La Paz – The Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, won a majority in Sunday’s balloting to select the members of the Constitutional Assembly, according to an unofficial rapid vote count.
MAS – the party of President Evo Morales – won 134 of the 255 assembly seats, or 52 percent, the conservative Podemos alliance obtained 62 seats, the centrist National Unity party 10, and the rest went to a number of smaller parties, according to the rapid count broadcast by television channel ATB, which belongs to Spain’s Grupo Prisa.
Morales received 54 percent of the vote in the presidential election in December, and he had predicted recently that MAS would take 80 percent of the assembly’s seats in Sunday’s balloting.
To approve a new constitution – which is the aim of the assembly – a two-thirds vote of the body is required, and it appears that MAS will have to compromise with other political forces to obtain the required number to approve a new charter.
The assembly will begin its work on Aug. 6.
With regard to the referendum on regional autonomy held simultaneously on Sunday, the preliminary vote count found that five provinces voted “no” to greater autonomy from La Paz and four voted “yes.”
The yes vote evidently won in the country’s south, east and tropical north, where there exists more opposition to the current government, and the no vote prevailed in the Andean center and western parts of the country, where Morales – an Aymara Indian – has more support from the country’s indigenous citizens.
The survey found that the provinces of La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosi and Chuquisaca voted no, while Beni, Pando, Tarija and Santa Cruz voted yes.
The populous and relatively wealthy Santa Cruz is the province that has been pushing hardest for more regional autonomy.
Meanwhile, Morales’ government appeared to place in doubt how the autonomy would be applied in the provinces that voted yes, with presidential chief of staff Juan Ramon Quintana making a statement to the Unitel television station saying that the result “is binding on the national level, but the possibility does not exist that it will be considered (so) on the provincial level.”
Quintana, however, admitted that the government party would have to work out an arrangement with opposition forces, especially the civil organizations that pushed for regional autonomy.
Several hours after the polls closed, television channels were reporting that MAS obtained between 57 and 60 percent of the total votes cast.
Morales himself proclaimed a “triple” victory for his government and his party, claiming that MAS obtained more than 60 percent of the votes for the Constituent Assembly and thus garnering an “absolute majority” of the seats. The second element of the victory, he said, was that MAS had received more than the 54 percent of the votes it had gotten in last year’s presidential election.
The third aspect of the victory, Morales said, was that the no vote in the autonomy referendum won in five of the country’s nine provinces, thus winning in more than 55 percent of the provinces.
He also said that he greatly respected the yes vote in the four provinces where that choice had prevailed, adding that the members of the Constituent Assembly would have to respect the result as well.
Upon learning of the apparent triumph of the yes vote in Santa Cruz, residents of the same-named city rushed into the streets to celebrate the result.
Morales has dubbed the civic and business leaders in Santa Cruz “oligarchs” who refuse to accept the changes he proposes for the country, and he recently gave this as the reason he had decided to renege on his original promise to vote yes in the referendum.
The celebration in Santa Cruz contrasted with the silence from MAS supporters, who rather tepidly expressed their satisfaction at having obtained an assembly majority.
Unitel reported early on that some 53 percent of the votes nationwide had been cast in favor of more regional autonomy.
The announcement of the preliminary unofficial results of the two ballotings came after a calm day of voting in which the most important incident was a demonstration by peasants in Sucre.
Members of the governing MAS party and the opposition, meanwhile, hurled harsh criticisms at one another for alleged vote-getting schemes and exchanged other verbal attacks.
The National Election Court announced Sunday that the official results of the vote will be announced within about 25 days.
Morales said Sunday’s Constitutional Assembly election and the referendum on regional autonomy would allow Bolivia to have a “peaceful” revolution and recover natural resources that belonged to the state.
“It’s going to start to liberate not just the people but also to free all the natural resources,” Morales said after voting in Villa 14 de Septiembre, a town in his political stronghold of Chapare.
“The natural resources, from a personal standpoint, should not even be given by concession (to private investors), they should belong to the state and the people,” Morales told reporters.
Morales, who nationalized Bolivia’s energy industry two months ago, said the assembly members elected Sunday would help chart a new “economic regime” in Bolivia based on state management of natural resources.
“All this wealth continues to be found in this mother earth, the Pachamama (Mother Earth in the Aymara Indian language), and some say that Bolivia is like Venezuela with many reserves,” Morales said.
Bolivians voted for delegates to a Constitutional Assembly charged with overhauling the Andean nation’s charter and on a measure that would give greater autonomy to the nine provinces.
Nearly 3.7 million people were eligible to vote for the 255 assembly members.
Voters chose from among 2,112 assembly candidates from 25 political parties, including the ruling Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, and the opposition Podemos movement.
Morales said during the election campaign that the assembly would allow Bolivians to “refound” the nation in favor of its Indians, who are the majority but he says have been humiliated, despised and exploited for centuries by the mestizo and white elites.
The president has said the current legal and constitutional system does not allow him to govern in the interests of the Indian majority nor “do away with colonialism and neo-liberalism,” which he blames for Bolivia’s lack of economic development.
Opposition leader and former President Jorge Quiroga, of the Podemos movement, has been a standard-bearer in the fight for autonomous regions.
The assembly vote marks the first time that a body is being elected through universal suffrage in Bolivia to write a constitution, while the autonomy referendum was also the first of its type to be held in the Andean nation.
MAS says the new constitution to be written by the elected body should include exclusive rights for Indians, in addition to nationalizing the land and all natural resources.
Morales nationalized Bolivia’s energy industry on May 1 and has long opposed neo-liberalism and globalization.
Neo-liberalism is the term commonly used in Latin America to refer to the laissez-faire policies of privatization and deregulation that many of the region’s governments adopted in the 1990s on the urging of Washington and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.
“The people must become constituents to achieve true independence. This is a struggle for independence, for liberation. We want to re-found our Bolivia,” Morales, who took office earlier this year, said recently while campaigning on behalf of assembly delegates from his party.
According to Morales, Indians played a role in gaining the country’s independence from Spain in 1825, “but they didn’t found Bolivia … (so now they want) to re-found it … (to) end discrimination and the contempt with which they have been regarded.”
MAS envisions a “communitarian social economy with private initiative” – involving limitations on property rights – and expresses the country’s “irresistible determination” to regain the Pacific access it lost in a 19th-century war with Chile.
Under the party’s plan, detailed in a document titled “To Re-found Bolivia,” collective rights and those of the indigenous people are to take precedence over individual rights.
MAS also calls for Aymara and Quechua to join Spanish as the country’s official languages and for the indigenous, multicolored banner, or “whipala,” to have the same status as the official national flag.
According to a 2004 report by the United Nations Development Program, 31 percent of Bolivians identify themselves as Quechua, 25 percent as Aymara and 6 percent as members of other Indian groups.
The remaining 38 percent of Bolivia’s population of roughly 9.4 million do not consider themselves to be Indians.
But 89 percent of those who say they are Quechua and 64 of the self-identified Aymara at the same time regard themselves as “mestizo.”
“From 1826 until today, Bolivia has had more than a dozen constituent assemblies. In all of them, the Indians, the peasants and the majority sectors were pushed to the margins of republican life,” read the first lines of the Morales plan.
In the new constitution, Morales wants to ensure that Indians have the right to “recognition of their political systems and configuration of authority,” and to manage their collective resources “according to their own traditions and customs.”
According to the MAS program, Indians should also have the right to practice their ancestral medicine and “to exercise differentiated political rights and citizenship, in accord with their usages and customs.”
The avowed goal is to create a democracy that is “plural, participative, communitarian and representative, based on the diversity of the peoples, for the elimination of all forms of colonialism, segregation and discrimination.”
“We will promote the mechanisms of consensual democracy practiced in communities,” says the program from the party of Morales, an Aymara who often touts the virtues of consensus and criticizes Western-style politics of majorities and minorities.
The executive, legislative and judicial branches of government are to be constituted “through universal suffrage and through traditional communitarian systems of decision-making and forms of election,” the document says, also urging the establishment of a mechanism for voters to recall any public official from the president on down to their local magistrate.
Left unaddressed are the question of how the indigenous and Western political norms and institutions are to be integrated, the delineation of their respective jurisdictions and the method of resolving any conflicts that might arise between the systems.
Judges and magistrates “will be elected by universal and direct vote,” the document says, adding four paragraphs later that “national judicial structures will incorporate the indigenous peoples’ forms of justice.”
In Bolivia’s traditional Indian communities, justice is often meted out in village assemblies.
“The decision imposed by the original (indigenous) authority within the ambit of its competence will be effective and valid before the ordinary judiciary, the police and any other state entity,” the document says, with the proviso that Indian courts must respect human rights.
The Morales agenda for the Constitutional Assembly also deals with land ownership, a crucial issue in a country where, according to U.N. figures, the 100 wealthiest rural families hold five times as much acreage as 2 million peasants.
“The agrarian regime and landholding will be regulated by the state based on the principle of not putting individual interests over the collective one,” the text says.
“Natural resources are social property and the management of their sustainable exploitation is delegated to the state,” reads the document.
Bolivia’s chief resource is its estimated 48 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which the Morales government nationalized on May 1, though the move actually consisted of giving foreign energy firms six months to accept the state petroleum company as the controlling partner in their operations here.
Morales, who began his political career as leader of a coca-growers union and decided to retain that position even after his inauguration as president, also declared that “coca leaf is part of (Bolivian) cultural traditions and will be protected by the state.”
At the same time, “Bolivia condemns drug trafficking in all its forms and manifestations.”
Coca, the raw material for cocaine, has been used by Andean Indians since time immemorial for medicinal, nutritional and ceremonial purposes.
