Discusses the history that led to the referendum and the potential ramifications of the upcoming vote.
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On August 10, Bolivians will go to the polls in a referendum to decide whether the president, vice-president, and eight of the country’s nine departmental prefects (governors) will remain in office.1 Opponents of President Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) coalition have sought to cancel the upcoming recall referendum by challenging its legality, but it is unlikely that they will succeed. The law authorizing the referendum was approved just months ago, in May, by the Bolivian Senate, where the opposition Poder Democrático y Social (PODEMOS) party enjoys a majority. To be sure, the referendum’s passage chagrined sectors of the opposition at the departmental level, both because some prefects will be hard-pressed to garner enough votes to remain in office, and because the referendum is viewed as a distraction from the regional autonomy agenda that opposition prefects have been pursuing, especially in the “media luna” lowlands departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija.
1. There will be no recall referendum for the prefect in the Chuquisaca Department, where voters elected an opposition candidate in July 2008 to replace the MAS prefect who had resigned as a result of the violence surrounding demands to transfer the nation’s capital from La Paz to Sucre, the Chuquisaca departmental capital.