Breathe
By Isabel Mercado
Bolivia has more export products than it is believed; but not even the most furious patriot would think of offering our justice to any bidder. So devalued is it, that there is practically no crack through which to paint a seductive face on it.
However, love is blind. Especially that love cultivated in ideological brotherhoods, those that do not recognize borders -and apparently do not check data either-, and so now it turns out that nothing more and nothing less than the virtual president-elect of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman to lead that huge nation with whom we have so many affinities (good and not so good), wants to emulate the Bolivian example to remedy its also rotten justice system and call for judicial elections by popular vote.
The concern of the recently elected Mexican president is understandable: if there is something that this giant country has to promote, it is a reform of a justice system that, like the Bolivian one, has been kidnapped for decades by power, not only political power, but also by organized crime, which has cost this society thousands of deaths and alarming levels of legal insecurity.
Insecurity is one of the most worrying problems in Mexico. The diffusion of certain crimes in the media is only a fraction of what happens on a daily basis. To this climate of uncertainty and constant fear we must add the cost of violence, to the point of considering the last six years as the most violent in Mexican history.
In addition, Mexico is the country with the highest level of impunity in the Americas (fourth in the world), with an average of 91% of crimes committed with impunity.
So one wonders, aren't there better ideas to plagiarize for such a challenge? It is likely that the affection (between Arce's MAS and AMLO and Sheinbaum's Morena) overshadows sanity; if that were the case, it is convenient to remember/precise some figures that are public knowledge.
The Bolivian constitutional reform of 2009 included among its main reforms the judicial election by popular vote. At that time (15 years ago), the idea of handing over this responsibility to the people, after having witnessed decades of judicial ineffectiveness and submission of justice administrators to the power of the day, did not seem so bad, but with two judicial elections held in the country (2011 and 2017) and a third that has not yet been finalized, there are several lessons to be shared.
First, although popular, the election ended up being one of the least; that is to say, absenteeism and disinterest of the people in electing these representatives prevailed. Let's see: in 2011, 60% and in 2017, 66% of blank and null votes were registered, which represents a clear message in a country where voting is mandatory.
Another purpose of the popular election was to distance the representatives of all the organs of justice from the political parties, which manipulate them as an institutionalized practice. Well, the judicial election has only deepened and evidenced this dependence. Since the Legislative Assembly elects the candidates by two thirds of the votes, they have become lackeys of power before they are even elected, because just to get on the ballot they need the favors of the legislators, which generally benefit those who know that they will then submit to their designs. Moreover, party militancy has become so naturalized that there has been no lack of elected or to-be-elected authorities who have posed proudly sporting the colors of the parties that sponsor them.
Worse is that, with this, all vestige of experience or merit to reach hierarchical positions in the administration of justice disappeared almost completely, to the point of despising the trajectory and knowledge versus participation or membership in certain social, political or trade union organizations.
All this led to a deepening of the crisis of justice in Bolivia, to the point that its own manager, former President Evo Morales, acknowledged in 2014 that it was one of the great mistakes of his years in office. Now, although the third version of these elections should have been held in 2022, there are still no political agreements (yes, political!) to make these elections viable. The ruling party (the MAS in its arcist wing) has decided to extend the current electoral authorities, contravening the essence of its own rules; while they have repaid the favor by denying the former president Evo Morales (from the opposition wing of the same MAS), the possibility of participating again as a candidate in the general elections of 2025.
It is difficult to understand the intricacies of Bolivian politics, but it should not be hard to deduce that it has had some thunderous failures. Perhaps the worst, or the most painful for the people, has been to make us believe that we could have a better justice with our help, when it is well known that one cannot be both judge and party, and those who took office, before being judges, were part (of the same political system that corrupts them).
*Isabel Mercado is a Bolivian journalist with experience in investigative journalism and management of Bolivian media.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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