursday declared: “The ruling party has carried out massive electoral fraud. But we will not allow them to mock the will of the people.”

For his part, the president claimed a clean victory and accused Mr. Mesa of trying to steal it.

“We all knew he was a coward, but now it turns out that he’s also a delinquent,” Mr. Morales told reporters.

On Friday, for the fifth-straight day, thousands of Bolivians heeded Mr. Mesa’s call to take over the streets of La Paz and other cities. One of the protesters, political consultant Krupskaya Oña, said Mr. Mesa has finally risen to the challenge of leading the movement.

“He used to be bookish and timid,” she said. “But now he’s icon of democracy because he’s the only one left who can challenge Evo Morales. ”