The president of Bolivia, Luis Arce, announced this week the repeal of the law 1386, also known as “mother law”, which had generated a general strike, mobilizations and blockades in much of the territory of the South American country.
Arce asked the congress during the weekend the abrogation or repeal of the law, a procedure that began to be discussed this Monday.
“The country does not want more anxiety and uncertainty unnecessarily,” said the president in a television message.
In this way, a large part of the unions and civic committees that had taken to the streets for about six days announced this Tuesday the cessation of the unemployment, but they indicated that they will continue in “emergency and permanent mobilization.”
The protests had begun last week, after several months of tensions after the approval in August of the law 1386 or law mother what tried to impose a control against money laundering.
The law, officially called National Strategy to Combat the Legitimation of Illicit Profits and Terrorism Financing , has seven points, among which the one that establishes that the strategy indicated in the law may be modified by the president through a decree stands out.
Rejection
The law was considered by various social strata of Bolivia as an excess in the exercise of executive power.
Different Bolivian civic leaders indicated that the norm sought to impose a “economic and financial totalitarianism.”
For example, the National Committee for the Defense of Democracy noted in a statement issued after the approval by Congress was known bol iviano that the law “seeks to generate financial intelligence actions against the population, control of the economic activities of the people, persecution and intimidation, exempting from all this process the main illegal activity that generates illicit profits, which is drug trafficking.”
Roberto Laserna, social researcher affiliated with the Center for the Study of Economic and Social Reality (Ceres), told BBC Mundo that the law was a direct blow to the Bolivian economy, which largely navigates informality.
“The sectors that came out to protest represent to a large part of the country’s demography and they are important from an economic point of view, because they handle a large amount of resources but mostly operate in the informal economy, so they feared being affected by the new legislation, ”he said.
After several weeks of lawsuits and the refusal of the central government to repeal the law, unions and or Social ganizations decided to take to the streets on November 8.
The protests had a national scope and were compared with those that ended with the departure of Evo Morales of power in 2019.
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