Tony Wood · What next for Bolivia? · LRB 19 December 2019 https://www.lrb.co.

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What next for Bolivia?

Tony Wood

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Tony Wood is
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The crisis that led to Evo Morales’s forced removal as president of Bolivia began on the
In Moscow night of Monday, 21 October. Presidential and parliamentary elections had been held
In Moscow
on Sunday, and according to a preliminary tally released by Bolivia’s electoral
Diary authorities that evening, Morales had a lead of 8 per cent over Carlos Mesa, his nearest
Russia’s Oppositions rival – not quite enough to avoid a run-off. This was an unofficial count, based on 84
per cent of total ballots cast, and on Monday the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE)
Fue el estado
suspended it in order to begin releasing official counts. Under pressure from the
Elmer Mendoza
Organisation of American States, however, the TSE resumed the unofficial count, and
late on Monday released a revised tally. This time it was based on 95 per cent of ballots
RELATED ARTICLES and showed that Morales’s lead was just over 10 per cent. If confirmed, that would have
been enough to hand him a fourth consecutive presidential term.
7 FEBRUARY 2019

Perry Anderson Was this shift in the unofficial tallies itself evidence of fraud? Morales’s Movimiento al
Bolsonaro’s Brazil Socialismo (MAS) tends to have more supporters in rural areas than Bolivia’s other
parties, so it wouldn’t be sociologically or statistically surprising for its tally to improve
21 APRIL 2016
markedly late on in the count. Morales’s opponents, however, denounced the whole
Perry Anderson election as illegitimate; Mesa was claiming fraud even before the elections began. This
Crisis in Brazil wasn’t surprising either: Bolivia’s elites have been implacable in their opposition to
Morales since he first took office with a landslide victory in 2005. But healthy MAS
31 MARCH 2011 majorities in 2009 and 2014 and a period of sustained economic growth have made
Perry Anderson Bolivia one of the success stories of the ‘Pink Tide’, the swing to the left in Latin
Lula’s Brazil American politics over the last twenty years. Poverty and inequality were drastically
reduced, and steps were taken to undo centuries of discrimination against the
22 OCTOBER 2009 indigenous majority (around 62 per cent of the population), including the drawing up
Greg Grandin of a new ‘plurinational’ constitution, ratified by referendum in 2009, and a massive
Latin America Pulls Away expansion in education and employment for Quechua and Aymara speakers.

In recent years, however, support for Morales among the middle classes has dwindled,

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1 NOVEMBER 2007 and there have been divisions within the popular movements that first brought him to
Geoffrey Hawthorn power. Some of the indigenous organisations allied to the MAS were angered by the
The Unstoppable Hugo government’s commitment to the extraction of natural resources; its plan to build a
Chávez road through the Isiboro-Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park was a
flashpoint in 2011 and again in 2017. Yet he retained substantial support, and the MAS
14 DECEMBER 2006 was still by far the most popular party. On 21 February 2016, the government was
Lorna Scott Fox narrowly defeated (51 per cent to 49) in a referendum on whether to amend the
Return to Santiago constitution to allow Morales to run for a fourth term. This was the opposition’s first
nationwide electoral victory against MAS. In 2017, Bolivia’s constitutional court
5 OCTOBER 2006 effectively overturned the referendum result by abolishing term limits – allowing
Michael Taussig Morales to run again – on the absurd grounds that preventing anyone from doing so
In Colombia was an infringement of their human rights. At the time, many on the Bolivian left
denounced this as a terrible blunder. It certainly strengthened the hand of MAS’s
opponents and lost Morales more middle-class voters. Even so, a string of polls
RELATED CATEGORIES conducted in the run-up to the 2019 elections gave Morales a plurality of the vote, with
an average 12-point lead over Mesa. The question was whether the lead would hold up
Politics and economics,
on election day.
Political systems,
Corruption, Elections,
The official result, announced on 25 October, gave Morales a lead of 10.57 per cent. But
Americas, South America
by this time large protests had already erupted across Bolivia, drawing people from a
range of social groups. Crowds stormed the offices of the electoral authorities in some
areas, forcing a suspension of the official count in La Paz, Cochabamba, Chuquisaca,
Potosí, Oruro and Beni; in Potosí, Pando and Tarija they set TSE offices on fire,
destroying all the ballots. The opposition – spearheaded not by the defeated Mesa, but
by hard-right groups led by the Catholic conservative Luis Fernando Camacho – wasn’t
Upcoming Events demanding a recount or a second round: it was gunning for Morales’s removal. MAS
supporters also took to the streets in defence of Morales.
Christmas Late
Shopping Evening On 30 October, in the face of continued protests, the Morales government agreed to an
#4 - with Kate OAS audit of the election. This was a remarkable concession: the OAS has a long record
Young of furthering US and local elite interests (most recently it led the failed charge for
11 December regime change in Venezuela). The OAS had already inflamed the situation by
at 6 p.m. expressing ‘deep concern’ about the unofficial tallies and calling for a run-off vote. Its
initial report, released on 10 November, went much further, impugning the entire
BOOK TICKETS electoral process. It referred to a string of ‘irregularities’ – poor handling of server
security, some anomalous tallies – though without providing any evidence that these
would have affected the outcome. (The final report, released on 7 December, was more
Christmas Late
thorough but still could claim nothing more than ‘there cannot be certainty over the
Shopping Evening
margin of [Morales’s] victory’.) Nevertheless, Morales agreed to the OAS’s
#5
recommendation that fresh elections be held. Protests had continued to mount,
19 December
however, and in the days preceding the release of the report the police in several of
at 6 p.m.
Bolivia’s departments had gone over to the opposition. Having lost the police, Morales
soon also lost the support of key allies in the trade unions, the Central Obrera
BOOK TICKETS
Boliviana, and then the army. On the afternoon of 10 November, Williams Kaliman, the
head of the armed forces – a presidential appointment – ‘suggested’ that Morales
View all Upcoming Events resign. Two days later, Morales and his vice president, Alvaro García Linera, fled into
exile in Mexico after anti-MAS protesters looted their houses and torched those of
other MAS officials.

By any sensible definition, what took place in Bolivia on 10 November was a coup:
Morales was forced out of the country at the prompting of the army, two months before
the end of his third presidential term. What happened next confirmed that his
opponents wanted not just to suspend constitutional democracy but to strangle it. On
12 November, Jeanine Añez, an ultra-conservative Catholic senator from Beni, declared
herself president. Her party, the Movimiento Democrático Social, had scored 4 per cent
in the election. The two people in line to replace Morales and his vice-president, the
heads of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, had both resigned in protest, leaving the
succession unclear at best; but the vote to install Añez as head of the Senate, and then
as interim president, was conducted without a quorum in either house – in part
because key MAS deputies were physically prevented from entering. The White House
rushed out a statement saying: ‘Morales’s departure preserves democracy.’

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Añez moved swiftly to consolidate her unconstitutional position. On 13 November she

fired Kaliman and installed a new army high command, and the following day she
selected a new cabinet. It includes a number of hard-right conservatives: Camacho’s
lawyer, Jerjes Justiniano Atalá, now secretary of the presidency; the interior minister,
Arturo Murillo, who has vowed to ‘hunt down’ specific MAS officials ‘like animals’; the
communications minister, Roxana Lizárraga, who has threatened Bolivian and foreign
journalists reporting on the situation with prosecution for ‘sedition’; and the foreign
secretary, Karen Longaric, who has vowed to send Morales to The Hague for crimes
against humanity.

Añez’s seizure of power and the composition of her cabinet point to the most significant
and alarming fact about the Bolivian crisis: while the 20 October election was the
trigger, it is not Mesa’s centre-right coalition that has benefited from Morales’s
removal, but the hard right, who aggressively stoked the protests and who seized
control once Morales was removed. Bolivia’s new interim leaders combine two varieties
of revanchism: a religious conservatism, bringing together evangelicals and Catholics,
that is gaining ground across Latin America, and a reassertion of the racial and class
privileges of Bolivia’s traditional elites. In sharp contrast to the Morales
administration, the new cabinet initially had zero indigenous members. Photographs
show the majority of them making the sign of the cross at the swearing-in ceremony.
On the day of the coup, Camacho strode into the presidential palace carrying a Bible
and a rosary; Añez, who in 2013 tweeted that indigenous rituals were ‘satanic’ (she has
since deleted that tweet, along with another mocking indigenous people who wear
shoes as inauthentic), carried an ostentatiously large Bible on her first appearance as
president. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, many policemen ripped the
chequered-rainbow wiphala, the flag of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples, from their
uniforms. The wiphala was recognised under the 2009 constitution as an official
national symbol. Reversing the gains made by the indigenous majority under Morales –
appealing to whites and mestizos resentful of the disruption of age-old racial
hierarchies – is central to the right’s agenda.

Camacho, who brands himself ‘Macho Camacho’, is the figure in whom these ugly
tendencies converge. He began his political career in the early 2000s as the leader of a
far-right youth group in his native Santa Cruz, the heartland of Bolivia’s landed elite
and a cradle of opposition to MAS. Earlier this year, he was elected head of the Civic
Committee of Santa Cruz, a body that for decades has co-ordinated elite interests in
Bolivia’s eastern lowlands and had close ties with the country’s military dictatorships in
the 1960s and 1970s. In some respects, he is a similar figure to Venezuela’s Juan
Guaidó, a student leader from the far-right fringe of the conservative opposition
suddenly elevated to lead it; though Camacho is also clearly modelling himself on Jair
Bolsonaro, in the hope of emulating his march to the presidency.

What next for Bolivia? In the days following Morales’s departure, MAS’s congressional
deputies began to regroup, and entered negotiations with the Añez government over
new elections. According to a law passed with MAS support on 24 November, new
electoral authorities must be appointed within a month, and elections held within 120
days of that, most likely in early March. The same law stipulates that neither Morales
nor García Linera can run; several people are currently being mooted as possible MAS
candidates. Mesa has confirmed he will run again, as has Chi Hyun Chung, a Korean-
born hard-right evangelical pastor who scored a surprising 9 per cent in the October
presidential vote. Camacho, too, has announced his candidacy. It’s hard to say how this
divided field will fare over the coming weeks: with Morales out of the picture, will
Camacho rise in the polls, as Bolsonaro did once Lula was barred from running in
Brazil? Or will the MAS be able to rally its supporters around a new candidate? Will the
far right be able to convert its non-constitutional advantage into legitimate power, or
will the left regain its democratic mandate?

These were not the alternatives anyone in Bolivia asked for or anticipated on 20

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October. The situation is being watched nervously across Latin America: the Bolivian
crisis may represent a tipping point for the region as a whole. The original momentum
of the Pink Tide has ebbed away, and the battle underway now is over what will succeed
it. The achievements of the Pink Tide governments have been impressive, but they have
also had numerous shortcomings, and any continuation of their redistributive policies
would require tackling these – not least the dependence on environmentally
destructive commodities (oil, gas, metals, soya and so on). A sharp turn to the right
would bring a highly reactionary social agenda, harsh economic measures, and a
massive increase in the use of force against those who resist.

There can be no doubt that the right is willing to spill blood to get its way: since the
October elections, at least thirty people have been killed and more than seven hundred
injured by the Bolivian security forces, who have proved only too willing to crack down
on protests against the Añez government. Yet the very need for this repression points to
an upsurge of popular opposition to the new government. Recent weeks have brought
recurrent street demonstrations and blockades of major roads in El Alto, La Paz’s twin
city, originally a bastion of MAS support. These tactics represent a rerun of those used
to bring the Bolivian government to its knees in 2003, prompting the then president,
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, to flee to Miami. (As it happens his vice president, who
then served as interim president, was Carlos Mesa.) These radical social movements
were crucial to Morales’s rise, and while they may have lost some of their vibrancy
during the MAS’s time in power, they may be quick to recover it if faced with a hard-
right government. The MAS itself is far from a spent force, but its supporters and
candidates are currently being subjected to intimidation and repression. Community
radio stations and media outlets supportive of the MAS have been shut down. It’s
already clear the next round of elections will be neither free nor fair.

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