Part One
LISTENING TO THE POOR –September’s enormous march, October’s blockades, and the assassination attempt against Evo Morales met with thousands of Indigenous standing guard
“For them –for this kind of government– we are worth nothing. So who are we, then? Do we not eat? Do we not know how to speak?”
–A Quechua protestor in Shinahota, Radio Kawsachun Coca, “Caminando Junto al Pueblo,” June 21, 2024
Bolivia is again witness to marches and road blockades of tens of thousands of Indigenous, with another massive mobilization that started Friday, January 10th, and ended in dozens of arrests targeting leadership five days later. Peaceful resistance has been met with paramilitary violence, extreme forms of crowd control, and indiscriminate arrests. The poor believe they are saving their country from a return to neoliberalism, now promoted by President Luis Arce. Arce’s former boss, ex-president Evo Morales, tried to avoid the blockades through huge assemblies and then a 7-day walk that ended on the 23rd of September. He led the march and said it “was the largest in history. In the city of El Alto, brothers and sisters who were awaiting us [lined on either side] wept with emotion, and the marchers, too, wept with emotion as they were received.” Their demands concern a disastrous economic decline. After that march, arrest warrants were issued for the highest campesino leaders in the land, that triggered a wave of road blockades. Arce launched a manhunt and 9 new charges against Evo Morales. That was followed by what seems to have been an assassination attempt, though the government refuses to launch an investigation,
In recent weeks in Bolivia, thousands of campesinos have mobilized to stand guard for ex-president Evo Morales in six concentric rings to protect the elected president of the Movement toward Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP). Among them are the historic Ponchos Rojos, the Aymara who volunteered to protect president-elect Luis Arce during the coup regime of Jeanine Áñez. This year they voted in their own leaders in June and ousted Arce’s imposed leadership, which led to the arrest of their executive and police occupation of their headquarters.
One of Evo’s closest ex-ministers, Juan Ramón Quintana, has gone underground. So has Ponciano Santos, the maximum leader of the Unified Trade Union Confederation of Campesino Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB). Two of the highest leaders of the “campesino, Indigenous and original peoples movement” –Humberto Claros of CSUTCB and Ramiro Jorge Cucho of the Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (Conamaq)– were seized without warrants on November 13th. They are now political prisoners accused of terrorism for having organized a peaceful blockade. The national government has designated the slingshot a weapon of terror. Thanks to the road blockades of the last thirty years, the Indigenous and campesino movement won respect for the vote of the poor, which has allowed them to come to power time and again in this century.
In November, two judges who gained notoriety for giving legal shelter to the criminal acts of the rich, declared –in defiance of existing jurisprudence– that Evo Morales cannot run for president. Over the last two years, the judicial system has been systematically perverted by high-court judges who unconstitutionally prolonged their terms in late 2022, with the assistance of the executive. One of them, Gonzalo Hurtado, in early January this year extended his presidency of the Plurinational Constitutional Court. That session excluded the newly elected justices who are the only magistrates with constitutional legitimacy.
Lawyers who volunteer their services to the social movements count over 100 political prisoners – people seized at the scene of road blockades in October, regardless of whether they were involved in the protests demanding economic security. Mainly Quechua, they were transported to the coldest reaches of the country far from their families, and charged at lightning speed with terrorism. They were denied access to lawyers of their choice, to clothing and food, and held incognito for the days required to heal their bruises. Forced to sleep on the stairs of the prison and to wear distinct uniforms that identify them as permissible targets of attack by other prisoners, their release is now a central demand of the grassroots MAS. Women in the social movements and attorneys say the prisoners are suffering torture. The CSUTCB leader Humberto Claros was transferred to another prison when other prisoners who do the work of the warden –they are addicts– reportedly tried to kill Claros.
International progressive media are picking up reports by journalists who have long disliked Evo Morales, rendering it difficult to hear the voices of the poor who massively support the Morales platform. On the first day of the march that started on September 17th, for example, such journalists claimed that only a few hundred joined the march, whereas photos on that day showed many thousands. The same journalists assert that villagers arranged to blockade the protesters on the first day, an assertion echoed by major media worldwide, while the marchers reported that the villagers were the ones who warned them of the impending attack.
Flora Aguilar, an executive of the “Bartolina Sisas” union in Chuquisaca –the campesina and Indigenous women’s movement made up of hundreds of thousands– was among those attacked. She served in various parliamentary positions at the highest levels during the years when the Indigenous held national power, from 2006 to 2019. She said that same evening, “That traitor Lucho [President Luis Arce] has sent public servants from different ministries to try to take the life of our brother Evo, to threaten the lives of the movement of Indigenous, campesino and original peoples. Not only threatening us, but our children as well.” Her toddler was held in the arms of someone next to her as Aguilar spoke to the camera. “They were drunk when they attacked us, not in their proper senses. We are tired of this government. There is no money in circulation, dollars have disappeared, there is no gasoline in the gas stations. The rising cost of the family food basket affects us all. And they want to take over our political party the Movement toward Socialism—Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples. They aim to drive out of existence the movement of Indigenous, campesino and original peoples.”
“What do I mean by all this?” asked Aguilar. “They have to recognize the highest-level party Congress held by MAS in Lauca Ñ because we observed all the requirements set out by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. The only credible candidate for the Indigenous movement is Evo Morales. Their actions aren’t causing us fear. On the contrary, they are giving us more strength because this struggle is for all the women and all the men in our Plurinational State of Bolivia, and for the generations yet to come.”
On the final day of the march into the Indigenous city of El Alto above La Paz, Eva Copa the mayor of El Alto and President Arce promised 100,000 of their supporters would block the marchers. With that news, the march swelled –to at least one million– on September 23rd. Arce and Copa managed to persuade several thousand supporters to turn out, and they were violent. The neighborhoods of El Alto organized themselves to stand guard alongside the enormous serpent of marchers, from one end of the vast city to the toll road into La Paz, where the poor of La Paz greeted them.
The march ended with speeches near the city’s main bus station to avoid the government’s paramilitaries and police, who were waiting for them at the main plaza. Not to be outwitted, Arce ordered the paramilitary youth –who he had flown in from Santa Cruz, according to the social media of the paramilitaries– to attack civilians. Together with police, they wreaked havoc at the bus station. The violence unleashed against the marchers resulted in the death of one of them who had acted as security for Evo Morales, Willy Avendaño. He was a long-standing organizer who lived in Argentina.
In the next days, Evo Morales was hunted with an arrest warrant, helicopters and the deployment of police and military forces. He was in his home in the coca regions, surrounded by tens of thousands of campesinos on high alert, of whom 95% vote for the political project created by themselves. That project goes by the name of “Evo.” A judge lifted the arrest warrant against Evo because the facts of the case have already been tried and dismissed. In response to her decision, the judge says her husband received a threatening phone call from Arce himself. She fears for her safety and that of her family. Other judges were found in her place willing to do the wishes of the national government. A few days past, the courts in Argentina dismissed the same case, that had been welcomed by the far-right Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich.
In the face of these events, the social movements made up of millions of Bolivians decided they had no alternative but to turn to the people’s historic tactic, used as their final resort: road blockades.The Indigenous piled rocks across the roads and brought to a standstill the center of the country. They persisted for twenty-four days and the blockades numbered around fifty, according to the army.
On October 25th, the protestors resisted police and paramilitary attempts to end the blockades. Blockaders fled up the mountainsides during 8 hours of tear gassing that killed a 62-year-old woman in her home, near the blockade of some ten thousand miners and campesinos in Pirque Parotani. That duration lasted four times as long as the tear-gassing that took place in Sacaba during the coup regime. In Sacaba, a march of coca farmers loyal to Evo Morales was fired upon in the first massacre ordered by the coup president, Jeanine Áñez.
In contravention of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission guidelines during and after the coup regime, Arce reactivated paramilitaries to terrorize the 7-day march, the blockades, and now, hundreds of people pouring in from across the country to stand vigil for Evo. Those paramilitary forces are infamous from the era of the one-year coup led by the country’s ultraright. In October, the criminal youth were brought in to attack the unarmed blockaders, followed by thousands of police with rubber bullets. Civilian blockades are legal under the Constitution. Using soldiers to attack civilians is not constitutional, but soldiers followed the police when the blockaders kept returning to remount rocks across the same roads after the toxic teargas dispersed.
On October 27th, an assassination attempt against Evo Morales began near a military base. It involved a high-speed car chase. The attackers pursued Evo’s two armored vehicles –loaned by the government of Venezuela– and their mission was deadly, as is evident from the video footage of the blood caused by a bullet that grazed the back of the head of one of the drivers. The vehicles helped save the passengers’ lives from the bullets of the sharpshooters, as did the drivers’ skill. At least 14 bullet holes were counted in one of the vehicles, and 4 in the second vehicle. The attackers retreated inside the army’s Ninth Division – campesinos had surrounded the base. Heavily armed masked men were flown out by helicopter.
Events across the last year in Bolivia are deeply troubling. Here, seven points are drawn from the analyses of people in the mass Indigenous organizations. Bolivian mainstream news, significantly funded by government advertising, treats the grassroots of the historic mass movements as unthinking and a danger.
“Indigenous, originarios and campesinos” –in their preferred designation– say they are defending the Plurinational Constitution and the right to vote for the candidate of their choice in the 2025 elections. Evo Morales Ayma is the person they trust to govern justly because, in their view, he has already done so for almost fourteen years. The first Indigenous president in a majority Indigenous country, Morales is campesino, and a leftist statesman of global stature.
While the majority’s loyalty to Evo shares much in common with the grassroots democracies of Venezuela and Cuba, the fault lines of the current political divide are racial. Those who support the candidacy of Morales number around 50%, according to recent polls that do not reach into the countryside where support for Morales is strongest. On the other side of the racial divide, the epithets are the same that one heard during the rightwing coup year in 2019 to 2020, for example, that Evo and his supporters are “squalid humans” (“una miseria humana”) to quote the senior cabinet minister María Nela Prada, or “savages” in the word choice of Assemblymember Jerges Mercado, also in Arce’s inner circle. Arce’s words directed at Evo are described by the Indigenous as those of a gamonal or large landowner toward his peon.
President Luis Arce is a British-trained economist. A mestizo, he served as minister of the economy under Evo after decades working in the nation’s central bank. He insists that his former comrade Evo is barred from running. According to legal experts, Arce has misinterpreted a decision at the international level and another in the national sphere, to justify this claim. A new opinion from the Inter-American court system was recently handed down at the supra-national level – from the legal arm of the Organization of American States that offers consultative opinions, with autonomy from the rest of the OAS. It recognizes the right of a candidate to run for office if they do not currently hold that office. Bolivia’s executive branch is approaching that decision “politically,” which is to say, it is twisting the truth with the assistance of the media.
Certain events are simply not covered. President Arce dismisses the election in Lauca Ñ last year of the party Congress of MAS-IPSP. At that Congress, thousands of delegates voted that Evo continue at the head of the party. They also chose Morales to run for president for the term of 2025 to 2030. The highest electoral court first gave its blessing, but then was persuaded by Arce to turn a blind eye to those votes of the delegates elected by the grassroots bases, that were conducted in compliance with their statutes and the Bolivian Constitution.
MAS-IPSP is an alliance of social movements and its largest member, the CSUTCB or Unified Confederation of Unions of Rural Workers of Bolivia, convened a union Congress a little over a month before the MAS Congress last year. That Congress elected their leaders, which required resisting indiscriminate beatings and 5 teargas attacks, ordered by Arce across 3 days. Their battle-hardened union of four million militants (in a nation of under twelve million), alongside other grassroots social movements, led the week-long march in September and the blockades that followed.
Anxious to work with the judiciary even though it has been corrupted by Arce, MAS-IPSP held a second Congress in May, seven months ago, that met all but one of the electoral court’s directives. The Congress was not validated. The same held true for a third Congress in the following months and a fourth celebrated on September 3rd.
On what grounds do the judges deny their approval? Arce has created parallel social movements, using bribes, jobs, and promises of public works. A denunciation released by CSUTCB during the 7-day march alleges the exact amounts received by the 3 senior social-movement leaders hand-picked by Arce. Across the last year, the electoral court has ordered that the parallel formations be accepted as part of decision-making within MAS-IPSP meetings. Union members and party militants do not accept individuals they did not elect. This context lies behind the following seven arguments made by the Indigenous bases of MAS-IPSP.
Part Two
ANALYSIS – Seven Indigenous arguments
One – U.S. claims to subsoil wealth and natural resources
The lived experience of the organized masses across decades leads them to accuse the U.S. embassy of playing the principal role in efforts to destroy Bolivia’s social movements. They believe events of the last twelve months cannot be understood as a contest between 2 men, Lucho and Evo, who are the current and past national presidents. Campesinos are profoundly anti-imperialist.
The poor say the last year has seen an assault on the autonomy of the grassroots in a struggle over distinct political projects. One of the projects is socialist and led by MAS-IPSP through a structure of assemblies, on the model of union decision-making, and the other is led by President Luis Arce. Arce is veering toward neoliberal arrangements, in the eyes of the poor. The national government uses tear gas and police aggression to shut down grassroots congresses (according to video evidence and the words of leaders respected for their integrity).
The stakes of Arce’s attacks on social-movement elections –most journalists dismiss their importance and define them as brawls– are lodged in the context of U.S. claims to lithium and minerals across the hemisphere. Arce has paralyzed lithium production, opening the door to privatization with the same formula used during the rightwing coup year. Arce’s aim of reprivatizing Bolivia’s natural resources is not a secret. Last year the executive argued this approach must be expanded in various nationalized sectors. It urged that international loan agreements be signed by officials, in secret, and outside the country. MAS-IPSP was born to dismantle neoliberalism. Proceeds from nationalizations underlay the dramatic reductions in poverty, mortality, morbidity, precarity, and political exclusion during the Morales presidencies. Journalist Freddy Morales of teleSUR reported on October 4th that “24 U.S. military personnel entered the country as tourists” with the aim of surreptitiously conducting studies of lithium. Some 80% of known global supplies of that resource are found in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.
Other troubling developments according to Evo Morales include the refusal of Sebastián Michel, the Bolivian ambassador to Venezuela, to recognize the election of President Nicolás Maduro – Michel’s position protects the far-right candidate of the U.S. embassy. Bolivia’s president did not attend Maduro’s inauguration – he said he was too busy. Arce’s Minister of the Interior, Eduardo del Castillo, has recommended seeking information from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency or DEA. Before 2006, coca farmers sacrificed 100 lives to elect Evo Morales and drive the DEA out of Bolivia, because its agents were savaging the poor while protecting the narcotrafficking political elite. Evo Morales as president never surrendered judicial sovereignty via extradition, while President Arce is doing just that. Such arrangements necessarily involve the U.S. embassy.
It is common knowledge that Perú and Argentina have opened their doors to transnational corporations while Chile has long been a testing ground for the penetration of capital and the unfettered reign of economic elites. To guarantee imperial strength, U.S. military bases operate –or are being built– in both Argentina and Perú. Chile welcomes joint military exercises with the empire. President Arce recently accepted the gift of a mobile health unit from the U.S. Southern Command – the supreme military command in the region that acts on the premise that all the hemisphere’s resources rightfully belong to the United States. Arce’s judgment is odd: he thought he could get away with claiming that the mobile clinic was a gift of the executive branch, but the U.S. embassy declared otherwise.
Two – Crooked courts
For well over a year, the constitutional right of the people to elect high-court judges has been blocked, and unconstitutional rulings handed down by judges who overstayed their terms in January of 2024. Recent judicial elections replaced only some of the magistrates.
The Inter-American court system has expressed deep concern. In July –absent the consent of MAS as the country’s largest political party– the judicial election process was restarted in exchange for canceling primary elections. By November, the executive branch had maneuvered to prohibit the election of high-court judges representing over half of the country. Elections were held for the others in December.
This situation has allowed venal judges to defy the Constitution and emit decisions that are gutting the Plurinational State, that was built collectively during Evo Morales’ terms from 2006 to 2019. The legislature is now forbidden by the courts to carry out its fundamental responsibilities, such as summoning cabinet ministers and requiring them to provide accurate reports, or investigating the use of government funds.
Particular judges –for example Israel Campero of the First Chamber of the Constitutional Court in La Paz– have decided critical cases this year. He is responsible for the prohibition levelled against legislators who questioned cabinet ministers.
Judge Campero also granted legality to individuals chosen by the executive to create parallel social organizations, and withheld recognition from the elected leaders of grassroots social movements. Decisions such as these defy Article 26 of the Constitution honoring the selection of grassroots leaders via their collectives. “Civil society is autonomous with respect to the government because sovereignty resides in the people,” explains Carlos Romero, an attorney and former cabinet minister who helped craft the extant Constitution, in a process that was violently resisted by Bolivia’s twentieth-century elites. He said to Radio Kawsachun Coca on April 6th, 2024, “The constitutional tribunal and all its subsidiary courts cannot define which social organizations are legal and which are not.”
Judge Campero is described as a “a big fish” or main player in Arce’s plans to control the judiciary, that were designed by Minister of Justice Iván Lima, who recently resigned. Campero was reelected to a six-year term in the Administrative Tribunal of the Organization of American States, even though Campero is criticized for having freed a convicted serial rapist and awarding house arrest to a man guilty of “femicide,” an assassin who kills women.
The “self-appointed” judges who unilaterally extended their terms at the end of 2023, it bears noting, were ensconced through the year of the coup regime, when they allowed scores of petty and powerful criminals to walk free. Many judges possess a long history of service to neoliberal elites.
Two Constitutional Court judges who overstayed their term limits this year –Gonzalo Hurtado and Yván Espada– recognized an individual chosen by Arce’s forces as the legitimate leader of the Movement toward Socialism in mid-November. They also decided that they can continue in their positions, already extended by themselves since 2023. They ruled on no authority except their own that their judgeships are excluded from the judicial elections that took place last month.
Three – Dismantling the party of the poor
The campaign of the rightwing to eliminate national primary elections defied the nation’s largest party, MAS, then brutalized its militants in July. On July 10th, public employees and paid thugs attacked Evo supporters according to grassroots leaders of proven probity. Extensive video coverage verifies their version. MAS counts more militants than all the other parties combined, but the executive has now won the support of rightwing parties in its efforts to destroy the elected leadership of MAS.
In 2019, primaries received constitutional protection. The rightwing has since maneuvered to allow any voter to cast a ballot in the primary elections for the MAS candidate, because such a practice would subvert the ability of a leftist party to remain leftist. In recent months, politicians of the right joined forces with the executive to call for the elimination of primaries.
“It’s a real shame that there are political forces that are in agreement with this proposal [to ban primaries], because all of the political organizations have militants,” said Aquilardo Caricari, a youth leader of the cocaleros from El Trópico. “This shows that the political parties of the right, for the most part, engage in no real organizing at the base. They are not interested in respecting the political rights that militants possess.”
The Supreme Electoral Court called a meeting of leaders of political parties for July 10th, promoted by the executive branch. Evo Morales was at first excluded though he is the elected leader at the head of MAS-IPSP. Eventually, Evo’s exclusion was reversed by grassroots pressure. On the day of the meeting, MAS refused to agree to the elimination of primaries, and Evo Morales left before the vote of the other parties.
Following Evo’s departure, a crowd of public employees and a small group of paramilitaries–with no provocation– attacked supporters of the grassroots MAS who were gathered in the plaza outside. They had spontaneously converged, upon learning of death threats levelled against Evo Morales. The attackers fired petardos –small explosives– directly at people’s bodies, injuring them. They were shouting the same rightwing slogans used by paramilitaries during the coup regime from 2019 to 2020.
Four – Shutting down parliament
The preceding points enumerate actions that are termed “de-institutionalization” or attacks on democratic institutions, and they have been central in efforts to shut down parliament. De-institutionalization is the term used by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Vice President Davíd Choquehuanca is responsible for scheduling sessions of parliament, and for many months now, he has mostly refused to do so. Parliament has been closed more often than open. On June 6th, when Choquehuanca was serving as president during Luis Arce’s visit to Russia, the doors of the Assembly were locked supposedly due to the need for fumigation, the lights were shut off, and legislators who overcame those obstacles had to provide their own lighting and sound system. Their long-standing demands won the day. Head of the Senate Andrónico Rodríguez managed that feat because he held the position of Vice President during Arce’s absence. One of many young politicians on the left, university educated, Andrónico is the son of cocalero organizers who himself became a union leader.
“I tell you,” said an anonymous marcher, “that brother Andrónico, I praise him. He is a fine youth, a good worker, and a fighter. They should all be like that. Arce’s people act like they’re crazy. They need to think with their heads, with their brains. For them –for this kind of government– we are worth nothing. So who are we, then? Do we not eat? Do we not know how to speak?” The person addressing the camera then gave a rallying cry in Quechua, the lingua franca of cocaleros in El Trópico. (RKC, “Caminando Junto al Pueblo,” June 21, 2024)
Months earlier, Choquehuanca delayed the opening of the legislature until February, when he was forced to respond to enormous campesino blockades calling for the removal of judges whose terms expired in the first days of January. The poor were demanding elections of new high-court judges. The Plurinational Legislative Assembly is the highest organ of people’s power, which means it should hold sway over the executive and the courts. During the blockades of tens of thousands that ran for several weeks from January to February, the majority of senators and deputies agreed with the Indigenous masses. It was a ruse for some, insofar as the parties of the traditional elites now portray the executive’s acts of de-institutionalization as entirely reasonable. The parties of the right switch sides when it serves their higher purpose of destroying MAS. In February, the president agreed to meet the demands of the protesters to end the blockades. He then proceeded to systematically block those demands with the assistance of the judges who overstayed their term limits.
In short, what we are witnessing is class war or, in the words of campesino leaders, “a revolution within the revolution.”
Five – High-end corruption
Presidential control of the judiciary has served to protect powerful political figures charged with corruption. Two of the high-court judges even asserted this publicly. Left unmentioned is the fact their hands are stained with the blood of the Indigenous.
Pliant judges managed to overturn pending trials of Cochabamba mayor Manfred Reyes Villa, a rightwing politician who has long acted on the national stage. Reyes Villa does not live in the district where he serves as mayor, which by law makes him ineligible for that office. Middle-class intelligentsia assert at every opportunity that he will be Bolivia’s next president. He was a military man in his youth, and is accused of having participated in the massacre of Harrington Street committed by the García Meza dictatorship. A graduate of the U.S. training School of the Americas –that was dubbed the “School of Assassins”– Reyes Villa also served as military attaché in Washington for a number of years. His father, a general, was a coup plotter and minister of defense. “His responsibility during the massacre de October of 2003” –that took almost seventy lives when the poor of the city of El Alto ousted a neoliberal president– “and his closeness to the paramilitary group Resistencia Juvenil Cochala,” is a matter of public record. He often praises the paramilitaries. He in fact resuscitated them when the coup government of 2019 made possible his return from self-imposed exile in the United States. The Inter-American system of justice has insisted the paramilitaries must be dismantled because they were critical to the coup d’etat of 2019. Reyes Villa is “a son of the dictatorship who is a political operator of the U.S. embassy,” summed up the head of the Department of Cochabamba’s legislative assembly, Juan Carlos Iraola.
Iraola says Reyes Villa is now “an ally of Luis Arce.” The overturning of Manfred’s more than one dozen charges –on an impressive array of fraud and corruption allegations, some of them involving guilty sentences– necessarily involves the consent of the executive since the Ministry of Justice failed to challenge it.
Cooperation between “Lucho” and “Manfred” over the last year reached new depths in November. The executive branch coordinated with Manfred in Cochabamba and the openly fascist right in Santa Cruz to send paramilitary youth in advance of the national police to break up Indigenous marches and road blockades. The courts also allowed Branko Marinkovic –cabinet minister of coup president Jeanine Áñez and a multimillionaire– to amass land in an amount six times the legal limit under the new Constitution. Those illicit lands include the homeland of ancient or “original” peoples, the Guarayos whose territories are protected by national and international law. In early July, Marinkovic was presented as the candidate of Bolivia’s far-right conservatives at a meeting in Brazil attended by ex-president Jair Bolsonaro (who allegedly tried to prevent President Lula from taking office) and Argentina’s explosive libertarian president, Javier Milei.
President Arce’s key players who protect the powerful are anathema to the Indigenous social movements. Iván Lima, Minister of Justice until recently when he was replaced by César Siles, is not a member of MAS. Siles, for his part, achieved the prohibition of Evo’s bid to run for the Senate during the Áñez dictatorship. Lima is reported to be an Opus Dei Catholic – an ultraright, international club of capitalists that burgeoned in tandem with the fascist regime of Francisco Franco in Spain. Lima’s law firm has served powerful businessmen since the 1990s. He says he resigned his ministerial post in order to accuse Evo of crimes tried and dismissed in years past. Evo Morales has again been charged with sexual abuse of a minor – and the woman in that case said such acts never occurred.
Former Minister of Justice Lima has a very particular understanding of violence against women: He always thought the coup president, Jeanine Áñez, should be tried as a constitutional president even though the military put her in office. Now as a private attorney he is pursuing the argument that Áñez’s seizure of power in 2019 was legitimate – with almost 40 deaths, countless rapes by state agents, and 1,800 acts of torture, not to mention violated laws and legislative norms. As Minister of Justice, Lima also protected from prosecution an array of churchmen who committed rapes over the course of years, according to the diary of one of them. More than one hundred Indigenous schoolchildren and adolescents in the care of priests were victims. Lima’s racism has made him dearly hated since his first days in office. At the beginning of the Arce presidency, he proposed a committee of “notables” to rewrite the Constitution written by the people, and now, Arce has expressed the same desire.
The social movements recommended the removal of various ministers, including Lima, from early on (Arce was inaugurated in November of 2020). Arce refused to do so, and the international progressive press largely failed to report on that fact for fear of stoking divisions on the left.
Ex-Attorney General Juan Lanchipa started his term in 2018, did the bidding of the yearlong coup regime, then failed to bring serious charges against the paramilitaries who unleashed terror under Áñez. Some of those criminals recently received very mild sentences in Cochabamba, the territory of Manfred Reyes Villa. They flashed victory signs on leaving the courtroom. In mid-November, Manfred Reyes Villa coordinated with the executive to transport the paramilitaries of Cochabamba to break up Indigenous road blockades, sending the violent youth out in front to commit outrages, followed by hundreds and then thousands of police. From Santa Cruz, paramilitaries were also recruited by the national government to break up the 7-day march and the road blockades. The paramilitary youth are paid by the day – as part of the country’s pyramids of corruption.
Corruption at its upper reaches includes the relatives of powerful politicians and allegedly the young-adult children of the vice president and president, who have experienced a rapid transformation into owners of luxurious properties or vast extensions of land. Grassroots MAS members are particularly offended by the instant riches of Arce’s children.
Minister of the Interior Eduardo del Castillo orders intense surveillance of national campesino leaders and accuses them of narcotrafficking without credible proof. At the same time, he is unable to prevent the escape of individuals such as Uruguayan Sebastián Marset, a highly visible socialite who lived in the same rightwing city that is home to the Minister of the Interior. Marset is said to be one of the largest narcotics kingpins in South America. Eduardo del Castillo has not found the intellectual authors of the smuggling of a half-ton of drugs flown from Bolivia to Madrid on the official airline, or possibly ten tons transported from Bolivia via Paraguay that was seized in Germany.
The grassroots of MAS accuse Interior Minister del Castillo of narcotrafficking. The claim deserves scrutiny given that under Arce, Bolivia has become one of the largest regions of illegal drug transshipment to international markets. During the presidencies of Evo, an astonishing drop in the illicit drug economy was achieved – thanks to serious policing of the borders as well as the regions of likely illegal crop cultivation, and collective control by peasant producers at the point of production. Both of these structural measures have been dismounted by Arce.
Six – The European and South American right
National campesino politicians remind us that not only “the empire,” but also wider networks of international far-right actors relentlessly promote the destruction of Bolivia’s progressive forces. Twentieth-century histories offer a distant example of this phenomenon, when the country’s economic and military rulers were advised by the Nazi Klaus Barbie –the Butcher of Lyons– who received a false identity from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. He directly participated in several dictatorships and trained torturers in Bolivia. In that era, Bolivia mirrored Brazil’s turn to fascism and built close alliances with those practicing state terror in neighboring countries.
Today, the assault on the mass movements is part of an updated imperialist practice. It is deeply global and runs the gamut from Spanish journalists adept at fake news, and their backers the politicians of Vox, European neofascists more broadly, and closer to home in Bolivia, the appeal of Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei among urban youth.
The current head of the U.S. embassy, Debra Hevia, is reportedly a principal intellectual author of the failed attempt to divide Bolivia some fifteen years ago when the new Constitution was written in consultation with the masses. The attempted secession of half of Bolivia (promoted by politicians including Manfred Reyes Villa), was also a European affair, employing Hungarian and Irish neofascists. Their deaths are a source of controversy. The U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg, Hevia’s superior, had masterminded the division of Yugoslavia, and in Bolivia, evidence on film of his involvement with those plotting secession led to his expulsion. Murderous rightwing violence in those years is not forgotten by the poor, since they were its victims.
Latin American rightists are soul mates of European and U.S. diplomats. Their strategies are constantly evolving. In the Ecuadorian coup from within, executed by then president Lenin Moreno, the left was pulverized, neoliberal Indigenous politics swept the polls with international academic support, and the nation went from one of the safest to one of the most dangerous countries in the hemisphere – it is now in the grip of an Albanian drug mafia. Bolivia’s mass organization of Indigenous women, the Bartolina Sisas, in May of 2022 was the only social movement that demanded a criminal trial for coup president Jeanine Áñez and charged the executive with following in the footsteps of Lenny Moreno. At that point, the other social movements were governed by Arce loyalists, but they have since held elections that respected the will of their members.
Seven – The majorities as protagonists
In the early 2000s and again during the coup year of 2019 to 2020, Bolivia’s majorities were the only force capable of building a future that respects grassroots democracy.
In mid-June, Evo Morales told social movement leaders to take precautionary measures because “the army has created something they call Plan Boquerón” to persecute protestors or marchers. “Some commanders have told me,” he said, “and I cite them, ‘We are not going to participate. That is not our mission’.” On June 19th, cocalero trade unionist and senator Leonardo Loza said, “We are alerting the distinct social sectors of our country. It’s as if we were returning to the era of the dictatorships – the rightwing is making plans to surveil, repress, and imprison people who join mobilizations. If we fail to denounce this, I am sure the plan will be carried out. It will be a calamity for our people. With our denunciation of this classified information, the Bolivian people can work to save itself from the claws of the government.” At the end of that month, a strange coup erupted for a little less than 3 hours, then practically vanished from sight.
Campesinos who honor Indigenous democracy say the most critical events of recent years have been the executive’s teargassing of national, departmental and provincial social movement congresses, and now the criminalization of their leaders. The executive branch has tried to force into place leaders subservient to the rightward shift of Arce. The march and blockades of recent months seem to have permanently discredited those leaders in the eyes of everyone except the middle class and the old oligarchy. Constitutionally protected actions of the poor are being brutally crushed.
Two leaders chosen by the executive branch “behind closed doors” to lead the largest social movements –Lucio Quispe and Guillermina Cuno– are not even members of MAS. They are jeered during their speeches. This is captured on film for anyone who cares to watch. Individuals affiliated with parties of the right such as Quispe and Cuno, or those who are expelled in general assemblies from the mass movements, receive the lion’s share of media attention in Bolivia, though their followers are scarce.
Civil servants or “functionaries” organized by the different ministries fill Arce’s events with the understanding they will be fired if they do not attend. They were mobilized to attack the marchers on September 18th, and again at the end of the march. In the first week of May at a congress organized by the executive that put forth Grover García, a functionary, as the next MAS presidential candidate, a young woman in attendance responded to a journalist that her social movement is “The Eco-Elves” or the Eco Duendes, which is the endearing, in-house term applied to scores of entry-level employees in the Ministry of the Economy. A few weeks later, in response to the same question posed at a demonstration of the president’s supporters, the person questioned had no idea what social sector or movement she might belong to, and burst out in laughter.
Elected campesino leaders of the grassroots MAS said to the press on the day Arce presented his own presidential candidate, Grover García, “We are standing guard, defending the MAS headquarters, because they are capable of anything. They try to start brawls. All they do is convulse the situation, unleash teargas on us.” The person speaking was Pedro Yanque, the second-ranking leader of the national campesino and Indigenous federation. “We will confront the police if they send them here. The people must understand, the congress they just held was not called by MAS. It’s really painful to see how they use public servants. On the day of the inauguration of their congress, it was a drunken spree. They are trying to take over the party, to prevent our brother Evo from running for president.”
Rank and file of the mass movements insist they are defending Bolivia from recolonization. They are Indigenous – campesinos, workers and miners. They talk about class war. Indigenous women in leadership, interviewed on the blockades, single out the U.S. embassy as their principal enemy. To quote one of them from the blockades in Potosí:
“Lucho Arce is a traitor: It’s clear he lacks the ability to resolve the economic crisis. Neither does he respect our Constitution. We demand the immediate liberation of all our political prisoners across the country, our brothers and sisters who find themselves at this moment in custody for unjust reasons. From this blockade, we invite everyone to join the blockades to recover our democracy. As we speak, the empire is at work in the Plurinational State of Bolivia. For that reason, yesterday or the day before, the high command with their blood-stained hands were changed, so they can repress us, kill us from hunger, and physically assassinate the people of this Plurinational State.”
by Cindy Forster
