More Evo? Yes, please!

[Catherina]

More Evo? Yes, please!
April 30, 2013 — Sabina Becker



From Bolivia, a little good news today:

The Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal of Bolivia has declared it constitutional that president Evo Morales and vice-president Alvaro García Linera may stand for re-election in the general elections of 2014. The case was decided in light of the fact that the first term of the government of the Plurinational State took place after the enactment of the new Bolivian constitution, approved in February 2009.

The president of the tribunal, Ruddy Flores, informed during a press conference that the tribunal ruled in favor of the candidacy of Morales in response to a consultation submitted by the parliament on the insistence of Morales’s party.

“The seven magistrates have unanimously determined the constitutionality of the project, in respect to Article 4,” Flores said.

The Bolivian constitution limits presidents to two consecutive terms in office, but Morales has always maintained that his first term (2006-2010) cannot be counted, since it took place before the re-founding of the country and did not complete the legal period of five years.

...

Once re-elected, Morales will govern Bolivia until the year 2020, and will thus become the longest-reigning Bolivian president.

...

Of course, the opposition are crying foul, but that’s to be expected. They have a bad case of the butthurt. Even if Evo were to stand down and let Alvaro run in his stead, the MAS would still win. And Evo could always run again when Alvaro’s term was up, and win handily. But since he didn’t complete his first term anyway when the new constitution was enacted (triggering new federal elections, which he won), that point is moot. Evo has a case, and he won fair and square in the courts. As he will at the ballot box again, when the time comes, next year.

So we’ll be seeing a lot more of his chipmunk cheeks and groovy aguayo-trimmed jackets in the foreseeable future. The only potential downside to all this is that we’ll also see more putschist efforts to topple him, like those of 2008. Let’s hope his federal police are keeping their eyes open, and their pistols well oiled.

http://www.sabinabecker.com/2013/04/more-evo-yes-please.html

[bemildred]

1. I figure we shouild have around 500 years of indigenous only rule to start with.

[Catherina]

3. I'm not quite sure what your comment means

since you and I generally seem to agree on things. I agree with your comment minus the sarcasm because that could possibly reverse all the injustices done by invading usurpers to the original owners of the land and resources.

There are few things more galling to me than seeing indigenous people still being driven out of their homes, off their lands, starving and wandering while rich euro-elites, and complicit euro-elite wannabes, live off their labor.

Why do 80 year old indigenous people have to slave on German coffee fincas for pennies, trudging barefoot for miles to get to coffee lands they used to own, while their exploiters continue to profit from 500 years of colonial abuse and waltz around in thousand-dollar Testoni footwear?

[bemildred]

4. The sarcasm smiley is NECESSARY lest someone think I intend to actually exclude non-indigenes.

For 500 years, or even for one year. That is why it is there.

What is necessary it to take their power and money, those that have too much, not to exclude ANYBODY from politics. Same rules for everybody, that's the correct deal.

But I knew someone would wonder about the sarcasm, the smarter ones ...

You can never undo anything, the best revenge is living well. I am sure Evo knows that. Galleano adjusted my attitude about that, and experience, I used to think more highly of retribution, now I just see it as more bad karma.

[Catherina]

6. "Same rules for everybody, that's the correct deal."

Then as usual, we're in agreement.

You're right, you can never undo anything, just try to make the best and fairest of it.

Retribution is bad karma. There's a part of me which would LOVE to say, all you descendants of colonials 'GET OUT' but after all these years, they're part of the landscape too and have a right to be there, just not on higher footing than the original owners. Everyone needs the chance, that opening, to live well.

Thanks for confirming. We may not always agree but I respect your opinions and didn't see how we could diverge that much on that one. Sarcasm lol.

[bemildred]

8. I too doubt that we disagree much about policy. nt

[Catherina]

2. And the people win again!

Awww how sad. The greedy, immoral neoliberals lose again. No one is interested in their dishonest, exploitative, vampiric pyramid scheme for the rich except those who profit from exploiting the labor and resources of the people they consider *beneath* them.

If I were in a generous mood, I'd order condolence or, better yet, burial flowers for their neoliberal supporters here but that would only confuse them as they'd confuse mockery with sympathy.

[Judi Lynn]

5. "Vampiric" is THE word to describe these land grabbing mutants.

It wasn't that long ago Bolivia's evil US-supported bloody dictator, Hugo Banzer drove indigenous Bolivians off their ancestral lands and gave the same land to newcomers he imported from South Africa, etc. to start up his vision of a "white Bolivia."

This was a fairly recent ugly page of Bolivian history revealed several years ago:

Landowners' Rebellion: Slavery and Saneamiento in Bolivia
Written by Alexander van Schaick
Monday, 28 April 2008 09:23

In recent weeks, cattle ranchers and landowners in Bolivia's Cordillera province, located in the south of the department of Santa Cruz, resorted to blockades and violence in order to halt the work of Bolivia's National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA - Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria). As a referendum on Departmental Autonomy for Santa Cruz draws near, the conflict calls into question the central government's ability to enforce the law in the Bolivian lowlands.

The dispute centers on the region of Alto Parapetí, south of the provincial capital of Camiri, where INRA is currently trying to carry out land reform and create an indigenous territory for the Guaraní indigenous people. Additionally, it claims various communities of Guaraní live and work on white or mestizo-owned ranches in conditions of semi-slavery.

For nine days landowners and their supporters blockaded major highways and virtually sealed off Alto Parapetí. The blockades continued until Bolivia's Vice-minister of Land, Alejandro Almaráz, left the region on April 18. At the end of February, Ronald Larsen, a major landowner in Santa Cruz, and other ranchers took Almaráz hostage at gunpoint for several hours when he and other government officials tried to enter the region.


An Incomplete Land Reform

In the 1990s and up to the present, the Guaraní Nation and Bolivia's other lowland indigenous peoples mobilized to force the national government to recognize their right to their ancestral territories. In 1996, the first administration of Gonzalo "Goni" Sánchez de Lozada passed a land reform law that gave Bolivia's indigenous people the opportunity to claim their Communal Territory of Origin (Territorio Comunitario de Origen or TCO).

The 1996 law - Ley N°1715 - reorganized the country's land law and agrarian reform institutions. It also established INRA to resolve land conflicts and issue titles through a process called saneamiento. In this process, INRA would establish property limits, to look into whether property owners had obtained land legally and to investigate whether they were putting their land to socially or economically productive use. (Latifundios, or huge tracks of idle land used to speculate on rising land prices or as liens to obtain loans, are banned by the Bolivian constitution.) Finally, INRA would resolve land conflicts through mediation and legal processes, title TCOs for indigenous people, and establish parcels of state-owned land for distribution. In the end, landowners would own land with clear title. INRA was to carry out saneamiento throughout all of Bolivia between 1996 and 2006.

~snip~


Injured by land owners at Cuevo



Landowners at a meeting against the saneamiento.

]More:
http://www.upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1254/1/

[Catherina]

7. It's extremely sad to me that as the US kind of sort of begins to pretend to confront

Last edited Wed May 1, 2013, 12:59 PM - Edit history (1)

It's extremely sad to me that as the US kind of sort of begins to pretend to confront its violent, unjust, immoral, disgusting actions against the Indigenous Americans we killed, beat and starved into submission to steal the US land from, that we pretend the same colonial assholes aren't still doing the same thing in Latin America.

It's like Palestine. Pretend for now you don't see a thing and then when all the natives are dead or gone, you can superficially *study* how they disappeared and justify how you had less to do with it than originally thought.

Assholes.

[ocpagu]

9. Great.

Good to see some supreme courts in the region are still abe to make reasonable decisions.

Evo has been great for Bolivia and for Latin America.

[idwiyo]

10. K&R