Very frustrating. The entire framing of this article - between unity/division and peace/violence - is completely disingenuous. The two voters given significant attention are those disillusioned with the socialists. They briefly mention someone voting for Arce, but not why, or anything.

It starts with the nonsense "sowing division" rhetoric that means absolutely fucking nothing. This is just code for "this outlet dislikes this leader." Sanders, Corbyn, Morales, Putin, Castro, Saddam, whoever you want, they all sow division because the newspapers dislike them, while near-universally reviled candidates like HRC do not.

And when the count is announced, large swaths of the country are likely to be angry, political observers say, and violence is a real possibility.

Wouldn't this be the logical outcome if the people believed an election to be stolen from them? If a democratic system fails to democratically produce a candidate, wouldn't the result be the assertion by the majority of their political will? Should people just accept a stolen election and go home? What is worse: to be deprived of democracy (looking at you, Democracy Dies in Darkness) or justified political violence?

In the weeks leading up the election, the United Nations documented at least 41 acts of political violence.

Let's not get into who against whom, or who the government is right now, for example. The socialists are violent, the centrists are peaceful, I'm not going to muddy this with details.

Mr. Mesa is running as the anti-Morales candidate, promising a return to peace after years of political and social division.

Peace if you're white, not if you're indigenous. The country was peaceful before the coup - even this article isn't concretely alleging any wrongdoing by the Morales government. Again, implying the violence is by the socialists, when it isn't.

and in some places fulfilled that promise, building schools, hospitals and roads. The country’s poverty rate fell to 35 percent of the population from 60 percent

some places*. lmao, what a piece of shit, if you want to accuse him of only helping certain regions just say which ones. Or why bother if it's hard?

Mr. Morales ran Bolivia amid a commodities boom — with money pouring into the country — and his party controlled congress for all 14 years of his presidency.

This is kind of interesting, NYT! Does Bolivia's mineral wealth provide an opportunity for international investment? Is that - maybe - the crux of this entire issue?