Bolivia’s Evo Morales is dealt a stinging rebuke:
While sporadic street battles erupted, voters in this divided country’s richest and second most-populous province appeared to approve a controversial measure Sunday that would make them autonomous from the leftist government of President Evo Morales.
According to an exit poll by the firm Captura Consulting, 82.7 percent of voters in Santa Cruz province supported the autonomy referendum, creating what promises to be a tense standoff between Morales and provincial leaders. . .
Morales has called the vote illegal, and the country’s top electoral court has said it will not certify the results because only the country’s Congress can call referendums. Morales has warned leaders of the eastern Bolivian province not to implement the autonomy statute, although he refused to send in troops to block Sunday’s vote. . .
Tension over the referendum exploded Sunday when autonomy opponents in the rural Santa Cruz towns of San Pedro, San Julian, Yapacani and Montero, as well as in the poor outskirts of Santa Cruz city, attacked polling sites, in some cases destroying and burning cardboard ballot boxes.
(Via Instapundit.)
Morales is a Hugo Chavez wannabe, but he evidently hasn’t learned to rig elections yet.
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