An alleged copy of the draft constitution approved Saturday is online here (hat tip to Sergio Molina Monasterios). I’ve only had a few brief moments to look it over (it’s 100 pages long, single spaced). But it’s not identical to the MAS draft constitution published in Bolivian newspapers on August 15, 2007.
However, it’s full of long, complex phrases that are—well, odd. For example, Article I declares that Bolivia is a “Unitary Social Plurinational Communitarian State of Law” (I’m not entirely sure what that means).
Article 7 declares that sovereignty resides in the “Bolivian people” (no problem)—and is exercised “directly” because it is “inalienable, indivisible, imprescriptible, and undelegatable.” The last part may be a problem. After all, a whole section of the document is later devoted to specifying how representatives—that is, “delegates”—are elected (meaning sovereignty isn’t exercised so “directly” after all). Such clear logical problems suggest that much of the flowery language is probably meaningless window dressing.
My first impression? This isn’t a constitution. It’s a philosophical jumble (in the postmodernist vein) written by someone who really likes using a thesaurus.
