Dismantle the infamous system of laws of the Bolivian dictatorship
By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 02/06/2025
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At the beginning of 1999, a few weeks after Hugo Chávez's electoral victory, Norberto Ceresole published: Caudillo, Ejército, Pueblo (Caudillo, Army, People). In this work, Ceresole also explained very clearly that for them, victory at the polls was a carte blanche to reform the entire Venezuelan legal system. However, the veteran sociologist was simply repeating the same prescription that Fidel Castro had applied in Cuba in the 1960s: in short, the law is the caudillo, and the caudillo is the law.
A few years later, in 2004, in Bolivia, coca grower Morales, supported by Carlos Mesa, Samuel Doria Medina, and Jorge Quiroga, would begin a similar process, as the Constituent Assembly convened that year was nothing more than a criminal act to replace the Republic of Bolivia with the Castro-inspired Plurinational State. Regarding this, Carlos Sánchez Berzain, in his article "Elections in Bolivia 17 Years After the Coup That Initiated the Dictatorship Process," explains:
Evo Morales, protected by amnesty, assumed the presidency of the Republic on January 22, 2006, with a five-year mandate without continuous reelection, and remained in office for almost 14 years. With the falsification of Law 2631, he installed and manipulated a Constituent Assembly whose constitutional proposal he ignored and amended with another infamous Law, Law 3941 of October 21, 2008, which replaced the Constituent Assembly. Thus, the constitution of the so-called "plurinational state" is not that of the Constituent Assembly, but the one the dictatorship needs.
Once the criminal act against the Bolivian nation was committed, Evo Morales implemented a whole network of infamous laws, since their spirit lacks respect for life, property, and liberty, but rather serves as mechanisms to undermine the fundamental rights of Bolivians. Let's look at some examples.
Financial Services Law 393, enacted on August 29, 2013, forced the entire Bolivian financial system to operate with artificially low interest rates and exclusively in the national currency. In both cases, it leaves borrowers and savers unprotected, forcing the former into a massive bubble and depriving the latter of their dollar savings.
Pension System Law 065 limited all possible investment areas for pension funds (even prohibiting the allocation of funds to real estate), but left open the possibility of unlimited investment in government financial instruments. Unfortunately for millions of Bolivian workers, this abuse led to pension funds yielding a paltry 4% in 2020. Additionally, this money was squandered on the dictatorship's pharaonic projects, as Morales himself admitted:
I'll be honest, we also had a loan (from the AFPs), I think it was $4 billion, but it was for investment. We built the cable car with that money, we paid interest, but we're also paying it back. The cable car has its rent.
However, reality contradicts the illiterate coca grower, as Mi Teleférico had an accumulated deficit of more than Bs. 1.3 billion in seven years of operation.
Law 421 of October 2013, institutes the weighted vote, a modality created by the MAS to grant parliamentary overrepresentation to rural areas, where it exercises union dictatorship without any qualms, with the argument that they need to "strengthen their development," to the detriment of the underrepresentation of urban areas, which demonstrates discrimination and affects justice, equality and parity of voting power.
In closing, the only real, credible, and necessary offer is to dismantle the entire system of infamous laws that the MAS has implemented in Bolivia over the past twenty years. All others are merely unrealizable dreams or simple demagoguery. Will any opposition member be willing to undertake this task?
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