The national political event continues to respond exclusively to the internal dispute of the MAS for the 2025 presidential candidacy, but it is beginning to generate effects and consequences in other areas. One of them is Santa Cruz.
The last round of this fierce fifteen-round fight was the arrest of Governor Camacho on the Day of the Holy Innocents. This political decision, undoubtedly the most important in Arce’s two years in office, scored an important victory for the president against Morales, who had been the winner of the previous round, which lasted not three minutes, but 36 days.
In this last episode, Arce wins because the radical wing of evistas can no longer reproach him and rub in his face every day for being an ally of the right (especially now that Arce eventually needs the parliamentary opposition to obtain two thirds that some laws require). With this treacherous measure, Arce has also been able to show the MAS platform that he can be as tough and unfortunate as Evo himself and has cured himself of the internal accusations that pointed to him as a softie. To date, Arce has completed the requirements and credentials (the record in the MAS case) to be the MAS candidate in 2025.
I believe that Camacho’s arrest was not exclusively a measure against Santa Cruz, but rather a decision that seems necessary in an internal slaughterhouse that increases its caliber every month. Under this sick reasoning, the collateral damage that must be paid is the relationship with Santa Cruz and with some national middle classes who did not like the way in which Camacho was arrested; They must be mistakenly thinking that, as happened in 2008, there will be time and money to “fix” things with Santa Cruz.
The government is wrong again, because although the reactions in some minority sectors of Santa Cruz have been linked to reactionary, anti-colla, racist positions and to that position that everything “other”, that is, everything that is not the Santa Cruz identity, is a curse, there is another much more significant and majority citizen reaction, which has assumed firm positions, but at the same time sharp and sensible.
Once again, the citizens of Santa Cruz, which always advance one step ahead of the local leaders, are showing signs of courage but also of maturity. Diverse voices are beginning to be heard demanding and proposing deeper readings of what the immense and diverse Santa Cruz is today, which synthesizes and unites all of Bolivia and which are also critical of some old local power structures that no longer seem to be within reach. the height of the circumstances.
The government’s errors are accelerating the conditions for Santa Cruz not only to react, but also to propose a renewed reading of its own complex and diverse reality, and with this, can consequently propose a new vision of the country. That is occupying the rightful place and that is what we have to do.
