Bolivians head to the polls on Sunday amid a spiraling economic crisis and the total collapse of the Movement Toward Socialism. A right-wing victory could bring neoliberal austerity back to Bolivia, unleashing a new cycle of social unrest.
As Bolivia celebrated its two hundredth year of independence last week, the mood on the streets and in the countryside was far from jubilant.
National elections take place on Sunday, and Bolivia is confronting a spiraling economic crisis and the total collapse of the left-wing Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) that has been in power for the past two decades.
It looks more than likely that the right wing will win power, with the latest polls putting far-right Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga in the lead at 24.5 percent and center-right Samuel Doria Medina in a close second at 23.6 percent. Bolivia now stands on the brink of a new historic cycle without the MAS in power.
The Collapse of the Left
On a dusty roadside in the windswept Altiplano village of Sullkatiti, two Aymara elders discuss the recent road blockades led by supporters of former president Evo Morales. The conversation switches to Spanish, and we all discuss the upcoming elections. “I used to like Evo, but these blockades are very bad. Who can we vote for here?” the woman asks despondently.
The MAS, led by Morales since 2005, presided over massive social transformations, including the newfound political visibility of Bolivia’s indigenous movements and a dramatic reduction in poverty and social inequality in one of Latin America’s poorest countries. But in recent years, charges of corruption and the cooptation of social movements have blighted the party, in addition to a high-profile struggle over its leadership.
“The decline of the MAS cannot be understood without recognizing the disconnect between social movements and their own bases,” Roger Adan Chambi, a lawyer and Aymara researcher explains. “The social movement has ceased to be a movement and has become just another arm of power, often blinded by cronyism and the allocation of positions.”
For the past two years, the MAS party bases have been engulfed in bitter and prolonged divisions between “Evista” and “Arcista” factions. The former supports Morales and the latter the current president, Luis Arce, whom Morales had nominated as his successor. The dispute has led to political deadlock, with Evista representatives blocking the Arce administration’s legislation related to financial spending, worsening the economic picture.
In the run-up to the elections, Evistas embarked on a series of blockades, primarily in the Evista heartland of tropical Cochabamba, which impeded the movement of vehicles and food around the country. Morales is unable to run in the elections both because he does not have an official party to run under and because he is prohibited by constitutional term limits that prevent indefinite reelection.
Blockade clashes culminated in June in a violent standoff in the town of Llallagua, a strategic urban mining center with connections to the coca-growing Chapare area and to the ayllus (indigenous societies) of the Norte de Potosi. Three police officers and a campesino were killed in scuffles as Evista blockaders protested the electoral authority’s rejection of Morales’s candidacy. Amid a growing public backlash against the blockades, Arce’s decision to send in special police units to quell the protest marked a turning point.
The internal collapse of the MAS raises poignant questions about the future of indigenous movements within the plurinational state. Forty-one percent of Bolivia’s population is indigenous, the second highest in Latin America, with a five-hundred-year history of marginalization and racialized oppression. Morales, who governed between 2005 and 2019, was the first indigenous president of Bolivia, and the MAS has historically been constituted principally by indigenous and peasant movements.
“MAS’s success, and also its greatest mistake,” Chambi observes, “was centering an entire political project around a single figure: Evo Morales. This decline weakens the indigenous movement as it has been articulated in recent years, but it also opens the possibility of rethinking an indigenous political project outside of partisan and caudillo tutelage.”
Dollars, Depression, and Debt
As Bolivians take to the polls, the burning issue is the economic crisis. Inflation is running at over 20 percent, prices for basic goods have mushroomed, and fiscal deficit now exceeds 12 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, in the cities, trucks snake around the streets in days-long lines outside gas stations because of chronic shortages.
Given its dwindling gas and oil reserves, Bolivia imports most of its fuel and subsidizes the cost, but with a fiscal squeeze it cannot cover both debt repayments and the subsidies. Bolivia allocated more than $3 billion in gas subsidies last year. Its external debt stood at $13.3 billion at the end of 2024, with foreign exchange reserves at an unprecedented low.
The lack of dollars arises from vastly decreased exports of hydrocarbons, the profits from which were the basis of the MAS’s redistributive economic agenda over the past two decades. The informal rate of dollar exchange is now around fifteen bolivianos to the dollar, more than double the official rate of 6.97.
New Horizons of Extractivism
The electoral campaigns from across the spectrum are oriented around the question of the economy and the solution proposed by all is clear: extractivism. Huáscar Salazar Lohman, an economist at Bolivia’s Centro de Estudios Populares (CEESP), explains,
The electoral process has exposed two underlying problems facing present-day Bolivia. On the one hand, the profound disarticulation of the popular movement, which has lost its historical capacity to set the political agenda and incorporate its demands into the public electoral debate, something that the disintegration of the MAS has only worsened by further fragmenting its organizational bases.
On the other hand, in the face of a growing economic crisis, the only solution emerging from across the political spectrum — both from the traditional right (which appears likely to win the presidency without major complications) and from those who defend supposedly leftist banners — is the exacerbation of an extractive capitalism focused on lithium, new hydrocarbon exploration, and, especially, the deepening of the agro-industrial and mining model.
In the Andes, the pishtaco is a mythic figure that rises to extract the fat from its indigenous victims. Some identify far-right candidate Tuto, who is topping the polls with a hard-line austerity agenda, as such a figure. Representing the interests of US capital and Bolivia’s traditional elites, he previously served one year as president from 2000 to 2001 and was vice president from 1997 to 2001 in the government of ex-dictator Hugo Banzer. His proposals include spending cuts to reduce the fiscal deficit and plans to stabilize the dollar exchange rate, financed by a $12 billion international rescue program from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
In a packed Tuto rally in the working-class Villa Adela neighborhood of El Alto, an Aymara and leftist stronghold, the sight of cholitas (urban indigenous women) wearing Tuto campaign swag is a peculiar vision given the politician has certainly been no friend to urban-working-class or indigenous movements. “They are all thieves here,” mutters the lady serving fideo by the side of the road. Tuto’s closing campaign party goes on into the small hours of the night, a sign of possible dealignment in the post-MAS era.
Meanwhile Medina has fashioned himself as the moderate candidate, describing himself as the “extreme center.” But as the owner of a hotel chain and Bolivia’s Burger King franchise, he upholds the interests of big business, and he previously served in the neoliberal government of Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada. He has pledged to bring dollars to Bolivia in one hundred days and adopt measures including shrinking the state and removing subsidies.
Amid widespread criticism of his handling of the economic crisis, the current MAS president, Arce, is not running in the elections. Instead Santa Cruz lawyer Eduardo del Castillo is running as MAS’s candidate, a moderate presence in the party who served as minister of government under Arce and commands little support from the social movements that formed the MAS’s base. He has performed well in the TV debates but is polling extremely low at just 1.83 percent amid broad disillusionment with the ruling party. If he fails to win 3 percent of the vote, the MAS will be forced to dissolve under Bolivian electoral regulations — the nail in the coffin for the once leading light of the Latin American left.
Splitting from the MAS, his former party, to run with Alianza Popular is thirty-six-year-old Andrónico Rodríguez, the coca-growers union leader, Morales’s former protégé, and current president of the Senate. He is the leading leftist candidate, but lukewarm performances in the television debates and his enduring ties to former ally Morales have hampered his campaign, and he is polling at a distant fifth place, with 8.46 percent of the vote.
Moreover, his choice of vice president, Mariana Prado, has garnered criticism from social movements such as cooperative miners and the peasant union confederation, who believe she lacks popular legitimacy. Feminists have also denounced Prado, who in 2018 testified as a character witness for a wealthy La Paz man who was convicted of killing his girlfriend.
He can count on the support of the rural Chapare sector, but whether he can make a broader appeal to the rural masses and the urban working class remains unclear. Cooperative miners, a powerful but controversial sector, have also nonetheless pledged support for Rodríguez. Frequently criticized by indigenous and environmental groups as “depredadores de la naturaleza” (destroyers of nature), the cooperative miners have been involved in the expansion of (illegal) gold mining in Bolivia together with transnational capital, particularly Chinese and Colombian interests.
But the final outcome of the election is hard to predict given that a large sector looks set to cast null votes after Morales urged his supporters in tropical Cochabamba to do so in protest of his exclusion. Enough null votes could bolster Evista calls to dismiss the outcome of the elections as illegitimate.
Morales undoubtedly retains enduring loyalty from large sections of the rural population in recognition of the positive transformations he initiated and his strong political positions that reflect their interests. But his failure to mobilize the bases beyond the Chapare coca-growers reflects the lack of wider enthusiasm for an electoral project with him at the helm. The CSUTCB, the powerful peasant union confederation that was the cornerstone of the MAS, pledged its support for Rodríguez.
Where Next for Bolivia’s Social Movements?
It is possible that the elections and their aftermath could spark a new wave of social unrest as significant as the coup of 2019, following the elections of that year, in which Morales was ousted by right-wing forces. In a recent speech, Arce declared that these events as well as recent strife “demonstrate that the security and defense of the state are not only defined by external threats but also by internal factors of political conspiracy and institutional disruption.”
To avoid a second round of voting, a candidate must secure more than 40 percent of the vote and a lead of at least 10 percentage points. If polls are correct, it is probable that no candidate will win outright in the elections this weekend, and we can expect a runoff on October 19.
Beyond the elections, if the right seizes power, economic restructuring looks inevitable. Loans from the IMF and the World Bank could entail harsh economic measures that stir memories of the brutal neoliberal adjustment years of the 1980s. The removal of fuel and food subsidies, which Bolivia’s poorest depend upon, would likely unleash a new cycle of social upheaval. Whatever the results next week, it is clear that the golden era of the MAS has ended in bitter discord, and the plurinational state faces a bleak future.
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