Today's Miami Herald reports that a truce between coca farmers and the military ends on October 1 and that violence could pick up then. I don't think the Rodriguez government is going to push the issue too hard before the December elections. Bolivia has been relatively peaceful the past few months, why leave on a bad note?
The Herald also reports that coca will be a major issue in the election. Obviously, Morales represents a coca growing region and there are a few rural regions where this matters, but is coca really an issue to most Bolivians?
I haven't seen polls on which issues matter to voters, but if I had to guess on the ranking via the media coverage it would be: 1) employment/economics 2) political stability 3) use of natural resources 4) personal security (not getting mugged/hurt in a protest) and then somewhere down the list would be smaller issues like coca growth and foreign policy. I'm guessing coca growth is the number one issue to a small segment of the population, and a background issue to most voters. Coca gets media coverage because of violent protests coming from coca farmers and US funding for counter-narcotics programs, but I can't imagine that a citizen in El Alto or Santa Cruz would consider voting on this issue.
Maybe some of my Bolivian readers will care to disagree or have the actual poll numbers on issues of importance?
Contra-Cronkite
2 hours ago
1 comments:
Thanks for the look out..
I think the real issue is national soverignty. It's just a series of examples of how outside groups or countries impose its will on a small, powerless country like Bolivia.
Sadly, it takes an outside group to provide incentives or coercion to control something that Bolivians should really care about, but not in the way that the U.S. has done so.
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