TheEconomistNovember 9th 2019 271A
t 11.40pm onOctober 22nd, two days
after Bolivia’s presidential and con-
gressional elections, Paul Handal met a
dozen neighbours on the street in Villa Fra-
terna, an upper-middle-class neighbour-
hood of Santa Cruz, the country’s biggest
city. Suspicions were mounting that the
president, Evo Morales, was trying to avoid
a run-off vote by fraudulent means. Oppo-
sition leaders had called a general strike to
demand one. Mr Handal and his neigh-
bours dragged trees and tyres to an inter-
section to build a barricade.
“We thought it would last a day or two,”
says Mr Handal, who owns a motorsports
consultancy. Then the tribunal declared Mr
Morales the winner and more evidence of
irregularities surfaced. Over the following
fortnight more than 100 people signed up
to man the intersection in Villa Fraterna.
“This is the second time Evo robbed us of
our vote,” says Mr Handal, who is at the bar-
ricade from 7am to 7pm every day. The first
was when Mr Morales decided to run for a
fourth term, in defiance of a referendum
vote in 2016. “My vote counts,” the protes-
ters daubed in white on the walls of a dried-
out canal. In the evenings families bring ta-
bles and chairs to play cards and listen to
the radio. Vendors from a nearby favela
bring food carts. Catholic and evangelical
groups take turns leading prayers.
Such scenes are occurring across Santa
Cruz, a city of 1.5m people that is laid out
like a bicycle wheel: 27 avenues project like
spokes from the centre, which is encircled
by anillos, or rings. Barriers made of
branches, bricks, refrigerators, trash bins,
scrap metal, wire and caution tape block
hundreds of intersections and thousands
of smaller streets. The paro cívico (civic
strike) has brought normal life to a halt.
Supermarkets are allowed to open until
noon, but most other business has shut
down. Schools are closed. Ambulances, po-
lice cars, garbage trucks and lorries deliver-ing food are the only vehicles allowed
through the barriers. The shutdown is
slowing commerce in the surrounding de-
partment of Santa Cruz, which provides
70% of Bolivia’s food and 30% of its gdp.
Orders for the strike come from Luis
Fernando Camacho, the head of the Comité
pro Santa Cruz, a group with roots in the
department’s elite that now claims to rep-
resent everyone. Dressed in a polo shirt and
flanked by bodyguards twice his size, the
lawyer spends his days coaxing power bro-
kers to support the strike and his nights
visiting barricades. Although the strike
costs Santa Cruz $30m a day in lost output,
most cruceños, including business owners,
support it.
Their rebellion is the most radical re-
sponse to the flawed election. Mr Morales
avoided a second round by just 35,000 of
the 5.9m valid votes cast after a mysterious
interruption of the vote count. Comités cív-
icos in other departments are staging
smaller strikes. Carlos Mesa, the defeated
presidential candidate, at first demanded
that the vote go to a second round but now
backs the protesters’ call for a fresh elec-
tion supervised by a new electoral tribunal.
The government is trying to head that
off by backing an audit of the vote count by
the Organisation of American States (oas).
It is “the institutional mechanism to deter-
mine whether or not there was fraud”, says
Adriana Salvatierra, the president of the
senate, who is from Mr Morales’s Move-
ment to Socialism (mas) and representsBolivia
Back to the barricades
SANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA
Protesters against Evo Morales’s flawed re-election are prepared for a long fight
The Americas
28 JamaicaandtheIMFAlso in this section— Bello is away