Word: bolivia
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...electing conservatives, Colombia and Mexico have bucked the leftist trend sweeping through Latin America. Over the past few years, left-of center governments have come to power by winning elections in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru...
While the eyes of the hemisphere were fixed on Mexico's hotly contested presidential election this week, another critical Latin American vote was being carried out in Bolivia - a national referendum in which President Evo Morales hoped to consolidate a leftist revolution that has turned South America's poorest nation into a regional player. And while Morales' forces won for the most part, the results also deepened the sense of showdown between Bolivia's poor, indigenous western highlands and a small but powerful affluent white elite in the eastern lowlands...
...Morales' party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), won 139 of the 255 delegates elected to rewrite Bolivia's Constitution this year, starting in August. That process, said Morales, an Aymara Indian and Bolivia's first indigenous President, "will finally put an end to the discrimination, exploitation and economic inequality that has plagued this country since its founding." But Morales fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to control that assembly, something he had practically guaranteed he'd get. Instead, he'll now find himself having to make deals with parties like the main conservative opposition group, Podemos...
...four other western states that voted against the autonomy item, highlanders like Patricio Mamani of the working-class El Alto community note that regions like Santa Cruz are where most of Bolivia's prodigious natural gas is located - reserves that Morales nationalized earlier this year as part of his government's reversal of recent Washington-backed free-market reforms in the country. "The elite in Santa Cruz want autonomy in order to control the wealth there," said Mamani during the vote on July 2. "They want to live off those riches and not share with the rest of the country...
...witnessed first-hand the violence and repression that SOA graduates use to govern," recounted Father Roy Bourgeios, founder of the 16-year-old organization dedicated to closing the institution, during an interview in his old home of Bolivia. An ex-U.S. Marine, Bourgeios lived as a Maryknoll priest in South America's poorest country during the dictatorship of SOA graduate Hugo Banzer in the 1970s. Bourgeois hopes to make more governments see that WHINSEC has become an anachronism, a relic of the U.S.'s big-stick foreign policy in Latin America. "A school that has no students," he says...