La Paz – Bolivia’s Socialist government said Monday that Congress and the courts will retain all of their current authority right up until the enactment of the new constitution expected to emerge from the Constituent Assembly whose deliberations have been paralyzed by conservatives’ recent walkout.
The opposition accuses President Evo Morales, who insists the assembly has plenipotentiary powers that exceed his own and those of Congress and the courts, of plotting to disband the legislature and the judiciary in a maneuver known in Latin America as a self-coup.
Unhappy with last Friday’s push by Morales’ party, the MAS, to impose on the assembly a set of rules that would enable the socialists to approve individual articles of the new charter by simple majority, delegates from three conservative parties abandoned the body.
The country’s vice president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, said Monday that the assembly’s “originator” status implies that the existing branches of government will retain their authority until the assembly members approve the new constitution.
He told a press conference that this continuity will allow the authorities to maintain the country’s institutional stability, but he also recognized the historic power assigned to the assembly, which convened more than a month ago in the southern city of Sucre.
The main opposition party, the rightist Podemos, repeatedly has accused Morales of preparing a self-coup by using MAS’ majority in the assembly to order the shutdown of Congress.
MAS, which holds 137 of the assembly’s 255 seats, has sought from the outset to discard the two-thirds rule set out in the legislation convening the body in favor of one allowing passage by simple majority.
After the 86 conservative delegates stormed out of Friday’s session, the MAS proceeded to push through the rule change, though it maintained the requirement for a two-thirds majority, 170 votes, to approve the full constitution once it is completed.
Garcia Linera on Monday made a proposal that Podemos, the MNR and the UN return to the forum in Sucre to discuss the details of the assembly’s rules, giving the conservatives a chance to suggest modifications that would address their concerns.
His proposal was made a few hours before a scheduled opposition summit in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, where leaders of the three parties will be joined by the governors of the provinces of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni – comparatively prosperous regions that are demanding substantial autonomy from the central government.
The vice president dismissed as a “political prank” the request by Podemos leader Jorge Quiroga to call for Organization of American States observers to verify the creation of the Constituent Assembly.
“That business of calling, when things just barely got a little hot, on whatever foreign power gives brutal evidence of insecurity and political infantilism,” Garcia Linera said of the statement from Quiroga, a former president who lost to Morales in last December’s election.
