Without beating around the bush, never MAS again! | Sin vueltas, ¡nunca más el MAS!

By Gisela Derpic, Brujula Digital:

It’s disheartening to go through the media and social networks for those who are interested in what’s happening and gather information to understand where they stand. To comprehend their world. Within it, their country. Ours. The one that will celebrate its 200th year of foundation in 2025 in a calamitous state, as was never imagined it would be. Even less after the boom in commodity prices that brought in enormous economic and financial resources of a magnitude not seen before in Bolivia since 2006.

The verified data from various sources, and the credibility of these sources to avoid deception, show that it’s an extremely deplorable situation, with a clear and unstoppable tendency to worsen: rising prices in general, dollar shortages and a banking freeze, fuel shortages, disappearing goods, company closures, unemployment, forest fires, water pollution due to gold mining, disappearances, citizen insecurity, smuggling, corruption, abuses, and illegalities. With a stifling centralism, no independence of powers, fraudulent elections, and incompetent and corrupt prosecutors and judges. With little glimmers of hope. More than enough reasons to resist and act, based on an objective and well-founded diagnosis that identifies the fundamental problem to be solved.

In this case, that problem is “masismo,” which came to power by distorting historical truth and discrediting the democratic political system. Yes, masismo, that Bolivian expression of the criminal totalitarian model embodied in the anti-Western bloc led by Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea; with its members in Latin America including Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia. Argentina until December 2023, with some doubts about Chile due to its unexpected stance on the Venezuelan crisis after July 28.

This model is summarized by the capture of power by a clique that enriches itself illegally and illegitimately while impoverishing the population through measures that combine wastefulness, improvisation, indebtedness, corruption, and systematic restrictions on private initiative. Stifling state control, rent-seeking, predatory, corrupt, abusive, illegal, and devoid of any institutional framework, it sustains the growth of transnational crime, pervasive in the anti-Western bloc. It thrives on lies and narratives of resentment and division. In this context, people are condemned to increasingly miserable survival, with the only option being emigration, empty-handed due to the current impossibility of withdrawing money from banks. Thus, the new criminal oligarchy facilitates its strategy of oppression, feeding off lies and narratives of resentment and division.

Masismo is not about an ideology or a national project. As it’s often said, it’s a modus operandi, so there’s no point in debating whether it’s divided or if it’s all a ploy to “confuse the issue,” because, regardless, they are all the same: co-authors, accomplices, and enablers of the disasters, skilled liars without moral scruples. All of them—the fugitive eternally threatening, his star ex-minister babbling without conviction, the ancestral high priest gone from the scene, and their pathetic spokespersons, old and young alike—are responsible for the disaster and share the same vision. Therefore, none should be trusted even slightly. They only guarantee the country’s definitive collapse through the deepening of the failed model of 21st-century socialism. It’s no wonder the Venezuelan tyrant instructed the MAS leaders at a meeting in Caracas this past April to fully implement the model to turn the country into another hell of misery and oppression like Cuba and Venezuela.

Since this is the central axis of the diagnosis, the objective is clear: to take power away from masismo, whatever their candidate may be called. A major challenge for democratic politicians and citizens alike. As for the former, we have no control. We must trust in a simultaneous attack of common sense that opens their eyes. As for the citizens, they will do what they know best, without giving up or tiring: defend democracy by safeguarding the votes, despite the fraud mechanism, to dismantle the failed totalitarian model and build a renewed country where regions and cultures come together, with legal equality and the rule of law. Where youth can work and develop their initiatives with creativity, taking advantage of technological advancements, in an environmentally friendly context. Where everyone can meet their needs and indulge themselves while simultaneously making Bolivia great. And this requires what masismo denies us: FREEDOM. Let’s go for it!

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