Bolivia elections - 2019-2020 - Arce Victory

[Estrella]

How do you say "se cayó el sistema" in Quechua?

[Estrella]

Talking about Bolivian TV stations, here's a livestream if you want to watch:

[Estrella]

How do you say "se cayó el sistema" in Quechua?

ayyyyyy lmao



Tbf they're probably just overloaded by demand to see the results, but still.

[Estrella]

Some overseas results are in and it shows an interesting pattern of where the rich (and white) expats go vs where the poor emigrants go.  For example, from what's counted so far, MAS is getting 83% in Argentina, 71% in Brazil and 50% in Spain, while CC is getting 73% in Germany and 41% in Italy (but with another 41% to Creemos in the latter).

[Estrella]

1.5% in, Mesa (CC) leads with 55% against 37% for Arce (MAS) and 7% for Camacho (Creemos).

Now, it's tempting to go for the Mexican comparisions, but it's worth noting that in 1988, after it became clear that the election was rigged, there was a massive, massive wave of indignation and protests, but it eventually came to an end.

However, back then, the PRI had advantages the current de-facto-one-woman-junta doesn't. First, the candidate that the election was rigged against was until recently a member of the PRI and could be negotiated with - indeed, he was negotiated with and accepted the result, though he wasn't very happy with it. Second, Mexicans were used to sham elections and so many people simply shrugged and thought 'okay, it's just one more stolen election, like many others'. Third, there wasn't that much of an ideological (or ethnic!) divide - the opposition presented themselves as "we're like the government, but less authoritarian and more principled!". These things are how they managed to reach a negotiated solution.

Point being, if the right really does win and it becomes clear that it was because the numbers were cut out of whole cloth, something is going to happen, and it's not going to be pretty.

[Estrella]

Results keep trickling in and Arce has finally pulled ahead.

[Estrella]

Also, the President-Elect is rad as hell:

https://twitter.com/mcotteri/status/1318204966603874304

[Estrella]

Some overseas results are in and it shows an interesting pattern of where the rich (and white) expats go vs where the poor emigrants go.  For example, from what's counted so far, MAS is getting 83% in Argentina, 71% in Brazil and 50% in Spain, while CC is getting 73% in Germany and 41% in Italy (but with another 41% to Creemos in the latter).

There are Bolivians in Italy?

Only 5,859 (that have a right to vote), so they're easy to miss, I imagine.

[Estrella]

Camacho had 14%. Similar to AfD in Germany and smaller than Le Pen in France.

You're clearly a smart guy, judging by what you write, but it would be good for you if you looked at different countries through different lenses, if you know what I mean. Bolivia and Germany or France have, frankly, nothing in common (besides the fact that they hold elections, and even that comes with an asterisk). Too much comparative politics is hazardous for your health

[Estrella]

Indeed, Creemos is a regionalist (and very right-wing) party. Santa Cruz and its capital, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, is the center of Bolivia's "white" (more like "mestizo but with less indigenous blood", but let's not get into that) culture and unsurprisingly a long-time right-wing stronghold. There is a small but growing movement to give this part of the country more autonomy or, on the fringes, even independence. You can read more about it here: Bolivia: a tale of two countries. Its members are... curious creatures - the most hilariously every-negative-stereotype-about-racist-right-wing-whites moments from that article:

She told me, ‘Santa Cruz is Bolivia’s most modern city. You’ve seen all the condos [the many gated developments]. It’s only natural. In Santa Cruz, we know how to invest our money, we know how to make it grow. Not like the Indians, who bury it in the ground as an offering to their “Pachamama”.’ Her dream was to see President Evo Morales, whom she called ‘that illiterate Indian’, removed.

[snark] Unsurprisingly for people who want to create a Volkstaat, they also have their own knockoff Weerstandsbeweging (presumably a similar clown car of morons like the original thing, for now):

She described an intense few months spent with the committee’s youth section, the Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC), who call her Tia (auntie) and are ‘prepared to do anything to ensure the triumph of democracy’; members are often sent to prison for acts of violence.

This is not from a Dickens book:

I always tried to make sure that my children didn’t mix with poor people, so that they wouldn’t grow up to be lazy. I wanted them to be surrounded by money and acquire a taste for it. [...] People from the west, like him [Morales], are born hating us. That’s why they held us back. They’ve screwed up our businesses with social rights and welfare and so on.

lolbertarianism.jpg

To them, communism means taxes. Pablo Mendieta Ossio of the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce’s Centre for Bolivian Economic Studies, told me that under Morales’s presidency, the people of Santa Cruz were victims of ‘extortion’: ‘The problem wasn’t so much the tax rates — our taxes are very low — as the fact that audits have become more frequent in recent years,which increases the chances of the tax authorities making mistakes, and therefore the likelihood of fines.

[Estrella]

2. I've found out where all the Bolivians here are: Bergamo. Literally. Of all Bolivian citizens in all of Italy, a whopping 25% live just in the city of Bergamo, where they constitute the largest immigrant group and ~3% of the total city population. I guess it makes sense that they voted so much for Camacho then, since the province of Bergamo is ground zero for cattoleghismo.

Like, why? I went looking for reasons and I tried but didn't find anything. What I did find, however, were some irrelevant but still hilarious things:

1. Three countries have a consulate in Bergamo: Switzerland (okay, it's in Northern Italy), Bolivia (there are a lot of their people there) and... Malawi? Is it just that rent in downtown Milano is so expensive? Why do they even have a consulate outside the capital?

2. There's a Facebook page called Comunidad boliviana en Bergamo and, to surprise of literally no-one, they post thing like this (warning: fantastically unashamed racism)



2a. "un alteñ@", yay woke white supremacy!

2b. "escalteño" is not even a pun, you're just sticking words together, idiots.

3. I think you have the correlation backward; they aren't voting for Camacho because they live among their ideological soulmates, but because they're (probably) mostly from Santa Cruz. That would partly explain why there are so many of them there, they could have chosen Bergamo because of an existing santacruceño community, but something must have led to creation of that community in the first place.