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A bust of Evo Morales was removed this Thursday from the lobby of the old Legislative Palace in La Paz, in accordance with a resolution approved by the Bolivian Senate on March 11 with more than two-thirds of the votes, which ordered its definitive extraction and explicitly prohibited its reinstatement in any space of the Legislative.
The measure was driven by Senator Claudia Mallón, from the APB-Súmate party, a conservative-liberal party, who argued that Parliament must restore its institutional integrity and eliminate the cult of personality.
According to the report from EFE, the resolution instructed that the removal be carried out within a maximum period of 72 hours.
"The Legislative Assembly must regain its institutional integrity; it is the home of democracy. There should never again be a cult to any leader, whether from the left, the right, or the center. Here must be the patriotic symbols, our national coat of arms, our flag of Bolivia," declared Mallón in the lobby of the Legislative Assembly.
The bust had been installed between 2011 and 2012, during the government of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), the party of Evo Morales. It bore a plaque identifying it as the "First Constitutional President of the Plurinational State," with the inscription "Governing by obeying the people, yesterday, today, and always."
Senator Wanda Medrano added that, according to current regulations, a bust cannot correspond to a living person, and she described the removal as "a precedent for the country."
Mallón went further by referring to Morales' supporters who demanded the sculpture: "Those who believe that this bust belongs to them can claim it, take it to their backyards, or to the refuge of a fugitive from justice like Evo Morales."
Morales, who has been residing in the Tropics of Cochabamba since October 2024 to evade a warrant issued by the Tarija Prosecutor's Office, reacted by describing the measure as "persecution and humiliation" with a "colonial mindset."
The indigenous leader, a major ally of the Cuban regime, faces a charge from the Prosecutor's Office of Tarija for aggravated human trafficking, filed last October. He is accused of having maintained a relationship with a minor with whom he allegedly had a child in 2016, during his presidency.
Justice has not yet set a date for the trial. The police have also not carried out the order to arrest him.
The removal of the bust follows the historic defeat of the MAS in the 2025 general elections in Bolivia, where the Christian Democratic Party won the presidency with 54.5% of the votes in the runoff in October.
Morales' party, which dominated the Parliament for years with an absolute majority, now has only two deputies in the current legislature, a collapse that made possible the approval of a resolution that the then-opposition had demanded for years.
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