Amidst bitter infighting and economic crisis, Bolivia’s left suffered a major defeat after nearly two decades of groundbreaking governance.
A nearly two-decade era of Indigenous-oriented governance and anti-neoliberal politics has come to an end in Bolivia. The Movement towards Socialism (MAS) government, which launched in the early 2000s with great hopes and optimism, is closing with disappointment and economic chaos.
In a reversal as drastic as the MAS’s landslide victory in
2005, three right-wing presidential candidates—from center-right to
far-right—won a combined 77
percent of the vote in the August 18 national election. Far from
commanding a majority in both the Congress and Senate as it has since 2006, the
MAS lost all its seats in
the legislature but one.
Rodrigo Paz Pereira of the Christian Democrats, along with
his popular vice-presidential candidate Edman Lara, defied opinion polls and
stunned observers by surging into the lead. They will advance to a runoff vote
against far-right candidate Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga on October 19.
Though Paz presented himself as a populist outsider
promoting “capitalism for all,” he is hardly new to politics. He is a sitting
senator representing the department of Tarija and the son of Jaime Paz Zamora,
a neoliberal president from 1989 to 1993, closely tied to Bolivia’s traditional
ruling elite. Yet it was his running mate, Edman Lara, who propelled Paz to
first place. Lara, 39, is a former police officer from rural Cochabamba
whose denunciations
of police corruption have earned him a large and enthusiastic
following on TikTok, Bolivia’s most popular
social media platform.
Disenchantment
with the MAS was palpable after the vote, when hundreds
gathered in the streets of La Paz to celebrate Paz and Lara’s unexpected
success. Zuleyka Pinto, a pharmaceutical chemist from El Alto who had
knocked on doors for their campaign for months, saw their ticket as
representing something new. “El MAS nunca más” (“the MAS never again”),
the crowd surrounding her chanted on election night.
“The MAS no longer guaranteed any possibility of surviving
economically, so people went to the other side,” says political analyst José
de la Fuente, a former employee of the MAS-controlled Cochabamba departmental
government. Indigenous and working-class voters “will never choose the
neoliberal right,” he explains, “so many of them opted for what they thought
was the middle.”
Other voters heeded a call by former President Evo Morales—barred
by term limits from running again—to spoil their ballots. Approximately 19 percent of
ballots were marked null, nearly six times above average. Yet not
all of these votes can be interpreted as support for Morales;
voting is mandatory in Bolivia for those under 70, and null and blank ballots
have long been used
as a form of resistance against traditional party politics. Even
so, with the number of null votes a whisker above perennial conservative
candidate Samuel Doria Medina, Morales triumphantly declared
victory, asserting
on the coca growers’ radio station, “if you add in the blank ballots
and the absentee vote, we’re in first place.”
Morales’s maneuvering eliminated any chance for 36-year-old
MAS Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez, who ran on an independent left
ticket. Once considered Morales’s political heir, Rodríguez garnered only 8.4 percent of the vote.
Rodríguez had been the hope of Bolivia’s left for months, but Morales’s fierce
antipathy towards him, his perceived indecisiveness in public appearances, and
an unpopular
vice-presidential pick all combined to sink his campaign.
With President Luis Arce deciding
not to run for re-election amid low approval ratings, former
Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo ran as the MAS candidate. In a
reflection of Arce and Rodriguez’s unpopularity, he scraped by with only 3.16
percent of the vote, just barely above
the 3 percent threshold required to maintain the party’s legal
status.
This fracturing
of the left echoed the infighting that has plagued the party since
2020, when Arce—Morales’s longtime finance minister—won a resounding
victory with 55 percent of the vote, one year after Morales was
ousted in a coup following
his unconstitutional bid for a fourth term. Morales always viewed
Arce as a placeholder, believing he could run again in 2025, and soon
clashed with Arce and his Vice President, David Choquehuanca, as they asserted
their independence.
Now facing
statutory rape charges, Morales has sought to destroy every Left rival,
including his former ministers and social movement allies. Morales even turned
on his closest ally: in 2023, when former Vice President Álvaro
García Linera proposed mediating the MAS leadership conflict,
Morales called him “my
newest enemy.”
“I would have been open to supporting the MAS if it had been
another person,” says Óscar Paco, a former Morales’s supporter who spoiled
his ballot this time, unconvinced by the contenders, including Rodríguez. “Evo
already had his moment—he should make space for young people.”
As people struggled to put
bread on the table—and with bread size
decreasing as prices rose—memories of MAS-era social welfare gains
faded from view.
Over two decades in power, the MAS party, which grew out of
Bolivia’s powerful social movements, achieved astounding
gains for poor people, particularly in its early years. Under
Morales, the country’s first Indigenous president, poverty was reduced
by half, natural gas contracts were boldly re-negotiated with powerful
multinationals, and rural infrastructure expanded dramatically. There was
hardly a village or low-income barrio that didn’t boast a new
school, road, or health clinic. These advances brought the MAS unprecedented
popularity and sustained its electoral dominance for 14 years.
But a steady concentration of power centered on Morales
weakened the country’s grassroots movements. Social movement leaders were
absorbed into the government, their loyalty ensured through perks such
as union
headquarters funded by the state, while critical social movement
voices were sidelined. “The MAS became distant from social organizations and
from ordinary people,” explains analyst de la Fuente. “It abandoned its agenda
and focused only on re-election.”
The MAS’s successes were not only material. For many
Bolivians, the most profound transformation was the decline of everyday racism.
During the 2019 protests in defense of Morales, a common refrain heard in the
streets was, “we don’t want to go back to
the racism of the past,” as a street vendor said through tears at
a rally in La Paz.
While the government’s investments proved successful at
stimulating the economy and lifting about 10 percent of the population into the
middle class, they were built on the extraction of the country’s abundant
natural resources—the same model in place since the Spanish invasion over 500
years ago. The boom-and-bust cycles that have plagued Bolivia ever since
brought the left-wing experiment to its knees. When commodity prices collapsed
after 2013, the government’s carefully accumulated reserves, among the highest
in Latin America, were drained as it maintained spending to shore up political
support.
Bolivia’s deeply entrenched patterns of extractivist
dependence were never shaken. If anything, more advanced
technologies and China’s surging demand for natural resources accelerated
exploitation, leaving ecological devastation in their wake. By 2024,
Bolivia ranked
second only to Brazil—a country eight times its size—in tropical
primary forest loss, much of it driven by soy expansion and cattle ranching in
the eastern lowlands.
Corruption scandals have further eroded trust in MAS
governance. One case diverted
millions of dollars earmarked for Indigenous development projects;
others have tainted Arce’s administration directly. “There’s been so much
corruption with Arce’s current government,” says Máxima Laura, a street vendor
in traditional Aymara dress and former MAS voter. “His
kids have profited,” she adds. Though Laura voted for Paz and Lara, she
is skeptical of their promises. “I don’t believe in politicians anymore. They
say one thing, but when the time comes, they change their mind.”
The rise of Paz and Lara, and Morales’s enduring influence,
leave the Bolivian left with few immediate paths forward. Since most political
parties in Bolivia revolve around individual leaders, MAS’s failure to renew
its leadership does not bode well for the future.
Morales’s top-down governing style still shapes political
culture at every level beyond the local. Bolivia’s Indigenous and working-class
unions have long relied on charismatic male leaders, corporatist structures,
and close ties between leader and base. As president, Morales famously
helicoptered into rural communities almost daily, launching public projects and
cultivating loyalty.
But the generational terrain has shifted. Most young
Bolivians, raised in relative middle-class
security thanks to the MAS’s own achievements, never experienced
the poverty or struggles that defined their parents’ lives. One consequence of
neoliberalism is that for many young people today, the primary focus is on
individual rather than collective well-being.
According to Iveth Saravia, who coordinates a children’s foundation in El
Alto, “a lot of young people talk about the need for new people, and for them
that new person is Tuto.” She sees it as ironic that “Tuto” Quiroga, who served
as vice-president under former dictator Hugo Banzer and briefly as president
more than two decades ago, is now embraced as fresh leadership. “It’s striking
how much historical memory has been lost,”
she observes.
This shift also shaped how Morales’s rhetoric was received.
His grand narratives of anti-imperial struggle increasingly rang hollow for
younger Bolivians, whose priorities centered on more immediate, everyday
concerns. The MAS discourse came to have “an ideological overemphasis,” notes
de la Fuente. For him, the future of the Bolivian left lies outside the
MAS: “Another left has to emerge, one that’s more mature and more savvy.” That
includes more seriously addressing environmental
issues, a cause the right has skillfully co-opted as
the MAS—like every government before it—prioritized economic development over
sustainability.
This is Bolivia’s great conundrum: how to improve living
standards through value-added industries, rather than perpetuating historic
patterns of resource extraction. It is, in many ways, the perennial dilemma of
the Global South.
Before formally gaining power, the resurgence of the right
is already taking shape through court rulings favoring key figures from the
2019 coup and subsequent massacres. In response to a rare Supreme Court order,
a judge annulled charges against former interim president Jeanine Áñez for her
role in the Sacaba and Senkata massacres, sending the case back to Congress for
approval before it reaches the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, another judge ordered
that former Santa Cruz governor Fernando Camacho be moved to house arrest and
that Marco Antonio Pumari, another central figure in the coup, be released from
preventive detention. “These politicized court decisions will inevitably pave
the way for more political violence like the massacres Áñez oversaw,” says Thomas
Becker, a human rights lawyer working with the families of 2019 massacre
victims.
Yet amid the crisis, one achievement stands out. In the year
of Bolivia’s bicentenary of independence from Spain, the only apparent winner
in the recent election is electoral democracy itself—no small feat in a nation
that has endured more coup d’etats than almost any other. This time around,
Arce appears
committed to a democratic transition, even at the cost of
dismantling his own party and the legacy of the self-styled “government
of social movements.”
But this is Bolivia: a country where social movements
have repeatedly risen—against
colonial powers, military dictatorships, and neoliberal governments alike—to
demand a more equitable and inclusive society. It may take time, but there is
little doubt they will rise again.
September 3, 2025
Linda Farthing is a journalist and
independent scholar who has co-authored four books on Bolivia. She has written
extensively on Latin America, including for the Guardian, the Nation, Al
Jazeera, and Ms. Magazine.
Benjamin Swift is a journalist based
in La Paz, Bolivia. His stories focus on climate change, the environment, and
LGBTQIA+ themes. Find more of his work at www.bswiftcreative.com
How
Bolivia is leading the global fight against climate disaster
(Both articles are among those republished on Z
Network and first published on my
blog.)
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