0 Shares 0



0

0







Thousands of Bolivians marched through streets across the Andean country on Tuesday to protest a new bid by leftist President Evo Morales to clear the way for him to run for a fourth term in 2019, Reuters reported.

Morales had accepted defeat in early 2016 when 51 percent of Bolivian voters rejected his proposal to reform the constitution to end existing term limits in a referendum.

But last month, Morales’ Movement to Socialism (MAS) party asked the country’s highest court to rescind legal limits barring elected authorities from seeking re-election indefinitely, arguing that these violate human rights.

Carrying signs that read “Bolivia said ‘no’!” and waving the red, yellow and green Bolivian flag, protesters said Morales wants to tighten his grip on power in the vein of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a leftist ally considered a dictator by the opposition.

The Morales government dismissed the protests as political rallies disguised as a grassroots movement and said the right-wing opposition wants to ensure Morales cannot run in the 2019 race.

“Any constitutional reform needed can be implemented when the will of the people is at stake,” Justice Minister Hector Arce said on TV channel Cadena A.

Morales, the country’s first president of indigenous origin, who came to power in 2006, has said he would happily give up office but that his supporters are pushing for him to stay. His current term ends in January 2020.

Bolivia's economy has posted steady growth under Morales’ leadership over the past decade. Since 2006, a year after Morales came to power, social spending on health, education, and poverty programs has increased by over 45 percent.

The Morales administration made enormous transformations in the Andean nation. The figures speak for themselves: the nationalization of hydrocarbons, poverty reduction from 60% to less than 40%, a decrease in the rate of illiteracy from 13% to 3%, the tripling the GDP with an average growth of 5% annually, the quadrupling of the minimum wage, the increasing of state coverage on all fronts, and the development of infrastructure in communications, transportation, energy and industry. And above all, stability, an unusual word in the troubled political history Bolivia, of which today, with the economic slowdown experienced by many countries in the region, is a real privilege.

*(Evo Morales Ayma, President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia speaks at the 33th ordinary session of the Human Rights Council. 23 september 2016. Image credit: UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré/ flickr)