Former President Evo Morales chews coca in the Lauca N, Chapare region of Bolivia, Nov. 3, 2024, amid an ongoing political conflict with the government of President Luis Arce. (AP Photo/Juan Karita, File)
By Isabel Debre and Juan Karita - Associated Press - Sunday, December 29, 2024
LAUCA, Bolivia — Bolivia’s leftist former leader Evo Morales has a campaign pitch for 2025 that has worked elsewhere: Other politicians of recent years have brought you nothing but misery. It’s time for a return to the past.
His supporters are looking to the charismatic but polarizing Mr. Morales for a rescue from the five tumultuous years since his 2019 resignation. The country’s first Indigenous president, he is credited with spreading the wealth of a commodities boom and ushering in a rare stretch of social and economic stability during his nearly 14 years in office.
His detractors say Mr. Morales —- who built an economy uncomfortably dependent on natural gas reserves and sought to stay in power longer than Bolivia’s constitution allows — bears responsibility for much of the turmoil that followed his tenure.
A bitter political battle is looming between Mr. Morales, still only 65, and his former economy minister and once-protege, President Luis Arce, over who will lead their long-dominant leftist Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, into the August 2025 election.
Mr. Arce has urged on allies in the judiciary against Mr. Morales, with the Constitutional Court disqualifying Mr. Morales’ candidacy and ousting him from the leadership of MAS, the party he helped found in the 1990s.
Prosecutors in mid-December charged Mr. Morales with statutory rape for fathering a child with a 15-year-old girl when he was 56 and president. Mr. Morales didn’t deny the relationship but accused Mr. Arce of deploying a “dirty, odious” campaign to undermine him.
Since talk of his arrest warrant surfaced in September, Mr. Morales has been holed up in Bolivia’s coca-growing region of Chapare, ringed by loyal supporters. Here, the former coca farmer and fiery union leader — long considered one of the last of the so-called “pink wave” of leftist leaders who once dominated Latin American politics — is planning his comeback.
Few outsiders are allowed inside his stronghold in Bolivia’s steamy lowlands, but The Associated Press was invited last month for a look from behind the barricades.
“They don’t want me to be the candidate because they know I’ll win,” Mr. Morales said in an interview. “We’re in a state of total siege, morally, legally and politically.”
The four-hour drive to Chapare from Bolivia’s third-biggest city of Cochabamba is steep and slick with mist. The loyalty of the locals to their political champion is quickly evident.
Federal security forces, chased out by Mr. Morales’ followers, rarely venture here. Door-knocking census workers — even emergency rescuers responding to a deadly landslide last month — said they were harassed and kicked out by Mr. Morales’ coca union activists.
Earlier this month and after 40 days of negotiations, police began trickling back.
Coca farmers drying their leaves proudly recount how Mr. Morales evicted U.S. anti-drug agents almost in the same breath as they extol the benefits of the coca plant, cherished by Indigenous communities and maligned by the West as the raw material for cocaine.
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“Brother Evo was in these fields with us,” said Jose Luis Calicho, 39, nodding toward Mr. Morales’ own plot of land. “He knows we’re not criminals, we’re not narco-traffickers.”
Since October, when gunmen opened fire at his convoy, Mr. Morales, who was unharmed, has slept inside the fortress-like compound of his coca-growing union. He says the shooting was an assassination attempt and blames Mr. Arce’s government, which denies involvement.
Those who believe Mr. Morales’ comeback can close the door on years of political and economic paralysis are less clear about the kind of future he could bring.
“When I came to power in 2005, the nation was suffering, and I transformed it,” Mr. Morales said. “Now our crisis is even worse. We don’t have fuel, we don’t have dollars.”
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Most Bolivians, stinging from surging inflation and waiting in long lines to fill their tanks, agree on that.
But attitudes toward Morales are starkly different in his remote redoubt in Chapare and the rest of the country of 12 million, especially when it comes to the 2016 statutory rape case that indelibly tarnished his reputation.
In the upscale districts of La Paz, the capital, residents say they’re repulsed by his actions. Freshly painted graffiti asks: “Would you vote for a pedophile?”
“The political damage to Evo’s good image is devastating,” said Romer Alejo, a criminal lawyer in La Paz.
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His critics condemn Mr. Morales’ constitution-bending efforts to hold onto power longer than any leader in Bolivia’s modern history.
“We’re at a breaking point,” said MartÃn Sivak, the author of a biography on the former president. “There’s a verdict from Bolivians on this idea of staying in power for too long.”
But even if Mr. Morales himself has become too divisive, without him, many fear the long unstable Andean nation could veer back toward chaos.
Mr. Morales’ 2019 ouster elevated a right-wing interim president, Jeanine Anez, who cracked down on her political opponents and sought to purge Mr. Morales’ legacy.
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On a hot, sticky morning last month, Mr. Morales emerged from his hideout with heavy security, to check on his fields. As he hunched over to cut weeds, his aides pulled out their smartphones to film him — a throwback to the early 2000s, when videos of the son of llama farmers in his humble alpaca sweater were a magnet for foreign media.
But Mr. Morales didn’t seem to notice. When everyone had gone, he kept on working. He said he wasn’t close to finishing.
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