Riots have broken out across Bolivia in the aftermath of Sunday’s presidential election, when the main opposition candidate rejected results that appeared to hand the victory to longtime incumbent Evo Morales, according to reports.
The violent protests erupted in at least nine cities after rival Carlos Mesa claimed the quick counts were fraudulent, the BBC reported.
Counting was still underway with Morales in first place — but he had not yet secured enough of a lead to stave off a second round.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal is running two separate counts. The quick count — at 95.6 percent of votes verified — puts the president ahead of Mesa with a lead of 9.33 percentage points.
That is just shy of the 10 percentage-point advantage he needs to win outright in the first round. If that result is confirmed, the two men would face each other in a runoff on Dec. 15.
“We are not going to recognize those results that are part of a shameful, consummated fraud, that is putting Bolivian society in a situation of unnecessary tension,” Mesa said, according to AFP.
Opposition supporters torched electoral offices in the southwestern cities of Sucre and Potosi, while rival supporters clashed in the capital city of La Paz.
International monitors from the Organization of American States expressed “deep concern” at sudden changes to the electoral count that show Morales closing in on an outright victory in the first round.
EPAMichael Kozak, the top US diplomat for Latin America, said the Electoral Tribunal was trying “to subvert Bolivia’s democracy by delaying the vote count and taking actions that undermine the credibility of Bolivia’s elections.”
“We call on the TSE to immediately act to restore credibility in the vote counting process,” Kozak said on Twitter.
The OAS observer mission in Bolivia expressed “surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls.”
It urged the election authority to “firmly defend the will of the Bolivian people” and called for calm on the streets.
With Post wires
