Bolivia in English

I've brought this up before, but it's always bad news when the English language media begins covering Bolivia. Bolivia is so isolated that it gets ignored unless something major occurs. The protesters made a big enough scene to be noticed today.

Looking at it from the protesters point of view, they need to keep these protests up over several days before they get anything accomplished. One or two days of protests are just an annoyance, not a regime change mechanism. And their biggest problem is that if they protest too well and shut everything down, they'll bring out the pro-Mesa protestors and they'll get beat. Mesa has been very good at keeping his opposition from finding a balance that forces him to resign, and my guess is Mesa will keep winning the political fights and beat his opponents once again.

One note, however. Mesa is still strongly against violence under his watch. If he believes that his staying in power will lead to people dying, he will leave the presidency. While the first thought is that this would cause the opposition to be violent, that's incorrect. The group causing the violence will also lose a chance at the presidency. No section within the opposition is yet willing to take the risk and give up their chance at power. Mesa knows his opposition is far from united and is playing them very well.

The one wild card is the terrorism that occurred last weekend. A group like that can cause violence semi-anonymously, and break Mesa's careful balance on power. I'm not sure who was behind the violence last week, but they are the threat to Bolivian democracy this week and I hope Mesa has prepared for that threat.