Journalist, political analyst, and writer
9 January 2022
A certain Evo…
He did not wake up one day with a conscience smeared with “morality” and realized that corruption is the worst scourge in the country; in his government, he had exercised it at whim and will, using State assets to distribute them among his followers of the Indigenous Fund with amounts that passed the hundreds of millions of bolivianos that, until now, the exact amount is not fully known. But if that is not all, the favors to his girlfriend, to whom he even recognized a son that was never born, reach the tens of millions of dollars and she was “imprisoned and released and not affected at all” in her personal fortune because they did not take a single penny from her… and we could talk about the Urea plant, with surcharges that exceed $ 200 million, or the sugar mill in San Buena Ventura, or the liquid separation plant in the Rio Grande with a surcharge of $ 40 million, or the so-called Carlos Villegas, to the South, in Tarija; anyway, there are more but the subject is different. Not to mention the capricious and discretionally handling of the ordinary and electoral administration of Justice that even enabled him to an election in which, in the worst style of the 20th century, he committed fraud, counting on a militant Electoral Tribunal and the help of a Mexican group that toured the country’s electoral system, like Juan Evo through the coca-growing Chapare, that is to say, “at pleasure”, so… I move on to another topic.
“That certain Evo”, understanding the weight and value in the economy and political resistance of the Department of Santa Cruz and, above all, aware that the Santa Cruz “Model” is a reality, believes that saddle with the municipal corruption committed by Percy Fernández and “Architect” Sosa at the head, counting on many operators of this corruption, as an expression of the Santa Cruz model will allow him to weaken the Department, aware that, despite some, Santa Cruz is, today, the only one that stands up to political power in the country and shows active political resistance.
Santa Cruz expresses the resistance today, the city of Potosí also; Morales believes that power is his and tries to make the country see in Arce Catacora a ventriloquist doll that says and does what he, Morales, tells him; that is why he has publicly suggested a change of ministers, “taking care to warn” that the President must be protected, his so-called “brother, Lucho.”
From Radio Kawsachun Coca, where he is a tenant because he does not have greater access to capital cities, Morales tries to weaken the Santa Cruz image and after that the opposition political action of Santa Cruz, because he knows that this is the only way to go if he wants to continue having validity in politics.
No one can deny the corruption in the Santa Cruz Mayor’s Office; from the possibility that it gives me in this medium and where I work, I have been denouncing it for years and maintaining, in addition, that without the complicity of the MAS this would not have continued, this could not have been maintained for so long, even if the fled political Judas and former ally of Percy Fernández dared to say that they never had an agreement (“PEVO”, he boasted of repeating on more than one occasion).
And I am not the only one who has denounced the corruption of Percy and the “Architect”; many former city councilmen, former collaborators have done it but the perverse system was invulnerable, until it fell due to a weak link, exploding due to a domestic lawsuit, but that is a well-known story; the important thing is that Santa Cruz had already decided on the punishment for Percy/Sosa: it did not even give them a city councilman. Someone is going to doubt that the corruption of Percy and his allies was stopped, understand all those who benefited from the money that Santa Cruz city generated?
Listening to the “Dandy without a trade” (Richter) say that the Santa Cruz model is exhausted, just the year in which non-traditional exports (agro) surpassed hydrocarbons, is the symbolic slap in the face of such stupidity, but they do not care, they are “sentence shooters”, some “catch on” and others do not.
Morales and his minions may try to weaken us that way, indeed, from his refuge in the Chapare, because he does not dare to say it here, he says that the “ghost items are the Santa Cruz Model” and that … no thanks, that is not what he wants for Bolivia, (thinking of re-running if he manages to weaken Santa Cruz?) when Luis Fernando Camacho mistakenly suggests replicating the model in the rest of the country, as if it could be “copied and pasted” elsewhere, with another history, other connotations.
The Santa Cruz Development Model process dates back to 1825 and exploded in 1957; in all that time we had not only the abandonment of the Department (which was in the “confines”, according to those who administered the State) that suffered from the postponement of demands, that saw fragmentation and loss of territories, not only against foreigners but in the country itself and, of course, with material and infrastructural underdevelopment (hence the struggle for royalties, for water, pavement, and Electricity, in 1957); this is marked very well in several works, by Sergio Antelo, Paula Peña, Ana Carola Traverso (who is about to publish a book of her research), Carlos Valverde Barbery, to name a few, without excluding others who do and did so much for this land.
The Governor of Santa Cruz, to enter this debate, needs to understand it better; he must have the ability to develop an idea that truly expresses the Santa Cruz Model, which is not a slogan, which is a reality, that has been a reality since 1957, when due to civic struggles we began to “be what had been thought” and, after receiving the first money from royalties (1964), we began to take off… of course, before, we already had “think tanks”, we already had the Public Works Committee with a planning structure and everything that put us where we are today, being the base of national development, those of us who supply more than 70% of what the country consumes, being the second city in population-wise of all the country’s Departments; in a nutshell, what Morales and those who do not love us (they will have to excuse us for not crying for that; it causes us laughter because it is inevitable).
In sum: Morales believes that if he weakens Santa Cruz (let him continue to shout at Radio Kawsachun Coca, the radio station of his tenancy) he will come back, that is why he is with one foot inside and the other outside the Government, harassing Luis Alberto Arce who doesn’t know what he is going to do; there it is, that fight is easy if Arce concedes, he ceases to be his own image, of course, the issue is what he does with Del Castillo, Lima Magne, and a few other Ministers who are terribly awful.
Morales looked for a fight with which he will not be able to win, nothing strange that in a short time he flatters us and looks more at Arce. Quiet, he’s not going to stay.
Source: https://www.paginasiete.bo/opinion/2022/1/9/un-tal-evo-320249.html
