FUNCTIONAL OPPOSITION CANDIDATES BOOST VOTE-CATCHING DICTATORSHIP’S CANDIDACY IN BOLIVIA

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
April 2, 2019

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Someone disqualified from being a candidate just announced that he will win the elections with 70% of the votes, and we have to believe it because that someone is Evo Morales, the consummate manipulator of laws he promulgates to fit his interests and convenience, who uses the judicial so that judges can pervert the course of justice in his favor, someone who has hatched an electoral system with the same plan already used by Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s dictators.  This is about Bolivia’s electioneering dictatorship that moves forward without any qualms in the process to conduct elections for Evo Morales so that he may be a candidate for the fourth consecutive time with the active participation of the functional opposition candidates.

Cuba’s dictatorship has created and directs the regimes that today control Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia using the model that feigns democracy under the flawed premise that if there are elections there is democracy, when in reality neither Human Rights nor basic individual freedoms are respected, there is no Rule of Law, there is no separation or independence of the branches of government, there is no freedom for political affiliation, there are people imprisoned and political exiles, and the total control of the State is used to commit crimes of Transnational Organized Crime.

In this model, Evo Morales has implemented the “vote-catching dictatorship” in Bolivia.  He has conceptualized this electioneering dictatorship as “that political regime that by force or violence concentrates all political power into one person or group, crushes and suppresses human rights and basic freedoms and utilizes elections as a means of simulation and propaganda in order to indefinitely keep itself in power”.

In the vote-catching dictatorship, elections are the façade with which the absolute owner of power, the dictator, seeks to hide his true nature.  It is about controlled and manipulated elections.  The manipulation of elections includes the existence of “opposition candidates” who have the role of legitimizing the dictator as the sure winner.  In the electioneering dictatorship the dictator has all the legality in his favor, because he has created it and has tailored it to meet his needs through the absolute control of the legislative, judicial, and electoral branches, like what is now happening in Bolivia.

Under these conditions, those who allow themselves to be opposition candidates are really accomplices of a criminal process because what they are really doing is perpetuating the dictator in power.  This is why they are “functional opposition candidates”, in other words; fake candidates of the opposition, because they are meeting the needs of the dictator who is the official candidate, they are subordinated to the regime, they depend from it, they are connected to the dictatorship for whom they are useful in simulating a democracy that does not exist and elections in which people vote but not elect.

In his recurring criminal acts Evo Morales, to be a candidate for the fourth consecutive time, changed the Constitution and eliminated the Republic of Bolivia, supplanting it with the Plurinational State of Bolivia.  In this chain of crime, summarized in my previous column of 10 February of 2019 entitled “The Republic of Bolivia and the crime the dictatorship calls Constitution”, to be able to favor Evo Morales, a constitutional prohibition of “total reform of the Constitution ” was violated and a mandate that read “the President may only be reelected once after having served at least one constitutional term” was broken.

The Constitutional supplanting to allow Evo Morales’ reelection was done with laws promulgated by Carlos Mesa and when the President of the Senate was Oscar Ortiz, both of whom are today presented as the main opposition candidates and without whose active and direct participation Evo Morales should have stepped down in January of 2011, because he would not have had neither the Constituent Assembly, nor the Castroist Chavist Constitution that wrecked the Rule of Law in Bolivia.

With their participation in the so-called “primary elections in Bolivia” all candidates that today appear as opposition candidates, including Mesa and Ortiz, have proven to be “functional candidates” with the shameful act of agreeing to the candidacy of the disqualified Evo Morales.  Reporting on these primary elections, BBC News stated; “unusual voting in which all candidates won and none competed with the others”.  If the functional candidates had not participated of that farce, Morales would not have been legitimized as a candidate and would have been left alone, with his dictatorship exposed.

Functional candidates can still participate in the return to democracy in Bolivia by withdrawing from an electoral campaign in which they don’t have the slightest chance of winning.

Published in Spanish by Infobae.com on Sunday, March 31 2019

Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators’ Association, ATA # 234680.