Bolivian government and strike leaders do not yield positions

Bolivia is experiencing protests and strikes this week as an action against a new law: the National Strategy to Fight the Legitimization of Illicit Profits and the Financing of Terrorism was called by the National Committee for the Defense of Democracy (Conade), called “ mother law ”.

The point of greatest protests is Santa Cruz, but they have also been held in several cities of the country, including the capital, La Paz, and Potosí, where one person died in clashes between protesters and people who support the Government.

Meanwhile, the president of Bolivia, Luis Arce, assured that the protests of civic sectors and the opposition against the law are actually a “pretext” to evade the trials installed by the 2019 crisis, which he says was a “coup de State”.

For this reason, he expressed that it is necessary to defend what he calls a “process of change” in the nine departments of the country.

Bolivia remains embroiled in a controversy between the ruling party, which assures that Evo Morales was overthrown in 2019 by a coup d’état, and his detractors, who maintain that the crisis was the result of allegations of fraud in favor of the ex-president in the failed elections. 2019 generals, then canceled.

The president warned that if the law is annulled, as demanded by the mobilizations that have already been unemployed for three days, the opponents “are going to look for” another law to observe and “everything is going to question.”

The governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, and his father, José Luis Camacho Parada, are the main defendants on whom the Prosecutor’s Office has not taken action, unlike the former interim president Jeanine Áñez, two of his former ministers and former military chiefs and police, who are detained and are being processed.

According to the Bolivian newspaper Page Seven, the Government says that it is open to dialogue, and that Camacho and especially Rómulo Calvo, a civic leader from Santa Cruz who also leads the protests, is a “seditious.” This, in turn, described the generals who were promoted on Wednesday after Arce relieved five departmental police commanders from their duties as “lickers” and “chupamedias.” (I)