Bolivia coca leaves

The future of Bolivia might be best considered smoking something, that happens to grow there very well.

The good news for Morales is that the NO won and that he won the constituent assembly vote.

The bad news is that he is far from the necessary 2/3 he needed in the constituent assembly to ram down the throat of Bolivia his constitutional plans. And where the SI won, it won big enough to destabilize the country if Morales does not pay attention to it.

Let's look at the Santa Cruz province, the hot bed of autonomy. Partial results from the Bolivian CNE page informs us that the SI is winning with 74%. That is quite clear, no? The natives are restless and want control of their own future. In fact, although I could not get the complete info on the real nature of the 13 political parties running in Santa Cruz, it possible that some of the Morales supporters might have crossed over and voted SI anyway. This is clearer in Tarija the only province reporting full results so far. The NO lost with 39.2% but Morales's MAS did get 40.8%. Small enough shift of course, bigger if we include potential allies, and telling of things to come if the Sucre august assembly does not behave.

But it gets better: already the MAS leaders of Santa Cruz announced that they will support the inclusion of autonomy in the new constitutional draft. I suppose that they want a political future in Santa Cruz when things get back to normal. Thus on some aspects this constituent assembly majority for the MAS is not even what it seems as some of the MAS delegates might shift sides on decentralization issues.

Still, more ominous signs are in the future if things are not managed well. If indeed only the Eastern provinces voted decisively for the SI, Cochabamba, the political base of Morales, home of the Coca growing country, is split. With half the voting centers reporting, the SI is at 50.2%!!! Cochabamba might still go the SI way and we would have the Altiplano against the low lands with the ambiguous Yungas in between. The achievement of Morales is to have cut in half his country with only 6 months of rule.

I think that it would be a good idea for Morales to stop listening to Chavez and Castro advisers who probably know less about Bolivia than this blogger does. Surely the heavy Venezuelan presence, when not outright interference, in Bolivia campaign has been resented and thus must account in part for the weakening of Morales positions already seen. The Bolivian opposition is not the Venezuelan one.

PS: by the way, and unverified gossip reached me as of Merentes, the finance economy minister of Venezuela spending the last two weeks of electoral Bolivian campaign in Bolivia. Merentes is assumed to be the one that figure out the electoral tricks of chavismo as to how get overrepresentation (“el Kino Chavez” of 1999). Thus, if he indeed was there, was it to suggest them how to cheat or to buy off votes with Venezuelan money? Is there a way for Venezuelan media to investigate such a gossip, or at least let us know it is only a malicious gossip?