November 13, 2022, 5:00 AM
November 13, 2022, 5:00 AM
Opposition politicians in the country see that Santa Cruz, with the 23 days of indefinite strike, has already fulfilled its objective, bringing forward the delivery of the census results and the distribution of resources the year before the 2025 elections, but the distribution of seats is missing. and give the INE independent control systems.
Members of the hunger strike pickets, both the one made up of three assembly members of the Citizen Community (CC) in La Paz and those of Conade, claimed that the distribution of seats had not been included and said that they will not lift their pressure measures until they know the resolution of the council this Sunday.
This is the picket line of three CC deputies, in the Assembly building, La Paz | Photo: APG
Former President Jorge Quiroga stressed that the Santa Cruz struggle had very positive results. “Santa Cruz with enormous civility, sacrifice, is on the streets for 23 days. The sacrifice must serve to have results in 2024, to be able to compare them with the electoral roll and see the inflated voting pockets that the MAS has. This has been achieved thanks to this region, because you will be able to contrast with the census, municipalities that have more voters than inhabitants, where they fill out the minutes by show of hands and commit fraud.”
Beyond the fraud, he mentioned as another achievement “that resources be distributed before 2025. Let us remember that when he kicked off the 2022 census, he did it for 2024 and results in 2026. They did not want to deal with these issues. But the registry can be cleaned up and resources will be redistributed, commitments achieved by Santa Cruz for the entire country.”
He insisted that to honor the sacrifice of Santa Cruz, and guarantee the government’s commitment “better if it is with the Legislative Assembly with a law that says that there will be the redistribution of seats before the end of 2024. If that does not happen, the 2025 elections will be in October. They will be convened in April of that year. To do this we should know how many deputies each region has. And within each of them, the population must be reassigned to national constituencies. This is a very complex job and will require at least three months, it has to be worked on from the beginning of that year, better from the end of 2024”.
In addition, he warned that there is a constitutional sentence issued in 2001 due to a consultation that the Congress of the time made to the Constitutional Court, which indicates that the distribution of seats cannot be done with preliminary results, but definitive ones, so he warned that the Government puts a trap for Santa Cruz because it only offers to redistribute resources until September 2024, not the new spaces in the Assembly.
Saturday evening, the day before today’s town hall, in the Cristo de la Concordia and the Santa Cruz flag | Photo: Ricardo Montero
During an interview with the program ¡Qué semana!, of EL DEBER Radio, the Deputy Minister of Communication, Gabriela Alcón, pointed out that the Government’s commitment is restricted to announcing the results and distributing resources in 2024, not the issue of seats. . Another source from the Executive pointed out that this is a very delicate issue, so it should be treated with patience.
Quiroga said that, if this does not happen, he bet that the final results will be in April or May 2025, “the government will say ‘elections have already been called, nothing can be done’ and we will vote on the bicentennial, on the way to the third century.” of republican life, with the seats and the uninominal distribution of the year 2012. That would be terrible, it would be dishonoring the sacrifice of Santa Cruz”.
For his part, the former president and leader of the Citizen Community (CC), Carlos Mesa, warned that Arce in his message “does not mention the fence, the prohibition of exports from Santa Cruz, the campaign of lies, the partialization of the Police and the violence of their shock groups. He does not guarantee electoral rolls, constituencies or seats and shuns dialogue by imposing his will”.
The mayor of La Paz, Iván Arias Durán, declared that Santa Cruz achieved an “important victory.” Through his Twitter account, the mayor stressed that the eastern region managed to deliver the results two years earlier than planned by the State.
For the mayor of La Paz, the first Santa Cruz victory was that “there is no corner of Bolivia in which it is not known what the census is and what it is for.” The second Santa Cruz victory, according to Arias, is that the data from the national survey will be earlier than expected by the Government, which expected to deliver the results only in 2026. “The Government planned to carry out the census in June 2024, deliver provisional data on 2025, final data and distribution of resources only in 2026”, he said.
He added that “it has been possible for the census to take place in March/April 2024, for the provisional data and distribution of resources to take place in 2024.”
The senator of the Citizen Community, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, sees that other measures must be taken to guarantee compliance with the decree that will ratify the date of the census for March 23, 2024.
The legislator assured that it must contain provisions that respond to the demands of citizen movements, including that universities verify the results obtained by the INE and a schedule that guarantees compliance with the new announced deadlines.
“The census should have been prepared since 2012 (…). They didn’t do their job. For this reason, there are two fundamental doubts: if in the time indicated by the president everything that we have demanded before 2025 will be fulfilled and what will be the counterpart of the National Institute of Statistics (INE) ”, affirmed Paz, in a video posted on their Twitter and Facebook accounts.
He insisted that “If you don’t have a counterpart, the INE is going to cheat, it has already deceived us. We had to have a census now, in November 2022, and there isn’t, because they lied to us, they politicized the process,” he insisted6.
Other points that must be taken into account, according to the opposition senator, is that in the framework of this debate they are the guarantee that the Government “does not touch” the US$ 23,000 million in contributions to the Investment Fund Administrators. Pensions that workers have.
