Bolivian President Evo Morales is dismissing the importance of a deadlocked assembly struggling to rewrite Bolivia's Constitution, saying that his administration will push forward with his populist reforms on its own.
Analysts on Friday described the comments as a possible prelude to a further expansion of Morales' executive powers -- or a calculated bluff designed to break the months-long stalemate in the Constituent Assembly.
"One day I was talking to [Vice President] Alvaro [Garcia] and some of my Cabinet, and I realized that the profound changes, the real transformations, were not going to be made through the Constituent Assembly," Morales said on Thursday to members of his Movement Toward Socialism party during a two-day convention.
"Instead, the democratic and cultural revolution is the hands of the government, along with the social sectors" allied with his administration, he said.
The comments appeared to downplay the importance of the Constituent Assembly that Morales himself convened in a bid to grant a greater voice to Bolivia's long-oppressed Indian majority.
Political analyst Cayetano Llobet said the comments reflect frustration.
"Morales wants absolute power, and he thought the Constituent Assembly would give it to him. But it hasn't given him that power, and it doesn't look like it will," Llobet said.
Demanded by Bolivians long before Morales took office a year ago, the assembly opened in Sucre on Aug. 6 to great fanfare.
But five months later, delegates have failed to write a single word of a new constitution and a bitter fight for control of the body has polarized the country.
Morales, whose backers hold just over half of the body's 255 seats, contends that a new charter can be written by a simple majority of the delegates, effectively shutting the conservative opposition out of the process. Opposition delegates demand that every article in a new constitution only be passed with a two-thirds vote.
Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian political scientist at Florida International University in Miami, said the president's threat to move ahead with his reform agenda independent of the assembly could be a ploy to bring the opposition back to the negotiating table.
"This is what Evo has been really good at: upping the ante and coming up with all sorts of unexpected moves," Gamarra said.
Conservative delegates have threatened to leave the assembly, and last month protesters vowed not to recognize any constitution written without the two-thirds vote.
The impasse has thrown a wrench in Morales' plans for a larger government role for powerful social movements, indigenous groups and labor unions. He also suggests replacing the Senate with a popular assembly and revising an existing law prohibiting presidents from running for re-election.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the