AP
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Bolivia’s charismatic, long-serving ex-President Evo Morales advised The Associated Press on Saturday that he didn’t know what to do about threats by the right-wing presidential candidates to arrest him in the event that they got here to energy.
From his stronghold in Bolivia’s tropics of Chapare, the place he has been holed up for months beneath the safety of die-hard supporters, he repeated his name for voters to deface their ballots in Sunday’s high-stakes elections in defiance of the race from which he’s barred due to a contentious constitutional court docket ruling.
“What are we going to do? Not even I know,” he stated in response to questions on how he would respond if both of the right-wing front-runners, multimillionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina and former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, wins the presidential election and fulfills their threats to arrest him. “I am in the crosshairs of of the right-wing empire.”
Morales, 65, was charged final 12 months with human trafficking and accused of impregnating a 15-year-old woman when he was president.
While he has not outright denied having sexual relations with the underage woman, he has described the costs as politically motivated. A decide issued the arrest order as he and his former finance minister, President Luis Arce, bickered over the management of their long-dominant Movement Toward Socialism Party.
As a outcome of their bitter energy wrestle, the get together splintered. With the Bolivian economic system present process its worst disaster in round 4 many years, the implosion of the MAS get together has given the right-wing opposition its greatest shot at profitable on the poll field since Morales first got here to energy in 2006.
“Look, it’s an election without legality, without legitimacy …. without the Indigenous movement, without the popular movement,” Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, contended in his interview with the AP at his political group’s headquarters, the place he broadcasts a weekly radio present.
The null-and-void vote, he stated, “isn’t just a vote for our political movement.”
“It’s a protest vote, a vote of anger.”
He insulted Doria Medina and Quiroga, who’ve each run for president thrice earlier than, shedding at the very least twice to Morales, as “eternal losers.”
Citing widespread voter disillusionment with the choices, he expressed confidence that the election final result would reveal an unusually excessive proportion of invalid votes.
“No one is going to win. It will be the spoiled vote, which is Evo’s vote,” he stated, talking in third particular person.