Foreign policy is pretty central both to why I first became interested in politics and how I think leftist politics should work. And I think issues in Latin America are among the world’s most interesting and important. Yet I haven’t written much about Latin America in this blog. I’ll aim to correct that a bit with some discussion of Bolivia.
But, first, I want to say a bit about the special difficulties of writing about US policy in Latin America, generally, and in Bolivia, specifically. In the social media-inspired era of having an opinion about literally every little thing, I might bring a bit of a retro attitude toward Bolivia: fear of making a mistake. Fear, perhaps, that my own methods aren’t well suited to Bolivia.
In previous posts on Israel-Palestine and North Korea, I’ve written in a US-centric way. I’m an American writing about US foreign politics and its global implications, so perhaps that’s a given. It’s also fine when talking about Israel and North Korea, two countries where the US plays a pretty central role. The US is the main diplomatic enabler of Israeli repression of Palestinians, and it’s the main foil within internal North Korean politics.
Things are different in Latin America. Not to stretch the disanalogy too far. The US has had a huge influence in Latin America, much of it for the negative and much of it tied, rhetorically and strategically, to the Monroe Doctrine. But political history in Latin America has lots of causes independent of specific US action or antagonism. Especially Bolivia right now.
The Politics of Bolivia
In one sense, the Bolivia story resembles many others. There’s a long history of European settler-colonialism and its aftermath. Indigenous people in Bolivia struggle to survive, preserve their ways of life, and thrive in a world that must seem, in many ways, post-apocalyptic. This is a story we find in much of the Western Hemisphere.
But what heightens these issues in Bolivia, specifically, is that the Native American population is proportionally larger and more diverse than anywhere else. About 20% of the people of Bolivia live specifically in Indigenous communities. They come from dozens of different ethnic groups divided across the highland and lowland parts of the country. Including people with mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, Indigenous people easily make up a majority of Bolivia’s population.
Officially, Bolivia freed itself from colonialist domination by the early 19th century. But to a greater or lesser extent, economic and white minority interests dominated the country until the 2005 election. Between those dates, the country alternated between expanding liberal democracy and military dictatorship, with the basic interests and concerns remaining mostly intact. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, the president prior to Evo Morales, makes a fine example. He’s a US-educated fiscal conservative many Bolivians nicknamed ‘El Gringo’. Sánchez de Lozada resigned and fled to the US in 2003 as a result of pressure from Morales’s Indigenous popular movement.
Evo Morales
Bolivia elected Evo Morales as its first Indigenous president in 2005. Morales and his party, Movement for Socialism, received an absolute majority of the vote and had the support of the majority Indigenous population, a first for Bolivia. Nor was this some one-off fluke due to a crisis situation. Morales expanded his coalition in the 2009 election and still topped 60% in the 2014 election. Even in the contested 2019 election, Morales easily won a plurality of the vote. His movement is the only political force in Bolivia with a mandate from broad popular support.
Morales’s background is from the Indigenous Aymara community in the Andes and the interests of farmers in that region. His activism focused on the interests of coca growers, who were under massive attack from the US and Bolivian allies. Organizing coca growers put the Morales movement in position to claim popular legitimacy once a much larger conflict broke out that united coca growers with other groups of Bolivians. That larger conflict was over the use of Bolivia’s natural gas reserves, which put together the interests of highland and lowland Indigenous peoples.
It’s this union that put Morales in position to take the big electoral win in 2005. And with Bolivia’s previous political establishment discredited and disunited, his opposition was isolated to a narrow, but powerful, political and economic elite. They were basically down to raw economic interests without political coverage. These interests could, and did, still make trouble for Morales, but they couldn’t regularly command more than one-third of the vote in national elections. From there, they simmered and plotted.
Policies under Morales
So, what did Morales do in office? I’ll set aside the details, though there are good places to get started. The gist of it is that he did about what he said he would do. He took the boot off the throat of the Indigenous majority, and he fought economic and social inequality. Much of it he did through vast increases in social spending. He moved the country from a more or less still-colonized economy to a mixed economy where companies and Bolivia’s people shared the benefits.
In terms of data and methods, Morales doubled the country’s GDP during his first two terms. And during those two terms, he reduced extreme poverty by half. These latter benefits are the sorts of things he reached through nationalization. The culmination of his early economic and social policy was a plan to nationalize Bolivia’s electrical grid.
2019 Coup in Bolivia
Evo Morales won the 2019 election, but he’s not the President of Bolivia. Why? Here’s a legalistic answer. He resigned the office in November 2019. Shortly after that, his legal successor, Adriana Salvatierra of Movement for Socialism, also resigned. A right-wing opposition leader was next in line, and now she’s in charge. Even this legalistic story is thorny, as the Bolivian Senate did not accept Salvatierra’s resignation before naming her right-wing replacement. Perhaps in Bolivian law, Salvatierra is still the rightful president. But, legal or not, the facts on the ground have put the right-winger in charge.
Here’s a more informative answer. Morales (and then Salvatierra) resigned in November 2019 in the face of mass protests. The protests started over (probably false) allegations of electoral fraud and (probably true) allegations that Morales subverted the democratic system to stand for a new term in the 2019 election. I think it’s also clear enough that the protests allowed for more than a bit of opportunism on the part of Morales’s opponents. It’s this latter point that’s led to the ‘coup’ label. While the protests turned quickly from anti-Morales to pro-Morales after the coup, the coup has thus far proven successful.
Mistakes and Lessons from Bolivia?
To point out that Morales is Bolivia’s first Indigenous president is not to absolve him of all sin. Robert Mugabe was Zimbabwe’s great anti-colonialist leader. His presidency…certainly had its problems. Whereas in some situations a certain identity might be necessary to rule a country effectively, it’s never sufficient. Potential Morales missteps fall under the same note.
Morales opponents never quit planning his ouster. In the early years of his presidency, they formed local autonomy movements in areas they controlled. Much of this came to a head in 2008. They also sponsored a recall referendum, which failed spectacularly. As for the autonomy movement, Morales himself effectively embraced and repurposed it. He packaged it with a new constitution and used it to advance Indigenous autonomy.
Constitutional Issues
The constitutional issues started getting more complicated with the 2014 election. Given that Bolivian voters approved a new constitution in 2009, courts ruled that the first Morales term, from 2005-2009, didn’t count toward term limits. And thus they ruled him eligible to stand for re-election for a second (really, his third) term in 2014. He ran in 2014 and won. The trouble? That was supposed to be his final term. But Morales tried to amend the constitution via referendum to allow him to run for another term in 2019. He lost the referendum. His response was to challenge the loss in court, and the courts ruled that Morales could run for another term in 2019.
Lessons?
The Bolivian opposition saw the opportunity and took it. They organized mass protests and forced Morales and Movement for Socialism out of office after he won the 2019 election. Morales himself surely knew this might happen. Why did he run for re-election when the law didn’t really allow for it? Did he have a good reason to try to amend the constitution again in 2016? Did he have a good reason to challenge the failed referendum?
It’s hard to say. I think answering these questions requires some very in-depth knowledge of internal Bolivian politics and probably internal Movement for Socialism politics. To create and sustain a popular movement requires organizing. Along with that comes the identification and growth of organic leaders. Did Morales fail to do these things? And, if so, why? Was he trying to hold onto personal power at the expense of the movement? Or was the situation so precarious that only Morales himself could lead the relevant popular coalition?
I’m not sure I have the answers to these questions. At the very least, the end of the Morales presidency ought to teach us the necessity of leadership development and succession to popular movement organizing. It can’t all depend on one person or a few people. The failure of one cannot be the failure of entire movements.
Current Bolivian Government
Bolivia is currently led by Jeanine Áñez. She’s not quite as obvious in her US-centrism as, say, El Gringo. But it’s the same basic idea. She’s a right-wing Christian who opposes much of the secularization of government carried out under Morales. And she’s an opponent of the interests of coca growers, a big part of the original motivation of the Morales movements. And, of course, she did all the things we’d expect of anyone attempting to realign Bolivia under the interests of the US and its own economic powers. Right away she recognized the shadow state of the coup leader in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó.
The End of the Pink Tide
Morales first won election in 2005 not as an anomaly, but rather as one of the later victories in the Pink Tide movement across South America. The Pink Tide began its electoral successes with the victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998, continued through elected leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and have now largely fallen apart due to economic decline in the late 2000s and declines in, e.g., oil prices in the 2010s.
The Pink Tide through South America produced and reproduced many of the same issues found in Bolivia. Indeed, it’s difficult to discuss Morales and Áñez without mentioning the situation throughout South America, particularly the situation in Venezuela. The issues blew up much sooner in most other places, largely because the ethnic bonds found in Bolivia, while present in other countries, weren’t as strong. And so, it’s hardly surprising that the kinds of troubles in 2019 Bolivia happened sooner in places like Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
Postscript: What To Read Next
I’ve written a few Foreign Policy 101 posts in this blog. The post here on Bolivia is the third. For point of reference, here are links to the other two:
