Bolivia elections - 2019-2020 - Arce Victory

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Áñez officially confirmed as acting president (by the constitutional court), new elections must be within 90 days.

Is the constitutional court a relatively impartial institution in Bolivia or is it a de facto third chamber of Congress like the SCOTUS?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

But remember folks, Morales is the real authoritarian.

He expanded the size of government.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

New Archbishop of La Paz today. He's from an 80% indigenous area, went to seminary in Cochabamba, and was previously bishop of an almost entirely indigenous mission area up in the Andes. Pretty sure the previous guy supported Añez's (initial) coup.

Not that it's likely to change anything, but it does make one wonder if a message is being sent.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This is a victory for muh socialism (CONDOLENCES, LANDLORDS), muh Pachamama (CONDOLENCES, TRADCATS), and "laying off that whiskey and letting that cocaine be" (CONGRATS, JOHNNY CASH). Great honer!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

So . . .

How ya feelin' CIA?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Some overseas results are in and it shows an interesting pattern of where the rich (and white) expats go vs where the poor emigrants go.  For example, from what's counted so far, MAS is getting 83% in Argentina, 71% in Brazil and 50% in Spain, while CC is getting 73% in Germany and 41% in Italy (but with another 41% to Creemos in the latter).

There are Bolivians in Italy?

Only 5,859 (that have a right to vote), so they're easy to miss, I imagine.

That's probably a good thing because they seem like massive HPs. 41% for Camacho, yeesh.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Indeed, Creemos is a regionalist (and very right-wing) party. Santa Cruz and its capital, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, is the center of Bolivia's "white" (more like "mestizo but with less indigenous blood", but let's not get into that) culture and unsurprisingly a long-time right-wing stronghold. There is a small but growing movement to give this part of the country more autonomy or, on the fringes, even independence. You can read more about it here: Bolivia: a tale of two countries. Its members are... curious creatures - the most hilariously every-negative-stereotype-about-racist-right-wing-whites moments from that article:

She told me, ‘Santa Cruz is Bolivia’s most modern city. You’ve seen all the condos [the many gated developments]. It’s only natural. In Santa Cruz, we know how to invest our money, we know how to make it grow. Not like the Indians, who bury it in the ground as an offering to their “Pachamama”.’ Her dream was to see President Evo Morales, whom she called ‘that illiterate Indian’, removed.

[snark] Unsurprisingly for people who want to create a Volkstaat, they also have their own knockoff Weerstandsbeweging (presumably a similar clown car of morons like the original thing, for now):

She described an intense few months spent with the committee’s youth section, the Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC), who call her Tia (auntie) and are ‘prepared to do anything to ensure the triumph of democracy’; members are often sent to prison for acts of violence.

This is not from a Dickens book:

I always tried to make sure that my children didn’t mix with poor people, so that they wouldn’t grow up to be lazy. I wanted them to be surrounded by money and acquire a taste for it. [...] People from the west, like him [Morales], are born hating us. That’s why they held us back. They’ve screwed up our businesses with social rights and welfare and so on.

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To them, communism means taxes. Pablo Mendieta Ossio of the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce’s Centre for Bolivian Economic Studies, told me that under Morales’s presidency, the people of Santa Cruz were victims of ‘extortion’: ‘The problem wasn’t so much the tax rates — our taxes are very low — as the fact that audits have become more frequent in recent years,which increases the chances of the tax authorities making mistakes, and therefore the likelihood of fines.

Autonomist or separatist movements in areas wealthier than the country as a whole really just cannot ever be trusted. Tale as old as time.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Autonomist or separatist movements in areas wealthier than the country as a whole really just cannot ever be trusted. Tale as old as time.

Lol
You know what I am going to say.

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Lega's the obvious example in Europe, yeah, but I also tend to think "woke" rich-region separatisms like Catalonia's are, to use the parlance of our times, kinda sus for this reason. To say nothing of the Calexit/Jesusland-map fantasists here in the US.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

More seriously: the people in that article are a level of stereotypical posho-classist-asshole-ness which I don't think I had ever seen before.

When Antonio linked me to Estrella's post that I was originally responding to yesterday my first reaction was "So it's suburban Veneto but with the racial politics of Alabama? Sounds like a delightful place."

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

There were definitely religious appeals involved in the coup against Morales because indigenous people in Bolivia are often crypto-pagan pachamamistas, but my impression is that most Bolivian Christians didn't actually find those appeals, like. compelling.

Autonomist or separatist movements in areas wealthier than the country as a whole really just cannot ever be trusted. Tale as old as time.

Lol
You know what I am going to say.

UmbertoBossi.jpg

(Looks at GDP)

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Not that I'm a huge fan of Scottish nationalism either (sorry), but isn't Scotland slightly poorer than the rest of the UK (more because of how much richer Greater London is than everywhere else than because it's poorer than the other parts of England)?