Bolivia’s Maybe Election

Two weeks from today Bolivia will vote in a historic election, with the political heads of the President, Vice-President, and eight of the nation’s nine governors on the line.

Or maybe it will just be another Sunday.

Such is the uncertain world of Bolivian politics these days.

The Run-Up to the Recall Vote

The national ‘revocatoria’ vote scheduled for August 10 is the product of an odd political chess game that President Evo Morales and his opposition have been playing out for more than a year. As we have written about here before, the idea of the “vote-on-everyone-one-more-time” was first launched by embattled Cochabamba Governor Manfred Reyes Villa in January 2007, after the region exploded in violent confrontations between his supporters and Morales’. Then it languished, only to be resurrected even more oddly by the opposition in Congress in May, which signed onto a lopsided voting formula favored by Evo.

Sometimes in Bolivian politics you can only interpret people’s actions one of two ways. They are either so incredibly Machiavellian that mere mortals such as myself can’t possibly understand the grand strategy involved, or politicians here are just incredibly foolish.

In any event, with two weeks to go until the maybe-election – I’ll get to the ‘maybe’ part in a minute – evidence of the ‘epic vote’ is pretty minor here in Cochabamba. A couple of weeks ago MAS backers opened up a couple of local campaign offices to modest turnouts and the sounds of off-key tubas. Evo’s opponents are slightly less visible. Yesterday they hung a series of banners down Calle Americas, a central strip in the city’s affluent northern neighborhoods. “No MAS Muertos [No More Deaths]”, “No MAS Venezuelas.” What it may lack in strategy the opposition makes up for in catchy slogans.

There is also that nifty full-page in today's Los Tiempos featuring an array of legal experts calling for the suspension of the vote. I really did think it was a news feature, until I spotted the fine print "solicitude" in the top right hand corner, "advertisement". Shall we take bets on which regional governor with a famous moustache paid for it?

Evo meanwhile is making the rounds at rallies in some of the region’s rural areas. Here in the metropolis of rural Tiquipaya the only evidence I have seen so far from the campaign is a lone MAS sound truck at the Sunday market this morning, draped in the Bolivian flag and a Whipala.

In other words, while most of the commentators writing about the coming vote from abroad have amped it up us a major political drama, most Bolivians I know seem to care much more about the fact that 1 Boliviano now gets you just two rolls of bread (it used to buy you 5) and that the local trufi drivers blocked the road here for two days in a dispute over routes.

More to the point, all this is in wild contrast to the feel of things here in December 2005, when Morales was first elected. You could not step foot into the streets without being struck on the head by an election banner, or being run over by a sound truck, or offered a leaflet. The campaign atmosphere was electric. Not this time. Not yet at least.

The Maybe-Election

Bolivian politics has developed a long habit of being operated under rules that are never quite clear, sort of like the games designed by my five-year-old daughter. What kind of vote does it take for a Constituent Assembly to approve a new constitution? Can regions unilaterally declare their autonomy? Quien sabe? Who knows? The rules governing the ‘revocatoria’ vote are no exception.

Last week the sole remaining magistrate on the National Constitutional Court (in Bolivia this is separate from the National Supreme Court) declared that the vote should not be held. Her logic – the failure of Morales and the Congress to agree on appointments to the other two Court slots has left it without the ability to adequately rule on challenges to the election’s constitutionality, and therefore it should not take place. Meanwhile the National Electoral Court, which has responsibility to organize the vote, has declared otherwise.

To no one’s surprise, those who favor the vote and those who oppose it (Morales backers and backers of the threatened Governors, respectively) have taken sides on the constitutional questions in accordance with their politics. Who is right? What will happen? Quien sabe?

Odd Positioning

Then there is the quite odd positioning of the various politicians involved, acts of political contortion that have left several of the nation’s leaders looking as much like pretzels as they do candidates.

There is Manfred Reyes Villa, the elected Governor of Cochabamba. His position is as follows: He proposed the vote in the first place but now says it is illegitimate and won’t campaign or accept the results of he loses – though he probably will if he wins. And he also announced last week that, while the vote is unconstitutional and illegitimate, everyone should go to the polls in two weeks and vote No on Evo. Just in case I suppose.

Then there is Evo. On the one hand he is trying to campaign on what he considers to be a record of accomplishment. Last week I was on the receiving end of a pair of widely circulated e-mails generated (at taxpayer expense) from the Ministry of the Presidency. Slick presentations, adorned with both the government emblem and Evo’s campaign logo touted bar graphs showing the steep rises under his tenure in government spending for public works and services – the bread and butter of politics here.

On the one hand one might take that as a sign that Evo is reaching out once more to the urban middle class that joined with his natural rural base to back him in 2005 – I am guessing that the e-mails and PDF files were not intended for the residents of Tapacari. But on the other hand Evo seems quite clear that he is campaigning primarily to mobilize that rural base again, in ways not likely to sooth city-dwellers and the middle class.

Yesterday in a speech to the core of his base (and one of the more radical elements of it) the cocaleros, Evo returned to the themes and attacks that are always certain to win cheers from his backers and give nervous pause to those on the fence. He attacked the lone Constitutional magistrate by name, declaring her to be an enemy of democracy and an insult to Bolivian women. He declared his other opponents to be tools of neoliberals and the U.S. and all a part of the same regimes responsible for the deaths of the nation’s martyrs, from Tupak Katari on down.

There is of course, no doubt, that a core of the opposition to Evo springs from a deep well of antagonism by wealthy interests threatened by his rule and by racism in response to his existence as the nation’s first indigenous President.

But that alone does not explain the people who sit next to me in a dilapidated Toyota station wagon in the morning, the working poor headed into the city for a long day of work. The objections of the elite and the racism of many does not account for the declarations of, “Ayyy Evo, he just wants to fight with everyone,” or, “He said he was going to make things better, but it is all just the same.”

It may well be that, as polls suggest, Evo is headed for a victory in two weeks. But if I were MAS or Morales I’d be plenty worried about that mom sitting next to me in the back seat. Politically deserved or not, it is that kind of antipathy from people that once supported you that carries the makings of a defeat. It is also the kind of opinion and expression that gets left out by those writing about the vote based reports via their computer screen.