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Soriek  1yr ago (text post)   1073 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 20

Happy 20 TTs guys.

I’ll be trying something new with this one and changing the format so the top level post only contains an explanation of the thread, like we do with Wellness Wednesdays and Fun Fridays. The country-specific coverage will be placed in separate comments where people can respond to them directly, or start their own threads as separate comments. This is part of my hope that long term this will become more of a permanent thread that sustains beyond me, because I likely won’t be around long term. In the short term as well, I’ve been trying to produce a lot of the user content but there will be weeks where I'm too busy, and it would be nice to have a stickied thread where people who want to can still chat foreign policy without me.

So:

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. In the past I've noticed good results from covering countries that users here live in, and having them chime in with more comprehensive responses. In that spirit I'll probably try to offer more snippets of western news (but you'll still get a lot of the global south). I don't follow present day European politics all that much so you'll have to fill in the blanks for me.

But also, no need to use the prompts here, feel free to talk about completely unmentioned countries, or skip country coverage entirely and chat about ongoing dynamics like wars or trade deals. You can even skip the present day and talk about IR history, or just whatever you’re reading at the moment - consider it very free form and open to everyone.

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Bolivia

A follow up to last week’s post mentioning that Bolivia’s former socialist President Morales has announced he’s running for re-election. True to prediction, his former protege and Finance Minister Luis Acre does not seem to be stepping down from the Presidency, which seems to be leading to an internal feud. The Movement for Socialism party has won every national election in like 18 years so at this point likely the only thing that can stop the party in the short term is a situation exactly like this:

Their rivalry has become increasingly pointed and public. Morales believes the government is trying to smear him and perhaps legally rule him out of contention for 2025. He has been highly critical of Arce’s policies, while legislators loyal to him have become a kind of opposition in the legislative assembly, voting against the government and trying to remove some of Arce’s ministers from their positions. Meanwhile the two factions have traded accusations of corruption, links to drug trafficking and treason…

if both Arce and Morales run, they will split the MAS vote. Even if only one of them runs, their battle might leave whoever winds up being the candidate too tarnished to win another majority. In broad strokes, Arce could lose some of the rural workers who idolize Morales, while Morales could lose some of the middle-class voters who are put off by his radicalism. That would hand an electoral opportunity to the opposition, which is otherwise weak and fragmented, with no single leader who could unite voters at a national level.

More fundamentally, though, the rupture between Arce and Morales threatens the coherence of the once-irresistible bloc of social organizations that support the MAS. Aside from a few—such as the coca-grower unions of the tropics, which resolutely support Morales—most of those organizations are now experiencing internal divisions and even schisms. Even if the official leaderships continue to support Arce and the government, parallel leaderships loyal to Morales are emerging. One striking example of this occurred in late August, when a meeting in El Alto of the CSUTCB, the main organization of Bolivia’s rural workers, descended into violence that left hundreds injured. Afterward, two men announced competing claims to leadership of the group: one backed by Arce and given official authority; the other embraced by Morales and now threatening to mount blockades in a bid to recover the confederation.

Separately, former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada of the National Revolutionary Movement (don’t get it twisted, actually a neoliberal party) has agreed to a settlement in US courts for the families of people killed by the government protesting the country exporting its natural gas. Apparently this is one of the first court cases of its kind and raises interesting precedent for the future.

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