Mercury News: Bolivia president's bid to consolidate power sees setback
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Mon, Jul. 03, 2006, Bolivia president's bid to consolidate power sees setback, Backers Fail to Gain Control of Assembly, Fiona Smith, Mercury News
LA PAZ, Bolivia - President Evo Morales' ambitious plans to empower Bolivia's indigenous majority and boost state control over the economy suffered a setback Sunday when his party failed to win control of an assembly that will rewrite the constitution, unofficial preliminary results showed.
The vote results, based on a partial count of actual votes at 100 percent of polling stations done for the PAT TV network, gave Morales supporters 132 seats in the 255-person body, far short of the two-thirds majority they needed to push through their leftist agenda.
In a separate ballot question with potentially explosive results, voters in four of Bolivia's nine states overwhelmingly chose greater political and economic autonomy for their states, according to the unofficial results.
Sunday's vote was a crucial test for Morales, an Aymara Indian elected in December on promises to wrest political control of South America's poorest nation from a corrupt political class and more evenly distribute the nation's wealth. He began by nationalizing the natural gas industry May 1.
Morales had hoped to use the constituent assembly to enshrine in law the seizure of unproductive lands from absentee owners, and to strengthen traditional Indian justice systems in a country with a notoriously corrupt legal system.
He is now apt to have to compromise when the constituent assembly begins work Aug. 6. The body has up to a year to rewrite the constitution, which must then be endorsed in a nationwide referendum.
Morales had urged a ``no'' on autonomy, saying it would benefit only ``oligarchs.'' Now, he will be forced into accommodation on the issue with political foes led by the Podemos party of former President Jorge Quiroga.
Quiroga made Morales' close relationship with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela the central issue ahead of Sunday's vote. He accused Morales of selling Bolivia out to Chávez's plans to consolidate power regionally.
Podemos won 64 seats in the constituent assembly Sunday with a collection of other, smaller opposition parties splitting the rest, according to the PAT results.
The autonomy result, split right along Bolivia's geo-economic fault line, is sure to exacerbate longstanding tensions between the wealthier eastern lowlands and the poorer, less fertile Andean highlands that are Morales' support base.
Voters in the eastern state of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest and wealthiest and the center of opposition to Morales, approved autonomy by 72 percent, the PAT results showed. That state's leaders complain that too much of their revenues are siphoned off by the central government to subsidize the poorer highlands.
Morales remains president of Bolivia's coca-grower's union, and his Movement Toward Socialism party, or MAS, is a broad caldron of social and union activists, landless peasants, coca growers and middle-class intellectuals.
They are people more accustomed to rabble-rousing than governing and are now apt to be forced into uncharacteristic compromise. That could be difficult for Morales, who told reporters as he voted Sunday that he intended through the constitutional rewrite to stop ``the discriminators, the exploiters, the marginalizers, the haters toward the peasant movements.''
Critics claimed Morales would seek to use the assembly to increase his power as did Venezuela's Chávez, who held a constituent assembly in 1999 that concentrated executive power and hastened his re-election.
Many in MAS also support changes that would allow Morales to run for another five-year term. The law now bans him from running for re-election in 2010.
International election observers reported no serious irregularities.
Morales won the presidency in this nation of 9 million by a wide margin and remains hugely popular, though his relations with the United States have chilled as he has forged closer ties with Venezuela and Cuba.
LA PAZ, Bolivia - President Evo Morales' ambitious plans to empower Bolivia's indigenous majority and boost state control over the economy suffered a setback Sunday when his party failed to win control of an assembly that will rewrite the constitution, unofficial preliminary results showed.
The vote results, based on a partial count of actual votes at 100 percent of polling stations done for the PAT TV network, gave Morales supporters 132 seats in the 255-person body, far short of the two-thirds majority they needed to push through their leftist agenda.
In a separate ballot question with potentially explosive results, voters in four of Bolivia's nine states overwhelmingly chose greater political and economic autonomy for their states, according to the unofficial results.
Sunday's vote was a crucial test for Morales, an Aymara Indian elected in December on promises to wrest political control of South America's poorest nation from a corrupt political class and more evenly distribute the nation's wealth. He began by nationalizing the natural gas industry May 1.
Morales had hoped to use the constituent assembly to enshrine in law the seizure of unproductive lands from absentee owners, and to strengthen traditional Indian justice systems in a country with a notoriously corrupt legal system.
He is now apt to have to compromise when the constituent assembly begins work Aug. 6. The body has up to a year to rewrite the constitution, which must then be endorsed in a nationwide referendum.
Morales had urged a ``no'' on autonomy, saying it would benefit only ``oligarchs.'' Now, he will be forced into accommodation on the issue with political foes led by the Podemos party of former President Jorge Quiroga.
Quiroga made Morales' close relationship with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela the central issue ahead of Sunday's vote. He accused Morales of selling Bolivia out to Chávez's plans to consolidate power regionally.
Podemos won 64 seats in the constituent assembly Sunday with a collection of other, smaller opposition parties splitting the rest, according to the PAT results.
The autonomy result, split right along Bolivia's geo-economic fault line, is sure to exacerbate longstanding tensions between the wealthier eastern lowlands and the poorer, less fertile Andean highlands that are Morales' support base.
Voters in the eastern state of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest and wealthiest and the center of opposition to Morales, approved autonomy by 72 percent, the PAT results showed. That state's leaders complain that too much of their revenues are siphoned off by the central government to subsidize the poorer highlands.
Morales remains president of Bolivia's coca-grower's union, and his Movement Toward Socialism party, or MAS, is a broad caldron of social and union activists, landless peasants, coca growers and middle-class intellectuals.
They are people more accustomed to rabble-rousing than governing and are now apt to be forced into uncharacteristic compromise. That could be difficult for Morales, who told reporters as he voted Sunday that he intended through the constitutional rewrite to stop ``the discriminators, the exploiters, the marginalizers, the haters toward the peasant movements.''
Critics claimed Morales would seek to use the assembly to increase his power as did Venezuela's Chávez, who held a constituent assembly in 1999 that concentrated executive power and hastened his re-election.
Many in MAS also support changes that would allow Morales to run for another five-year term. The law now bans him from running for re-election in 2010.
International election observers reported no serious irregularities.
Morales won the presidency in this nation of 9 million by a wide margin and remains hugely popular, though his relations with the United States have chilled as he has forged closer ties with Venezuela and Cuba.
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