Will an audit of Bolivia's election end a standoff between the government and the opposition?
October 22nd, two days after Bolivia’s presidential and congressional elections, Paul Handal met a dozen neighbours on the street in Villa Fraterna, an upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Santa Cruz, the country’s biggest city. Suspicions were mounting that the president, Evo Morales, was trying to avoid a run-off vote by fraudulent means. Opposition leaders had called a general strike to demand one. Mr Handal and his neighbours dragged trees and tyres to an intersection to build a barricade.
The government is trying to head that off by backing an audit of the vote count by the Organisation of American States . It is “the institutional mechanism to determine whether or not there was fraud”, says Adriana Salvatierra, the president of the senate, who is from Mr Morales’s Movement to Socialism and represents Santa Cruz. The government has agreed to let the election go to a second round if the auditors find fraud.
Mr Mesa, a former president, is not a bystander but neither is he shaping events. He is “just interested in being president”, says Mr Camacho dismissively. The candidate resists Mr Camacho’s radical demand that Mr Morales resign. “It has to be the popular vote that defines” his exit, says Gustavo Pedraza, Mr Mesa’s running-mate, who is from Santa Cruz.
The standoff threatens to weaken a consensus among social groups that Mr Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous-origin president, had managed to create during his 14 years in power. In Plan 3000, a working-class neighbourhood of Santa Cruz named for a project to house 3,000 people displaced by a flood in 1983, residents complain that the strike is hurting people without savings. “We’re not beggars,” says Marítimo Solares, the leader of a youth group affiliated with the.
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