The judicial booty | El botín judicial

Renzo Abruzzese, El Deber:

There is no longer any doubt that the future of the regime is being played out on two levels, first with the election of judges and the possible reform of the Judicial Power, and the second by manipulating census data so that by 2025 there will be a more or less manageable distribution of MAS-supporting population; however, this is a much more complicated objective to achieve, despite the fact that, as has already been denounced, movements of contingents that were registered in certain regions in order to vote in them have begun early. Everything speaks of a plan of fraud made with Venezuelan precision and Cuban efficiency. What interests us, however, is to reflect on the election of judges that must be carried out shortly (God willing).

The first certainty is that the MAS regime is not willing to allow independent and honest candidates to be elected, and consequently, we still have many surprises ahead. The reason for this official position lies in the fact that the only real source of legitimacy that the government of Arce Catacora possesses derives from that branch of the State, that is, the only device that guarantees governability and stay in power are the judges and prosecutors that it eventually controls. It could be said that this assertion ignores the legitimacy given by social movements, however, such movements are actually prebendal devices, highly questionable and in many cases of dubious reputation, properties that transform them into entities that are too weak, variable, disloyal, and too ambitious, in a few words, all the efforts we have seen to block judicial reform and dispense with that army of judicial hitmen, obey the fact that -without them- the Government would be a weak barge in the middle of the ocean, an easy prey to the internal forces of the MAS that are desperately vying for power.

It is clear that in this “legal” impasse, the Government is very little or not interested in guaranteeing the democratic institutionalism that presupposes an independent Power, on the contrary, maintaining its current state of deinstitutionalization, or deepening it, means keeping it as a repressive device under the control of the Executive Power and its leaders.

Arce Catacora knows perfectly well what it is all about as much as Evo Morales does, at the end of the day the judges and prosecutors were useful to both of them, so there are no conflicts there, but there could be conflicts of interest. Evo Morales knows that depending on who assumes those judicial roles, his fate could change diametrically, and Arce Catacora is aware that if Evo controls the Judicial Power, his political legitimacy is reduced to the minimum expression; putting this in literal terms, whoever ends up with the judicial booty will be able to dispose of the most powerful political device within the governing forces, something very similar to what once supposed (during the cycle of military dictatorships) to have the support of the generals and colonels of the Armed Forces. The fact is that the outcome of this election holds the key to keeping in power whoever eventually acts as the caudillo.

The MAS does not interfere in legal issues

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