Random thoughts on the Bolivian Election

With a sudden flood of opinions on Bolivia, I want to give some of my own unedited thoughts on some of the issues being talked about.

The institutionalization of MAS may have weakened Evo Morales in the short term, but it ensured they will remain the force of the majority for a long time to come.

The unprecedented success of Evo Morales and Movimiento al Socialismo–Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (MAS-IPSP) is often lazily grouped along with a variety of other political movements as “populism” - not only by the clueless English language media, but by the insular, right wing Latin American media which allows the upper and middle classes in Bolivia and throughout the region to live in a bubble detached from the majority they are terrified of. But ultimately, Evo’s success is very easy to understand - he did what he promised to do and lifted an unprecedented number of people out of poverty. Whatever else you want to say about Evo and MAS, the numbers speak for themselves.

Bolivia has spent most of its history as the poorest country in South America. For the majority of Bolivians, the country was a failed state, especially for the indigenous majority of the altiplano, the harsh, high altitude western part of the country dominated by a mestizo elite in La Paz. For many, especially the Aymara and Quechua communities, life had been the same since colonial times, as a white and mixed race minority profited off mining and later oil extraction while the majority of the country remained underdeveloped.

Although Bolivia has a history of nominally left wing governments - ones that usually ended in either a military coup or a shift to the right, the mestizo political class at best engaged with the altiplano indigenous community from the perspective of class politics or generalize “development” - important for sure, but indigenous representation remained limited.

Evo Morales has often been accused of exploiting his Aymara heritage - although he grew up speaking Aymara in a traditional adobe house and didn’t know any Spanish until he was six, he is no longer fluent in Aymara (per Evo, Spanish was the perferred language in mixed Aymara and Quechua communities) and is alleged to live a “western” lifestyle. These accusations primarily come from the racist elite (note the attempted scandal after the coup where they showed pictures of Evo’s normal looking apartment), but from Aymara activists too, including political allies turned rivals such as Félix Patzi and Felipe Quispe.

But MAS has not just put a brown face on tired social democratic ideas - beyond “representation”, this has been the first government in Bolivian history to really offer political power to Aymara and Quechua activists, and the economic success has given Bolivia, for the first time, a sizable indigenous middle class. Andean Bolivia remains very poor, but El Alto, the informal settlement on the harsh plain above La Paz turned city of a million people, the majority of them Aymara, has never had more resources, or been so integrated into La Paz proper. The “Neo-Andean” houses that now fill El Alto are just one example of the increased wealth now available.

And the Bolivian economic success story goes far beyond the Aymara heartland. The Evo Morales government has cut poverty in half, and you can see the development everywhere. From a purely capitalist perspective, Evo Morales has given half the country a reason to support MAS purely in the name of self interest.

Of course Bolivia is still very much a capitalist country, and MAS has run into the same trappings of all reformist governments who think they can harness the tools of the bourgeois state to create equality. Over 13 years, the Morales government saw diminished returns and while they may have extended political participation to the masses, the new, more indigenous political class did not open to everyone. MAS did not change the primary characteristic of the Bolivian economy, that is one dependent on the extraction of natural resources for the global economy, and although resources were heavily nationalized, multinational mining and gas companies continue to get their share. Much of the commitment to the environment articulated in Bolivia’s new constitution remains lip service, as mining and natural gas continue to be the main economic drivers of Bolivia.

Although exploited by international nonprofits looking to destabilize the country, the conflicts between the state and indigenous and left wing activists were not inherently a psyop, but a natural result of the contradictions of reformist socialism, and the success of the Morales government allowed them to roll over any resistance to the extractivist model.

If you compare the electoral votes from Evo’s first victory in 2005 with his largest success in 2014, you see the success MAS had in moving from their altiplano heartland into lowland Bolivia, even in the right wing stronghold of Santa Cruz - by 2014, MAS had become the establishment party. The 2015 regional elections however, showed a warning sign of what was to come. MAS lost the governorship of the La Paz department to Félix Patzi, an Aymara activist and Evo’s former minister of education who was kicked out of MAS following a drunk driving conviction. In El Alto - one of Evo’s most important support bases, MAS lost the mayor election to Soledad Chapetón, a member of Samuel Doria Medina’s centrist National Unity Front. Patzi and Chapetón serve as an Aymara extension to third-way middle class opposition to Evo Morales and MAS, typically characterized by mestizo figures such as La Paz mayor Luis Revilla, Medina, and Carlos Mesa. By the end of the first decade, Evo had alienated enough people that cries of fraud would be more realistic. The failed constitutional referendum in 2016 to pave the way for Evo to run again reflected this.

It is fair to say that too much success had taken away some of Evo Morales’ shine - after 13 years it wasn’t just racism that created resistance, and a lot of the La Paz middle class that MAS was able to win over was ready to go back to their natural home on the center right.

But after 13 years of stability and prosperity, including economic success by all measures for most of this period, the MAS brand had expanded far beyond personal loyalty to Evo Morales. If the opposition was correct to read in 2019 that Evo was weaker than he had been in years and could be overthrown, they bought into their own propaganda that he was a “populist” “strongman” without an institution behind him. Handing the country over to some of the dumbest, most corrupt, vicious, and outright racist political figures in Bolivia for a year was enough to guarantee turnout for MAS. While Evo’s brilliant political instincts are still needed for such a comeback, this is about more than Evo Morales. As an Argentine political commentator put it, “"la Whipala se respeta, carajo" - too many citizens of Bolivia now have too much dignity to put up with the likes of Jeanine Áñez now. And regardless of the limitations of his reformist project, this alone is the lasting legacy of Evo Morales.

This is all a good reminder of just how terrible the Bolivian political class is

There’s a lot of reasons for Bolivia’s underdevelopment - colonialism is the big one but not the only, and that’s a topic for another day. The US deserves a lot of credit for Bolivia’s 20th and 21st century troubles, but the other legacy of Spanish rule and American regional domination has been an absolutely terrible political class.

Prior to Evo Morales, other “populist” governments attempted to better integrate the country, which ended with a military coup virtually every time. Military dictators Gualberto Villarroel and Juan José Torres tried to defy the conservative military elite with Perón inspired pro-worker reforms, and both met a violent ends - the former by an angry mob of students as his inconsistent reforms lead to repression, the latter a victim of Operation Condor while living in exile in Buenos Aires.

Reformist minded presidents Víctor Paz Estenssoro and Hernán Siles Zuazo with their origins in the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) improved the living conditions of indigenous and poor Bolivians with pro-worker and universal programs, but the party remained in the hands of a westernized mestizo elite. Conflicts with the traditional elite and their military allies on one side, and the more radical labor unions on the other, lead mostly to instability. Paz Estenssoro and the MNR, over 4 decades of relevance, shifted further and further to the right, supporting the right wing dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in the 70s and returning to power himself in the 80s having fully embraced neoliberalism. It was under him that Chicago Boy and privatization guru Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada got his start. Left wing rival Jaime Paz Zamora and his Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) would also embrace Banzer, while Siles Zuazo, the only MNR alumni to not sell out completely to the right, ended his second Presidency in disaster after having been abandoned by most of his allies, including Paz Zamora.

This of course is a common theme in 80s and 90s Latin American politics - the end of the Cold War gave us the peak Washington Consensus years, and formerly left wing parties such as Mexico’s PRI and Argentina’s Justicialist Party during the Carlos Menem years were some of the most aggressive neoliberal reformers around, and in Bolivia the MNR and MIR were happy to play that role.

The problem is, while the traditional La Paz centric political elite were fully on board with technocratic neoliberalism, by the late 20th century the economic heart of Bolivia had moved from the altiplano to the media luna, the eastern departments centered around Santa Cruz, the natural gas producing lowland which has become the richest and most populous part of the country. Santa Cruz is a world apart from the Andean highlands, with a mestizo majority and significantly sized European minority that identifies more with the old world than the indigenous people of the Andes. Alienation and resentment has resulted in politics far to the right of even the modern political elite in La Paz, and the Santa Cruz elite have replaced the aristocracy and military as the primary force of reactionary politics in Bolivia. The combination of gas wealth and political alienation breeding reactionary politics resembles Alberta, although in this case with far more racism.

This is the world that Carlos Mesa, the runner up in 2019 and 2020 comes from. Mesa, a so called independent moderate, left journalism for politics when the MNR tapped him up to be the vice presidential candidate under Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (“Goni”). Goni, the driver of shock therapy since the 80s, ended his second presidential term in 2003 when he resigned in disgrace and fled to exile in the United States following the massacre of 60 people in El Alto who were protesting Goni’s plans to privatize natural gas reserves. Mesa, as president after that, was pressured by activists (including Evo Morales) to issue a referendum on the nationalization of gas. Although the referendum passed with over 86 percent of the population supporting nationalization, Mesa tried to triangulate his way out of this and simply increase royalties, which ultimately lead to his resignation in 2005.

Mesa hasn’t changed much since then - although socially liberal and a supporter of at least some of the social programs developed under MAS, his primary concern remains neoliberal standards such as anti-corruption and state “efficiency”, buzzwords for mass privatizations. On less explicitly economic issues, Mesa talks a good game, recruiting environmentalist and indigenous activists to his political coalition, but even the more admirable elements of Mesa’s world view are only possible through dependency on international investment, especially from the United States. This third way approach to politics seems like a relic of another era, and although it might have left him the inoffensive option for the middle class in 2019 and 2020, he has as little appeal to the hardliners in the media luna. And winning over the urban middle class, liberal sectors of the elite, and Andean region professionals isn’t enough for a majority when MAS has a good third of the electorate even in the most extreme parts of the media luna.

The sizable far right, representing the lowland elite including ranchers and loggers, were the force that had historically threatened MAS rule far more than the 90s neoliberals did, having been pacified with concessions during the most successful electoral years of the Morales government. Staunchly Catholic or Evangelical and identifying more with their European than indigenous ancestry, the political base of Luis Fernando Camacho and a significant portion of the Añez regime are explicitly racist, with little interest in democratic niceties. While the divide between liberals such as Mesa, Medina, and Quiroga and conservatives like Camacho, Añez, and Croatian fascist Branko Marinkovic can be seen a good cop, bad cop political theater, there is genuine distrust, and to someone like Camacho with little interest in respecting institutions outside of Santa Cruz, it’s no surprise that consolidating his own base was more important than backing Mesa.

So in a way, MAS was fortunate enough to be facing the region’s weakest bourgeoisie, and while there will be speculation for a long time over why the coup was able to be overwhelmed so easily, there’s a reason the Bolivian political class has a history of collapsing on itself. It’s possible that many of these figures genuinely consider themselves more truly democratic than Morales “populism” but even among the more cynical retrograde factions, even foreign backing can only go so far when the elite lack any institutional foothold or coherency outside of their own interests.

Those of us on the left tend to treat the bourgeoisie as all powerful, and while their class interest often are, individually the elite is made up of flawed and often very stupid individuals. The Bolivian elite, a group on the periphery of the periphery, lacks the resources and institutional stability compared to other countries in the region, and their failing in part was their own incompetence.

International interference was real, but we probably should blame Juan Guaidó over Tesla

One of the more fun theories thrown around by western leftists was that the coup was all about lithium, and that Elon Musk’s “confession” on twitter was more than a stupid joke. It didn’t help that Evo himself gave support to this theory, although that was probably more a savvy political move to drum up international support than anything else.

While thinking this is fun, the reality isn’t quite that simple. The golden rule still applies here - when there’s unrest under a left wing government, blaming Uncle Sam is never wrong, but there has been a consistent playbook for a while now that didn’t start when the Bolivian government cancelled a deal with a German corporation for a massive lithium project in Potosí.

First of all, it was the Morales government and the MAS run departmental government that negotiated that project in the first place - the German project was selected over international rivals for their agreement to build production facilities instead of just extracting raw material, because as lithium rich as Bolivia is, they lack such facilities to maximize the value. The plan was only scrapped in the face of massive protests organized by Marco Antonio Pumari and the Potosi Civic Committee. Pumari, a regional leader in opposition to the Morales government, would go on to be an ally of Camacho and the vice presidential candidate in his campaign.

This was just one example of the nationalist-extractivist project of MAS, designed to lift people out of poverty, being more complicated than simply Bolivia vs the big bad multinationals. Bolivia’s nationalization of industries upset plenty of powerful people, both at home and abroad, but this is still state capitalism, and there was plenty of money to be made for international companies willing to play ball. The US has been hostile to Bolivia under this government but their relationship was mainly a pragmatic one, as Bolivia may be rich with natural resources but nothing quite the level of Venezuela’s oil.

It is a safe bet however, that the US has been happy to fund opposition to the Morales government, through a combination of direct engagement to with their traditional allies (both the Santa Cruz far right and Carlos Mesa have ties to the state department) and through NGOs, many of which had seemingly benevolent aims in the environmental, indigenous, and always nebulous “human rights” sectors.

The last few years leading up to 2019 saw those NGOs taking a larger and larger role. Part of this had been the fault of the Morales government - their willingness to roll over protests and engage less and less with their previous environmental commitments made it easy for foreign backed nonprofits to take the mantle of the defenders of the planet, and the state’s mega projects, along with events such as the massive fires in the Amazon, made the government a fair target for criticism, even if the critiques didn’t always come from a sincere place.

The government’s dip in popularity was unfortunate to coincide with an escalation of the situation in Venezuela. Marco Rubio had managed to wrangle his way into running the Trump administration’s Latin American policy, and while his focus was on Venezuela and Cuba where the political benefits were more obvious, Rubio is definitely no friend to Evo Morales. But more than anything else, fucking with Bolivia remained a way to put more pressure on Venezuela, and with Bolsonaro and Macri offering a regional anchor for regime change beyond Colombia, much of the attention on Bolivia was simply part of the road to Caracas.

Just look at two of the figures to suddenly gain international attention as opposition to Morales leading up to the coup. First there’s Jhanisse Daza, founder of the environmental NGO “Rios de Pie” which had gotten significant international airtime during the Amazon fires in an attempt to shift blame from Bolsonaro to Morales. Daza is a locally minor figure who spends her time split between Bolivia and the United States, but she represents the most visible Bolivian representative associated with the comical Human Rights Foundation, a joke of a human rights nonprofit run by Venezuelan oligarch Thor Halvorssen, that has pumped most of their international funding into Venezuelan ops.

Then look at Senator turned unexpected President Jeanine Añez. Prior to becoming the face of the coup, Añez had little political clout outside of her home department of Beni in the Amazon, although such representation gave her a platform during the numerous media luna protests. Beyond that, a curious and little mentioned fact is that her husband, Héctor Hernando Hincapié Carvajal, is a failed Colombian Conservative politician and an Alvaro Uribe supporter. If we want to get into conspiracies, the Colombian government of Uribe disciple Ivan Duque might be a more interesting subject than Elon Musk.

And the regional right deserves plenty of credit for this coup. Duque and Bolsonaro definitely knew about it as was happening, and while Macri feigned neutrality, we later found out the Bolivian military was conducting exercises over the Argentine border (bordering Argentine province Jujuy, remains governed by right wing radical of Bolivian descent, Gerardo Morales, who had a tense relationship with Evo), and Macri would refuse to allow Evo Morales in Argentine airspace when he left the country. While it’s easy to claim these right wing governments were doing the bidding of Washington, they had their own interest in removing Venezuela’s only remaining regional ally, and the electoral comeback might not have been possible if Macri was reelected. Evo’s subsequent exile in Buenos Aires gave him ties to almost half a million Bolivian citizens, the overwhelming majority of who supported him.

Even the OAS under the detestable Luis Almagro, possibly more responsible than anyone for the disaster in Bolivia, seem to have almost a singleminded focus on Venezuela. The coup government immediately joined the Lima group to put pressure on Maduro. While American financial incentives to liberalize the economy lead to the classic playbook of disruption (seen also in Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador), the clumsy aggression of the coup and subsequent failure to consolidate power is very much in line with Trump’s Latin American strategy, where everything outside of Venezuela is an afterthought.