A BOLIVIAN court ruling that the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) will not be banned from standing in this month’s election does not negate the threat of democracy being crushed again, a Bolivian democracy campaigner says.

Miriam Amancay Colque of the Bartolina Sisa Resistance said the court’s decision on Monday was “very important and testimony to the strength of the MAS,” but “let us remember that many MAS candidates to the plurinational legislative assembly have been disqualified with unjustified excuses. [Former president] Evo Morales is one of them. Former foreign minister Diego Pary is another.

And she pointed to violence right outside the court — right-wing thugs set upon MAS supporters waiting to hear the verdict with baseball bats — as evidence that there is no guarantee the election will be allowed to proceed smoothly.

“The court in La Paz rejected the request of far-right senator Carmen Eva Gonzales to annul the MAS’s participation” (based on its presidential candidate Luis Arce allegedly breaching electoral rules by speaking about polling in a restricted period).

But she noted that Interior Minister Arturo Murillo, who vowed after the military overthrew Mr Morales last November that the country’s first indigenous president would spend “the rest of his life behind bars,” had just returned from the United States to declare that “the police and the army are ready to act in defence of democracy at any cost.” She said that rightwingers were stockpiling weapons and “we fear a continuous attack by ultra-rightist fascist forces to crush our constitutional right to elect the next president.”

And the electoral court, whose staff include USAid employees and coup President Jeanine Anez’s own son, had already “purged more than 51,000 Bolivian citizens abroad from the electoral roll,” she noted.

Last week the Morning Star exposed contingency plans drawn up by right-wing paramilitary groups to prevent the MAS winning the election as it did last year — before being deposed by the army.

These included proposals to set “false flag” bomb scares at hotels where election monitors are due to stay that could then be blamed on the MAS and used as an excuse to impose a state of emergency, annul the election result or even cancel the vote.