Bolivia holds a divisive popular vote for its top judges, offering lessons for the region

LA PAZ, Bolivia — Campaigning for Sunday's judicial election may be strictly forbidden, but look closer on the streets of Bolivia's capital, La Paz, and you'll find that some candidates have sneakily plastered their faces on packs of corn puffs and others have slipped subtle slogans into official voting manuals.

After all, it's a popular vote, and even a bit of PR can work wonders when voters know nothing about the dozens of names on their sprawling ballot papers.

Bolivia is the only country in the world that holds elections for top judicial posts. Soon Mexico will, too, after former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador pushed through a highly contentious overhaul of the justice system in the face of mass protests.

As Bolivia's ex-President Evo Morales did when remaking the judiciary in 2009, López Obrador has championed the overhaul as a way to purge the corrupt elite and boost democracy.

But apathetic Bolivian voters say the elections have had the opposite effect, turning their courts from neutral arbiters into political prizes.

''I'll flip a coin,'' said 25-year-old architecture student Marisol Nogales when asked how she would vote on Sunday.

It's never easy to find supporters of Bolivia's system of electing judges, which, over a decade ago, replaced a nomination system rooted in qualifications and training.

Across the world, academics, investors and judges have warned that judicial elections can cement the dominance of the ruling party and gut checks and balances. And across Latin America, from El Salvador to Honduras, experts have characterized politicized judiciaries as profound threats to democracy.

In Bolivia, even senior judicial officials struggle to sound positive when asked to defend the election.

''It should be a calm, easy and simple process, but it has become very litigious, very controversial,'' Francisco Vargas, the vice president of Bolivia's electoral tribunal, told The Associated Press from the court in central La Paz.

This year in Bolivia, experts find it even harder than usual to praise the system. With the posts up for grabs every six years, Sunday's vote was supposed to take place in late 2023.

But as the deadline approached last year, the Constitutional Court — packed with allies of President Luis Arce — suddenly intervened to push the vote back a year, escalating his power struggle with his former mentor and current rival, Morales, over who will lead their long-dominant leftist party into Bolivia's 2025 presidential election.

Both understand that whoever wins over the Constitutional Court ensures their own political survival.

Arce cited the paralysis of their divided party in justifying the vote's delay. Morales' loyalists, who hold a majority in Congress and would have determined the shortlist of judicial candidates, accused Arce of illegally extending the mandates of friendly judges for fear of losing influence over the courts.

''What happened was disorder, the kind that can lead us to a greater conflict,'' said Iván Lima, the former Minister of Justice.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights criticized the postponement of elections, raising alarm about its ''potential to undermine the effective functioning of the Bolivian justice system.''

Now, after many attempts to derail and further delay the vote, it is finally moving ahead Sunday. But there's a wrinkle: It's a partial election. Only four out of nine seats on the powerful Constitutional Court are up for grabs. The other five — the majority of sitting judges, as it happens — will stay in their posts.

''The judges have turned the Constitutional Court into a sort of super power,'' said Bolivian political analyst Paul Coca.

Sunday marks the third time that Bolivia has held judicial elections. If the past two rounds under then-President Morales, in 2011 and 2017, are any indication, turnout will be low. Both times, the majority of Bolivians, outraged or simply baffled by the notion of endorsing unknown judges pre-selected by Morales' allies with little transparency, voted null or blank.

Critics questioned the legitimacy of the elected judges. But they nonetheless shaped the evolution of Bolivian democracy.

In 2016, Morales asked Bolivians in a legally binding referendum to decide whether to let him run for a fourth term, in defiance of a two-term limit established in the 2009 Constitution he had backed.

When he didn't get the answer he wanted — a slim majority voted ''no'' — his party found a workaround through the pliant Constitutional Court, where judges ruled that to deny Morales another term as president would be to violate his human rights.

''This was his major mistake,'' said Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court.

It was Morales' decision to run again in 2019 that brought a precipitous end to his remarkable 14-year tenure and ushered in a surreal parade of crises. As allegations of electoral fraud sent angry crowds into the streets, Morales resigned under pressure from the military and went into exile.

Five years after coming under fire for allegedly manipulating the courts, Morales now finds himself on the receiving end of the judiciary he overhauled.

''First Evo's party used the court to challenge the referendum's results to promote another candidacy. Then Arce's administration colluded with the same Constitutional Court to delay and reduce judicial elections to favor the self-prorogated judges, who run politics through judicial review,'' Veltzé said.

Last year, the Constitutional Court endorsed a controversial resolution from the northeastern province of Beni that the government insists blocks Morales from running for president in 2025.

Last October, a prosecutor in Bolivia's southern province of Tarija issued an arrest warrant for Morales after reviving a 2016 statutory rape case against him.

And earlier this week, the country's top criminal court swiftly extradited Morales' former anti-drug chief to stand trial in the United Staes on charges of cocaine trafficking, despite criticism from legal experts unsatisfied by the court's review of evidence.

''They've been trying to destroy me morally, legally and politically,'' Morales told the AP about the legal cases against him.

Vargas, the tribunal's vice president, is quick to insist that Bolivia is not some kind of strange outlier for electing judges by popular vote. The U.S., Switzerland and Japan also hold judicial elections. But, he conceded, not in such a sweeping way as Bolivia does, or as Mexico will.

Mexico's new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, bracing for fallout from the overhaul she inherited, is keen to see how Bolivia's vote plays out. The National Electoral Institute, the Mexican voting authority, sent a delegation to observe the process in La Paz this weekend, Vargas said.

When asked whether he would recommend that Mexico follow Bolivia's example, Vargas let out a sharp laugh.

''If you want me to tell you my personal opinion,'' he said, ''it might cause me some problems."