BOLIVIA: Confirmed in office in a landslide recall election vote, Bolivian president Evo Morales now plans to push through major constitutional reforms early next year that will further antagonise his right-wing opponents.
The reforms would give more clout to Bolivia's indigenous majority, enable Morales to run for re-election and undermine the campaigns in opposition-led provinces for greater autonomy from central government. But they have driven a deep wedge between Morales and some regional governors.
"We should start 2009 ... by calling a referendum on whether to approve the state's new constitution policy," presidential minister Juan Ramon Quintana told state television on Monday.
Morales won a clear mandate in Sunday's election but four pro-autonomy governors who oppose him also comfortably survived their recall votes, and Bolivian politics remain deadlocked. Some fear more violent protests like those that rocked the country last week.
The governors trying to block Morales' socialist reforms are furious that he has cut their share of windfall natural gas revenues and accuse him of governing only for his supporters.
Quintana said voters should have the final word. "If we can't reach substantive agreements ... then we must address all those issues which divide us to a referendum - issues like re-election, the compatibility of autonomous governments, land issues," he said.
Such a vote would be highly divisive in a Bolivia already polarised along economic and racial fault lines between Morales' Indian power base in the impoverished west of the country and resource-rich provinces in the east.
After winning Sunday's referendum with more than 75 per cent support according to unofficial results, Ruben Costas, governor of Santa Cruz province in Bolivia's agricultural heartland, promised his supporters regional autonomy and dismissed Morales' planned constitution.
Morales called for dialogue with the governors but his overture is likely to fall on deaf ears.
"It is very probable we won't be able to find harmony between [regional] autonomy statutes and a new constitution," said Quintana. "That's why we need a new referendum on the new constitution."
However, nationalisation minister Hector Arce, a top Morales aide, said dialogue with the governors was vital.
"The mandate implicit in the vote, for whoever looks at it calmly and impartially, is dialogue, consensus-seeking," he told private radio station Erbol. "Lots of people voted for the president, but lots of people also voted [for some governors]," he added. "So people are demanding dialogue."
Morales had hoped the recall vote would undermine the governors' autonomy drives. Unofficial results showed the country's first Indian leader, a former coca leaf farmer, won more than 60 per cent of the vote on Sunday, way above the 53.7 per cent he was first elected with in December 2005.
The Organisation of American States estimated that more than 82 per cent of the 4.1-million electorate turned out for the obligatory vote.
Partial official votes issued yesterday by the national electoral court said Morales had 52 per cent support with about a quarter of votes counted.
While the main players in Bolivia's power struggle survived the recall votes, at least two governors were defeated. They include Manfred Reyes Villa, the anti-Morales governor of Cochabamba in Bolivia's coca-growing heartland, but he said the vote was illegal and is refusing to step down.
"It's not a question of holding onto a job, but respecting the law," Reyes Villa told reporters as he turned up early for work yesterday. "It is not my aim to lead my town of Cochabamba toward violence, but we have to respect the law."
Quintana said the government would decide on how to proceed with removing Reyes Villa from office and naming an interim replacement once the results are official in a week or so.
- (Reuters)