Bolivians strongly back Morales in recall vote

[endarkenment]

Source: AP

By FRANK BAJAK – 1 hour ago

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — A bold gamble by President Evo Morales to break a political deadlock and re-energize his leftist revolution paid off as Bolivia's voters resoundingly endorsed him in a recall referendum.

More than 63 percent of voters in this bitterly divided Andean nation ratified the mandate of Bolivia's first indigenous leader and his vice president, Alvaro Garcia, in Sunday's vote, according to partial unofficial results.

Eight of the country's nine governors also were subject to recall — and two Morales foes were among the three ousted, according to a private tally of votes from 1,000 of the country's 22,700 polling stations.



Read more: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5icZrFuWnQi36L3-KJnSKwKf-9Y5gD92G5DO00

---

Another setback for Washington's attempts to rollback the re-assertion of regional independence in latin america.

[Bacchus39]

1. I don't see it that way at all

Morales planned the recall vote himself because he knew he'd win. so after the vote, the divisions in the country remain.

funny your last comment, the opposition is seeking just that, regional independence.

[endarkenment]

3. Of course you don't.

But then again you are ignoring, or don't know, that the recall vote was directly a result of Washington backed efforts from the Bolivian right to destabilize the government by calling for autonomy for the ethnic spanish dominated regions from the central government.

Regional independence from Washington's domination, not efforts to breakup existing political entities in order to destabilize democraticaly elected governments we don't like. I guess I wasn't clear.

[Bacchus39]

4. oh, I didn't realize the vote was on whether to become independent from Washington or not

I would have expected more than 60% in favor then.

[endarkenment]

6. Then you do not understand very much about what is going on to the south.

But I find your proclamations of ignorance a bit far fetched, given your posting history on this and related subjects.

[Bacchus39]

7. I don't agree at all with your assessment

the recall was called in an attempt to strengthen Morales' hand. I do not believe Washington is advocating the dissolution of Bolivia.

[David__77]

8. So, you're saying "how dare a democratically-elected leader use democratic processes?"

He won, they lost. That's democracy, no?

[Bacchus39]

11. not saying that at all

it was a foregone conclusion that Morales would win which is why he proposed the recall vote in the first place. the divisions in Bolivia remain so I don't really see the point, other than perhaps he will try again to push through his stalled agenda. i doubt it will have any signficant impact on the opposition trying to push through their agenda either. back to square one.

I am not sure where you came up with that comment, my point was simply that the vote wasn't about Washington but rather about Morales.

[David__77]

12. Why are "divisions" so bad?

Isn't disagreement a part of democracy? I'm not aware of too many cases in which there is a grand consensus among the people. In this case, there is class struggle. The rich and relatively prosperous feel threatened by Morales' agenda.

[Bacchus39]

15. I don't see the recall vote as solving anything

yeah, competing ideas are certainly part of democracy. but this wasn't even a vote on Morales' proposals. Morales was already elected president so what was the purpose?? I think you could argue politics. getting rid of the opposition governors. Morales can appoint the replacements for those who lost. very convenient isn't it??

[killbotfactory]

16. The opposition implemented the recall vote

The Bolivian Congress voted Thursday to hold a national referendum within 90 days on the rule of President Evo Morales, his vice-president and nine regional governors, the senate said.

The opposition is banking on winning the vote of confidence, riding on a tide of support shown in Sunday's referendum in Santa Cruz, where 85 percent of voters backed more autonomy from La Paz.

(snip)

The national vote of confidence agreed Thursday was originally proposed by Morales, but his government appeared to have been caught off guard and now seems reluctant to organize it.

Presidential spokesman Ivan Canelas questioned why the opposition, who hold a majority in the senate, had supported the move when they earlier opposed it.

(snip)

That vote was held in response to a drive by Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, to give more of the country's wealth and land to his fellow Indians, many of whom live in poverty in the western Andes mountains.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gBpgYyMM47u-1_7A9XjqcUJDzgIw

I don't think this was some devious scheme cooked up by Morales. The opposition got greedy with some election results and tried to oust him. Thankfully it backfired.

[High Plains]

26. Ha ha, you're funny.

[RethugAssKicker]

2. Great News !... The Imperialists need to STFU now !

[Joanne98]

5. Great news! Go Morales!

[David__77]

9. Wonderful news!

The progressive trend in Latin America is alive and well! Imperialism wants to split Bolivia, but this will not happen.

[WriteDown]

10. I'm non-plussed by this.

The divisions will remain.

[David__77]

13. What's wrong with "divisions?" There's always a disgruntled minority.

Democracy. Majority rule. That's the game.

[WriteDown]

14. 60/40...

is more than a just a disgruntled minority. That is a real split. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Bolivia.

[High Plains]

27. Bush won with 50.1 % (arguably).

Are we on the verge of civil war now?

[Robbien]

17. Nice to see the dollars we spent on disrupting Bolivia go to naught

The rich global elite will have to find another way to grab Bolivia's assets.

[gratuitous]

18. Obviously, a large majority of Bolivians don't know what's good for them

Fresh from a little tete-a-tete with Henry Kissinger, I'll bet George W. Bush knows what's best for Bolivia, and by God they're going to get it!

What's best for them, I mean.

[Judi Lynn]

19. Clearly there are people who don't know the U.S. has been meddling in Bolivian government for ages.

Here's a very abbreviated view of just one of their presidents, written in 1995, before he served again, and had to leave office due to death. During his next hitch he made things far worse for the poor majority of Bolivians all over again:

COLONEL HUGO BANZER
President of Bolivia
In 1970, in Bolivia, when then-President Juan Jose Torres nationalized Gulf Oil properties and tin mines owned by US interests, and tried to establish friendly relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union, he was playing with fire. The coup to overthrow Torres, led by US-trained officer and Gulf Oil beneficiary Hugo Banzer, had direct support from Washington. When Banzer's forces had a breakdown in radio communications, US Air Force radio was placed at their disposal. Once in power, Banzer began a reign of terror. Schools were shut down as hotbeds of political subversive activity. Within two years, 2,000 people were arrested and tortured without trial. As in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, the native Indians were ordered off their land and deprived of tribal identity. Tens-of-thousands of white South Africans were enticed to immigrate with promises of the land stolen from the Indians, with a goal of creating a white Bolivia. When Catholic clergy tried to aid the Indians, the regime, with CIA help, launched terrorist attacks against them, and this "Banzer Plan" became a model for similar anti-Catholic actions throughout Latin America.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html

The U.S. President who thoughtfully assisted Hugo Banzer so he could crank up the suffering for the Bolivian indigenous people was Richard M. Nixon.

[Robbien]

20. The AFP is now reporting that the US State dept. is calling for unity

and that it is saying that Bolivia should meet with the rich elite and "compromise" to settle differences.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iRaZMQ7xQItM92rL0pt99Q1TmKAg

What? When the right wingers win (even with less than a tenth of one percent of the vote) they have a mandate to do what they want. But when lefties win (with huge margins), they have to compromise?

[Judi Lynn]

21. They've got NO SHAME in Bush's State Department. Good grief.

If they wanted to contribute they'd BUTT OUT and stop huddling with the racists behind everyone's back, and allow the democracy to prevail.

Can't believe they actually said this, from your article:

The United States, he said, supported the efforts of the Organization of American States, the Catholic Church, and the international community to facilitate the dialogue, and "stands ready to assist."

"We reiterate our support for Bolivia's unity and territorial integrity, and remain committed to be a good partner in Bolivia's journey to a more democratic, prosperous future," he said.

He's claiming the Catholic Church stands with him (and the racists who have been terrorizing the indigenous people for ages) when it was Nixon's administration which savaged the Bolivian Catholic Church when it attempted to protect the indigenous people, using its "Banzer Plan."

If a person lied like this, you would have written him off years ago as a pathological liar.

[Judi Lynn]

22. Bolivia backs left-winger Morales to 'carry on his revolution'

Bolivia backs left-winger Morales to 'carry on his revolution'

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 12:03 PM on 11th August 2008

~snip~
Morales had sought the referendum to try to topple governors who have frustrated his bid to improve the plight of Bolivia's long-suppressed indigenous majority, which is concentrated in the country's barren western highlands.

His leftist agenda has met with bitter opposition in the landlocked country's unabashedly capitalistic east, where protesters who accuse him of being a lackey of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez blockaded airports last week to keep Morales and his ministers from touching down for campaign visits.

All four governors there easily survived Sunday's plebiscite, as expected.

But Morales did surprisingly well in those states. In one, Pando, he was endorsed by 51 percent of voters, while he won 40 percent approval or better in the other three, according to the vote tally by the Ipsos-Apoyo firm for the ATB television network

~snip~
Natural gas and precious metals revenues have boomed since Morales nationalized the gas fields in 2006 and renegotiated extraction contracts.

Bolivia now keeps about 85 per cent of these profits, and combined with rising global energy and mineral prices, exports have nearly doubled since 2005 to US$4.7 billion last year.

More:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1043541/Bolivia-backs-left-winger-Morales-carry-revolution.html

[bvar22]

23. VIVA Democracy !!!!!

I hope it spreads to the USA!


"There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans. I want us to compete for that great mass of voters that want a party that will stand up for working Americans, family farmers, and people who haven't felt the benefits of the economic upturn."---Paul Wellstone

[Peace Patriot]

24. As usual, Bacchus39 chimes in with the RIGHTWING line that, with a leftist getting

a smashup victory like this--SIXTY-THREE PERCENT for Morales--it is meaningless.

Well, let me tell you something about politics in Bolivia. There has NEVER BEEN such UNITY as this in Bolivia. Previous presidential administrations have been short, ineffective failures because NOBODY could pull together the fractured parties of Bolivia--until now. Further, this astounding victory for Morales was NOT expected--until the last couple of weeks before the vote, when polls started to show the pro-Morales shift--and even then, the size of it was not predicted. It was NOT guaranteed. The U.S./Bush has poured millions of our tax dollars into the white separatist movement, trying to foment civil war and split off the gas and oil rich eastern provinces into fascist mini-states in control of the resources. It was unclear until days before the election how effective that Bushite (our taxpayer) money had been. A month ago it was close. Morales had to beat his previous vote. (That's how the referendum was set up.) The vote that made him president was 54% or 56% (can't recall which)--and THAT was considered phenomenal support in Bolivia--and was remarked upon in almost every news story. It was considered astonishing support. He has now topped that in spite of millions of dollars from the U.S. used against him (USAID funds, also organizing/training, and--no doubt--money from budgets we know not of).

This is an INCREDIBLE victory. The will of the great majority of the people of Bolivia could not be clearer. But rightwingers will downplay this every way they can--as Bacchus39 does. Morales's strength just keeps growing--much like Rafael Correa's strength in Ecuador, and Hugo Chavez's strength through 2006 (where he just kept getting bigger and bigger margins of victory--63% for Chavez in the '06 presidential election). These are the three main centers in the Bolivarian Revolution--Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador. Chavez lost the recent constitutional referendum by a hairsbreadth--50.7% to 49.3%--possibly because there were too many amendments--69--causing voter confusion, and one of them was equal rights for gays and women, in a country with a particularly rightwing Catholic clergy--and possibly also because of Bush/USAID funds and organizers in the country, helping the rich minority to be a more effective opposition. Their inclination is to kill and destroy--stage coups, assassinate leftists, ruin the economy, for instance, with the Venezuelan oil professionals' strike; all that didn't work (Chavez just got more popular), so something else needed to be tried--such as the training of rightwing students as a front for the fascist cause. Since Venezuela has been the avant garde of the Bolivarian Revolution--way ahead of everyone else--we have seen Bushites and fascists testing out various tactics there, to undo the will of the people, and to slander and hamper the Chavez government. The white secessionist movement in Bolivia, however, is a new one. And there is evidence of similar Bushite activities in Venezuela and Ecuador (secessionist movements to split off the oil rich provinces). Bolivia was/is the test case for this strategy. It was immensely important that Bolivian voters could see through it, and give the Morales government such a resounding victory. This will help to retard this rightwing strategy in Venezuela and Ecuador.

Combined with the win of leftist Fernando Lugo (the beloved "bishop of the poor") in Paraguay--another remarkable victory--this victory by Morales sets a very firm leftist trend in the region. But fascists never rest, as we know. They are already conspiring against Fernando Lugo. This Morales victory should give him and the majority in Paraguay a boost. I believe that Paraguay was to be the staging area for Bush/U.S. military support for the white separatists in next door Bolivia, and Lugo is a big monkey wrench in that plan (he wants the U.S. military out of his country). But he is newly elected, and his position--and social justice reforms--are not yet as solidified and advanced as they are in Venezuela and Ecuador.

[Judi Lynn]

25. Getting that progressive priest elected next to Bolivia is surely a heaven-sent gift to democracy!

He won't be allowing _Bush or anyone else to use his country as a place from which to stage raids, incursions, bombing missions into Bolivia to bring "help" as Rumsfeld claims to their racist, brutal, fascist friends and allies living on the stolen land in Bolivia, plotting to rip off ALL the nation's natural resources and steal them in such a way they'll never be required to share them with the country which owns them all.

As you've noticed there are occassional Americans who are throwing themselves on the cyber floor, kicking and shrieking as they suspect they are going to have to bow to the inevitable, in time, and realize Latin America is pulling itself up from under the heel holding them down for so very long as Latin American citizens were tortured and slaughtered and forced off their land which was given to multinationals and the people themselves turned into slaves working alongside with their wives and children in many cases just to be able to buy the scarce, costly food, and afford the inadequate shelter.

Meanwhile our own corporate media has perpetuated a near total news blackout to the point people here had NO IDEA why folks in other countries, f'r instance, like Venezuela in 1958, have surged into the streets in fury when people like Richard Nixon arrived in their limousines, as they shouted, "Yanqui, go home." We were all encouraged to believe it was all so mysterious, uncalled for, rude, and Latin Americans were hot tempered, unruly, violent, unstable, and later on people everywhere were just jealous, envious of our "freedoms," and our "way of life." Yeah, you bet! Just grouchy, crabbly furriners. That's the idea!

It IS sad to see people who know better trying to continue to promote just that same stupid, arrogant, ignorance-based xenophobic, racist misperception, delusion of our own vast superiority. We have known NOTHING because we have been kept ignorant intentionally. While we have lived in complete darkness and confusion about other countries, people in other countries have been very well informed about the rest of the world. Travelers, including our own Congresspeople have commented on it after their trips elsewhere. Odd, isn't it? Others are well informed, we get quickie, shallow news bites.

The reason for that has to be that as long as we don't know anything, we can be "played," emotionally, our feelings, crude fears, suspicion, hostility made instantly mobile by dropping in distortions, or even outright lies like the ones we've seen from Nixon, Reagan, and the _Bushes.

The challenge is for Americans to start waking up quickly and doing all the necessary homework while there's still daylight, and the goverment hasn't found a way to block our access to the interetS and plunge us all back into darkness!

We see agents of this propaganda campaign every single day, don't we? I'd like to think we have total evidence people are starting to see straight through them, too!

Tons of Americans LOVE what they've heard about Evo Morales. I was astonished to see how many, many people in Jon Stewart's audience were completely familiar with him when he went on a couple of years ago or so. Very cool.

Best wishes, good luck, god speed, and protect Evo Morales.