Former Bolivian President Evo Morales (2006-2019) said in an interview with EFE that the government of Luis Arce has “four plans against him,” including “killing him” before allowing him to be a presidential candidate for the 2025 elections.
“If they don’t put Evo in jail, they will disqualify him through legal proceedings for drug trafficking, (…) if not, they will kill me,” said the former president at the end of a 25-kilometer road march.
The former president believes that the current government wants to block his candidacy because he is “a radical in the fight against corruption,” and that if he were to become president again, he would put many “corrupt” people in jail during this administration.
Morales, who has also been the leader of the ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party for 27 years, is leading thousands of his followers on a 187-kilometer march across the Bolivian highlands, bound for the city of La Paz on Monday.
The mobilization that Morales calls “March to save Bolivia” is named by the Executive as the “March of Death” and Arce considers it an attempted “coup d’état” against his Administration.
“Police officers sent me a bulletproof vest on Tuesday… on Wednesday the military sent me another one,” Morales said, adding that the government’s plan is to kill him when he leads the march into La Paz, the city where the government is based.
Morales said that eliminating the MAS is also part of Arce’s plan, because he has “a racist mentality” and does not accept that a political movement is led by indigenous people.
Arce and Morales have been engaged in a long battle for control of the ruling MAS and the Executive since 2021, and according to the opposition this fight keeps the country in tension and threatens to destabilize it.
For the former president, Luis Arce “is the worst president in the history of Bolivia.”
According to Morales, “Lucho (Arce)”‘s mission was to “recover the Bolivian economy” after what he and his associates considered to be a “coup d’état” in 2019.
Due to this alleged “coup d’état,” the then president resigned and went into exile in Argentina, and the MAS party placed Arce as its candidate in the 2021 elections, which he won.
“The people and I trust an economist,” he told EFE, since Arce was the Minister of Economy during his administration.
The former president said that the country’s economic crisis, due to a lack of dollars and fuel shortages, is due to Arce selling out to the United States and the right, and that this is why he seeks to “reduce the State” and follow “the economic formula of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”
For his part, President Arce has stated on several occasions that Morales wants the MAS and Bolivia to respond to “a single person” and that the economic crisis is due to the former president’s management and the lack of exploration projects for natural gas reserves, a product on which the country’s economy depended until recently.
Hunger strike and blockade
“I’m not trying to talk, but if the elections were held today we would win with 60%,” Morales said in the living room of a house in Calamarca where he spoke to EFE after walking for six hours and giving a speech to his followers in the town square.
On his fifth day of walking, the former president looked tired and his lips were purple due to the intense rays of the highland sun, but he said he had the “strength” to continue to the end.
According to Morales, walking through the highlands and meeting people “reminded him of 2005,” the year he was first elected president of Bolivia.
According to the leaders of the Morales-aligned MAS, after the march ends the former president will go on a hunger strike to have his candidacy recognized, despite a ruling by the Constitutional Court that prohibits it.
They also announced that if their demands are not heard, a road blockade will be held throughout the country starting on September 30.
The MAS, which is divided into two factions, the ‘arcistas’ and the ‘evistas’, has held separate congresses to appoint different boards of directors, actions that the Electoral Court does not accept and demands that they hold a joint meeting before choosing a presidential candidate, something that has not happened.
Bolivia / EFE
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2024-09-25 01:51:39
