The Battle in Bolivia: 'New Left' President Evo Morales Faces Opposition to New Constitution

A current showdown over efforts to draft a new constitution is exemplary of this divide. Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

While international attention is focusing on President Hugo Chavez and the Sunday referendum on the Venezuelan constitution, a conflict that is just as profound is shaking Bolivia. Evo Morales, the first Indian president of the country, is forcing a showdown with the oligarchy and the right wing political parties that have stymied efforts to draft a new constitution to transform the nation. He declares, “Dead or alive I will have a new constitution for the country by December 14,” the mandated date for the specially elected Constituent Assembly to present a constitution for the country to vote on by popular referendum.

A violent conflict that left three dead and hundreds injured erupted over the past weekend in the city of Sucre where the Constituent Assembly has been meeting. After more than a year of obstructionism by the right wing parties, Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and its allied parties that control 60 percent of the Assembly’s vote, approved the broad outlines of a new constitution designed to alleviate economic inequalities, codify a new agrarian reform program and end the apartheid system that the indigenous population has lived under for centuries.

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