The vote will take place in favour of Arce Catacora and David Choqueuhanca, despite the doubts that exist as a result of the contradictions in Mas’s candidacy. These are reasonable doubts, since the personalist and vertical stages in the management of the State by the HAF have often weakened the basic structures of social movements.
The stubbornness in holding a candidacy that had lost the referendum (Pp.-García Linera) generated serious doubts; and in addition, this stubbornness, caused the discourse of the oligarchist right, lost and disconcerted, to be a gift. With this discourse, they managed to articulate the mobilization on the street, revealing its racist character to the colonized middle class.
There are doubts because, as there was no depth in a real project of rupture against colonialism and capitalism, we were in a scenario of almost complicit coexistence of the eastern agricultural oligarchies. These oligarchies didn't come.
"There are doubts because, as there was no depth in a real project of rupture against colonialism and capitalism, we were in a scenario of coexistence almost accomplices of the eastern agricultural oligarchies"
One with the economic stability achieved by the MAS government, and they did not hesitate to provoke a violent coup d'état, such as the one that paid the blood classes in the massacres of Sacaba and Senkata.
There are doubts and contradictions between a constitution and a discourse (which gives priority to the community in the economic and social sphere) and the developmentalist practice against indigenous peoples, which is precisely the indigenous people who give the HAF the raison d'être.
Finally, there are serious doubts about the large number of drugs that have become a pseudo-revolutionary discourse. On many occasions, relevant sectors of the State have participated in this discourse and, on many occasions, have removed the people who have given their lives from the real process of change. However, we will have to vote in favour of MAS and I will do so.
The main reason is that, first of all, despite all these shortcomings, the candidature of Arce and Choquehuanca is the only representative of the popular and indigenous sectors, so they will be able to challenge this sector. All others respond only to the interests of the strategic alliance between the United States Department of State and the oligarchic classes. Mesa and Quiroga are the most serious consequence of a neoliberal colonial past that left the country on the verge of failure. It is a country that has also been dependent on the payment of salaries in the public sector, with a dependence on international institutions. The new representatives, Camacho and Chi, represent the far-right ignorant, violent and orthodox religious, such as the cartoon of Trump and Bolsonaro.
We will have to vote in favour of Arce and Choquehuanca because a victory by Mesa or Camacho would strengthen the coup between October and November 2019, in addition to the impunity of those responsible and authors of the massacres of Senka and Sacaba. Likewise, the normalization of violence by fascist groups such as the Cochala Youth Resistance or the Youth Union Cruceñista, which impose their fanatic racism on our streets.
"We will have to vote in favour of Arce and Choquehuanca because a victory by Mesa or Camacho would strengthen the coup from October to November 2019"
The vote in favour of Arce and Choquehuanca, a process of fourteen years that, despite all the errors mentioned, took a great step in the reduction of poverty and achieved rights, but above all achieved achievements of dignity and self-esteem for the workers, citizens and indigenous people trampled by the colonial State, from the creation of the republic to its impoverishment in the years of the neoliberal model.
We will have to vote in favour of them, but from the day after the victory, it is clear that they must be required to make themselves self-critical and to recover the process. In any case, in the end there will be a process of not returning to the desert of the colonial neoliberal past.
Finally, the people who are in favour of the working classes and of the people fighting for decolonization and for the peoples of origin should not have too many problems to know what they are and what they are not. We must therefore vote for Arce Catacora and David Choquehuanca.
*René Behoteguy Chavez
He is a Bolivian, militant of Askapena and resident of the Basque Country.