The former vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, assured that The triumph of the Rejection in the Exit Plebiscite was predictable, pointing to an error in the strategy to explain the changes. “The novelty is how he dealt with all this and I think that the way out of dealing with it in a manner with good manners was a mistake,” he emphasized.
The former vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera,< /strong> lamented the failure of the constituent process, assuring that “it was a mistake” deal with it “with good manners.”.
This was stated in a conference he gave within the framework of the seminar organized by the Academy of Christian Humanism University, entitled “Neoliberalism and Human Rights: Debates from Latin American critical theory.”
At the time, the politician The Bolivian gave a conference entitled “Time Suspended: Interregnum and Decline of the Economic Cycle of World Accumulation”, according to El Mercurio.
On the occasion, Linera was consulted for his impressions after the crushing triumph of the Rejection in the Exit Plebiscite, last September.
García Linera and the triumph of Rejection: “It was foreseeable”
In this regard, the former vice president analyzed what happened, admitting he was “sad”, although he acknowledged that it was “foreseeable”.
“ I’m a little sad about what has happened here, but you know what? It was predictable and that’s what makes me even sadder.”
“They have not faced things here that have not happened on the continent, nothing new and then there was a chance to come back. I am not one of those who have a reading that the media was the evil ones, they always are.”
“It is not news that there has been a campaign to demonize the constituent” , he added.
“So, that the constituent process has faced a very adverse media environment, full of insults, lies, and falsehoods that have poisoned the debate, that is common to the constituent processes of the continent, it is not new”, he insisted.
“The novelty is how he dealt with all this and I think that the way out of dealing with it in a manner with good manners was a mistake”.
Former Vice President García Linera: “No you can legalistically defend a text that is political”
In this sense, he maintained that “you cannot legally defend a text that is political. The Constitution is a political text, for a reason it says Political Constitution of the State, it is a correlation of forces. What has regulatory effects over time? Of course, but it is a political treaty that is going to define the normative forms in which they are going to be applied in the next 20 or 50 years.”
Although he emphasized that “no one can copy the experience of the other, nor should anyone say what to do”, he pointed to the strategy used in Bolivia to obtain the approval of the Constitution.
“In our case, what we did with the Constitution.We knew that the Constitution is a political fact, it must be treated politically. Second algorithm, the fate of a government is at stake in the Constitution,” he explained.
“We realized those two algorithms and said ‘okay, what How do we go about defending the Constitution? Well, let’s show what the Constitution is going to do’ And what is it going to do? We nationalized gas, we nationalized telecommunications & # 8221 ;, he insisted.
Former Bolivian vice president defended plurinationality
Likewise, García Linera referred to one of the most innovative aspects of the Bolivian Constitution and which was attempted to be replicated in the new Magna Carta in Chile: plurinationality.
“¿ What is multinationality? You indigenous, me semi-white, we can sit down to eat at the same table, and you have as much right to be a senator as I do, and your language and your dress are the same for any public office and for any social right.”
Because of the above, he said that “we have to have that ability to explain a text, in our case of 450 articles, things that reach people, their hearts and their pockets. That is the best way we did to approve our Constitution”.
“If you achieve a Constitution, when society is in a boiling state, in an igneous state, the mold that you have assembled will be more favorable in unfavorable times. And I think we have lost that. And now recovering that is going to be more complicated; So, that is what makes me sad, ”he closed.