[News] Bolivia - New Constitution Passed, Celebrations Hit the Streets
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jan 27 13:02:58 EST 2009
Bolivia Looking Forward: New Constitution Passed, Celebrations Hit the Streets
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20375
January 27, 2009 By Ben Dangl
After Bolivia's new constitution was passed in a
national referendum on Sunday, thousands gathered
in La Paz to celebrate. Standing on the balcony
of the presidential palace, President Evo Morales
addressed a raucous crowd: "Here begins a new
Bolivia. Here we begin to reach true equality."
Polls conducted by Televisión Boliviana announced
that the document passed with 61.97% support from
some 3.8 million voters. According the poll,
36.52% of voters voted against the constitution,
and 1.51% cast blank and null votes. The
departments where the constitution passed
included La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí,
Tarija, and Pando. It was rejected in Santa Cruz, Beni, and Chuquisaca.
The constitution, which was written in a
constituent assembly that first convened in
August of 2006, grants unprecedented rights to
Bolivia's indigenous majority, establishes
broader access to basic services, education and
healthcare and expands the role of the state in
the management of natural resources and the economy.
When the news spread throughout La Paz that the
constitution had been passed in the referendum,
fireworks, cheers and horns sounded off
sporadically. By 8:30, thousands had already
gathered in the Plaza Murillo. The crowd cheered
"Evo! Evo! Evo!" until Morales, Vice President
Alvaro Garcia Linera and other leading figures in
the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government,
crowded out onto the balcony of the presidential palace.
"I would like to take this opportunity to
recognize all of the brothers and sisters of
Bolivia, all of the compañeros and compañeras,
all of the citizens that through their vote,
through their democratic participation, decide to
refound Bolivia," Morales said. "From 2005 to
2009 we have gone from triumph to triumph, while
the neoliberals, the traitors have been
constantly broken down thanks to the consciousness of the Bolivian people."
He shook his fist in the air, the applause died
down. "And I want you to know something, the
colonial state ends here. Internal colonialism
and external colonialism ends here. Sisters and
brothers, neoliberalism ends here too."
At various points in the speech Morales, and
others on the balcony, held up copies of the new
constitution. Morales continued, "And now, thanks
to the consciousness of the Bolivian people, the
natural resources are recuperated for life, and
no government, no new president can...give our
natural resources away to transnational companies."
A Weakened Right
Though news reports and analysts have suggested
that the passage of the new constitution will
exacerbate divisions in the country, some of the
political tension may be directed into the
electoral realm as general elections are now
scheduled to take place in December of this year.
In addition, the constitution's passage is
another sign of the weakness of the Bolivian
right, and their lack of a clear political agenda
and mandate to confront the MAS's popularity. The
recent passage of the constitution is likely to
divide and further debilitate the right.
Even Manfred Reyes Villa, an opponent of Morales
and ex-governor of Cochabamba, told Joshua
Partlow of the
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/register&destination=login&nextstep=gather&application=reg30-world&applicationURL=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/25/AR2009012500625.html>Washington
Post that, "Today, there is not a serious
opposition in the country." When the right-wing
led
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1478/1/>violence
in the department of Pando in September of 2008
left some 20 people dead and many others wounded,
the right lost much of its legitimacy and
support. "With Pando, the regional opposition
just collapsed," George Gray Molina, an ex-United
Nations official in Bolivia, and a current
research fellow at Oxford University, told
Partlow. "I think they lost authority and
legitimacy even among their own grass roots."
Celebrations
Fireworks shot off at the end of Morales' speech
in the Plaza Murillo, sending pigeons flying
scared. Live folk music played on stage as the
crowd danced and the TV crews packed up and left.
The wind blew around giant balloon figures of
hands the color of the Bolivian flag holding the new constitution.
As the night wore on, more people began dancing
to the bands in the street than to those on the
stage. At midnight, when the police asked the
thousands gathered to leave the plaza, the crowd
took off marching down the street, taking the
fiesta to central La Paz, cheering nearly every
Latin American revolutionary cheer, pounding
drums and sharing beer. After marching down a
number of blocks on the empty streets, the crowd
hunkered down for a street party at the base of a
statue of the Latin American liberator, Simón
Bolívar. The celebration, which included
Bolivians, Argentines, Brazilians, French,
British, North Americans and more, went on into
the early hours of the morning.
Oscar Rocababo, a Bolivian sociologist working on
his Master's degree in La Paz, was elated about
the victory in the referendum. "The passage of
this constitution is like the cherry on top of
the ice cream, the culmination of many years of struggle."
Benjamin Dangl is currently based in Bolivia, and
is the author of
<http://www.akpress.org/2007/items/priceoffireakpress>The
Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements
in Bolivia (AK Press). He is the editor of
<http://upsidedownworld.org/home/>TowardFreedom.com,
a progressive perspective on world events, and
<http://upsidedownworld.org/>UpsideDownWorld.org,
a website on activism and politics in Latin
America. Email Bendangl(at)gmail(dot)com
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