Bolivian protesters unseated a president. So why are they still in the streets?
Evo Morales, Bolivia’s leftist indigenous president, resigned Sunday and has fled the country for Mexico, unseated by nationwide protests over the presidential election. This election, as Santiago Anria and Jennifer Cyr explained here at TMC, was controversial for two reasons. First, Morales ignored constitutional term limits and ran for his fourth consecutive term, even though he’d lost a national referendum to lift those limits. Second, election auditors found evidence of electoral fraud.
So why are Bolivia’s protests continuing? Bolivians are in the streets to try to defend the democratic institutions that Morales remade over 13 years. To understand what’s at stake, it is helpful to draw distinctions between the country’s democratic institutions and Morales’s personal style of rule, which endangered the very institutions he championed.… Seguir leyendo »