A Stupid Holiday | Un feriado estúpido

By Juan Cristóbal Mac Lean, Brujula Digital:

Photo: Ministry of Hydrocarbons

What do they want? For us to celebrate MAS’s looting of Bolivia? To cheer for the fact that the country has broken its own corruption record? Or should we celebrate the destruction of institutions? Should we congratulate them for definitively and legally losing the sea, the famous sea? Should we take pride in having the worst universities in the world? In the disastrous state of healthcare? In a completely corrupted justice system? Or in the strengthening of the coca/cocaine complex and its conquest of the TIPNIS?

Or should we all, obligatorily, celebrate the fact that Bolivia, the country of blockades, was excluded—and reasonably so—from the route of the highway corridor connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic?

And speaking of less abstract matters: Should we be happy, set off fireworks, because there’s no gasoline, dollars are unavailable, and prices keep rising without end? Because we all know that these early signs of disaster didn’t originate from an earthquake, a war, or “neoliberal” conspiracies. It’s they themselves who, without any shame, declared as a mandatory holiday the day they seized power. Long before committing fraud, it was they who drove the entire country into its current ruin.

Simply put, like others before them, they squandered all the money. The difference is that no government before them had ever had so much money. And quickly, the “leader of the humble” bought himself a luxury jet—the most expensive available—to live among the clouds. With that, we could say he fired the starting shot for MAS’s total corruption. Later, on the road to power, the legal henchmen ensured the deaths of inconvenient anti-corruption figures like Aramayo and Bakovic.

Was Luis Arce already the boss’s cashier when the $38 million jet purchase was made? I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. In any case, after years of being a loyal cashier for misdeeds, Arce learned to carry them out on his own. And here we are.

Should we, lastly, rejoice that they’ve managed to turn Bolivia, on the international stage, into nothing more than a shameful country? To give the most recent example: it’s shameful to congratulate Nicolás Maduro, a man whom no one in their right mind, anywhere in the world, fails to recognize as a political criminal and one of the worst kinds of mafioso.

The list of international embarrassments of this kind is far too long to summarize here. And do they want us to celebrate these too? What is it they want us to obligatorily celebrate?

They can keep their holiday.

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