LAUCA Ñ, Bolivia — Bolivia’s charismatic, long-serving ex-President Evo Morales informed The Related Press on Saturday that he did not know what to do about threats by the right-wing presidential candidates to arrest him in the event that they got here to energy.
From his stronghold in Bolivia’s tropics of Chapare, the place he has been holed up for months below the safety of die-hard supporters, he repeated his name for voters to deface their ballots in Sunday’s high-stakes elections in defiance of the race from which he’s barred attributable to a contentious constitutional court docket ruling.
“What are we going to do? Not even I do know,” he mentioned in response to questions on how he would reply if both of the right-wing front-runners, multimillionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina and former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, wins the presidential election and fulfills their threats to arrest him. “I’m within the crosshairs of of the right-wing empire.”
Morales, 65, was charged final 12 months with human trafficking and accused of impregnating a 15-year-old lady when he was president.
Whereas he has not outright denied having sexual relations with the underage lady, he has described the costs as politically motivated. A choose issued the arrest order as he and his former finance minister, President Luis Arce, bickered over the management of their long-dominant Motion Towards Socialism Social gathering.
On account of their bitter energy wrestle, the occasion splintered. With the Bolivian financial system present process its worst disaster in round 4 many years, the implosion of the MAS occasion has given the right-wing opposition its greatest shot at successful on the poll field since Morales first got here to energy in 2006.
“Look, it’s an election with out legality, with out legitimacy …. with out the Indigenous motion, with out the favored motion,” Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, contended in his interview with the AP at his political group’s headquarters, the place he broadcasts a weekly radio present.
The null-and-void vote, he mentioned, “isn’t only a vote for our political motion.”
“It’s a protest vote, a vote of anger.”
He insulted Doria Medina and Quiroga, who’ve each run for president 3 times earlier than, dropping no less than twice to Morales, as “everlasting losers.”
Citing widespread voter disillusionment with the choices, he expressed confidence that the election end result would reveal an unusually excessive proportion of invalid votes.
“Nobody goes to win. It will likely be the spoiled vote, which is Evo’s vote,” he mentioned, talking in third individual.
