In early November, several civic committees, public universities or citizen platforms, among other organizations, began a strike in the cities of the central Bolivian axis in rejection of a package of laws that intended to increase police control and political centralism, to the detriment of autonomies. .
This conflict is the result of the MAS government’s difficulties to generate consensus in a society where regional governments, social classes and indigenous groups (mainly in eastern Bolivia) have failed to find common ground to resolve their historic fractures with the state.
While the ruling party permanently sees ghosts and becomes entangled in the fallacious theory of the coup d’état, a large part of the opposition reproduces a political discourse in line with McCarthyist anti-communism. Permanent conflicts, connected to unresolved structural problems, are linked to the State itself. And the Bolivian State acts in function of the interests of the political force in power.
This is a symptom that the Bolivian State is a mere instrument of power, which generates distrust in the citizens. A year after Luis Arce took office, there is a structural and a conjunctural dimension to explain the Bolivian political crisis that has intensified in the last month.
Conflicts over time
The MAS has been the main political force in the 2020 and 2021 national and sub-national elections, and predominates at the territorial level. However, he lost his political hegemony at the national level. As a result, the government has difficulties in establishing a political articulation between the State and most of Bolivian civil society, composed of popular sectors and middle classes not aligned with the government, to lead the country through a framework of ideas that encompasses the entire society. . This has led to socio-political conflicts as the MAS tries to impose its positions.
The country’s political crisis, which is expressed in a multi-sectorial strike and street blockades, was fueled by the government’s attempt to establish a normative architecture in the name of the “National Strategy to Fight the Legitimacy of Illicit Gains and the Financing of Terrorism .” This measure could affect several informal popular sectors, middle classes and business because any movement of money, regardless of the amount, can be considered suspect of being illegal, which has caused some uncertainty.
Faced with this reality, the MAS singled out a single social organization, the Civic Committee of Santa Cruz, as the main responsible for trying to politically destabilize the Arce government. In this way, the government intentionally simplifies the conjunctural dimension of the conflict for ideological convenience and limits the possibilities of establishing a space for deliberation and understanding between the national government and the mobilized sectors.
structural dimension
Bolivia has, in general, three contradictions or structural fractures that the State has not been able to resolve until today, despite reports from the MAS governments and the Political Constitution approved in 2009 that would solve all historical conflicts: the ethnic-cultural, the political -spatial and the difference of social classes. These conflicts are responsible for deeply rooted problems in Bolivian society, such as racism, political centralism, regionalism and social exclusion, among others.
According to Latinobarómetro 2010, one year after the approval of the Political Constitution of the Plurinational State (2009), confidence in political parties reached 17%. A decade later, according to the same index, support has declined by one point. The great distrust towards political parties in Bolivia, however, did not affect citizen participation, which in the 2020 general elections was almost nine in ten voters, with an electoral support for the MAS of 55%.
By way of conjecture, this contradiction is due to the fact that voters supported the winning party in search of political certainty and in hopes of overcoming the economic crisis after a pandemic year and a transitional administration plagued by misguided policies, corruption and political turmoil . However, the disagreements between representatives and represented manifested in the distrust of political parties is still worrying.
Bolivia is a difficult country to understand. The corporate interests of the parties are above a vision of the State and the public interest. Populist emotions and sectoral pettiness are current currencies, which erode any political process aimed at strengthening the role of the state. This has been evidenced by the conflicts on the Bolivian streets throughout the month of November.
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