BUCKING THE trend in south America, where electorates have been drifting to the right, Bolivia’s radical president Evo Morales has secured a comfortable re-election with 67 per cent of the vote. His Movement for Socialism (MAS) has also won two-thirds of the seats in both houses. Promising more of the same, Mr Morales says he will accelerate reforms enhancing Indian rights and state control of the economy.
An Aymara indian and former coca farmer, brought up in dire poverty, Mr Morales is Bolivia’s first indigenous president and is hugely popular in his community which supported a constitutional reform earlier this year to allow him to run for a second term. He nationalised the energy industry in his first term, generating a windfall for the state that he has used to boost social spending on schools, pensions and mothers. Since 2005 the country’s GDP has soared from $9 to $19 billion and the IMF expects growth of 2.8 per cent next year, a strong performance by regional standards.
But efforts to tap lithium deposits and increase gas production have faltered for lack of foreign investment. Relations with Washington are toxic, not helped by Mr Morales’s association with Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez and the expulsion of the US ambassador and US anti-drugs officials as meddlers and spies.
However, a shadow was cast over the election, reflecting the sometimes violent divide between Mr Morales and the prosperous, autonomy-seeking eastern region of Santa Cruz where in April Irishman Michael Dwyer died with two others at the hands of the police in circumstances that are still the subject of dispute.
Claims that Santa Cruz opposition figures brought Mr Dwyer and his colleagues to Bolivia to establish a separatist militia and even to assassinate Mr Morales played no small part in raising the temperature of the campaign. Whether or not they were involved in an assassination plot – the case is very unclear – there is strong evidence the group’s presence was known to police who may have been involved in a shoot-to-kill operation. The subsequent Irish inquest flatly contradicted Bolivian police claims of an extended gun battle – Mr Dwyer was killed by a single shot to the heart, most likely from above, indicating that he was in bed. And the coroner found no evidence of gunshot residues on the body.
A promise, reiterated in October by the Bolivian ambassador, of an international inquiry has yet to materialise. It is important that the Irish authorities continue to press La Paz on the issue.