Three Wise Men or Three Blind Mice?

Tomorrow are the Bolivian Presidential Elections. Very exciting and a little scary, as no one really knows what to expect in terms of who is going to win or what the consequences will be...

The three main parties are the MAS, PODEMOS and UN.



MAS is represented by Evo Morals (see picture, face on the left) who used to be a coca farmer, became the leader of the Coca Farmer Union, and is now running for president. MAS means "more" in Spanish, so his motto "Somos pueblo, somos MAS" translates to "We are the people, we are MORE". Most people think Evo will win, just because he has a majority of the indigenous population behind him, and they make up over 90% of the country's inhabitants. If he doesn't win, the odds of road blocks popping up are quite good...















PODEMOS, which means "we can", is represented by Tuto Quiroga - and as you can tell, their colors are red and white. From what I could see in La Paz, this is the party which has invested the most money into PR - and one of their promises is to give each family a set amount of money each year for each male and female child in the family. If you ask me, that money would be better invested in specific programs for education and healthcare, but then again that doesn't buy as many votes.







The third main party is UN which stands for Unidad Nacional, and whose representative is Samuel Medina. He is the middle ground between MAS and PODEMOS, which gets him a lot of votes... but the fact that he is the general manager for Burger King is against him because 1) the state of BKs here is not impressive, and if you can't run a BK then how are you supposed to run a country properly? and 2) instead of using Bolivian potatoes (of which there are so so many to choose from), he imports potatoe mash from god knows where and makes fries from paste. Eww.