The Totalitarian Process Continues

Last January the 10th, while I was reading the local papers and filling up my spirit with some news about the incoming conversation between the regime and the opposition, a small publication about the firing of personnel in the National Electoral Court bring me to attention. Mainly for two reasons; first, the maSSist regime had just had their new appointee named the president of that institution, he is a puppet under the name of Exeni, that openly defended and approved the new illegal constitution by MAS in a Blog he shared with other neo indigenous fanatics and the second reason because this is going to supposedly be a very important and intensive electorate year, so it is strange for me that changes are made within an institution that was among the clearest in the country. When I investigated a little more about the people being fired, I couldn’t be more disappointed; the regime was at it again and there is now a new tyrant want to be in town; getting rid of decent people in very important positions to fill the blanks with their own zealots.

Exeni’s first actions as president of the Bolivian National Electoral Court was to fire Juan Carlos Villaroel, 18 years working in the court surviving different Bolivian governments and politicians; he was in charge of Goods and Services and his main job tasks where being responsible of the electorate registration books, the ballot format and presentation, the Court’s informatics spreadsheets and of all electoral material. This position is off key importance because in the hands of corrupted people the electorate books can be use to register people more than once, something the maSSist regime are accused to do more than once. This position also controls the feeding of information for the Electoral Patron and it could easily be use to allow acolytes to the regime to vote more than once in places where their representation is poor. The format of the ballot is also important, since in Bolivia there is usually a lot of political parties involved in elections, being at the borders of the ballot or away from other parties with similar colors could be of relative weight.

The second person being dismissed by this obscure personage was Miguel Serrano, 15 years of transparent work an before Exeni’s black hand the Director of Information; he managed the Electoral Patron, the militant inscription, the political parties legal status, the civil registrar data base and the compute and diffusion of results of the electoral votes. Whoever maSSist takes this position will have to be closely monitor because it could be use to invent legal problems towards parties not in accordance to the regime in a manner that their inscription could be prevented, whoever in this position could also intent to manipulate the results of the votes in areas where the maSSist have little penetration, spatially with the “loss” of information or ballots. Most important off all, this position controls the data base of who can or cannot vote; people in areas like the “Media Luna” or cities like Cochabamba and Sucre that now are against the regime, can find themselves suddenly “depurated” from voting by “mistake”.

The third person fired by Exeni’s mischievous hand was Gabriela Romero, 5 years working in the National Electoral Court and in charge of Civic Education; she demonstrated incomparable impartiality in all elections she participated working on Citizen Participation and capacitating of Electoral Juries and Electoral Notaries. We can expect whoever within the maSSist organization that replaces Romero to make that branch of the Electoral Court and appendix of the very well organized and financed political propaganda program within the regime.

This knife staving at the back off Bolivian democracy doesn’t come solely from the hand of Exeni. Totalitarian regimes like the one within the MAS don’t work under one man’s decisions; they use several perpetrators to achieve their goals, the maSSist movement can most likely be portrait, once again, to the 1940’s German Nazis; Exeni being one more puppet among several others, that could very likely end up saying that they didn’t know what the regime was up to when in dishonor and legally charged; as a matter of fact, the firing of these three persons within the National Electoral Court cannot be a decision he made, since he was not even a week in charge, it was clearly ordered to him by the rules up above in the regime, I wouldn’t be surprised if not by Evo and Alvaro themselves.