La Paz, Feb 4: Exiled former Bolivian president Evo Morales has been registered as a candidate for the Senate from the Cochabamba Department in the May elections, a member of Morales’ Movement to Socialism (MAS) party has announced.
“Our brother, President Evo Morales, is on the official lists of the Cochabamba Department as the first one on the list of candidates for the Senate,” Leonardo Losa said on Monday.
The announcement came a day after Morales, who fled the country in December after the army withdrew its support for him during violent protests over his disputed re-election to a fourth straight term, said in an interview to Chilean newspaper La Tercerat that he wants to return home and run for senator in upcoming elections.
Currently living in Argentina, the 60-years-old ex-president also talked about the night he fled the central South American country and said the night he left Bolivia, heading first to Mexico, he carried with him a suitcase with some clothes, a bit of food and two or three thousand dollars.
He alleged that his replacement by acting president Jeanine Anez amounted to a putsch.
“What we lost with the coup we will recover on May 3 in democracy,” Morales was quoted as saying.
He said he will run for a seat in the Senate and declared himself a “victim of the United States” empire.
Earlier Morales had also said that his representative, who dealt with the procedures necessary for his election to parliament, had been detained. The ex-president of Bolivia also said that all of his documents had been stolen.
However, Losa said the registration of the ex-president as a candidate had been carried out “in line with the law.”
Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, was in power for almost 14 years. But he is now barred from standing as a presidential candidate in the May ballot.
(UNI)
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