A democracia boliviana a enfraquecer?

How Evo Morales running again — and again — undermines Bolivia’s democracy, por  Ben Raderstorf e Michael J. Camilleri (Washington Post):

Unlike with Morales’s counterparts in Latin America’s three consolidated dictatorships — Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua — his past elections have been democratic and his governance style autocratic but not authoritarian. Members of Bolivia’s long-suppressed indigenous majority felt vindicated by the election of an Aymara president, and many analysts now see Morales’s 13 years in office as successful on economic merits, with consistent growth (real GDP per capita has almost doubled) alongside fairly ambitious socialist redistributive efforts. (...)

[I]t is difficult to predict how this election will go. For Bolivians, the stakes go far beyond control of the presidency. Morales has shown a growing willingness to use state institutions and resources to secure his hold in power. If he is reelected, he will govern from a position of political and economic weakness, a reality he has yet to confront. A government that is politically vulnerable today might be unelectable by 2024. Morales, who will turn 60 later this month, might have burnished his reputation by quitting while he was ahead. Instead, it is difficult to see him walking away. Having eliminated the formal constraint of term limits, he might find that extending his rule under less accommodating conditions requires a more decisive break with democratic checks and balances. If so, Bolivia risks following the paths of Venezuela and Nicaragua, where authoritarian consolidation became the only alternative to surrendering power.