It’s quite possible that the protests currently raging in Bolivia are just a foretaste of what’s to come in the coming months. In recent days, demonstrators have set up roadblocks in several regions of the country, there have been sometimes violent clashes with the police, and there are said to have been injuries and even deaths. The protests are primarily about the replacement of the Supreme Court. In Bolivia, its judges are chosen by the people in elections that should have taken place at the end of last year. The demonstrators are now demanding that these be held immediately.
But the actual conflict is different. It’s about a power struggle, on the one hand Luis Arce, the incumbent president of Bolivia, on the other hand Evo Morales, its former head of state. Morales led the country for almost a decade and a half. Now he wants to return to power. Whatever the cost.
Morales has long been an icon of the Latin American left. The politician comes from a humble background. He was born in the Altiplano, the Andean highlands, but spent part of his youth in Cochabamba, in the tropical lowlands. Many people there make their living from coca cultivation. Morales entered politics through her union. He became a member of parliament and won the presidential election in 2005, becoming the first indigenous candidate in his country’s history.
They were golden years: the Bolivian economy was booming, largely thanks to a global raw materials boom. Morales launched social programs, won the elections again in 2009, and ran again in 2014, although the constitution actually prohibits more than one re-election. But Morales won again – and from then on he worked to finally consolidate his stay in power.
The Constitutional Court paved the way for Morales to run again in the presidential elections
In 2016, he tried to use a referendum to remove the article limiting consecutive terms of office from the constitution. Without success. So Morales went to court. And in fact: in 2017, the judges at the Constitutional Court ruled that the ability to run in elections was a human right – and this was above the constitution.
And so Evo Morales ran again for the highest office in the state in 2019. The mood was already charged in advance and the counting was delayed. In the end, Morales declared himself the winner, but the opposition spoke of fraud. Protests broke out and election offices were set on fire. When parts of the police turned against him and the army leadership also turned away, Morales denounced a coup, but then he went into exile.
A right-wing interim government took office and new elections were not held until a year later, in October 2020. Morales was not allowed to run, but his party, the socialist MAS, won in the first round of voting with 55 percent of the vote. Shortly afterwards, Morales returned to Bolivia. “We have restored our democracy without violence and we have retaken our homeland,” he declared with great pathos in front of cheering supporters. And even back then, no one actually doubted that Morales ultimately wanted to go back to the presidential palace. Only someone else was already sitting there: Luis Arce.
Luis Arce and Evo Morales were once confidants, but now they are enemies to the death
Arce is an economist, he also belongs to the MAS party, and he was finance and economics minister under Morales for a long time. He was considered a confidant of the ex-president, which is why he was nominated as a candidate in the 2020 elections. But now both men are enemies to the death. Morales accuses Arce of betraying the party’s ideals. In parliament he schemes against Arce’s allies, and he even accused his son of being involved in illegal deals with natural gas and lithium.
Arce, in turn, has removed people close to Morales from the ministries. And the fact that his government has now delayed the election of the judges of the Supreme Court with a regulatory review process is probably no coincidence: Shortly afterwards, they reversed the 2017 ruling, which had once made it possible for Morales to do so by citing human rights ran again in the 2019 elections. Morales then spoke of the “complicity of some judges” and a “dark plan” by the Arce government. He called on his followers to “defend” him. Protests promptly broke out.
They are hitting Bolivia at an inopportune time: important natural gas exports are declining, foreign exchange is becoming scarce, the country is sliding towards a crisis, while at the same time the political turf wars are becoming increasingly violent. Elections are not scheduled to take place in the South American country until 2025. The path to them, that much is clear, will be difficult and rocky.