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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Here's an article from 2017 that I think sums it up quite well: https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/06/20/bolivia-s-democracy-at-risk-what-role-for-external-actors-pub-71301
But to make it short: a president going into a fourth term when the constitution only allows 2 should ring alarm bells, especially when said president is ignoring a referendum by doing so.
Term limits are bullshit anyway. If a president is good and well liked they should stay.
Our "best" (relatively) President won four terms because he implemented a basic social safety net. Capital responded by making sure that wasn't possible again.
It's funny how a prime minister in Europe holding power for more than a decade is fine but a President in Latin America is suddenly a dictator for wanting more than 2 terms.
Personally I'm not convinced of term limits either. It's more about the fact he readily ignored a constitution implemented under his rule, as soon as it started bothering him.
And I mean thats what the referendum in 2016 was about. If the people had wanted him to stay in power, they would've voted to increase the maximum amount of term limits. But they simply didn't, they did not want him to go into another term. He did anyway.
the bolivian constitutional court ruled his term under the old constitution didn't count for the new one.
And yet he won the actual elections. As I said, extremely shortsight and stupid move, and yet he never lost.
Yeah, the party not having a succesor figure was an important problem, that instead of fixing they went for the stupid shorsighted route, which gave oxygen to every ultra-reactionary force, local and international.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup and the subsecuent massacres? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment "non-voters" or blocked from it in several ways, than any other party. Why? Because the other parties represent the interests of powerful minorities. The last thing they wanted is poor disenfranchised people voting.
Do I care about spineless, reactionary comprador journalists, judiciaries and other burocrats? LMAO. That whole scum did everything to maintain the pre-Evo status-quo conditions of Bolivia. Latin America is scourged with them, my country included. Dipshits that could have fitted perfectly in the US Confederacy, for example.
They are a minority that clinges to immense power that has never been democratized. You can't vote for who runs Fox News nor the CNN, nor the Supreme Court, and yet those people have more power over the destiny of a country than any Congressmember.
The thing Americans always seem to forget when they talk about "Not a real democracy".
We've had three elections (debateably closer to five or six) of the last eight decided by an electoral college appointing a popular loser to the Presidency, in a country that heavily restricts enfranchisement and barely breaks a 60% participation rate on a good year.
Bolivia had north of 80% turnout and Evo was winning in landslides consistently.
The President of the appointed regional minority party is pointing at the wildly popular leader and claiming the other isn't a liberal democracy.
Really
moment.
Also one of those times the electoral college didn't even decide things and the Supreme Court came in to pick the winner of the election
Of course none of the justices appointed by George HW Bush recused themselves from the case and every one of them ruled in favor of his son, George W Bush and that's not even getting into how governor
rigged the Florida results for his brother
SCOTUS deciding to stop the count only mattered because the state was Winner Take All.
Florida was only the most glaring example. Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Gore's own home state of Tennessee... There was ratfucking everywhere. But, just like with Nixon in '60, it wasn't just a Republican problem. Gore wasn't willing to open up the can of worms that encompasses how the vote gets counted.
Now check the turnout % before the 2005 election, never north of 75%
the sdf lib is simply thinking in terms of
https://carnegieendowment.org/about/trustees
This is who you are allowing to shove ideology into your brain
I'd be fine with the same leader for 1,000 years if they are an agent of the proletariat and beloved of the people. Term limits has literally nothing to do with democracy or lack thereof. By the way, number of parties doesn't either. Two western misconceptions about what democracy is (lots of squabbling parties, lots of turnover in every elected position - neither of these are synonymous with democracy and in fact hinder it in many ways)
If he won the election, he won the election. Term limits are mainly a tool of capital, since capital does not have term limits.
Not to be pedantic, but saying “democracy eroded” makes me think there is some wide-ranging effort to undermine democracy along many vectors. If you just pointing to Evo winning elections in violation of term limits… idk that’s really just one thing. Even if I think that what he did was “undemocratic”, I wouldn’t call that a wholesale undermining of democracy.
It's undemocratic when one person wins multiple elections in a row because a majority votes for them.
How dare the people vote for and get what they want! Democracy has eroded!!!
Uh hun...
no term limits are silly. And it's undemocratic to have restrictions on who the public may elect
Who was the president when that constitution was put into place?
Evo, 2009 Consitution. They had the problem of not having a succesor figure. And instead of fixing that problem they went the other shortsighted route of removing term limits.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment "non-voters" or blocked from it in several ways.
lol. Some of us wanna play with the libs too ya know.
Ah, I thought you thought the constitution at that time was from some dictatorship from the seventies.
lol no. I'm pretty familiar with what went down in Bolivia with Morales as that's around the time in my radicalization when I began internalizing the incestuous relationship between the CIA, Corporate Media, American Foreign Policy and the IMF. I read Jakarta Method later and it was like I had watched a chapter happen in real time. That was also around the time I really started to grasp how much American media erases the disparities between Indigenous peoples and the governments they live under.