Here's an article from 2017 that I think sums it up quite well:
https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/06/20/bolivia-s-democracy-at-risk-what-role-for-external-actors-pub-71301
But to make it short: a president going into a fourth term when the constitution only allows 2 should ring alarm bells, especially when said president is ignoring a referendum by doing so.
Term limits are bullshit anyway. If a president is good and well liked they should stay.
Our "best" (relatively) President won four terms because he implemented a basic social safety net. Capital responded by making sure that wasn't possible again.
It's funny how a prime minister in Europe holding power for more than a decade is fine but a President in Latin America is suddenly a dictator for wanting more than 2 terms.
Personally I'm not convinced of term limits either. It's more about the fact he readily ignored a constitution implemented under his rule, as soon as it started bothering him.
And I mean thats what the referendum in 2016 was about. If the people had wanted him to stay in power, they would've voted to increase the maximum amount of term limits. But they simply didn't, they did not want him to go into another term. He did anyway.
Think on that one again if you would. He served two terms under the old constitution, the constitutional court ruled that the terms served under the old constitution didn't apply to the new one, then he (attempted to) served two more terms under the new constitution. Like, disagree with that if you want, but saying it was definitely illegitimate is definitely wrong, because the courts definitely ruled that it was legitimate.
The court ruled that the first term didn't count since the constitution was changed during that term, meaning it would only apply to terms started after the new constitution was adopted. Questionable but fair enough.
After serving another term and during the third, the MAS initiated a referendum to increase the amount of terms a president could serve. Very good, if the population wanted to keep this president, this was their way to do it.
However, the proposal was voted down, meaning the majority of the population was against an increase in the term limit.
The democratic thing to do then would have been to start looking for another candidate.
I was talking about presidential elections. The opposition coalitions never produced a candidate that people preferred over Evo. Cuz their policies sucked.
Yeah, the party not having a succesor figure was an important problem, that instead of fixing they went for the stupid shorsighted route, which gave oxygen to every ultra-reactionary force, local and international.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup and the subsecuent massacres? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment "non-voters" or blocked from it in several ways, than any other party. Why? Because the other parties represent the interests of powerful minorities. The last thing they wanted is poor disenfranchised people voting.
Do I care about spineless, reactionary comprador journalists, judiciaries and other burocrats? LMAO. That whole scum did everything to maintain the pre-Evo status-quo conditions of Bolivia. Latin America is scourged with them, my country included. Dipshits that could have fitted perfectly in the US Confederacy, for example.
They are a minority that clinges to immense power that has never been democratized. You can't vote for who runs Fox News nor the CNN, nor the Supreme Court, and yet those people have more power over the destiny of a country than any Congressmember.
The thing Americans always seem to forget when they talk about "Not a real democracy".
We've had three elections (debateably closer to five or six) of the last eight decided by an electoral college appointing a popular loser to the Presidency, in a country that heavily restricts enfranchisement and barely breaks a 60% participation rate on a good year.
Bolivia had north of 80% turnout and Evo was winning in landslides consistently.
The President of the appointed regional minority party is pointing at the wildly popular leader and claiming the other isn't a liberal democracy.
Also one of those times the electoral college didn't even decide things and the Supreme Court came in to pick the winner of the election
Of course none of the justices appointed by George HW Bush recused themselves from the case and every one of them ruled in favor of his son, George W Bush and that's not even getting into how governor rigged the Florida results for his brother
the electoral college didn't even decide things and the Supreme Court came in to pick the winner of the election
SCOTUS deciding to stop the count only mattered because the state was Winner Take All.
that's not even getting into how governor rigged the Florida results for his brother
Florida was only the most glaring example. Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Gore's own home state of Tennessee... There was ratfucking everywhere. But, just like with Nixon in '60, it wasn't just a Republican problem. Gore wasn't willing to open up the can of worms that encompasses how the vote gets counted.
This is who you are allowing to shove ideology into your brain
I'd be fine with the same leader for 1,000 years if they are an agent of the proletariat and beloved of the people. Term limits has literally nothing to do with democracy or lack thereof. By the way, number of parties doesn't either. Two western misconceptions about what democracy is (lots of squabbling parties, lots of turnover in every elected position - neither of these are synonymous with democracy and in fact hinder it in many ways)
Not to be pedantic, but saying “democracy eroded” makes me think there is some wide-ranging effort to undermine democracy along many vectors. If you just pointing to Evo winning elections in violation of term limits… idk that’s really just one thing. Even if I think that what he did was “undemocratic”, I wouldn’t call that a wholesale undermining of democracy.
You haven’t shown or proven any slow long term erosion though. Your entire thesis that it’s less democratic now is that an anti-democratic law was overturned and the populace elected who they wanted
this chart clearly proves that Evo Morales and MAS is less democratic, and therefore eroded democracy. Just because the fascists who came next (as they clearly should have, but don't imply i support them since i never explicitly said that!!!) massacred people doesn't excuse the lack of commitment to democracy from Evo. Checkmate tankie
Evo, 2009 Consitution. They had the problem of not having a succesor figure. And instead of fixing that problem they went the other shortsighted route of removing term limits.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment "non-voters" or blocked from it in several ways.
lol no. I'm pretty familiar with what went down in Bolivia with Morales as that's around the time in my radicalization when I began internalizing the incestuous relationship between the CIA, Corporate Media, American Foreign Policy and the IMF. I read Jakarta Method later and it was like I had watched a chapter happen in real time. That was also around the time I really started to grasp how much American media erases the disparities between Indigenous peoples and the governments they live under.
I mean, the fact he wasn't willing to follow laws implemented during HIS rule kinda tells you everything you need to know. "Rules for thee but not for me"
And yet he didn't just not follow it, he took the result to court as he was legally entitled to do. It's very strange how you'll hold to the narrative of an article written in 2017 when you have the benefit of knowing the outcome, of seeing the neo-nazis and other violent reactionaries that opposed him and killed thousands after they ousted him. They didn't just appear over night with a snap of a finger when he didn't "follow the rule", they were an active force in the government and the media that created the very narrative you're now espousing, despite knowing the truth.
I am merely criticising his (lack of) commitment to democracy.
I agree that Bolivia was better off with him than it is now, but that doesn't invalidate my point.
The fact that the people who came after him were/are worse does not retroactively turn him into a Saint.
THEY. DID. NOT. COME. AFTER. HIM. THEY WERE THE OPPOSITION HE WAS FIGHTING. It is their fascist propaganda that you're now repeating.
I'm done here, dude. If you'd like to educate yourself so you don't come off like a fash apologist in the future check out The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins and/or Washington Bullets by Vijay Prishad. Jakarta Method covers a specific group of US backed coups and genocides, but has plenty of notes and citations, While Washington Bullets is more of a polemic that covers American Foreign Policy from a broader perspective and assumes you've got a basic background on CIA activity in the Third World.
Few words elicit such warm feelings as the term "Democracy." Wars are supposedly fought for it, foreign policies are built around it, protecting and advancing it is considered the United States' highest moral order.
Democracy's alleged opposite - broadly called "authoritarianism," "autocracy" or "tyranny” - is cast as the ultimate evil. The stifling, oppressive boot of the state that curtails liberties and must be fought at all costs. This is the world in which we operate and the one where the United States and its satellite media and NGO allies fight to preserve and defend democracy.
So how is "democracy" defined and how are those definitions used to justify American exceptionalism? Where do positive and negative rights come into play, and how do societal choices like illiteracy, poverty, and hunger factor into our notions of freedom?
On today's episode, we discuss the limits of democracy rankings, the oft-cited "Polity IV" metric devised by the CIA-funded Center for Systemic Peace, and more with guest George Ciccariello-Maher.
Interesting. I agree that democracy is hard to define. But I do not agree that this means we should stop striving for it. And there definitely are governments that are more democratic than others.
I'm sure you think its fun playing this rhetorical bullshit about "democracy" but people fucking died because the US backed a coup against him that fucking dipshit libs like you nodded your heads too. The coup government massacred indigenous people as soon as they could. And you were nodding along.
No of course you don't. People like you never commit to anything. You just want to play around as if there aren't real stakes for real people.
Parroting state department propaganda about "democracy eroding" is fun for you, because you don't care about the actually people and what they want, or that to alternative to MAS and Evo's reelection at that time was fascists that were going to massacre thr indigenous base of MAS, the people that you are trying to claim that "democracy eroded" for.
the fact he wasn't willing to follow laws implemented during HIS rule kinda tells you everything you need to know.
What if they were from before his time? Would that actually be better, or would you have a new way to characterize that it tells you all you need to know?
I'll give you that, it shouldn't matter when or under which president a law was implemented when evaluating its validity. The only thing that matters is whether a law has the backing of the population.
him and the bolivian people defeated the reactionary lawfare imposed against them by the ruling class and rich of bolivia, those compradors. Democracy can only be realized when sell outs and imperialists are banished and excised from politics
How did it erode?
You forgot this.
Here's an article from 2017 that I think sums it up quite well: https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/06/20/bolivia-s-democracy-at-risk-what-role-for-external-actors-pub-71301
But to make it short: a president going into a fourth term when the constitution only allows 2 should ring alarm bells, especially when said president is ignoring a referendum by doing so.
Term limits are bullshit anyway. If a president is good and well liked they should stay.
Our "best" (relatively) President won four terms because he implemented a basic social safety net. Capital responded by making sure that wasn't possible again.
It's funny how a prime minister in Europe holding power for more than a decade is fine but a President in Latin America is suddenly a dictator for wanting more than 2 terms.
Personally I'm not convinced of term limits either. It's more about the fact he readily ignored a constitution implemented under his rule, as soon as it started bothering him.
And I mean thats what the referendum in 2016 was about. If the people had wanted him to stay in power, they would've voted to increase the maximum amount of term limits. But they simply didn't, they did not want him to go into another term. He did anyway.
the bolivian constitutional court ruled his term under the old constitution didn't count for the new one.
A questionable decision for sure, but ultimately not the issue. His 4th term was definitely illegitimate though.
Think on that one again if you would. He served two terms under the old constitution, the constitutional court ruled that the terms served under the old constitution didn't apply to the new one, then he (attempted to) served two more terms under the new constitution. Like, disagree with that if you want, but saying it was definitely illegitimate is definitely wrong, because the courts definitely ruled that it was legitimate.
but have you considered
?
It's lib political thought 101. 102 of course being everything filtered through blockbuster ip.
The court ruled that the first term didn't count since the constitution was changed during that term, meaning it would only apply to terms started after the new constitution was adopted. Questionable but fair enough.
After serving another term and during the third, the MAS initiated a referendum to increase the amount of terms a president could serve. Very good, if the population wanted to keep this president, this was their way to do it.
However, the proposal was voted down, meaning the majority of the population was against an increase in the term limit. The democratic thing to do then would have been to start looking for another candidate.
nah
And yet he won the actual elections. As I said, extremely shortsight and stupid move, and yet he never lost.
I don't get your point. Is a referendum not an "actual election"?
I was talking about presidential elections. The opposition coalitions never produced a candidate that people preferred over Evo. Cuz their policies sucked.
A plebiscite is not an election.
Yeah, the party not having a succesor figure was an important problem, that instead of fixing they went for the stupid shorsighted route, which gave oxygen to every ultra-reactionary force, local and international.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup and the subsecuent massacres? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment "non-voters" or blocked from it in several ways, than any other party. Why? Because the other parties represent the interests of powerful minorities. The last thing they wanted is poor disenfranchised people voting.
Do I care about spineless, reactionary comprador journalists, judiciaries and other burocrats? LMAO. That whole scum did everything to maintain the pre-Evo status-quo conditions of Bolivia. Latin America is scourged with them, my country included. Dipshits that could have fitted perfectly in the US Confederacy, for example.
They are a minority that clinges to immense power that has never been democratized. You can't vote for who runs Fox News nor the CNN, nor the Supreme Court, and yet those people have more power over the destiny of a country than any Congressmember.
The thing Americans always seem to forget when they talk about "Not a real democracy".
We've had three elections (debateably closer to five or six) of the last eight decided by an electoral college appointing a popular loser to the Presidency, in a country that heavily restricts enfranchisement and barely breaks a 60% participation rate on a good year.
Bolivia had north of 80% turnout and Evo was winning in landslides consistently.
The President of the appointed regional minority party is pointing at the wildly popular leader and claiming the other isn't a liberal democracy.
Really
moment.
Also one of those times the electoral college didn't even decide things and the Supreme Court came in to pick the winner of the election
Of course none of the justices appointed by George HW Bush recused themselves from the case and every one of them ruled in favor of his son, George W Bush and that's not even getting into how governor
rigged the Florida results for his brother
SCOTUS deciding to stop the count only mattered because the state was Winner Take All.
Florida was only the most glaring example. Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Gore's own home state of Tennessee... There was ratfucking everywhere. But, just like with Nixon in '60, it wasn't just a Republican problem. Gore wasn't willing to open up the can of worms that encompasses how the vote gets counted.
Now check the turnout % before the 2005 election, never north of 75%
the sdf lib is simply thinking in terms of
https://carnegieendowment.org/about/trustees
This is who you are allowing to shove ideology into your brain
I'd be fine with the same leader for 1,000 years if they are an agent of the proletariat and beloved of the people. Term limits has literally nothing to do with democracy or lack thereof. By the way, number of parties doesn't either. Two western misconceptions about what democracy is (lots of squabbling parties, lots of turnover in every elected position - neither of these are synonymous with democracy and in fact hinder it in many ways)
If he won the election, he won the election. Term limits are mainly a tool of capital, since capital does not have term limits.
Not to be pedantic, but saying “democracy eroded” makes me think there is some wide-ranging effort to undermine democracy along many vectors. If you just pointing to Evo winning elections in violation of term limits… idk that’s really just one thing. Even if I think that what he did was “undemocratic”, I wouldn’t call that a wholesale undermining of democracy.
It's undemocratic when one person wins multiple elections in a row because a majority votes for them.
How dare the people vote for and get what they want! Democracy has eroded!!!
I disagree, to me erosion is a slow and natural decline that can be kept in check by proper maintenance.
You haven’t shown or proven any slow long term erosion though. Your entire thesis that it’s less democratic now is that an anti-democratic law was overturned and the populace elected who they wanted
Uh hun...
no term limits are silly. And it's undemocratic to have restrictions on who the public may elect
Who was the president when that constitution was put into place?
Evo, 2009 Consitution. They had the problem of not having a succesor figure. And instead of fixing that problem they went the other shortsighted route of removing term limits.
Do I care about term limits in the face of seething ultra-reactionaries doing everything they could to revert back MAS policies, culminating in a literal coup? Of course not.
Evo never lost a presidential election, and his party did more to politically mobilize people who were up-to-that-moment "non-voters" or blocked from it in several ways.
lol. Some of us wanna play with the libs too ya know.
Ah, I thought you thought the constitution at that time was from some dictatorship from the seventies.
lol no. I'm pretty familiar with what went down in Bolivia with Morales as that's around the time in my radicalization when I began internalizing the incestuous relationship between the CIA, Corporate Media, American Foreign Policy and the IMF. I read Jakarta Method later and it was like I had watched a chapter happen in real time. That was also around the time I really started to grasp how much American media erases the disparities between Indigenous peoples and the governments they live under.
I mean, the fact he wasn't willing to follow laws implemented during HIS rule kinda tells you everything you need to know. "Rules for thee but not for me"
And yet he didn't just not follow it, he took the result to court as he was legally entitled to do. It's very strange how you'll hold to the narrative of an article written in 2017 when you have the benefit of knowing the outcome, of seeing the neo-nazis and other violent reactionaries that opposed him and killed thousands after they ousted him. They didn't just appear over night with a snap of a finger when he didn't "follow the rule", they were an active force in the government and the media that created the very narrative you're now espousing, despite knowing the truth.
I am merely criticising his (lack of) commitment to democracy. I agree that Bolivia was better off with him than it is now, but that doesn't invalidate my point. The fact that the people who came after him were/are worse does not retroactively turn him into a Saint.
THEY. DID. NOT. COME. AFTER. HIM. THEY WERE THE OPPOSITION HE WAS FIGHTING. It is their fascist propaganda that you're now repeating.
I'm done here, dude. If you'd like to educate yourself so you don't come off like a fash apologist in the future check out The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins and/or Washington Bullets by Vijay Prishad. Jakarta Method covers a specific group of US backed coups and genocides, but has plenty of notes and citations, While Washington Bullets is more of a polemic that covers American Foreign Policy from a broader perspective and assumes you've got a basic background on CIA activity in the Third World.
You know the justices are also elected there, right? It's not like he packed the court to keep in office.
Beyond that, when the choice is between an elected official and a literal military dictator, which path do you think supports democracy?
This again. The fact that I am critizising the one does not mean I support the other. On the contrary, if you wanna read my first comment again.
The immediate choice was between those two. Picking what he picked is not undermining democracy, it was attempting to save it.
Projection
Citations Needed Episode 25: The Banality of CIA-Curated Definitions of ‘Democracy’
Interesting. I agree that democracy is hard to define. But I do not agree that this means we should stop striving for it. And there definitely are governments that are more democratic than others.
What would you consider the most democratic governments? Give me a couple examples
I think the nordic countries have a pretty good thing going.
Social Imperialist smuglord detected
Total
bullshit
Fuck all the way off
I'm sure you think its fun playing this rhetorical bullshit about "democracy" but people fucking died because the US backed a coup against him that fucking dipshit libs like you nodded your heads too. The coup government massacred indigenous people as soon as they could. And you were nodding along.
they comment in the s.j.works "tankie watchers" comm, so they're probably just fishing for content
Makes sense. Libs acting like this about the Bolivian coup just really piss me off.
Hope they enjoy showing off me calling them a dipshit smuglord for trivializing the lives of indigenous people
I don't recall saying I support the coup. See my first comment for my opinion on the state of Bolivia after the coup.
I wasn't 'nodding along'. The situation in Bolivia has gone from bad to worse. Acknowledging the bad does not mean ignoring the worse.
No of course you don't. People like you never commit to anything. You just want to play around as if there aren't real stakes for real people.
Parroting state department propaganda about "democracy eroding" is fun for you, because you don't care about the actually people and what they want, or that to alternative to MAS and Evo's reelection at that time was fascists that were going to massacre thr indigenous base of MAS, the people that you are trying to claim that "democracy eroded" for.
So fuck you dipshit smuglord
What if they were from before his time? Would that actually be better, or would you have a new way to characterize that it tells you all you need to know?
I'll give you that, it shouldn't matter when or under which president a law was implemented when evaluating its validity. The only thing that matters is whether a law has the backing of the population.
him and the bolivian people defeated the reactionary lawfare imposed against them by the ruling class and rich of bolivia, those compradors. Democracy can only be realized when sell outs and imperialists are banished and excised from politics