Bolivia: Morales loses at Chuquisaca

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COCHABAMBA, Bolivia—Bolivian president Evo Morales and his leftist Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party are heading toward an August electoral showdown with right-wing opponents who have stalled the government’s reform programs with a campaign for regional autonomy in the nation’s more prosperous eastern lowlands.

Over the past three months, four of Bolivia’s nine regional departments have passed “Autonomy Statutes,” which Morales and his supporters have called illegal and separatist. On June 29, residents of the department of Chuquisaca delivered another challenge to Morales, electing right-wing candidate Savina Cuéllar, a Quechua Indian and former peasant farmer, to serve as the department’s prefect (governor).

Yet there is a wild card looming over the political landscape: On Aug. 10, Morales and all of the prefects except Cuéllar will be put to a recall referendum. Voters will choose both whether they want Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, to continue at the helm and whether they want their department’s prefect to continue to serve as well. MAS hopes that the recall referendum will not only reaffirm its mandate to carry out land reform, assert national sovereignty over natural resources, and redistribute wealth, but also remove a few of the prefects that have been its staunchest opponents.