Two important Bolivian cities, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, are isolated since Monday by multiple road blockages of peasants who demand the resignation of President Luis Arce. Throughout the country there is an environment of social seizure by and an increasingly accelerated inflation. The Government has responded with a trial against those who consider the instigator of the conflicts, former president Evo Morales, who, but is not associated with all outbreaks of outrage. “We will not allow you to try a coup d’etat,” said the Minister of Government (Security), Roberto Siles.
Siles has announced that he will sue Morales for “terrorism, public instigation to commit crimes, hinder electoral processes, attacks against freedom of locomotion and freedom of expression.” The accusation is based on an audio presented to the press by a peasant leader in which the ex -president’s voice is supposedly recorded asking him to extend the protests to peace, the heart of Bolivian politics. The voice attributed to Morales warns that if the blockages are limited to Cochabamba, as happened in October 2024, they would not achieve their purpose. He also calculates that the political crisis will be increasingly aggravated because “Lucho” (Arce) is not morally reliable for the population. “It is with all brothers. It is the final battle,” he is heard. The former president described this recording as a “assembly.”
“The mobilizations are not for a person or by a candidacy. They are the cry of the people who can no longer wait, to cry for bread and justice. Because when a government that was chosen with 55% support, today it barely has 2%, it is not an opposition that speaks: it is the people that rises,” he wrote in X.
This lawsuit adds to the various that has accumulated morals since it broke with. The most serious of them is an accusation of stupro to a 15 -year -old teenager with whom he allegedly had a son in 2016. In this case he cannot execute because the indigenous leader has taken refuge in the Cocalera del Chapare area, where he has a “union guard” that accompanies and protects him.
It is not clear how Morales expects to be accepted as a candidate, since he has not registered on time before the Electoral Court due to lack of his own political party, after his, the movement to socialism, passed to Arce for a judicial decision. In addition, the Constitutional Court has several times that, according to its interpretation of the Constitution ,.
The ruling party thinks that it seeks to impose its candidacy knocking down the entire Bolivian institutionality, overthrowing Arce and stopping the ongoing elections. “Evo lies when he says that his action is for the well -being of Bolivian families. He lies when he says that his protest is for the economy, against inflation … pursues my resignation and this only to enable his candidacy by force,” the president published in his social networks.
In the last hours Evo Morales has instruct again, as in other opportunities, a road block to cut communications between regions and prevent the passage of food, the free transit of people and avoid the normalization of the provision of fuels, …
– Luis Alberto Arce Catacora (Lucho Arce) (@luchoxbolivia)
In an unusual gesture in an electoral campaign, opposition candidates will meet this weekend in Cochabamba, the epicenter of the social conflict, to discuss the political and economic situation of the country.
The route cuts, the disappearance of the reserves of dollars and certain logistic problems have caused that these days lack fuel for the operation of the productive apparatus and the automotive park. The rows of cars that seek to supply are so large that they plug the traffic of the big cities.
To live on the export of hydrocarbons, the country has become a net importer of these. The economy is adjusting to this new reality by itself, as Arce has refused to take corrective measures.
The lack of dollars has also devalued the national currency and increased prices of imported goods. These phenomena, figures that Bolivia did not register since the late 1980s of the last century.
