Bolivians approve sweeping reforms

BOLIVIA: Bolivians on Sunday approved sweeping constitutional changes that would bring greater political power to the country’s indigenous majority and lets President Evo Morales run for re-election.

Exit polls by two of the country’s largest television networks showed that the new constitution being approved by a comfortable margin. Partial official results are due early Monday, with final results expected in three or four days.

“Now Bolivia is being re-founded!” Morales told supporters who gathered at the Plaza de Armas in La Paz to hear him speak from the balcony of the presidential palace.

“Here the colonial state ends, and internal and external colonialism end,” said the leftist Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

Morales called on the country’s governors and mayors “to work together to implement the new constitution.”

The new document scraps the single-term limit for the president, allowing Morales to stand for a second five-year term.

The changes also allow 36 indigenous communities and groups to win the right to territory, language and their own “community” justice, and enacts agrarian reform measures by limiting the size of landholdings.

The referendum was approved by 60 percent of the votes cast, according to the Unitel television network. ATB television network reported it was approved by 58 percent. However the exit polls also showed that the referendum was badly defeated in the eastern departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando, hotbeds of activity against the leftist president.

Morales earlier said that he expected the measure to be approved by 70 percent of voters, so the results encouraged his opponents. In Chuquisaca, Governor Savina Cuellar held a rally and called for her people to refuse to abide by the document.

La Paz, Monday, AFP