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LRB, Vol. 41 No. 24 · 19 December 2019
pages 14-15 | 2208 words
What next for Bolivia?
Tony Wood
The crisis that led to Evo Morales’s forced removal as president of
Bolivia began on the night of Monday, 21 October. Presidential and
parliamentary elections had been held on Sunday, and according to a
preliminary tally released by Bolivia’s electoral authorities that
evening, Morales had a lead of 8 per cent over Carlos Mesa, his nearest
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) suspended it in order to begin
releasing official counts. Under pressure from the 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 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.
Was this shift in the unofficial tallies itself evidence of fraud?
Morales’s Movimiento al 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
markedly late on in the count. Morales’s opponents, however, denounced
the whole election as illegitimate; Mesa was claiming fraud even before
the elections began. This 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 majorities in
2009 and 2014 and a period of sustained economic growth have made
Bolivia one of the success stories of the ‘Pink Tide’, the swing to the
left in Latin American politics over the last twenty years. Poverty and
inequality were drastically reduced, and steps were taken to undo
centuries of discrimination against the indigenous majority (around 62
per cent of the population), including the drawing up of a new
‘plurinational’ constitution, ratified by referendum in 2009, and a
massive expansion in education and employment for Quechua and Aymara
speakers.
In recent years, however, support for Morales among the middle classes
has dwindled, and there have been divisions within the popular movements
that first brought him to power. Some of the indigenous organisations
allied to the MAS were angered by the government’s commitment to the
extraction of natural resources; its plan to build a 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 was still by far the most popular party. On 21 February 2016, the
government was narrowly defeated (51 per cent to 49) in a referendum on
whether to amend the 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 effectively
overturned the referendum result by abolishing term limits – allowing
Morales to run again – on the absurd grounds that preventing anyone from
doing so 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 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 on election day.
The official result, announced on 25 October, gave Morales a lead of
10.57 per cent. But 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 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.
On 30 October, in the face of continued protests, the Morales government
agreed to an OAS audit of the election. This was a remarkable
concession: the OAS has a long record of furthering US and local elite
interests (most recently it led the failed charge for regime change in
Venezuela). The OAS had already inflamed the situation by 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 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 thorough but still could claim nothing more than ‘there cannot be
certainty over the margin of [Morales’s] victory’.) Nevertheless,
Morales agreed to the OAS’s recommendation that fresh elections be held.
Protests had continued to mount, however, and in the days preceding the
release of the report the police in several of 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
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 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.’
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 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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