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“Dishonest abuse.” “Rape”. “Improper treatment.” “Corruption of minors and pimperism.” Very serious criminal charges. However, some of them have been made in recent years to former Bolivia Evo Morales. “They are a dozen crimes that only the victim can start,” said the former attorney general and lawyer of the politician, Wilfredo Chávez on May 4. As if it were a dystopian future such as The maid’s storywhere commanders, all men, make decisions about women’s assignments, their bodies, creed, political ideology and their sexual rights, Chávez, aughed by followers and followers of the union leader, defended their Jafazo —O “companion Evo” – in the face of accusations of abuse to minors weighing against him.
“I wonder and openly ask you, (in) the thousands of marriage cases of minors, could all be considered criminals?” The lawyer asked, while a woman behind him denied her head. “It cannot be. They are criminalizing, and we all know the national reality, where the victim, if he does not feel victim, there will be no criminal action or criminal prosecution.”
The militancy towards Morales, or a kind of blind faith with the leader, seems to justify everything. Although, since 2014, there have been more than 6,000 marriages and unions of forced minors in Bolivia involving adolescents aged 16 and 17, according to data from the Ombudsman’s Office and the Civic Registry Service published by DW. A study by the Women’s Coordinator and Save The Children in 2021 also indicates that in the South American country there are more than 32,000 married or united adolescents even before the age of 15. But, for Chávez, “feeling a victim is an intimate subjective situation of a person.”
In a country where the age of sexual consent is 14 years, accusations such as those that have been made against former president Morales put the focus on a sexual crime, the stupro, which is committed when an adult has sex with a minor without their legal consent, using deception, blackmail or abuse of power, and that even the Inter -American Court of Human Rights has asked to be repealed.
What Chávez does not take into account, according to María Galindo, of the feminist collective Women creatingis that the victims suffer from a silencing produced by the power of the perpetrator and, even, of their own community “that supports the place they are occupying of being part of the offerings for the leader.” “The cases of stupro, but that in the international context are called rape, are very frequent in Bolivian society,” he explains. “Being public order crimes, you can act. It is not that minors do not want to report or do not feel victims. As in many cases, Stockholm syndrome happens, in which the victim builds a relationship of affection-dependence with the perpetrator.”
Seven accusations and two arrest warrants
Since his first government in 2006, Morales has accumulated at least five accusations of sexual abuse of minors against him in Bolivia, in addition to two similar accusations for which he is investigated in Argentina, where he remained 11 months exiled when he was forced to resign as president in 2019. In addition, he adds two orders of apprehension, accused of stupro and trafficking and trafficking of minors, and none has been executed.
But victims of sexual violence and the search for justice for women are in Bolivia a political game for government (no matter when you read this). In 2020, Jeanine Áñez’s right -wing administration filed two complaints against Morales for alleged relations he had with minors. In one of them, they accused him of having had a relationship with a minor who was supposedly pregnant when the former president was 57 years old and she, 15.
With the electoral victory of Luis Arce, in 2020, and the return of the movement to socialism to power that same year, the last case was dismissed in favor of the Cocalero leader. When the relationship between exaliates is broken, sexual violence against women has become cannon ammunition within the political bracelet that the president of Bolivia, once political dolphin of Morales, and the trade unionist.
While the current president, with full control over the four powers of the State – the Executive, Legislative, Judicial and Electoral – has used the arrest warrants as an ace under the sleeve to stop the political ambitions of the former president; Morales, astutely elusive, on the other hand, has never referred to the issue directly and has always referred to qualifying complaints as an attempt to “proscribe” his right to be a candidate. He has always brought the issue to political arena, with democratic behavior and on the laws “recurrently cheat and violation of constitutional principles,” explains the sociologist Sonia Montaño.
The last turn of the plot occurred last week, when Judge Lilian Moreno annulled an arrest warrant against Morales in the case of aggravated trafficking of people and then was arrested, without due process, as Morales himself denounced, seeing that the order was restored. Meanwhile, some voices in the country, such as the feminist María Galindo, perceive “a criterion of corruption” in the suspension of the arrest warrant; or a collection of political favors to pave the former president’s path towards his participation in new elections.
Morales has been covered for more than six months and without paying account to justice in Chapare, his political bastion. In the Cocalera region of the Tropic of Cochabamba he has armed a bunker, with a union guard in the style of Muamar El Gaddafi, where he can move freely and is unpunished in an inaccessible territory for the State. “They have managed to alter the entire state order and replace it with the General Staff of the People, which ultimately plays an important role that apprehensions have not been achieved. This parastatal presence could initiate an absolutely violent and bloody confrontation. In that sense, the government is measuring forces. An intervention would mean a possible social outbreak, at least in the tropics of Cochabamba, that I am sure that I am sure that in this time they know that in this time Very good that they should not force them, ”says political scientist Natalia Aparicio.
On Friday, May 16, there is a march towards La Paz, the headquarters of Government, in which the social movements will accompany Morales to register their candidacy for the presidency, despite being disabled by the country’s plurinational constitutional court. He says he does it “for the people.”
The man who ruled Bolivia for more than 14 years seems not to conceive of anyone more suitable than him to take the reins of the country, has been allied with his project or not. And the accusations of abuse of minors – you are always disappearing from the public scene – is not something that seems to stop him. Concern for victims of sexual violence will unfortunately remain frozen until it is a useful letter for political interests on duty.
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