Bolivia Looking Forward: New Constitution Passed, Celebrations Hit the Streets (Upside Down World)

[struggle4progress]

Written by Benjamin Dangl
Monday, 26 January 2009

Bolivia’s new constitution was passed in a national referendum on Sunday, thousands gathered in La Paz to celebrate. Standing on the balcony of the presidential palace, President Evo Morales addressed a raucous crowd: "Here begins a new Bolivia. Here we begin to reach true equality."


Polls conducted by Televisión Boliviana announced that the document passed with 61.97% support from some 3.8 million voters. According the poll, 36.52% of voters voted against the constitution, and 1.51% cast blank and null votes. The departments where the constitution passed included La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, Tarija, and Pando. It was rejected in Santa Cruz, Beni, and Chuquisaca ...

Though news reports and analysts have suggested that the passage of the new constitution will exacerbate divisions in the country, some of the political tension may be directed into the electoral realm as general elections are now scheduled to take place in December of this year. In addition, the constitution’s passage is another sign of the weakness of the Bolivian right, and their lack of a clear political agenda and mandate to confront the MAS’s popularity. The recent passage of the constitution is likely to divide and further debilitate the right ...

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1683/1/

[struggle4progress]

1. BOLIVIA: New Constitution Marks Break with the Past

LA PAZ, Jan 26 (IPS) ... In a parallel vote Sunday, 70 percent of voters decided that landed estates should be no larger than 5,000 hectares (the other choice given was 10,000 hectares).

Voters thus supported the leftist government's land reform programme, which stipulates that the authorities can expropriate - with fair economic compensation - unproductive land that is serving no social purpose, for redistribution to indigenous people and landless farmers.

Land ownership is heavily concentrated in Bolivia. According to a report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), just 100 families own 25 million hectares, while two million small farmers have access to only five million hectares.

Morales is set to sign the new constitution into law in February, after the results of the referendum are approved by Congress ...

http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4245:bolivia-new-constitution-marks-break-with-the-past&catid=88:in-depth

[Judi Lynn]

2. Thanks for the details. I'll come back later tonight to read these articles you've posted.

Looks like such good information, finally, from your snippets.

[roody]

3. Any comment from Pres. Obama?

[Judi Lynn]

4. Voters back new constitution:Charter offers power for indigenous Indian majority, consecutive term

Voters back new constitution
Charter offers power for indigenous Indian majority, consecutive term for president
By DAN KEANE The Associated Press
January 26, 2009 - 12:00 am

Bolivian voters embraced a new constitution yesterday that promises more power for the long-suffering indigenous majority and grants leftist President Evo Morales a shot at remaining in office through 2014.

The charter passed easily in a country where many can still recall when Indians were forbidden to vote. But its sometimes vague wording and resistance from Bolivia's mestizo and European-descended minority foreshadows more political turmoil in a nation polarized by race and class.

"Brothers and sisters, the colonial state ends here," President Evo Morales told a huge crowd in front of the presidential palace after the results of yesterday's referendum were announced. "Here we begin to reach true equality for all Bolivians."

The constitution - the central reform of Morales's three-year-old administration - won by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin, according to an unofficial quick count with a 3 percentage point margin of error. A final official tally will be announced in 10 days.

Morales, an Aymara Indian and Bolivia's first indigenous president, has said the charter will "decolonize" South America's poorest country by recovering indigenous values lost under centuries of oppression dating back to the Spanish conquest.

Bolivia's Aymara, Quechua, Guarani and dozens of other indigenous groups only won the right to vote in 1952, when a revolution broke up the large haciendas on which they had lived as peons for generations.

More:
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090126/NEWS03/901260312/1013/NEWS03

[Judi Lynn]

5. Bolivia Looking Forward: New Constitution Passed, Celebrations Hit the Streets

Bolivia Looking Forward: New Constitution Passed, Celebrations Hit the Streets
January 27, 2009 By Ben Dangl

After Bolivia's new constitution was passed in a national referendum on Sunday, thousands gathered in La Paz to celebrate. Standing on the balcony of the presidential palace, President Evo Morales addressed a raucous crowd: "Here begins a new Bolivia. Here we begin to reach true equality."

Polls conducted by Televisión Boliviana announced that the document passed with 61.97% support from some 3.8 million voters. According the poll, 36.52% of voters voted against the constitution, and 1.51% cast blank and null votes. The departments where the constitution passed included La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, Tarija, and Pando. It was rejected in Santa Cruz, Beni, and Chuquisaca.

The constitution, which was written in a constituent assembly that first convened in August of 2006, grants unprecedented rights to Bolivia's indigenous majority, establishes broader access to basic services, education and healthcare and expands the role of the state in the management of natural resources and the economy.

When the news spread throughout La Paz that the constitution had been passed in the referendum, fireworks, cheers and horns sounded off sporadically. By 8:30, thousands had already gathered in the Plaza Murillo. The crowd cheered "Evo! Evo! Evo!" until Morales, Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera and other leading figures in the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government, crowded out onto the balcony of the presidential palace.

"I would like to take this opportunity to recognize all of the brothers and sisters of Bolivia, all of the compañeros and compañeras, all of the citizens that through their vote, through their democratic participation, decide to refound Bolivia," Morales said. "From 2005 to 2009 we have gone from triumph to triumph, while the neoliberals, the traitors have been constantly broken down thanks to the consciousness of the Bolivian people."

He shook his fist in the air, the applause died down. "And I want you to know something, the colonial state ends here. Internal colonialism and external colonialism ends here. Sisters and brothers, neoliberalism ends here too."

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20375