Page 19 - MONTT GROUP LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE JANUARY, 2020(Ingles) .pdf

The Constitutional Court of Bolivia extended the mandates of the interim President, Jeanine Añez, and the legislators until after the May elections, when a new Government assumes and the Congress is renewed, probably in July or August.
Under Bolivian legislation, Añez could only remain in the interim Presidency until January 22, 2020, but the country’s Constitutional Court granted her the approval to extend her term until the May elections.
The corresponding ruling will be endorsed in the next few days by Congress and then promulgated as law by the Executive.
This procedure was pending, given that the Constitution establishes a period of six months, in this case, from the resignation of Evo Morales to the Presidency, from November 10th to May 10th. Meanwhile, the term in force of the current legislators ended on January 22, so if the period of Congress had not been increased it would have been without functions in the practice.
After the ruling of the Constitutional Court, the special envoy of the United Nations in Bolivia, Jean Arnault, “applauded” in a statement the judicial decision that strengthens the path to a general election “as the only legitimate way to overcome the crisis that emerged in October of last year”.
Candidacy for Interim President
Arnault also expressed his “rejection” of the recent statements of Morales, who said that returning to the country would support the idea of forming “armed militias” as in Venezuela.
At the same time, the interim President, Jeanine Añez, announced her own candidacy for the presidential elections. The authority remains in o ice thanks to the support of the opposition parties, which annulled the elections last October after the resignation of Morales and after the Organization of American States issued a report in which it was warned of the alleged irregularities perpetrated during the recount, which favoured the candidacy of the former President.
“It was not in my plans to participate in these elections,” said Añez. “The dispersion of the vote and the presentation of candidacies that fail to bring Bolivians together have led me to make this decision,” she added.
The determination of the interim President unleashed a political crisis; while a part of her cabinet supported her, there were some resignations, such as the Secretary of State for Communications. The “legality and legitimacy” of Añez “is truncated” when “she abandons neutrality and delegitimizes the only reason she occupies the position,” criticized former Bolivian President and candidate Carlos Mesa.
“It does nothing but endorse the statements of the ex-President that there was a coup in Bolivia,” Mesa warned in reference to Morales. The Bolivian Interim Head of State will run as leader of Together,(Juntos), a group formed by her party; the Social Democratic Movement; Sovereignty and Freedom, of the mayor of La Paz, Luis Revilla; All and Unite. Some of these forces supported
former President Carlos Mesa in the elections last October.
The Movement to Socialism Party of the former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, exiled in Argentina, will be represented by his Minister of Economist Luis Arce, recognized as the main driver of the economic model that made the Government of the former president successful in a period.
Economist and accountant, Arce is an academic who laid the theoretical foundations of what he called the “Economic, Social, Community and Productive Model.”
He graduated as an accountant in 1984; between 1986 and 1992 he studied at the Faculty of Economics of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, from where he graduated in Economics. His studies continued later abroad, with a master’s degree in Economics from the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom.
Morales Economic Policy
Arce’s role at the forefront of Evo Morales’ economic policies was key to the development of his political project. As he himself explained his model, aimed to “lay the foundations for the transition to the new mode of socialist production.” In this way, the model modify the way in which the economic surpluses generated by Bolivian society were organized and distributed. Thus, the economic scheme implemented by Arce —which had emerged in the late 1990s in groups of teachers and academics that he was integrating and, among others, also former Vice President Álvaro Garcia Linera— proposed that these surpluses happened in four sectors: hydrocarbons, mining, electricity and environmental resources. But the project stated that Bolivia should cease to be an economy based on raw materials, so it should ensure that these four sources feed sectors such as manufacturing, industry, tourism and agricultural development, which in turn are creators of employment and income for the population. The key role in this transition was that of the State, which according to the model defended by Arce must be “redistributing” and “having the ability to transfer resources to employment and income generators”.
In parallel, the interim President of Bolivia decided to break diplomatic relations with Cuba, for its “inadmissible expressions.” In a recent speech, Añez revealed that the Cuban doctors program, which was managed with total reserve by Morales o icials, cost Bolivia, in 13 years, USD $ 147 million with which that government paid salaries, food and transportation expenses to about 700 brigadiers . According to the President, only 20 percent of this money went to the doctors and assistants who performed the work, and the remaining 80 percent was handed over to the Cuban Embassy in Bolivia, that is, she said, “was diverted to nance the Castro- communism that has subjected and enslaved its people.” With this sum”, Añez insisted, “we were able to do 7,300 kidney transplants, taking care of half of Bolivia’s kidney patients.”
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