Bolivia’s opposition groups have announced new generalized strikes, and even nationwide hunger strikes starting next Monday if the Government does not resolve the demands of the Santa Cruz authorities, who are demanding the repeal of the decree that sets the new census for 2024.
Thus, civic committees from all over the country, the National Committee for the Defense of Democracy (Conade), opposition deputies and other citizen platforms have united to demand that the census be carried out in 2023, setting a new 72-hour strike starting this Monday, reports the newspaper ‘El Deber’.
«We are taking these drastic measures because the government has dragged us into this. The census is a necessity that we are all asking for to be carried out in 2023,» insisted the president of the Civic Committee of Tarija, Adrián Ávila.
The Conade has gone a little further and has reported that since Thursday some of its members have begun an indefinite hunger strike as a prison measure and that they are preparing a lawsuit against the president of Bolivia, Luis Arce, and other authorities for violation of laws and excessive use of force.
Some deputies of the opposition Comunidad Ciudadana party have announced that they will also join the hunger strike if the dialogue table convened for this Friday in the city of Trinidad, in the department of Beni, does not prosper.
Several citizen and opposition platforms to Arce’s government have gone out this week to protest in the streets all over the country in solidarity with the department of Santa Cruz, which this Friday celebrates two weeks of general strike and generalized strikes to demand that the population census be carried out next year.
The protests against the government of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) are once again having as epicenter the department of Santa Cruz, traditionally one of the bastions of opposition since Evo Morales took the reins of Bolivia more than fifteen years ago.
Its leaders, especially the governor, Luis Fernando Camacho, have demanded that the census be held as originally planned for the first semester of 2023 and have not taken as good the explanations of the Government about the technical impossibility of carrying it out due to the consequences of the pandemic.
For Camacho, one of the key pieces in the 2019 political crisis that caused Morales to leave power after winning the elections, postponing the census until 2024 not only contravenes the law, since it must be carried out every ten years, but the previous statistics, dating from 2012, are currently unreliable for redistributing federal budgets.
