Not all of Bolivia subscribed to the rest of the world’s desire for Barack Obama to be elected as president. The secondary school students at the Santa Cruz Cooperative School preferred McCain-Palin.
As Aka Lusi wrote:
I figure most kids vote their parent’s politics, and most of our parents belong to the anti-Evo Morales crew. Evo’s party translates to “Movement towards Socialism.” Obama was seen as wanting to make the US socialist…and for some reason a lot of our students were sure that Obama wanted to be friends with Chavez in Venezuela. I’m really not sure if had any specific statement on that, but I figure it was based on his whole idea that we should engage our friends as well as our enemies. Also, it’s strongly Roman Catholic, old school, which means no abortion, no gay rights, strict definition of marriage, etc.
On the other hand, we did have some kids make informed decisions. One kid told me he was going to vote for McCain, then asked me who I was going to vote for, and why. A few days later he came back a few days later and said he picked Obama because of what I told him about the environment, and that he still didn’t like abortion but that it wasn’t his say. 10th grader. Great kid. Oh, and the teachers were overwhelmingly in Obama’s camp, too…I think 21-3 or something (it’s in another picture).
Unfortunately, I heard some pretty racist comments by some Bolivian residents in the U.S. that they would never vote for a black person, and subscribing to some of the smear campaigns that were being waged by the Republicans (i.e. that he was a Muslim, that he was a socialist, etc.)
Photo by Aka Lusi and used under a Creative Commons license