The leader of the main Bolivian labor union said that Tuesday’s march in support of Arce in Santa Cruz, a historic opposition stronghold during the Morales governments (2006-2019), will be for reject “attempts at destabilization and a new coup by the right” and demand “respect for democracy and national symbols.”
Juan Carlos Huarachi, executive secretary of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) said that the decision to hold the concentration in Santa Cruz, which will replace planned protests against the so-called discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, was adopted when the opposition civic committees of Santa Cruz announced their strike tomorrow.
“For us it is totally clear that the right wants to repeat the coup of 2019 and we are not going to allow it, because the coup leaders have not only broken democracy but have also taken advantage of the pandemic to rob and loot the state,” said the union leader.
Santa Cruz is where “destabilization is brewing,” he added.
The two leaders that the COB sees as the main engines of destabilization of the Government of Arce are the president of the Cívico Santa Cruz Committee, Romulus Calvo, and the governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, the same one who entered with a bible in hand with the then de facto president Jeanine Áñez to the Presidential Palace of Quemado in 2019 when the coup against Morales was consecrated.
Both Calvo and Camacho made an effort in recent days to install the idea that it is not an opposition strike, but a “pro-democracy” strike, which explains the deepening of the political conflict in recent days.
Both the government – assumed last November – and its allies as well as the opposition are warning that democracy is at stake, a warning that in Bolivia preceded its darkest and most difficult moments.
And it’s not just about the most radical opposition.
Monday’s strike was decided at a meeting in which civic committees from various departments participated, the former presidents Carlos Mesa (2003-2005) and Jorge Quiroga (2001-2002) and references from other anti-Masist groups.
The opposition spectrum was very similar to the one that supported the massive protests against the Morales government in 2019, considering that there had been fraud in the October 2019 elections, in which the former president had been proclaimed the winner.
The mobilizations were the prelude to the coup. Later, independent experts and the Bolivian Justice ruled out that there had been electoral fraud.
In addition, the political scene is becoming more and more complex with multiple fronts of dispute.
On the one hand, there are the judicial processes for which several of the political figures emblematic of the coup of 2019, the subsequent de facto government and the violations of rights have been charged, called for an investigation and, in some cases, even detained. humans that were committed during that one-year management.
The defendants and their allies maintain that these processes are part of “a political persecution” by the government.
Secondly, The Santa Cruz Legislative Assembly set off the alarms in La Paz when it approved a law that assigns powers to prepare shortlists for the appointment of authorities such as the departmental prosecutor, representatives of the Ombudsman’s Office, the Comptroller’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office, electoral and judicial officials and an anti-corruption director.
The Arce government denounced that the only competent authority to define these appointments is the national Legislative Power and accused the Santa Cruz assembly and the governor who promulgated it of “an indication of the crime of separatism.”
For now, the Plurinational Constitutional Court has granted a precautionary measure imposed by the head of the national Senate, Masista Andrónico Rodríguez, and temporarily halted the Santa Cruz law.
And finally, the opposition rejects the bill Against the Legitimization of Illicit Profits that has half approval from the lower house and whose approval in the Senate, in the face of the escalation of threats and political mobilization, Rodríguez decided to postpone to enable rounds of dialogue with the opposition benches and “explain well” the text.
The bill seeks to guarantee the control of money, financial instruments and assets obtained from profits and their control when entering and leaving the country, granting more powers to the Financial Investigations Unit (UIF), the Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General’s Office.
The opposition and the business sector rejected the measure because they believe that it will give “extraordinary powers” to state institutions that, they maintain, work “politically.”
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