The roadblocks that the peasants who follow former President Evo Morales carried out for 15 days managed to get the Legislative Assembly of Bolivia, after reaching an inter-party agreement, to call, for June, the judicial elections that had been blocked since last year. However, they did not succeed in getting the judges of all the high courts, whose mandate expired in December, but was extended indefinitely by the Plurinational Constitutional Court (TCP), to be replaced by other judges. The road blockades, which isolated Cochabamba, Morales' stronghold in the heart of the country, and which according to President Luis Arce cost the national economy $1 billion, have been suspended this Wednesday.
The arrival of the carnival, which is a very important holiday in the country, hastened the resolution of the conflict, which may arise again after the holidays because Morales insists that the current magistrates exercise the extension of their mandate in an unconstitutional manner. “Thanks to the struggle and sacrifice of the social movements… it has been possible to take another step in approving the call for the elections of the Judicial Body, otherwise it would not have been possible. The trucho magistrates still need to [falsos] and illegals go home,” the former president wrote in X.
At issue is the TCP's decision to disqualify Morales as a presidential candidate. The ruling 1010/2023 of this Court, on December 29, established that no Bolivian can aspire to the first magistracy more than twice, whether continuously or discontinuously. This ruling broke the country's tradition, which allowed an indefinite number of discontinuous elections. It is tailored to Morales, who held the country's presidency three times (between 2006 and 2019) and had already announced his desire to run in 2025. And it is completely contradictory to another TCP ruling from November 2017, when Morales was president and wanted to be so again, who declared re-election a “human right” and, therefore, authorized him to run for a fourth consecutive election. In both cases, the judges did not rely on the Bolivian Constitution, but on various interpretations of the San José Pact on Human Rights.
The ruling that limits reelection was approved by two TCP magistrates who are also the authors of other rulings that favored the Government in different areas and were issued in December 2023, shortly before the original and constitutional mandate of the magistrates ended. One of these failures was the indefinite extension of the magistrates, after the Legislative Assembly failed in its duty to call judicial elections in 2023. This failure was due, in part, to the fragmentation caused by the division of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) in two parliamentary blocs, one in favor of President Arce and the other in favor of Morales, and in part to the actions of the TCP, which declared several initiatives of the Legislature to hold judicial elections unconstitutional. The opposition, including the “evismo”, accuses the Government of having acted together with the TCP to prevent the call to the polls. They believe that Arce wants to keep the Judiciary in status quo for as long as possible, because it supposedly responds to the orders of the ruling party.
“We have shown that we want things to be done well, the Constitution to be respected and we have all approved this new law. The road blockades were unnecessary,” the president spoke at the promulgation of the convocation law. He stated that behind the conflict there were “particular interests.” His government believes that Morales seeks to destabilize the current judicial system, as well as renew it as soon as possible, to find a way to dismiss the constitutional ruling that affects him.
Bolivia is the only Latin American nation in which the people directly elect the high judicial courts. Before the popular vote, the Legislative Assembly must draw up the list of candidates with two-thirds of the votes. As it is currently divided into three relatively equivalent blocs, the “arcista”, the “evista” and the traditional opposition, any of them could prevent the necessary sum of votes from being reached for the June elections. So the selection of candidates will require negotiations and agreements that Parliament has not been used to since 2006, when the indigenous and popular deputies and senators of the MAS burst into it with the force of a storm. The effective holding of the elections still depends on completing this difficult procedure.
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