Morales Wins

Morales Wins Bolivia Election Law With Hunger Strike
Bolivian President Evo Morales ended a five-day hunger strike today after Congress approved a new electoral law that will boost the voting power of his core constituency. Morales had canceled a diplomatic visit to Cuba to maintain a vigil inside the presidential palace, where for almost a week he consumed only water and coca leaves, the raw ingredient in cocaine and a folk remedy used in Bolivia to suppress hunger. He slept on a bare mattress on the palace floor, surrounded by fasting union leaders who form part of his coalition party. “The Bolivian people will never forget this revolutionary process,” Morales, 49, said today in the presidential palace, moments after concluding the strike. In remarks on state television, Morales said he hoped the fast would strengthen Bolivians’ support for “profound economic, social and cultural changes.” The new bill guarantees increased representation in Congress for Bolivia’s indigenous communities, who broadly support Morales, an Aymara Indian and a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Opposition lawmakers argued that the measure would give Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism party, known as MAS, an advantage in both chambers. The bill, blocked in the opposition-controlled Senate, passed after Morales agreed to reduce the number of proposed indigenous voting districts to 7 from 14. Hunger Strikes Morales, a former protest leader and head of the coca growers association, said he once refused to eat for 18 days while locked in a Bolivian prison, according to an interview published April 11 in the state-run newspaper Cambio. This was his 18th hunger strike, he said in the interview. Members of the opposition Democratic Power party, known as Podemos, stormed out of a session of Congress on April 9, demanding further changes and additions to the bill, including plans to create a new voter registry to prevent fraud. The lawmakers returned to the chamber on April 12 after Morales consented to the new voter registry, which will include photographs, signatures and fingerprints for all potential voters, in remarks broadcast the previous day. “We consider it wise of the president to recognize the new registry,” Senate President and Podemos member Oscar Ortiz said at a news conference at the Congress building on April 12. “It’s a measure that is going to strengthen Bolivia’s democracy.” Abandoned Airplane The ruling party had argued that the government didn’t have the resources to implement the new registry in time for the December elections. Morales, who has traveled abroad more than any other Bolivian president, said he would abandon plans to buy a new presidential airplane in order to pay for the registry. The Bolivian leader currently travels in a 30-year-old aircraft, Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera said April 12 at a news conference at the Congress building. “Morales is operating under a completely different definition of democracy, a majoritarian view that says, ‘I have 50 percent of voters behind me, so I get what I want,” said Miguel Centellas, a Latin American Political Science professor at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Morales took 53.7 percent of the vote in 2005 elections, becoming Bolivia’s first president to win a majority. He plans to run for a second-five year term in elections now guaranteed, according to the law, to be held this year on Dec. 6. About 40 percent of Bolivians say they would vote for Morales in the elections, according to a February poll by independent La Paz-based pollster Ipsos Apoyo. Former President Carlos Mesa, who emerged in late 2008 to oppose the new Morales- backed constitution, was the closest challenger with about 8 percent support. The survey has margin of error of 2.1 percentage points.