Bolivian President Evo Morales won a resounding re-election victory Sunday. Although there are not yet official results, national television in Bolivia estimated late Sunday that Morales won 63% of the vote, nearly 40 percentage points more than his nearest rival, Manfred Reyes Villa. The New York Times coverage of the vote focuses on whether or not Mr. Morales victory will lead him to seek the removal of term limits all-together during his second term. A new constitution, approved in the last year, allows the president two terms in office as opposed to one.
The AP adds that Morales’s MAS party also won “convincing majorities” in both houses of Congress, with the wire service saying it looks like MAS will win a super majority in the Senate but not in the House. “Evo Morales has a mandate unlike any other president in the hemisphere, including Barack Obama,” analyst Jim Shultz of the nonprofit Democracy Center in Cochabamba, tells the AP. “This is the fifth national election in four years and his margin of victory has only increased each and every time.” “We'll always back Evo Morales' government because he takes into account the poor,” another Evo supporter, an Aymara jeweler, tells the news service. The Wall Street Journal meanwhile quotes NYU History Professor, Sinclair Thomson who says Morales “is seen as having fulfilled his mandate.” The paper adds that the International Monetary Fund recently said Bolivia's economy was likely grow by about 3% this year, faster than any other economy in Latin America. All of this while Bolivia has successfully built up its monetary reserves to about $8 billion. For more, CEPR has a new report out on the successes of the Bolivian economy, arguing that “Key to the Bolivian economy’s relative success has been expansionary fiscal policy and control over national resources, especially the hydrocarbons sector – a relatively recent development.”
Interestingly, even in the opposition’s stronghold of Santa Cruz, Morales increased his share of the vote Sunday, coming within 7 percentage points of Manfred Reyes Villa.
· On Honduras this weekend, the Washington Post’s Mary Beth Sheridan reviews the last months of crisis in Honduras, writing that the country’s elites have successfully defied U.S. pressures once placed on the coup regime by the U.S. She writes:
“The story of how the second-poorest country in the hemisphere defied a superpower involves smooth-talking U.S. lobbyists and a handful of congressional Republicans. Perhaps most of all, it features a Honduran elite terrified that their country was being hijacked by someone they considered an erratic leftist.”
Speaking of the supporters of the June 28 coup, the Council of the Americas Christoper Sabatini adds: “Their game was a limited one. It wasn’t to hold on to power but to basically remove a president they didn’t like.”
Time’s Tim Padgett also has an excellent piece looking at the effect of the crisis on President Obama’s Latin America policy going forward. He argues: “Ostensibly, [Ass’t. Sec. of State Arturo] Valenzuela is President Obama's new point man on Latin America; in reality, that job looks to be under the control of Republicans in Congress and conservatives inside Obama's own diplomatic corps. In fact, when it comes to U.S. policy in Latin America — as events this week in Honduras suggest — it's often hard to tell if George W. Bush isn't still President.” He goes on:
“[A]s he ends his first year in office, Obama seems to have ceded Latin America strategy to right-wing Cold Warriors whose thinking — including the idea that coups are still an acceptable means of regime change — is no more equipped to help bring the region into the 21st century than the ideology of left-wing Marxists is… The Honduras debacle is just the latest example of Obama's actions failing his words in Latin America.”
The New Yorker’s William Finnegan has a very good piece on how the U.S. bungled Honduras which comes to the same conclusion as Time. “Honduras is small, poor, weak—a sideshow among the huge foreign-policy challenges confronting this Administration. But the importance, throughout Latin America, of the ineffectual, disingenuous U.S. response to the Honduran coup is not small. Restive militaries and oligarchies have taken note.”
In an editorial this weekend, the New York Times argues that aid to Honduras should only be restarted when a “unity and reconciliation government” is formed (prior to the inauguration of Pepe Lobo on Jan. 27) and after a truth commission is formed.
And according to Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer: “The U.S.-Brazilian spat over the Nov. 29 elections in Honduras is the latest in a series of recent confrontations after an eight-month love affair. President Barack Obama was widely applauded at the April Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago and got much applause in June when Washington joined the rest of the region in voting to lift Cuba's 5-decade-old suspension from the 34-nation Organization of American States.”
Meanwhile, with the latest on the ground in Honduras, La Tribuna reports that a “reconciliation government” may be formed as early as this week in Tegucigalpa. According to the paper, Micheletti has solicited names for such an interim government from Mel Zelaya, still holed up in the Brazilian embassy. It seems unlikely Zelaya will respond but a unity government has been pushed by Pepe Lobo, winner of last Sunday’s elections in an attempt to gain international support before he takes over in late January. To this end, EFE writes that Lobo also will be heading on the road this week to speak with other Central American leaders about gaining recognition from more countries in the international community. Among those he will speak with will be Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias who said over the weekend that everyone involved in the crisis in Honduras should receive amnesty.
And the Carter Center and Friends of the Inter-American Charter report on their fact-finding mission with a letter to the OAS late last week. The organizations call Nov. 29 elections a “partial path” out of the crisis but not a resolution to the “constitutional breach represented by the coup.” Further, the letter writers ask the OAS to endorse calls for a national unity government (excluding Micheletti), demand the repeal of restrictions on individual liberties and freedom of press, support the creation of a Truth Commission, and reintegrate Honduras into the OAS once such steps have been taken.
· The New York Times reports that Venezuela, facing a banking crisis, has asserted greater control over its financial institutions, and, over the weekend, detained one of the country’s most powerful financiers. Simon Romero writes: “The arrest on Saturday of the financier, Arné Chacón, and the removal of his brother, Jesse, as science minister, which Mr. Chávez announced Sunday, points to a broadening purge of a group of magnates known as Boligarchs, who built immense fortunes this decade on the back of close government ties.” Ricardo Fernández Barrueco, a billionaire who went into finance after assembling a business empire that sold food to state-controlled supermarkets, has also been under questioning by Disip, Venezuela’s intelligence agency. Speaking Sunday about the firing of the Chacón brothers, Chavez remarked, “I’m very sorry that he is the brother of a minister, but we're showing that no one here is untouchable.” The WSJ goes on, writing that “Critics say the scandal has laid bare the emergence of a new class of businessmen who in some cases have made billions of dollars from their contacts with the government.”
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