By Olivia Arigho-Stiles, Resumen Latinoamericano on March 18, 2024.
The conflict between Evo Morales and Luis Arce for the presidency of Bolivia in 2025 not only divides the Movement Towards Socialism, but also the social movements and unions that form its base.
Alongside the boisterous carnival street parties, traditional ch’alla ceremonies were held throughout Bolivia at the end of February. During these, incense is burned and blessings of coca leaves and alcohol are offered to Pachamama in rituals that affirm the bonds of reciprocity between people and Mother Earth. But today, in addition to the untimely festive chaki (hangover), the deepening political and social fracture is adding to the headache of Bolivia’s left and progressive movements.
Since 2020, when the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) returned to power under the leadership of Luis Arce, former president Evo Morales has been rallying his support base in the hope of becoming president again. But in December last year, Bolivia’s Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal ruled that presidents can only hold office for a maximum of two terms and that indefinite reelection “is not a human right”. The ruling dealt a catastrophic blow to Evo’s presidential ambitions.
Since then, Morales has been accusing Arce, his former Minister of Economy and close ally, of orchestrating an attempt to outlaw his possible new access to the presidency, declaring on X (formerly Twitter) that a “judicial coup” is underway.
The Bolivian people at the head of the Indigenous movement triumphed in their struggle, to enforce the Political Constitution of the State and democracy, in an uprising and rebellion of the popular sectors, in colonial times, threatened with extermination, marginalized and… pic.twitter.com/Smr9OYaYVM
– Evo Morales Ayma (@evoespueblo) February 6, 2024
Electoral struggle
To force elections in the Judiciary (which according to the plurinational Constitution should have been held in December), in late January Evo Morales mobilized his base in the coca-growing heartland of Cochabamba, pushing for blockades along the highways connecting that city to the business center of Santa Cruz. The blockades, which combine the demand for judicial elections with other local demands, caused food and fuel shortages and were repressed by security forces.
Huáscar Salazar, an economist and member of the Center for Popular Studies of Bolivia, says there is little hope for conciliation between the two sides. “What we are living in this moment is that arm wrestling, in which Evo and Arce are disputing the acronym of the Movement Towards Socialism and, above all, the candidacy for the presidency of that party for 2025”.
And he adds: “The problem is that this struggle is having tremendous consequences for the grassroots organizations, increasingly divided in their internal structures; but it is also a problem that this dispute is happening in the midst of an increasingly palpable economic crisis that nobody wants to take charge of”. The dramatic increase in blockades this month, as well as their geographic distribution, can be seen in an infographic prepared by Mauricio Fonda, an open data activist based in Bolivia.
In the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, MAS elected officials are divided between the Arcista and Evista lines. Elections to the Judiciary that were to be held last year have stalled due to disagreement over the shortlisted candidates agreed upon by the MAS-dominated Legislative Assembly. In Bolivia, magistrates of the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, the Agro-environmental Court and the Magistrates Council are elected by direct suffrage every six years.
With this state of affairs, the winners are the Arcistas, because the current composition of the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal has been favoring their interests, as was the case with the recent ruling on the election of Morales. And Arce’s condition as president gives him much more influence over the State institutions, which he used to his benefit.
Morales’ reelection has been an unresolved issue since 2017 and was at the center of the 2019 coup. The Constitution prohibits anyone from holding the presidency for more than two consecutive terms. In 2016, Morales narrowly lost a referendum that would have overturned the constitution and allowed him to run again. He then took the decision to the Plurinational Constitutional Court, which was favorable to him, ruled that reelection was a human right and annulled the referendum.
Many Bolivians considered this a legal and undemocratic farce, which was a major factor in the mobilization against Evo of the urban middle classes and opposition social movements in October 2019, when a coup allowed the far-right evangelical Jeanine Áñez to seize the de facto presidency.
With Morales’ backing, Arce was elected president in October 2020, after elections were finally held, a year after the coup. The current conflict between Arcistas and Evistas centers on the control of MAS itself, which in the last two decades consolidated itself as an enduring governing party.
Social antagonisms and MAS
The recent blockades are an indicator that Evo Morales can still mobilize a broad and motivated base. Blockades have a long and effective history in Bolivia and are a feature of most social conflicts. In 1999, during the Cochabamba Water War, a coalition of peasants, factory workers and community activists united to blockade roads in response to a new neoliberal law that would have privatized water. Similarly, after Luis García Meza’s violent coup d’état in 1980, peasants blocked roads to prevent the military from advancing through the countryside expanding severe repression. More recently, in 2019, miners and peasant movements blocked roads outside the cities to force Añez to call elections after nearly a year of a coup government characterized by fraud, corruption and massacres.
The blockades arise from a faction of MAS. It is important to note that MAS is not so much an orthodox political party as a shifting coalition of different and sometimes antagonistic social forces at the base. The refoundation of Bolivia as a “plurinational” state in 2009 was seen as a reflection of its plural social elements, a remedy for what Bolivian Marxist intellectual René Zavaleta Mercado called a “variegated society,” composed of different modes of production, historical temporalities and forms of governance within the confines of a (colonial) nation-state.
But, in the last decade, divisions in MAS played a destructive role in the movements of cooperativist miners, coca growers, peasants and urban workers, which are fragmented and often have parallel leaderships.
A looming economic crisis
One such movement is the powerful peasant union confederation, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), whose loyalties are divided. Morales supporters, such as current leader Ponciano Santos, have vowed to resume blockades if their demand for judicial elections is not met. Santos was elected last year in the midst of a national congress of the CSUTCB that ended in fights and arm-wrestling between evistas and arcistas, and many elements of the confederation do not recognize his authority.
Last year, during the MAS congress, Arce and his vice-president, David Choquehuanca, were expelled from the party.
And Arce’s political problems are compounded by Bolivia’s bleak economic outlook. Since last year there has been an acute shortage of dollars and the Bolivian peso has been devalued. As economist Stasiek Czaplicki Cabezas points out, the devaluation represents a 20% drop in the value of local currency savings, posing a future of financial insecurity for many Bolivians, particularly the middle classes. All this adds up to pressure against Arce.
With presidential candidates for the 2025 elections due to be decided this year, both sides are stepping up pressure to comprehensively manage the MAS apparatus. But the protracted conflict is spreading its toxicity through Bolivia’s social movements, dividing the rank and file. Meanwhile, disputes over judicial elections erode public faith in the democratic organs of the state, undermining the legitimacy of whichever side ultimately emerges victorious. In 2024, Bolivian politics is more polarized than ever.