PhD. in Constitutional and Administrative Law

In legal theory, the law should be the vehicle for the realization of the Rule of Law; however, Bolivian institutional practice demonstrates that both concepts live in a permanent conflict. While the right embodies the system of guarantees, proportionality, and the limits to power, the law in Bolivia has been reduced to a tool of selective coercion, subordinated to the political conjuncture, to the arbitrary application by judges, prosecutors, magistrates, and to the blackmail of corporate groups. This fracture has consolidated a regime where norms abound, but arbitrariness and the exclusion of the just prevail.

In labor, bodily attachment and the supremacy of union pressure, the crudest example of the victory of a regressive law over a fundamental right is found in labor jurisdiction. In Bolivia, detention for employer debts (bodily attachment for social benefits) remains in force, a figure sustained by pre-constitutional norms of totalitarian origins such as the decree-law of the Labor Procedural Code of 1979 and shielded by unconventional constitutional jurisprudence.

This practice frontally violates Article 7.7 of the American Convention on Human Rights (Pact of San José, Costa Rica), which is part of the Bolivian constitutional block, established in Arts. 410 and 256 of the Constitution, and expressly prohibits detention for debt, with the sole exception of failure to fulfill family alimony duties.........

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