From ineptitude to political blindness

As feared, the passing of the days without results in Trinidad is confirming that the Government of Luis Arce bet on delay with this new meeting that they put the adjective ‘technical’, which is actually political, because it obeys to a political strategy to try to find arguments and exert pressure, so that the government position is imposed, that is, the 2024 census.

The details of the schedule can be easily resolved for a very simple reason: if until four months ago this same government said it was in a position to hold the census on November 16 of this year, that is, within a week, then there is no no doubt that it can be done within a year, in 2023.

That is why the date of the census is a political and not a technical issue. The attempt to prolong the discussion in Trinidad and set long deadlines hides a tactic to tire the people of Santa Cruz who today enter the 18th day of their indefinite strike.

However, just as in the negotiation attempts the Executive has shown that it does not have effective operators with the capacity to dialogue and reach agreements, the presumed belief that unemployed citizens will end up getting tired and return to their normal activities implies that in their environment Luis Arce also does not have collaborators who make correct readings of reality.

Any moderately experienced politician knows that after 18 days of strike, no people is going to go home empty-handed. And less Santa Cruz, who has a lot of patience, as he had during three weeks of unemployment in 2019.

If there were a moderately lucid thinker in the Casa Grande del Pueblo, he would know that the more days that pass in a crisis, the more irreducible is the expectation of those who mobilize. Finally, it implies completely ignoring the people of Santa Cruz: the people who are mobilized in the roundabouts, avenues and streets sacrifice themselves, but they do not have a bad time. As frequent as their outings to protest have become, they have learned to find ways to kill time in a useful and even fun way.

They are unaware, finally, of the condition of silent and peaceful but inalienable combativeness of the people of Santa Cruz. In this particular case, the Government has made a great effort and with ‘success’ to increase its unpopularity in Santa Cruz with several blunders that will go on to register in the inventory of aggressions in the region.

Among them are the criminal fence that he carried out in alliance with his shock groups and that turned out to be completely counterproductive; the siege of the Palmasola refinery where the Government Minister, Eduardo del Castillo, YPFB itself and the complicity of the Police converged in the organization; and the siege of the solid waste dump for more than eight days, among other bad precedents that the people of Santa Cruz will probably not forget.

Even members of his own party have postponed Luis Arce in his management of the conflict over the census. Deputy Héctor Arce, from MAS, described Trinidad’s ‘technical’ debate as ‘bland’, and said that the definition is being lengthened to ‘hide corruption, drug trafficking allegations and minimize the fracture that exists in the MAS’.

A glimpse of intelligence, after so many mistakes, should lead President Arce to announce today, during his management report in the Assembly, that he made the decision that the census be carried out in 2023. That would defuse the prolonged conflict. But it is unlikely that it will. More can the political blindness of the management of it.