Transparencia Electoral expresses concern over marked institutional deterioration in Bolivia

December 28th, 2022

Transparencia Electoral expresses its concern over the arrest of Governor Luis Fernando Camacho, of the Department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, who was elected on March 7th, 2021 and took office on May 3rd of that year.

The organization draws attention to the practice of illiberal regimes of detaining subnational authorities, both elected and in office, as has happened in Venezuela (2014) and Nicaragua (2022), after holding elections in which they seek to project a plural and democratic nature.

On December 21st we issued a statement from DemoAmlat, our organization’s democratic promotion initiative, where we expressed our solidarity with Magdiel Jorge Castro, of Cuban origin and a legal resident in Bolivia, since Bolivian authorities decided to expel him for a period of 3 years just for making the violations of Human Rights in Cuba visible.

Bolivia has come a long way since the electoral fraud of October 20th, 2019, revealed in detail both by the Technical Mission of Electoral Experts of the European Union, and by the Electoral Observation Mission of the Organization of American States (MOE/OAS). That fraud unleashed an unprecedented institutional crisis, and after much effort a new electoral process was reached in which all guarantees were offered and after which the ruling party managed to return to power.

Transparencia Electoral urges the Bolivian authorities to stop the deepening of this illiberal model, to preserve democratic institutions and to safeguard the civil and political rights of all dissidents in the country.