Whatever the outcome of the battle that the government has mounted, it has already lost it, because its slogan that the census cannot be done next year is a call to line up behind defeatism and resignation.
The president who has placed his fate in the hands of a quartet of losers – the ministers of Justice, Government, the spokesman and the Presidency -, able only to watch over their sectarian interests, is defending the worst legacy of colonialism , summed up in the idea of “you can’t”. That forced way of seeing and interpreting things collides head-on with the evidence produced by the will and tenacity of a people that has conquered freedoms, built democracy and imposes itself daily over hard adversity.
“You can’t”, the motto of the bureaucrats who try to prove alleged impossibilities, daughters of their laziness, laziness and incapacity, is the alibi with which they try to hide that the decision to postpone the census is the product of an electoral strategy, so as not to face the new demographic, economic and social reality of our country and postpone its treatment until after a new election.
That strategy is already defeated, because the wounds that the MAS opens and deepens with the conflict, mean that the electoral majority that it achieved years ago in Santa Cruz cannot be repeated and leads it to shrink more and more.
With each day of unemployment, the suffering and hunger of the overwhelming majority of families that depend on meager and unstable daily income increases and piles up; of young people who only get precarious jobs, without wages, benefits or insurance.
The only winner of the situation is the corporation of the gold cooperatives, whose ridiculous taxation has been reduced, at the same time that the license has been extended so that they overwhelm our national parks, natural reserves and indigenous territories, poisoning our main basins with mercury and annihilating what it has, which is the basis of the country’s new green and biodiverse economy.
The defeats accumulated by the new “gang of four” with its impositions on the census, its intolerance and repressive responses, already show their echoes in the parliamentary guerrilla of MAS factions and the silent deepening of divisions in the courts and prosecutors, in the Armed Forces, the Police and in all co-opted and colonized institutional spaces. Those fractures also threaten the tenuous bubble of economic stability that it has managed to maintain at the cost of mounting debt, dependency, and environmental devastation.
The decomposition of the MAS momentarily favors the aspirations of Morales Ayma’s camp, which is delighted that the weakening of governability and governance brings closer a horizon of early elections, called without recall by the president’s own will, overwhelmed by his inability to solve problems. However, even in that hypothetical scenario, Morales would lose to his former candidate.
Morales, who greets with smiles the troubles that the ruling group is experiencing, does not understand that, when he recommends him not to exaggerate the “coup threats”, denounced by the quartet and his mentor, he exposes the very falsity of his story that he himself was a victim at one blow. He also does not seem to realize that his authoritarian attitude is reducing and isolating his influence to the fringe of the big capitalists of the coca trade, determined to consolidate their control and monopolistic influence beyond Chapare.
The advantage enjoyed by both sides is that they have no rival at the forefront, because their opponents frighten the electorate by making it clear that their eventual government will be one of devaluations, layoffs and strengthening of advantages and privileges for the most concentrated and transnationalized economic groups. .
Those opponents who have not had the courage to prosecute the former and current members of the Plurinational Constitutional Court (TCP) for prevarication, for coup plotters (they substantially altered the constitutional order) and prevaricators, lack an alternative national project.
The census can and must be done based on consultation, participation, mobilization and social control. It is a completely possible goal, as is a good government, based on consultation, encouragement and respect for the collective good, above the group selfishness promoted by the corporatist and sectarian regime.
