This Sunday, August 17, 2025, the year of the Bicentennial of the Act of the Independence of the Republic of Bolivia, those enabled to cast their vote inside and outside the national territory will have the opportunity to participate in one of the greatest evidence of the state of democracy.
The history of votes in Bolivia has more shadows than lights.
Throughout the nineteenth century there were few electoral processes. Women, illiterates and people without rent had no right to vote. At least formally, because on some occasion a leader, taking advantage of his privileges, managed vote of illiterates. Only in the mid -twentieth century the female vote was approved for women who knew how to read and write, after various mobilizations of the suffragists. They voted in the municipal elections of 1947 and also actively participated in the brand new post -war political parties of the Chaco.
This meant that, for more than one century, a handful of Bolivians, almost all urban and with good income, defined the presidency, vice presidency (s), senatías and deputations that ruled the country.
On the one hand, the narrative of the importance of the universal vote exercised from the 1956 elections (DS 3128 of 1952) is repeated; But it is omitted to complete that experience with the trap that managed the revolutionary nationalist movement (MNR). In 1956, in 1960, in 1964, the general elections were not transparent. The MNR brought to the most impoverished and illiterate masses for vote in its favor without allowing the presence of the opposition in rural, miners. In cities, voters did not find ballots other than pink.
In the enclosures the celestial votes of Bolivian socialist phalanx were destroyed; They were scarce, but they still didn’t tell them. The anecdote of Alfonso Prudencio, “Paulovich” is known, because at the table where he voted as a deputy candidate no ballot appeared in his favor. With his famous mischief, he commented that he could doubt his wife’s vote, but not the vote that he himself had deposited in the urn.
After the double Sexenio (1952-1964), in the sixties and seventies there were more de facto governments than chosen by the population. The 1966 elections were held under the pressure of the military, René Barrientos and Alfredo Ovando, outlawing the MNR.
In 1978, Hugo Banzer summoned elections with political prisoners and exiles. The massive hunger strike initiated by mining women with the support of the Catholic Church and other churches made the dictator yield to participate all parties and leaders.
However, the official candidate, another military, Juan Pereda Asbún organized a gross fraud with his green ballot, which did not prosper for spontaneous social control, especially of the peasants in the Altiplano and the journalists. Angry, gave a coup d’etat.
The following elections, in 1979 and 1980, did not culminate with the presidency of the winner until the victory of the citizen mobilization in October 1982.
It is often said that on that date “the Bolivians recovered democracy”, something that is not accurate. Hard data show that only from that date until December 2005 there was the free democratic exercise already width and length of the whole country, with votes from Bolivians abroad. In 1985 the municipal elections were given after several lustra.
However, there were also shadows in the processes of that decade. Only in the nineties when President Jaime Paz Zamora and Vice President Luis Ossio Sanjinés opted for an electoral court of independent notables. Huáscar Cajías Kaufmann led the most impeccable electoral processes in Bolivian history and achieved that the rules of the game were fulfilled despite the pressures of non -democratic groups.
Until 2008 the maximum electoral authorities continued that tendency to maintain confidence in the referee. The CNE -POSTERIORIALLY PLURINATIONAL ELECTORAL ORGANO- was subtly intervened with the presidency of José Luis Exeni, an open defender of the “change process” (movement to socialism). The training instruments went to moreist militants with non -democratic history.
The deinstitutionalization of the electoral courts until their decomposition in 2016-2019 caused the broad distrust in their decisions. His bad behavior caused the greatest citizen mobilization of Bolivian history that he took out of power to Mas and that was shortly to culminate in the civil war encouraged by Álvaro and Raúl García Linera, Juan Ramón Quintana and the presence of the foreign narcoguerrilla.
In 2020 the meritocracy was recovered, without recovering at the same time the guarantee of transparency. However, Luis Arce Catacora’s victory was unquestionable despite the controlled vote in rural areas and the siege of international activists on the southern border willing to cause incidents if he did not win the MAS.
In this five years, personal efforts have recovered the institution, especially at the departmental level. There are still disguised militancy and dangerous prominence as the case of the Tahuichi Quispe Quispe tribune. The presence of observers of clearly identified international organizations will help control.
It is vital that the parties with democratic history respect the victory of the rival. Hopefully the dirty war that some candidacies encouraged, including against the prestige of the media. His decisions will be as important as the discipline of all who will attend voting in peace.
