Image by Lesly Derksen.

Preliminary results of first-round voting for president of Bolivia on August 17 determined that centrist Rodrigo Paz, with 32.1% of the vote, and right-winger Jorge Tuto Quiroga, with 26.9%, will advance to second-round voting on October 19. Not making the cut were conservative billionaire politician Samuel Doria Medina, who gained 20%; leftist Andrónico Rodríguez with 8.1 %, and Eduardo del Castillo, candidate of the Movement for Socialism Party (MAS) with 3.1 % of the vote.

Evo Morales, a founder of the MAS Party and its standard bearer as president from 2006 until 2019 had sought election as an independent contender. Facing overwhelming obstacles, he urged followers to submit a null vote signifying rejection of all candidates. Null votes represented 19.1% of the total.

Current MAS President Luis Arce, former finance minister under President Morales did not run for president. He had scored a 55% majority win for the MAS Party in October 2020.

Rodrigo Paz Pereira, candidate for the Christian Democrat Party, was the election surprise; his ratings in pre-election polling had been low. The U.S.- educated Paz served as mayor of Tarija city and senator for Tarija department. His father, Jaime Paz Zamora, a prominent leader of Bolivia’s Revolutionary Left Movement, democratic socialist in orientation, served as Bolivia’s president in 1989-1993.

Perennial presidential candidate Jorge Tuto Quiroga took undergraduate and graduate degrees in Texas. Formerly vice president of Bolivia, he served as president for a year ending in 2002.

We suggest the dismal performance of the MAS Party, really its collapse, resulted from three highly adverse processes, specifically: insurmountable divisions within the Party, popular discontent over terrible economic conditions, and the intrusive power of dominant sectors of Bolivian society. Any one of these might have led to defeat. Together, they were poison.

Splintering

Evo Morales’s election victory in 2005 was extraordinary. He won overwhelmingly, without a second-round, and was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president. On a roll, he took 64% of the vote in 2009 and 61% in 2014.

Then he stumbled. Morales sought reelection for a constitutionally forbidden third term, despite the failure in 2016 of a constitutional referendum that would have allowed that third term. Even so, in 2019 he ran and won re-election. (The counting of terms had begun with Bolivia’s new Constitution taking effect. Another term, uncounted, had taken place beforehand.)

Troubles multiplied. Morales’s reelection provoked charges of electoral fraud. Violent street protests continued for two weeks. Military pressure on November 10, 2019 forced Morales to abandon the presidency. This was a U.S.-assisted coup carried out by rightwing extremists. Meanwhile, Morales was facing charges of corruption and accusations of having abused an underage female in his care.

Morales’s sway over the MAS Party had taken a hit and would deteriorate further after he returned from exile more than a year later. By that time, Luis Arce, finance minister in Morales’s government, was president, having won election in late 2020 ,enabled by the coup government led by de facto President Jeanine Áñez – now in prison.

Morales turned against Luis Arce’s government. His loyalists serving in the Legislative Assembly blocked legislative proposals. He sought the presidency again, despite the Supreme Electoral Council’s ruling against another Morales presidential term. He created his own “Evo the People” Party.

President Arce opted not to run and the MAS Party selected Eduardo del Castillo as its candidate. Meanwhile, Morales’s adherents, mostly Indigenous people from Chapare state, the candidate’s home base, were advancing his cause throughout early 2025 with marches, rallies and highway blockades.

The MAS suffered one more fracture. Andrónico Rodríguez, the 37-year-old senate president, formerly an organizer for coca-growing unions and widely regarded as Evo Morales’s political heir, stepped away from the MAS electoral campaign to put himself forward as Bolivia’s next president.

Popular discontent

Beginning in 2006, the new government under Morales took Bolivia by storm. The “plurinational state” set forth under the new Constitution promised rescue for Indigenous peoples. Having nationalized oil and natural gas production, the government secured new export income, especially from Brazil and Argentina, and was able to pay for expanded social programs. Marginalized Bolivians had new access to education, to healthcare, particularly for mothers and children, to old-age security, and to land.

In 2018, the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted that Bolivia was “the fastest-growing economy in South America over the past five years,” and consequently had “reduce[d] poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent.” Bolivia markedly increased its international currency reserves.

Then came troubles. Oil and gas prices fell on the international market, with natural gas prices by 39% in 2014-2015. Bolivia’s natural gas deposits were near depletion. Facing diminishing income from exports, the government took on debt to fund social programs. It withdrew dollars from its foreign currency reserves.

Bolivians are grappling with shortages of gasoline, diesel fuel, and currency, particularly dollars. Inflation is now the highest in 38 years. A socialist, now retired, explains why he no longer supports MAS. Quoted he states that, “Anything is better than this. Now we have no dollars. There are lines for gasoline, bread, everything. There are no medicines in the hospitals.”

Old Faithful

Not much stops the elite classes in Bolivia from arranging for a government that fits their needs. One survey shows the nation as having experienced more than 30 coups d’état in 200 years of existence, almost all provoked by powerful figures jostling for power. One’s assumption is that conservative forces had been steadily maneuvering, unobtrusively, to undermine the MAS government.

They showed signs of life in April, 2009 with an assassination attempt against Morales involving foreign mercenaries. They are perennially active, it seems, in the Santa Cruz Department, epicenter of industrial-scale agriculture, oil and gas production, and racist and even separatist agitation.

Luis Fernando Camacho, the Santa Cruz businessman, lawyer and governor, who was imprisoned for his part in the 2019 anti-Morales coup, epitomizes the presence of rightwing extremists in Bolivia.

A subvariant is Bolivian Army commander Juan José Zúñiga. The general presented himself with troops and a tank before the Government House in la Paz on June 26, 2024 in order to remove Present Arce. He was arrested and the coup ended.

Commentator Fernando Molina, examined the forced removal pf President Morales in November 2019 under the title of “Rebellion of the Elite.” He states that:

“Inequality in the possession of productive factors originated in their distribution among the various strata of colonial society with most of these ending up with the Spaniards’ descendants. … [and] this inequality has persisted over time. Today, most capital, the richest land, and all quality education ends up in the hands of the white ‘stratum’ …From this incredible position of power, [members] of the traditional elite dominate almost all social orders.”

Big Brother

If elite power is one perennial, U.S. intervention is another, so much so that President Morales expelled U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008 – and USAID in 2013.

The U.S. presence looms in other ways, most recently in the person of Marcelo Claure, who helped determine the outcome of Bolivia’s presidential vote. He manipulated presidential candidate Andrónico Rodríguez in order to further splinter Bolivia’s left opposition.

Who is Marcelo Claure? One version sees the U.S.-educated Claure as one “of 30 major U.S. business and tech leaders” joining President Trump in Saudi Arabia on May 13. They discussed “investment opportunities” in the United States. Another sees Claure as Bolivia’s richest man, who happens to live in New York, command center for his communications, finance, and sports empire.

Marcelo Claure attends to Bolivia. Writing on social media on January 29, 2025, he extolls Andrónico Rodríguez’s potential as “hope for renovation” within MAS and “leader of the democratic left.” An opinion poll appearing on February 5, paid for by Claure, shows a 16% favorability rating for Rodríguez, topping all candidates.

New polling on March 31, also under Claure’s auspices, showsRodríguez being favored by 25% of potential voters and, of these, 41% opposed the Luis Arce government and Evo Morales. Reporter Carlos Peñaranda Pinto, who describes the entire sequence, suggests these results encouraged Claure to persevere.

Claure expresses pleasure at Rodríguez’s announcement on May 3 that he was now running independently for president. Claure confesses on social media that, “I have shared a lot with him over the last three years, and now that he has decided to become a politician who said NO to pedophiles and incompetents, I am sure he will be a constructive, not destructive, opposition figure.”

The game was over on July 24. On Facebook, Claure links Rodríguez with Arce and Morales: “the cursed socialists do everything possible to scare away investments.” Polling on July 30 put Rodríguez’s approval rating at 6.1%.

According to Peñaranda Pinto, “Claure clearly did not intend to influence the renewal of a new electoral ‘left’; his real goal was to destroy the old one.” For us, the display of tight relations between one rich and powerful U.S. politician and a similarly endowed Bolivian personage is almost palpable.

The last words here are those of Rodrigo Paz Pereira, a day after his electoral victory: “Change is underway, and there is no turning back. What matters now is whether the renewal will remain a factor for profound change or whether we will be left with the paradigms of the past.”

It’s unlikely, everything considered, that the candidate’s vision of profound change takes in decent lives and justice for Indigenous and otherwise marginalized Bolivians. The more likely outcome is an open door for U.S. corporations to plunder Bolivia’s natural resources, and no relief from the difficulties facing Indigenous Bolivians.

The post Bolivia Elections Restore Established Order, Socialists are Dismissed appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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