The Blog from Bolivia is not my cup of tea, I agree with practically nothing written there. That being said there was an interesting note on how Evo has faltered as of late on the 2/3 question:
First, it about the fear among many Bolivians (particularly the middle class) that Morales is becoming the Evo they didn’t want to elect.
“I voted for him because I voted for ‘the change,” says a neighbor of mine, who has since become a fierce critic of Morales. His nationalism on the economy – negotiating better deals with foreign oil companies, resisting unfair “free trade” agreements, etc. – is still popular. But the fear Morales evokes is not about a strong state role in economics, it is the fear (warranted or not) that Morales aims to take that strong state into other aspects of people’s lives. And here Morales has not been very politically smart.
When letters from the education ministry went out informing private and public schools that they would need to start teaching in Quechua and Aymara, and that the government wanted to rollback Catholic religious education in the schools (this is a very Catholic country), it evoked alarmed comments among reasonable people such as this, “See Evo wants us to be just like Cuba. He wants to kick out the church.” That’s when the opposition finally found some political traction. That is when people first started taking their anti-Evo fears into the streets.
The rallying cry for a 2/3 votes on everything in the Constituent Assembly (again, there is no dispute on a 2/3 vote requirement for the final document) is an extension of that same political wind. People aren’t turning out in mass in the streets here over a number, but because many see the MAS demand for simple majority vote (on procedural issues and separate articles) as a power grab, as Evo and MAS being able to push their way forward “without talking to anyone.”
Here MAS was even less politically adept than on education reform. As a friend of mine described it the other day (a person with very strong ties to Bolivian social movements on the left) – “Why did they pick this fight over 2/3? It is stupid. They could have compromised early, having all the committee votes decided by a simple majority and letting all the votes of the full Assembly be decided by 2/3. They aren’t even talking about what the new Constitution should actually include and now the right is unified all across the country.”
Morales also doesn’t exactly calm those opponents down when he attacks them by declaring, as he did a few weeks ago in Santa Cruz, that hunger strikers there are fasting because they are fat.
