Is Evo Morales making his return to Bolivia?

AARTS AND CRAFTS Fair in an affluent neighborhood of La Paz, the administrative capital of Bolivia, Paula Maceda, a 22-year-old homemade backpack seller, sighs as the subject of government returns. “We are fed up with politics,” she said. “We want jobs, vaccines, food. In 2019, she was in college when signs of fraud in an election apparently won by left-wing president Evo Morales led to weeks of protests. After police and military withdrew their support, Mr. Morales resigned and fled to Mexico. In El Alto, a poor town of a million people on the icy plain above La Paz, Ms Maceda’s family locked themselves inside as pro-Morales mobs torched police posts. police. Across Bolivia, 36 people were killed. In the closing days of 2019, his class debated the crisis: “Some of us thought there was fraud, others thought it was a coup.

Almost two years later, the feud over what happened still dominates Bolivian politics. In March, the government of Luis Arce, Mr Morales’ former finance minister and winner of a new election last year, jailed his predecessor, right-wing interim president Jeanine ñez, for carrying out a coup. ‘State.

Other troubles are emerging. On July 28, the attorney general announced that he would end an investigation into the alleged fraud. Opposition groups in La Paz and Santa Cruz, a city crippled by previous protests, called for further protests in the first week of August, such as The Economist went to press. After Mr. Arce’s election, Mr. Morales returned to Bolivia late last year and appears keen to return to politics.

Despite all the talk about fraud or the coup, it was not clear what happened in 2019. After a 24-hour pause in the rapid vote count sparked the first protests, the Organization of American States audits (AEO) and the European Union (EU) found serious irregularities, such as a hidden server used to send tally sheets that was not reported to election authorities. Following Mr Morales’ forced resignation, the vice president and congressional leaders also resigned, leading to a power vacuum. In talks mediated by the Catholic Church and the EU, opposition leaders and some lawmakers from Mr. Morales’ Movement for Socialism (MAS) decided that Ms. Áñez, the second vice-president of the Senate and the next according to the constitution, would fill it. Later that day, however, lawmakers refused to take her oath. Other protests erupted, this time against Ms Áñez.

MAS leaders now accuse the opposition, the AEO and half a dozen foreign ambassadors conspiring to spark a civil uprising to oust Mr. Morales. The Attorney General confirmed many of the irregularities noted by the AEO but found that they were due to “negligence” and not to fraud. The opposition denies having participated in a coup. He argues that the origins of the uprising and the breakdown of democracy go back not to 2019, but to 2016, when Mr. Morales ignored constitutional term limits and a referendum in which 51% of Bolivians said he should not be allowed to represent himself.

Since 2019, such rows have become routine. Under Ms Áñez, the Attorney General’s office rushed to open cases against Mr Morales for fraud, corruption, terrorism and sedition. The same office closed most of them as soon as Mr. Arce won and filed complaints against 60 officials of Ms. Áñez’s government. Human Rights Watch, an international observer, says both sides have resorted to “vengeful justice.” Even Mr Arce’s justice minister, Iván Lima, calls the prosecutor’s schedule “imprecise” and the crimes alleged against Ms Áñez (terrorism and sedition) “unconstitutional”.

Part of the problem is that the line between the executive and the judiciary has long been blurred. In 2011, Bolivia began electing judges by popular vote. Although this decision was presented as a way to democratize the courts, it rather facilitated political control. Candidates are selected by the MAS– dominated Congress, which favors loyalty over experience. Short terms (two to six years) also make judges vulnerable to pressure. More than half are acting candidates who can be expelled at any time. “There is a problem with the independence of judges,” admits Lima.

A plan for judicial reform was shelved earlier this year as the MAS focused on the coup affair. According to Jorge Richter, spokesperson for Mr. Arce, this affair is necessary to restore democracy. The government “does not want to turn the page on impunity,” he said, adding that the MASthe return to politics will also rely on prosperity, by reintroducing an economic model that the “coup d’état” thwarted: public investment, import substitution and redistribution of wealth.

But for many economists, this model is woefully outdated. Growth has slowed since 2014, when commodity prices fell and the MAS started to dip into foreign exchange reserves to finance spending. Reserves fell to $ 4.7 billion (12% of GDP) from a peak of $ 15 billion in 2014. Although checks to the poor, low-interest loans to businesses and liquidity to state-owned enterprises are expected to push growth to 5% this year, Bolivia will have a hard time repaying debts. The pandemic slashed the mostly informal economy by 9% last year.

the MASThe obsession with talking about a coup could help rehabilitate Mr. Morales. The same goes for her strategy of blaming Ms Áñez for the covid-19 crisis, even though she inherited a creaky healthcare system from Mr Morales. Three-fifths of people think Mr. Arce does a good or average job and more than half expect their livelihoods to improve soon. According to Mr. Richter, Mr. Arce occasionally meets with Mr. Morales in order to “assess threats from political enemies”.

To critics, this looks like an attempt to stifle opposition. “They took back power and swore never to give it up again,” explains María Teresa Zegada, sociologist. In the last hours of the outgoing Congress, MAS lawmakers have changed the rules so that many appointments, including that of the chief of police, no longer need a two-thirds majority. Cecilia Requena, senator from Comunidad Ciudadana, the largest opposition party, says her party is not informed of what will be discussed in each legislative session. Congress is just a funnel for Mr. Arce’s orders, she says.

But the MAS is not as unified as you would like people to think. The coup account “masks enormous frustration” over cronyism, corruption and broken social promises under Mr. Morales, argues Magali Vianca, a lawyer who has worked in several MAS administrations before leaving the party. After losing his two-thirds majority in Congress last year for the first time since 2009, the MAS also lost ground in the regional elections in March.

While 75% of El Alto residents voted for Mr Arce last October, the mayoral candidate backed by Mr Morales only got 20% of the vote. The winner was Eva Copa, a 34-year-old alumnus MAS senator. In her previous role, Ms. Copa negotiated with Ms. Áñez; photos of the senator and the interim president fueled the hope of reconciliation in Bolivian politics. It was fleeting. In December the MAS accused Ms Copa of aiding the “coup” and forced her to quit the party.

The way Ms Copa manages as mayor (in a fortress-like office, built after protesters razed the previous two) will be a test for left-wing alternatives to the MAS. So far, she says, it’s squeezed “in the middle like a sandwich.” The same goes for many people in El Alto. Relatives of protesters who were killed in the chaos after Ms Áñez took office, possibly by soldiers she sent, complain that the MAS uses their deaths as a “political flag”.

Many people no longer care whether what happened in 2019 was a fraud or a coup. Ms. Maceda says she is too busy trying to earn enough to feed her siblings. As for Mr Morales, people will protest if he tries to run for president again, she thinks. “We will not stumble twice on the same stone.■

This article appeared in the Americas section of the print edition under the title “Fraude, Coup d’Etat or Prologue?