Writer and Filmmaker
22 January 2022
Chancellor by force
What can be said of a chancellor whose most important visible act has been to fall ill with Covid? For everything else he has been invisible: the shadowy operator of a repressive apparatus motivated by animosity and political revenge.
In the first scene of Molière’s farce “The Doctor in Spite of Himself”, Sganarelle, a poor and drunken lumberjack, is beaten into admitting to being a doctor (which he is not) and assisting a rich man who provides him a fortune. Attracted by that life that he never enjoyed before, Sganarelle decides to forever adopt the disguise of a doctor, although it does not go well for him at the end of the play.
The farce of the clueless and undiplomatic Foreign Minister of Bolivia has not been so amusing. He doesn’t even try to take on the role “by force” for which he was never prepared. When he makes headlines it is always for nefarious reasons, but most of the time he assumes the status of “disappeared”.
It is hard to conceive that at the head of Bolivia’s international relations there is a person who festers thirst for revenge and babbles social resentment, and who, can be noticed from a mile away, shows ignorance on diplomatic issues. Behind him, the shadow of Choquehuanca, his inspiration, and of Evo Morales, who appoints ambassadors from his entourage, can be discerned.
Disrupting and shattering the diplomatic rank, a corollary of an arduous job of classifying career professionals with many years of experience, was one of Mayta’s greatest blunders, as it resulted in the dismissal of 90% of foreign service officials, for being “snub-nosed diplomats, who liked to go to lounges to flex their little fingers while having cocktails,” (as he said). With that bitterness, he fired many career diplomats who worked in MAS governments.
The result of giving priority to his gallbladder was a year of abandonment of the 36 diplomatic missions of Bolivia. He summarily fired career diplomats, but also administrative and consular staff, including secretaries, auxiliaries, and local contract drivers, who had worked for Bolivia for decades. Embassies and consulates were left as empty shells without being able to meet the needs of the Bolivian community, nor maintain a minimum of relations activities with the authorities of the host country.
Much later the MAS supporters arrived with criminal records, who were appointed on the spur of the moment in commissions of the Legislative Assembly where the candidates were not even interviewed, as is mandatory. Approval requests were sent directly to governments, without going through the diplomatic missions as they should be. The few Ambassadors were chosen directly by the “boss”: Pary, Arce Zaconeta, Llorenti, Michel, Aguilar, Tapia, among other unconditional faithful supporters.
For lawyer Mayta, the position is as big as a carnival Pepino costume*, a Pepino that assumed the role of punisher. He is whipping with firecrackers all the diplomats of the administration of President Jeanine Añez and has not even read the reports and recommendations left by the outgoing officials, complying with the regulations.
The Foreign Ministry has dedicated itself with heart and soul to finding excuses to persecute dozens of diplomats, and since it has not found reasons, it does so with banal administrative tricks. For example, he compiled a long list (14 pages) of “prosecuted” for not having submitted their affidavit of assets on the exact date (although almost all of them did so when they handed in their job positions). Others are harassed with administrative letters; simply to quench Mayta’s thirst for revenge who, although he does not appear as a member of the MAS in the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), does not need a political militancy card to behave well with his bosses.
The anonymous Torquemada from the Foreign Ministry, for whom the earth is flat, do not review in their investigations the 15 years of administration by Choquehuanca, Pary, or Huanacuni, where money was squandered by the handful when they organized costly international meetings in Bolivia and used State resources to prescribe for themselves countless international trips, most of them superfluous. An independent audit of the fifteen years of mismanagement is urgently needed.
Source: https://www.paginasiete.bo/opinion/alfonso-gumucio-dagron/2022/1/22/canciller-palos-321417.html
