August 2025

To preface this piece: I am a white male American socialist anthropologist who’s lived in Bolivia (La Paz and El Alto) over most of the last three plus years while researching in and among Aymara communities in the Bolivian Altiplano. I am not directly involved in leftist organizing in Bolivia and so am not privy to any special information besides that which I’ve gathered from observing, living, and researching in the country. The places where I’ve worked were MAS strongholds, and they have every reason to be. To give a basic example, the road between El Alto and the community I’ve spent the most time in (Sullkatiti Titiri) was paved for the first-time during Evo Morales’s presidency, and water and electricity connections were introduced and/or improved. I have heard similar stories in my visits to other communities across the Aymara Altiplano–for the majority, as it has been expressed to me, the past 20 years, and especially the Evo Morales led gas boom years, is the most positive historical experience within cultural memory. 

The Aymara people of the Bolivian Altiplano have lived a long history of oppression from and struggle against Spanish and then Bolivian colonizers (as well as American imperialism), protagonized the Gas War in El Alto in 2003 that culminated in the fall of neoliberal president Sanchez de Lozada, and became a strong MAS voting bloc during the presidencies of Evo Morales. As a student of the Aymara culture who also speaks the language, I can write to some extent about the transformation of the Aymara world under the MAS while nonetheless insisting on their political independence much the same way they have done in the streets. It could be argued that Aymara peasant union led road blocks in 2020 were the final straw that pushed the far-right coup regime to allow elections, but I would argue—as Felipe Quispe did[1]—that these road blocks were intended to defend democracy in general rather than the MAS in particular. 

My analysis of Bolivia is necessarily partial due to my geographically and culturally limited engagement—while I’m knowledgeable about the country in general I have not seen other regions and Indigenous cultures first hand. That I have not seen it myself would be epistemologically meaningful to Aymara interlocutors, seeing as the language has two past tenses that differ based on whether or not the speaker witnessed the events they are narrating. What this means in practice is that most of my specific examples will be drawn from Aymara political struggle and from the altiplano as a territory. From this tradition also comes my long-running critique of the easy association people make/have made between the MAS and the Indigenous Aymara peasant movement. The wiphala flag, for instance, was most famously adopted by the MAS from this tradition.[2] But many of its most radical proponents and most important leaders, such as the late great Felipe Quispe, always maintained a cautious distance from Evo Morales and the MAS and denounced its sometimes-insincere attempts to ingratiate itself to or appropriate from this tradition of struggle.[3]

Introduction: The Process of Change

The Process of Change undertaken in Bolivia during Evo Morales’s time as president ought to be seen as one of the most important projects of social transformation in Latin America during the Pink Tide period, which ushered in progressive governments across the region. Most importantly, as Bolivia’s income swelled due to high prices for the country’s abundant natural gas, the MAS government instituted a number of social welfare programs to redistribute this wealth. It also invested heavily in state owned industries and companies. 

The early returns on these redistributive policies based on natural gas extraction were booming economic growth and poverty reduction unprecedented in Bolivian history. Nonetheless, times have changed, and at the time of writing Bolivia is in the midst of a worsening economic crisis that threatens to reverse the economic gains made during the Process of Change. At the root of the crisis is a twofold problem with the natural gas industry: not only has the international price of natural gas decreased, but also Bolivia’s existing reserves are largely tapped out. Of course, Bolivia still has significant natural gas reserves within its territory—the problem here is that since the “nationalization” of the gas industry the state gas company has invested little to nothing in exploration, and the private transnational companies which had been extracting the gas (and which continued to do so while paying higher royalties) ceased to conduct their own exploration due to the new financial arrangements governing the Bolivian gas industry.  

The Process of Change in Plurinational Bolivia and the Indigenous leaders and masses which have protagonized it have naturally been celebrated topics of discussion for the North American left over the past couple of decades. Bolivia is the most Indigenous country in the so-called Americas (in terms of percentage of population, at around 40+%)[4], and its long oppressed and disenfranchised Indigenous majority gaining political power via the presidency, and later attaining political hegemony, is something to celebrate. Moreover, the Process of Change instituted by Evo Morales’s government contributed to the largest reduction in poverty and extreme poverty in Bolivian history. I was and am inspired by these accomplishments: you can make a very legitimate argument that the past 20 years (approximately) have been the best period ever for the average Bolivian. 

So why am I here to hold a requiem for the MAS-IPSP? To put it simply, the Bolivian economic miracle is over because the natural gas that fueled it is gone and the government’s attempts to develop a lithium industry from scratch have not succeeded. The crisis right now is a twin crisis: perhaps the most important consequence of the absence of natural gas exports is the subsequent absence of dollars entering the state’s coffers and the economy in general. The government’s foreign exchange reserves in cash are lower than they have ever been in the history of the country. The lack of dollars means that the country cannot afford to import foreign products, most critically diesel and gasoline. Critical diesel shortages have prompted truckers’ union strikes and blockades and rising prices across the economy due to increased fuel and shipping costs. Inflation stands at at least 24.86% annually as of July 2025’s official data[5], and the prices of imported goods especially have skyrocketed. Bolivia’s domestic industries are also consequently lacking in input materials; the country’s balance of trade is nonetheless very much in the red and has been since October 2024.[6]

The government remains steadfast in its effective peg of the Boliviano to the American dollar, 6.96. In reality, both MAS governments’ maintenance of this peg amounted to an effective subsidy of the boliviano that was possible so long as the state had dollars to inject into the market. In the absence of such reserves a parallel exchange rate and market have emerged, where the dollar is currently worth approximately twice as much as the official rate (you can receive between 12-15 bolivianos for dollar sold at the moment). In real terms, this means that the boliviano has lost a significant amount of its value; correspondingly, prices are rising steadily. Despite the official statistics which show Bolivia as having the lowest inflation rate in the region (due to the effective peg and subsidy of the currency), the emergent parallel market demonstrates that it actually has the highest or second highest inflation rate in the region over the past year or so. And, of course, it is at the moment impossible to obtain dollars from banks at the official exchange rate, as the banks either also lack dollars or are unwilling to lose money on such a transaction. 

What this means is that, on the actually existing market, a monthly minimum wage (as of 2025) of 2500 bolivianos is worth not $360 (approximately) but somewhere between $208 and $178 (approximately), a difference of 42-51%. When a formal sector worker’s wage is worth about half what it was before, it seems more appropriate to speak of catastrophe than crisis. By the time this article is published, the disparity since writing will have only grown. As a consequence of the dollar crisis, Bolivia is also experiencing an acute but variable intensity shortage of gasoline and diesel, which the country has long both imported and heavily subsidized. This subsidy on gasoline is now of major controversy, seeing as it is one of the major outflows of dollars from the government’s coffers (another major expense being the dollars needed to import the fuel itself). Based purely on the math, it and pretty much every demand side subsidy that the government maintains (and there are many), needs to be eliminated. This will lead to a (further) significant increase in prices, which are already rising a lot considering that Bolivia has the highest inflation rate in the region. Bolivia’s credit rating has been consistently downgraded in recent years and is currently CCC-, with basically nowhere left to go down but defaulting.[7] Bolivia’s hard currency FX reserves at that time sat at just $47 million and total exports had fallen 19% due to dwindling gas production. Bolivia will next have to service foreign debt in 2026 and is at serious risk of being unable to pay absent drastic corrective measures. 

In what follows, I argue that the Process of Change as such has ended, and that the MAS is no longer a capable leader of the Bolivian masses, which are as divided now as they have ever been. In the current context of economic and political crisis, the Indigenous and working class social movements must return to the forefront to reconstitute a new mass decolonizing, socialist, and anti-imperialist left. These social movements must find new leaders to replace those who are little more than sellouts to whichever MAS president is in power at the time. The social movements have taken power in Bolivia before and they could very well do so again. At the moment, however, I cannot help but feel despair. These movements have never been more fractured and these fractures are mostly little more than sellout factions supporting one of the sides of the MAS. At the peak of the Evo-Arce feud organizations like the CSUTCB and every other Indigenous, peasant and working-class social movement was divided into “officialist” pro-Arce and “dissident” pro-Evo factions; the situation is still much the same although now there are third splinter groups supporting the presidential candidacy of Andronico Rodriguez. There is little in the way of organic social movement or syndicalist politics, and this is a shame. It is also something that the MAS is quite responsible for. Evo first and now Arce are nothing if not experts in co-opting and or decapitating the leadership of social movements/organizations.[8] I maintain that there are few tactics that Arce now employs that rightfully earn him criticism for having drifted to the right are things that he learned from watching Evo. The end of the unity of independent mass social movements united in a common political struggle doomed the Process of Change even as it most firmly vested power in the figure of the president and the formal leadership of the MAS party. Neither Evo nor Arce followed through on their lofty rhetoric about governing by obeying the social movements–if a “social movement state” existed in Bolivia during the MAS years, it existed for only a brief period before the centrality of state and party power asserted itself. 

Background: From the Revolution of 1952 to the Decree of 1985

A thorough discussion of Bolivia’s Process of Change and Democratic Cultural Revolution under Evo Morales (2005-2019) and later Luis Arce (2021-Present) really requires quite a bit of historical context. Still, I’m not sure which point in history is a sufficiently explicatory starting point. There is a common periodization in the Bolivianist anthropological literature of the contemporary protagonism of Indigenous politics in Bolivia that dates from the introduction of neoliberal reforms in 1985. Nonetheless, we can identify examples of clearly Indigenous politics (by Indigenous actors for Indigenous liberation) in Bolivia going back much further, and Indigenous revolts and land occupations were central events to the success of the 1952 Bolivian national revolution.[9] 

Seen especially from an Andeanist historiographical point of view, the timeline for understanding the rise of the MAS needs to start with a discussion of the 1952 National Revolution and its aftermath. It is common in the literature for scholars to focus on the introduction of neoliberal shock therapy reforms in 1985 as a starting point for specifically Indigenous social movement importance in Bolivia. Because these reforms completed the liquidation of the organized mining proletariat as the vanguard of the Bolivian workers’ movement, goes the argument, and because of neoliberal identity politics, Indigenous social movements that articulated politics qua indigeneity were able to rise to the forefront of Bolivian popular politics. 

However, this overlooks the importance of the 1952 Revolution. In terms of the social changes it unleashed, Bolivia’s revolution was one of the most transformative in Latin American history, despite its lack of a clear communist or socialist orientation. It effectively liquidated the holdings of the two most important sectors of the bourgeoisie: the hacendado/gamonal large land owners in the highlands who lived off of exploiting Indigenous labor, and the tin mining rosca which lived off the same. Hacienda lands were returned to the communities they usurped and the mines were nationalized and placed under the control of the national miners’ union. It is more common in the literature to focus on the nationalization and worker control of the mines, with the miners taking the role of the revolution’s proletarian protagonists. It is certainly true that without the armed organization of the miners the revolution wouldn’t have been possible, and it is also true that they were the vanguard of the proletariat in this period. Miners were the largest and most organized working-class sector in the country. Nonetheless, the Indigenous movements that would seize this protagonism in later decades also have their roots in the contradictions the revolution tried to address[10]; namely the subjugation of Indigenous land and labor and a highly profitable mining sector that generated nothing for the country’s development because the three titans of the industry didn’t keep or invest their profits in Bolivia. The agrarian reform was insufficient at addressing the land problem in the Aymara altiplano and the social gains insufficient at tackling institutional racism and permitting the Indigenous majority to fully exercise sociopolitical rights. Haciendas expanded across the altiplano in the 19th century, usurping Indigenous community lands and exploiting this Indigenous land and labor. Indigenous laborers were in effect peons with little rights or independence. The proletariat in the mining camps lived more independent lives that were nonetheless short and extremely harsh–also of Indigenous descent, the miners were organized in militant, Trotskyist influenced unions that were the vanguard of the Bolivian workers’ movement. The Indigenous masses on the haciendas were essentially excluded from national politics but remained a target of state repression due to frequent revolts and organizing against abuses and denials of their rights.[11]

The dissolution of this proletariat with the relocation and closure of the mining camps as part of the neoliberal decrees of 1985 sparked a total reconfiguration of the Bolivian economy and working class. It is arguably for this reason that the distinctly Indigenous identifying political subject was able to assume protagonism in Bolivia’s political struggles while articulating as precisely that, an Indigenous political subject. This was a new development, not because the miners were not ethnically Indigenous but because their demands were made in terms of their sectoral interests and those of the organized working class more generally. With their disintegration as an organized force it was necessary that another identity become the articulatory pole of Bolivian subaltern politics.

I propose that it makes sense to start this article with a discussion of the 1952 revolution, the subsequent 1953 agrarian reform, and the subsequent undoing of this revolution through the actions of military dictatorships and democratically elected governments starting in 1964 and continuing through the Banzer dictatorship (part of Operation Condor, 1971-79) up until the introduction of neoliberal reforms by Victor Paz Estenssoro, once the leader of the revolution, in 1985. The agrarian reform instituted by Paz Estenssoro’s/the MNR’s first government in 1953 was arguably the most revolutionary such reform in Latin American history. It liquidated the haciendas and the large essentially feudal landowning class that had encroached, exploited, abused, and enslaved Altiplano Aymara communities for centuries; the formation of haciendas through expropriation of Indigenous community land was a key step in primitive accumulation in Bolivia in the late 19th century.[12] Although the revolutionary state expropriated the haciendas, it pursued a policy of individual rather than collective land titling which contributed to the parcelization of larger plots of land, eventually making the problem not latifundias (large landed estates) but minifundias (extremely small individual landholdings). 

It must be noted, however, that although the state supported expropriation of the haciendas, in many cases the expropriation itself and in every case the demand for the land to those who work it came from militant Indigenous organizing and direct action across the altiplano.[13] This prompted the first waves of large-scale rural to urban migration in the Altiplano. Another fundamental change instituted by the national revolution was the nationalization of the tin mines (then Bolivia’s primary export and dominant economic sector) under a national mining company controlled by the miners’ union. 

Generations of Bolivian leftist thinkers since the great Marxist sociologist Rene Zavaleta Mercado have understood the problem of the state in Bolivia thusly: the battle for state power is a battle to control the surplus generated by the economy.[14] In some detail, Zavaleta theorized that the degree of development of the Bolivian state corresponded to its ability to control the division of surplus-value. Moreover, Bolivia is a motley society in which a plurality of economies both capitalist and not coexist. These insights have been foundational for the modern Bolivian left and they form an intellectual undercurrent to the economic model implemented by the MAS. This model, the Social, Communitarian, and Productive Economic Model (MESCP in Spanish) essentially proposes that the state should look to generate an economic surplus in certain strategic productive sectors (gas/energy production and mining, principally) and redistribute that surplus into the employment sectors. The natural gas industry produced tremendous wealth but employs/employed relatively few people, and this would be the case with lithium as well. This is an important difference in the laboring conditions of the most or potentially most productive sectors of the Bolivian economy: when, for instance, tin was Bolivia’s dominant export; tin mining was a labor intensive industry, giving rise to a large and well organized proletariat led by miners and their families. 

The revolution was always going to be curtailed by the massive amounts of American aid it received, but it was truly ended by General Rene Barrientos’s military coup in 1964, which governed in a pact with the peasantry and violently repressed the left.[15] Barrientos’s government ended with his death in a helicopter crash in 1969. He was succeeded by his vice-president Siles who was swiftly overthrown in General Ovando’s 1969 coup. His government lasted 13 months and took a surprisingly left-wing/populist approach. The brief government ended in 1970 with a right-wing military coup that saw a military junta govern for all of a day before its overthrow in another left-wing military coup by General Juan Jose Torres. Torres would govern for 10 months before his overthrow in General Hugo Banzer’s right-wing military coup (part of Operation Condor). Banzer’s grip on power would last longer than his predecessors and marks perhaps an even more conclusive end to the national revolutionary period than Barrientos’s 1964 coup. Banzer reigned until 1978 and was himself overthrown in a coup by General Juan Pereda, who was overthrown four months later by General David Padilla, whose government called democratic elections. The president who emerged from these elections (chosen by the legislature in the second round on an interim, compromise basis), was former MNR founder Walter Guevara Arze–he was overthrown within the year in a bloody coup by the general Alberto Natusch Busch. Natusch was forced out of office after only 16 days following a general strike and a complete lack of political support. Lidia Gueiler, the first woman to assume Bolivia’s presidency, was then appointed on an interim basis to call elections, which were carried out on June 29th, 1980. Before the results of the election took effect, Bolivia’s brief return to democracy was dashed by yet another extremely bloody, far right coup, led by general Luis Garcia Meza. Garcia Meza openly collaborated with Bolivia’s major drug traffickers, and his repressive regime was propped up by the cocaine trade; the regime’s criminality and violence was so extreme that not even Ronald Reagan could be persuaded to support it. Garcia Meza was forced to resign in 1981, and was replaced by general Celso Torrelio, who was later replaced by general Guido Vildoso, who is the most recent military dictator to hold the Bolivian presidency–he called democratic elections and the military has not assumed power since. The return to democratic governance under Hernan Siles Zuazo saw Bolivia’s brewing economic crisis reach a head, as the country reached one of the highest levels of hyperinflation ever recorded. The period of democratic governance from 1982-2005 cannot be said to be a popular democracy, as the Indigenous masses of the population continued to be excluded from government and meaningful representation. 

This succession of mostly right-wing military dictatorships only succeeded in reversing some of the gains of the revolution. For instance, the effects of the agrarian reform were never reversed and the hacendado class never reconstituted itself. Moreover, the more general social gains of 1952 (the insertion of the Indigenous majority into the class of citizen, at least formally) were also never quite reversed, although anti-Indigenous racism would continue being a major theme of Bolivian social life until at least Evo Morales’s presidency. Anti-Indigenous racism is still a major motivating force of the Bolivian right, although its open expression has become less welcome in polite society. 

The Rise of the MAS and Evo

My own perspective is largely Andeanist, but the roots of the MAS grew elsewhere, in the formation of coca growers unions in the Tropic region of the Cochabamba department. These unions cut their teeth in anti-imperialist direct action in their conflicts with the United States DEA’s coca eradication programs in the region. The addition of causes like plurinationality, Indigenous liberation, and so on came later as the nascent party entered national politics. This gave rise to a radical Aymara Indianista critique holding that the MAS only ever appropriated Aymara and other Indigenous rhetoric and symbolism without being a truly Indigenous party.[16] In any case, it’s undeniable that the MAS agglutinated significant support from Bolivia’s Indigenous population in its heyday, especially rural Quechuas and Aymaras. 

The relationship between citizens and the state in Bolivia, and in particular the changes in this relationship over the nearly fourteen years of Evo Morales’s presidency (2006-2019), has been a popular topic for anthropologists interested in indigeneity and social movement politics. A chief goal of his presidency was to complete the decolonization of Bolivia, a project to be carried out by the “decolonizing state” which would transform the relations of economic exploitation and cultural oppression that had defined and disempowered indigenous peoples’ experience of Bolivian citizenship. His election in 2005 has been viewed as the culmination of a revolutionary epoch[17] that had begun with the Water Wars (2000) in Cochabamba[18] and had been preceded by decades of militant indigenous, worker, and peasant organizing. Morales’s ascension to the presidency, however, brought with it a debate internal to the left-indigenous movement over how to produce common ideological discourses incorporating the indigenous identities vociferously expressed during the Water and Gas (2003) wars and long subalternized by Western colonization.[19] As Nancy Grey Postero notes[20], the defining contradiction of the state-led decolonizing process was the use of liberal state mechanisms to overturn coloniality and its afterlives.

The Water (2000) and Gas (2003) Wars in Cochabamba and El Alto are two foundational events in the insurrectionary cycle that ultimately brought down neoliberal governance in Bolivia (Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada fled the country in the wake of the Gas War after the armed forces had murdered 80+ protesters in violent repression that he ordered). The Gas War gave rise to the October Agenda, whose demands included the nationalization of Bolivian natural gas and other resources such that the proceeds could benefit Bolivians and develop Bolivia; the October Agenda significantly influenced the early years of MAS governance, particularly insofar as the gas was “nationalized”. Both sociopolitical conflicts were caused by neoliberal governments’ attempts to privatize key resources, water provision in the city of Cochabamba and the direct export of Bolivian natural gas at low prices through private pipelines to the United States via Chile. The privatization of water in Cochabamba would have significantly raised the price of water and would not have prioritized water access over profitability. In the case of gas, transnational companies would extract gas in Bolivia territory to be shipped immediately out of the country–in this instance, to the United States at a very low cost and with almost no income to Bolivia. El Alto, the largest Indigenous-majority city in the Americas, became the site of an Indigenous-popular insurrection[21] against this plan that eventually formulated the demand for resource nationalization and the use of Bolivia’s natural resources for the development of Bolivia first. El Alto at the time was also an extremely poor city, whose inhabitants often commuted to work in La Paz where they suffered racism and abusive employers.[22] More than a hundred Alteños were murdered by the armed forces during the repression stage of the Gas War, and hundreds more were wounded.

During Morales’s presidency, indigeneity was supposed to represent not only “the presence of ethnic politics but also [a] cultural and knowledge centered challenge to the conventional western paradigms through which state transformations are debated.”[23] The state’s representation of indigeneity as embodying an ontological alternative to neoliberal capitalism was later reduced from a site of emancipation to one of liberal nation-state making.[24] But it remains a site of emancipation in other senses, and one whose relevance was reasserted by the racist violence that succeeded the Morales government’s fall in November 2019.

A key innovation early in the years of Evo’s government was the unification of Bolivia’s largest Indigenous and peasant social movement organizations into a bloc called the Pact of Unity. The Pact of Unity included the following five organizations: the Unitary Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia[25] (CSUTCB, Spanish acronym), the National Confederation of Indigenous Peasant Native Women of Bolivia - Bartolina Sisa, the Syndicalist Confederation of Intercultural Communities of Bolivia (CSCIB), the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB), and the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ). These are (or were) the largest and most important Indigenous peasant social movements representative of the entire country, but they have mostly fractured into pro- and anti-government factions with varying levels of organicness. CIDOB and CONAMAQ withdrew from the pact in 2011, but government affiliated splinter groups were founded that rejoined in 2013. The Pact of Unity’s role largely shifted towards being a government support bloc rather than an articulation of decolonizing Indigenous peasant politics. 

Economic Successes and Failures

The global left in general should re-evaluate its image of Evo Morales and his sector of the MAS, and would do well to adopt a more critical posture towards the MAS as a whole. I am not interested in adopting  the frankly tired (if not entirely off base) criticism of the MAS as an extractivist, ecocidal party. With that said, although Evo Morales successfully created an image of himself as a leading environmentalist in the Global North, this is far from the truth. It is basically correct that MAS has furthered an extractivist capitalism that continues Bolivia’s role as a primary commodity exporter. From here one could easily conclude that the actions of Morales’s and Arce’s governments with respect to capital accumulation through resource extraction regularly contradicted their environmentalist and pro-Indigenous discourses, demonstrating their governments’ insincerity. 

I think that this line of criticism is at best incomplete. Moreover, I would argue for a periodization of the MAS’s discourse, with the emphasis on decolonization, plurinationalism, and Indigenous rights declining over the years of Morales’s governments, to be replaced by a discursive emphasis on economic growth and stability due to the MAS’s economic model. It’s worth taking actually existing plurinationalism on its own terms. The key contradiction at the heart of Bolivian Plurinationalism was/is that there is/was an economic imperative to extract natural gas in lowland Indigenous (i.e Guarani) territories to fund social programs and economic development for the Indigenous and mestizo urban masses, as well as rural development in predominantly Aymara and Quechua regions. Poverty and inequality were drastically reduced for the majority at the expense of other territories-cum-sacrifice-zones. One can only imagine how hollow the promises of plurinationalism ring for the Guarani communities whose communities are besieged by gas extraction without their consent, or an Esse Ejja child with mercury poisoning because illegal mining contaminated the river and its fish with dangerous levels of mercury.[26]

When we talk about the Bolivian economy under the MAS we are talking about what is/was, at least officially, an attempt at a novel socialistic economic model adapted to Bolivian conditions. It is/was called the “Social Communitarian Productive Economic Model”—this will be referred to with its Spanish acronym, MESCP.[27] The MESCP proposed a significant return to state involvement and investment in the Bolivian economy as a break with the neoliberal model implemented between 1985-2006. Large-scale investments in new state industries, along with significant investment in various wealth transfer programs, was made possible by the windfall revenues that the state was receiving through royalties from natural gas extraction. This windfall was owed in part to high global commodity prices and in part to the renegotiated contracts with the transnational gas companies that were agreed to as part of the “nationalization” of gas, which really just meant that the companies would pay significantly higher royalties to operate in Bolivia. The number of government employees also swelled to nearly half a million at the present. 

Generations of Bolivian leftist thinkers since the great Marxist sociologist Rene Zavaleta Mercado[28] have understood the problem of the state in Bolivia thusly: the battle for state power is a battle to control the surplus generated by the economy. In some detail, Zavaleta theorized that the degree of development of the Bolivian state corresponded to its ability to control the division of surplus-value. Moreover, Bolivia is a motley society in which a plurality of economies, both capitalist and not, coexist.[29] These insights have been foundational for the modern Bolivian left and they form an intellectual undercurrent to the economic model implemented by the MAS. 

This model, the Social, Communitarian, and Productive Economic Model (MESCP in Spanish) essentially proposes that the state should look to generate an economic surplus in certain strategic productive sectors (gas/energy production and mining, principally) and redistribute that surplus into the employment sectors. The natural gas industry produced tremendous wealth but employs/employed relatively few people, and this would be the case with lithium as well. This is an important difference in the laboring conditions of the most or potentially most productive sectors of the Bolivian economy: when, for instance, tin was Bolivia’s dominant export, tin mining was a labor intensive industry, giving rise to a large and well-organized proletariat led by miners and their families. The dissolution of this proletariat with the relocation and closure of the mining camps as part of the neoliberal decrees of 1985 sparked a total reconfiguration of the Bolivian economy and working class. 

It is arguably for this reason that the distinctly Indigenous identifying political subject was able to assume protagonism in Bolivia’s political struggles while articulating as precisely that, an Indigenous political subject. This was a new development, not because the miners were not ethnically Indigenous, but because the miners’ demands were made in terms of their sectoral interests and those of the organized working class more generally. With their disintegration as an organized force it was necessary that another identity become the articulatory pole of Bolivian subaltern politics. In criticizing Bolivian plurinationalism, it is obviously worth considering the common critique that the MAS has furthered an extractivist economy which contradicts its discourse and its own plurinationalist basis regularly in its actions. Indeed, this contradiction–manifested by the need to extract gas on Indigenous land–is constitutive of actually existing plurinationalism. Nonetheless, it’s also not exceptional per se that a country which has been in many ways a resource colony for the past 500 years still has an economy that revolves around natural gas and mining. 

What is indisputable is that, for instance, Guarani territorial claims in the lowland Chaco region go by the wayside because that territory sits atop a major gas reserve.[30] We can understand actually existing plurinationalism as a political-economic regime where the state captures and redistributes the economic surplus through social programs, reducing poverty and creating levels of social and political inclusion never before seen in Bolivia. This economic surplus, however, largely comes from gas royalties, and so the contradiction confronts us again. This is a geographically uneven process of development: the cities–themselves predominantly Indigenous–are the privileged sites of redistribution, while Indigenous territorial rights are violated in extraction zones as a necessary condition of extraction. The Bolivian economy has arguably grown even more dependent on illegal gold mining in recent years, particularly after the state gold reserves were largely sold off for liquid assets—the state is replenishing its reserves by buying gold from and effectively laundering the money for illegal (and some legal) gold mining cooperatives, many of which operate in national parks and or Indigenous territories. 

The model, in any case, is broken. Bolivia is in an acute economic crisis that threatens to become a chronic condition. It has become increasingly clear that the economic model instituted during Evo Morales’s presidency and continued during Arce’s presidency must be considered a failure in the long run. Its apparent successes in the period from 2006-2019, and from 2006-2014 specifically, had more to do with the global commodity boom than anything innovative or fiscally sound inherent to the Bolivian economic model. Beyond the technical constraints of the model itself, the Bolivian economy was victim to severe mismanagement of strategic state industries and to significant graft and corruption in the same. The wholesale privatization of these state companies under a new right-wing government is certainly very possible. 

A return to a largely neoliberal economic model will probably lead to a rise in formal unemployment (given the importance of the state as an employer) but change little with respect to the structure of the Bolivian economy given that its status as a primary commodity exporter cannot be much more entrenched than it already is (the economy’s dependence on such exports only increased under the MAS). Bolivia could potentially become a more attractive destination for foreign direct investment, but aside from the government’s predisposition to receive such investment there remains the problem of Bolivia’s weak and corrupt institutions, particularly the judicial system. While Evo and the MAS talked a lot about honesty and good governance, it’s undeniable that there was extremely significant corruption at all levels of the Bolivian state and (especially) the Bolivian justice system during the MAS years–if you want to have any degree of success in your interactions with the justice system, or really any public institution, you ought to be prepared to pay significant bribes (myself and everyone I know here has extensive personal experience in the matter). Arce’s government has also been accused of significant acts of corruption and has further degraded the institutionality and impartiality of the justice system.  

Yet, while this can be talked about as a degradation (and in my experience often is by average Bolivians), it was not unprecedented. Bolivian right wing governments of the past and their institutions have never been any less corrupt, and justice being out of the reach of ordinary Bolivians is not a novelty. The personal role that the leading right wing candidates Samuel Doria Medina and Tuto Quiroga have had in past corrupt and unjust administrations demonstrates the insincerity of the opposition’s pledge to reform Bolivia’s institutions. In traditional Bolivian right-wing fashion, the contracts they sign for resource exploitation projects with transnational companies will likely be quite favorable to the companies and give the country only a minority stake. This was famously reversed in Evo’s new gas contracts upon assuming office, which reversed the terms to give 80% of the proceeds from gas extraction to the Bolivian state, leaving ~20% for the private company. The consequence of this and the centrality of the national gas company in the industry was that the foreign companies stopped investing in exploration (the discovery and drilling of new gas fields), and the Bolivian state and the YFPB failed in their obligations to invest in the same to maintain and grow the natural gas industry. 

The goal of this mass investment was state-led industrialization, such that Bolivia could cease being nearly exclusively an exporter of raw materials and instead become a producer of added value products. The highs of the gas boom, nevertheless, failed to lead to any substantive industrialization, and indeed today Bolivia is even more dependent on primary commodity exports than it was when Evo Morales was first elected. As President Arce put it in his book about this “fair and successful” economic model, “the economic logic of the MESCP is the social appropriation of the surplus that gives rise to an expanded reproduction of society. The economic model’s perspective is social, it considers not only the destination and beneficiary of the surplus, but also the social character of production.”[31]

In Arce’s conception, the neoliberal phase of the Bolivian economy sought to entrench Bolivia’s status as a primary commodity exporter, and “the fundamental characteristic of this process turned on the privatization of the generation, appropriation, and distribution of the economic surplus in favor of domestic private companies and principally to foreign ones. The production and exit of the economic surplus without the control of the State was observed, without benefits to Bolivia’s people and regions.”[32] Control of this surplus by the State and for the industrialization of Bolivia constituted a definite step towards the realization of Bolivian political economic sovereignty. By nationalizing gas and promoting state industries, strengthening the economic role of the state, and breaking with international organizations such as the IMF[33], Bolivia charted a new path in its economic history that—at least on paper—marginalized transnational capital to a more significant degree than had ever been the case in the country.  Evo founded at least 14 new state industries in his time in office and nationalized others, with Bolivia having 39 state companies by the end of his time in office. In total 53 state companies have been created since 2007. During Arce’s government the official discourse has shifted to one promoting that Bolivia is undergoing “import-substitution industrialization”, which was famously attempted by multiple countries in the region in the 20th century with unspectacular results. 

The MAS governments, under Evo and Arce, also made important political economic pacts with the agroindustrial elite in the eastern Bolivian lowlands. Without these pacts, Evo arguably would not have been able to stay in power past ~2008 (Media Luna period of revolt from landed/oligarchic and racist interests in the eastern lowlands). This curtailed the promises of a new agrarian reform, or agrarian revolution, in Bolivia as part of the Process of Change.[34] The period from 2006-2009 saw intense and often violent confrontations over land distribution and property rights between the then-new MAS government and the entrenched, reactionary agribusiness elites of the eastern lowlands. Yet, 2010-2016 saw a rapprochement and an “agro-capital-state” alliance in formation[35]; other authors would suggest that the more progressive approach to land reform lasted until 2012, with the formation of an unstable conciliatory arrangement with the agribusiness elite from 2013-2019, ending when they nonetheless supported and financed the coup against Evo Morales.[36]

In Jeffrey R. Webber’s assessment, which I largely agree with, attempts at an early radical rural politics from below—led by the Indigenous and peasant unions and communities seeking a second Bolivian agrarian revolution in direct confrontation with agricultural elites—was unsuccessful, and later enveloped and limited by the state. Moreover, lowland agricultural elites violently resisted the formation of the plurinational state, and actively sought to secede from Bolivia in response. The government’s ability to stay in power and govern hinged on how it dealt with the threat of the fascist landed oligarchs. Short of seceding from Bolivia, the far right from the lowlands began to heavily promote the change to a federalist system in Bolivia that would give more significant power to regional governors instead of the central government in La Paz—it is not uncommon to see right-wing Cruceños who proudly say that they identify as being from Santa Cruz, not from Bolivia. The Cruceño, or Camba in local slang, identity is on the one hand a local identity just as general as the corresponding “Colla” in La Paz, but when employed by the Camba right it’s usually defined as a whit(er) identity that is distinct from and superior to the Indigenous coded notion of “Colla” identity in La Paz. In any case, the early years of the Morales government did see important changes to land tenure laws—for instance, according to the letter of the law large properties must fulfill a socioeconomic function (i.e. not lie fallow) or be expropriated. 

Neoliberalism is, justifiably, a dirty word in Bolivian politics, and it has been the explicit ideological enemy of both MAS governments—the MESCP is/was a socialist, or at least state led, response to Bolivia’s relatively socially, politically, and economically disastrous neoliberal period. By the end of the neoliberal period in Bolivia in ~2006, the majority of the population lived in poverty (combining the rates of poverty and extreme poverty); Bolivia’s GINI coefficient in 2005 was an astronomical 58.5, which had been reduced to 41.6 by 2019 and was 42.1 as of the most recent data in 2023.[37] If we define poverty as income of $3.00/day or less, the poverty rate has decreased from about 19% in 2000 to about 3% in 2023.[38] If counted according to the Bolivian poverty line, the same data shows a reduction 38% to 23% in the same period.[39] 

Taken together, these data points suggest a significant reduction above all in extreme poverty, and consequently a significant reduction in wealth inequality, during the MAS years. In other words, the MAS’s economic model was for a period unprecedentedly successful (in Bolivian terms) at redistributing wealth to construct a more equal economy. The effects of this are noticeable in the similarly significant growth in purchasing power for the majority of the population, and even the generation of a new bourgeoisie, in some cases new Indigenous bourgeoises like the Aymara merchants in El Alto who build luxurious cholets for enormous sums.[40]

Nonetheless, it is arguably true that none of the economic models that Bolivia has attempted from the 1950s and 1960s to the present have led to sustained economic growth.[41] The formal end of the Bolivian revolutionary period was in 1964, and from 1965 on Bolivia opened itself more to foreign investment and private enterprise while maintaining strategic state industries and involvement in the economy. Bolivia experienced a particularly severe hyperinflation crisis in the early 1980s which was the impetus for the 1985 shock therapy decree. While shock therapy wiped out the savings of the majority overnight and threw many into poverty, it did rapidly halt inflation; nevertheless this period in 1985 is the most economically traumatizing in living memory for the majority of the population. The wave of privatizations that began in the late 1980s during Jaime Paz Zamora’s presidency and was most famously implemented thereafter by president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in the 1990s did little to improve the Bolivian economy for all but a select few lucky oligarch types. State industries were sold off completely at prices that were just a fraction of their true values. At the same time, the basis of the gas industry that would dominate Bolivia’s 21st century economy was being laid as Sanchez de Lozada’s government actively courted foreign investment in the gas sector. 

Bolivia’s economy and the few periods of somewhat sustained growth it has experienced have come in natural resource cycles: silver, tin, oil, natural gas, gold, and (hopefully) lithium. The nationalization of the natural gas that was important to the MAS was a rephrasing of 1952’s revolutionary call to expropriate and nationalize the tin mines, a goal which was realized in that revolution. The resulting state mining company, COMIBOL, was never particularly successful and was eventually dissolved and the mines closed, with the miners being dispersed to new settlements. Indeed, the dispersal of the miners was one cause of large-scale migration to the tropic of Cochabamba, particularly the Chapare region, where many former miners took up coca cultivation. 

Of course, at one point Evo Morales’s government and the Process of Change in general were quite fiscally sound. In 2011 the World Bank even positively reviewed Bolivia’s shrewd financial management. From 2006-2014 the Bolivian economy experienced a 4.6% annual average growth rate and the Bolivian government managed a budget surplus and unprecedentedly high foreign exchange reserves.[42] While the highs of the Bolivian gas boom are largely attributable to favorable global markets and prices, the lows are more attributable to poor management of the economy and state coffers than to lower global commodity prices today. Global market forces are not responsible for the downturn in Bolivian gas production, nor are they responsible for the government continuing to subsidize fuel at the pump which it imports in dollars and can no longer consistently afford to pay for, among other bad decisions (and Bolivia has in fact become a net importer of hydrocarbons).[43] Bolivian natural gas production peaked in 2014 at 22,187.95 million cubic meters, according to official statistics, and has declined every year since then; in 2024, the most recent full years’ worth of data, Bolivia produced only 11,896.41 million cubic meters of natural gas. According to the Bolivian Central Bank’s statistics, the Bolivian state has also been deficit spending since 2014; starting at -3.4% of the GDP the deficit now stands at around -8%.[44] In money that is approximately $3.5 billion. Bolivia’s external debt is at a near all-time high for the country, at around $13.3 billion.[45] While Bolivia would have received record revenues in any case due to the global price of gas and the amount it exported during the boom years, the changes Evo made to gas contracts and more specifically to how that increased income was invested and redistributed meant that his years in government were, for the average Bolivian, the best years in living memory. The failure is that this boom only lasted for an intense ~20 years, and is coming to a painful end that threatens to reverse the trend towards decreasing poverty and to revert what positive structural changes there were made to the economy. The MAS has gone from 60+% presidential election highs and legislative supermajorities to staring down its own extinction, and with that will go its economic model and much of its gains, although I anticipate renewed social conflict when the new right wing government engages in corrupt betrayals of Bolivia’s economic sovereignty as has always been its modus operandi.

Plurinationalist Contradictions

Perhaps the most celebrated feature of Bolivia’s Process of Change was the refoundation of Bolivia as a Plurinational State under a new constitution, written in its majority by social movement and MAS representatives at a constituent assembly in spite of right wing opposition and violence. In theory, plurinationality refers to a recognition of the fact that not only was the prior Republic of Bolivia exclusionary of the Indigenous majority, but also that it makes little sense to talk about a unitary nation in a previously colonized country where at least 36 Indigenous languages are spoken by Indigenous nations which never ceased existing and which predate the conquest. Plurinationalism is significant in Bolivia because it created the conditions for the Indigenous majority to participate in the nation and wield political power for the first time. Plurinationalism is ultimately an inclusion within the nation, but in the context of Bolivian indigenous movements’ historical demands, that is a tremendous advance. 

As previously stated, in criticizing Bolivian plurinationalism I don’t want to rehearse the tired criticism that the MAS is an extractivist regime (questionable) which contradicts its discourse and its own constitution on plurinationalism regularly in its actions (true). I do not necessarily see a contradiction between the state’s plurinational project and its near exclusively extractivist economic model. This is the near unanimous critique offered by both foreign and Bolivian academics: that extractivism is not revolutionary but rather a continuation of the same capitalist economic model that requires the invasion of Indigenous lands and the destruction of nature. Of course, they are right: aside from the redistribution of wealth (which is a profound advance) and the state’s larger role in the economy, there is no radical break with past models of accumulation. However, I don’t consider it especially interesting to observe that Bolivia, a resource colony for 500 years, has not yet significantly transitioned past this economic model. What I’m interested in is the way in which this model differs from the neoliberal model it replaced, and how despite representing a significant improvement (in terms of the reduction of extreme poverty and inequality) for the long-excluded majority, it doesn’t address specifically Indigenous concerns about territory and autonomy. 

Alvaro Garcia Linera’s Geopolitica de la Amazonia[46] contains an important defense of actually existing plurinationalism because it responds to the TIPNIS crisis, where the Bolivian government sought to build a road through the TIPNIS reserve despite the opposition of the Indigenous nations which lived there. The police repression of a march against the road, ordered by the government, prompted the resignations of several government ministers and saw several indigenous organizations officially break from the MAS. Thus, I take Linera’s intervention as an articulation of the state’s view on plurinationalism and, perhaps more importantly, on the role plurinationalism plays in the MAS’s political economic vision. He presents a reading of Indigenous movements in Bolivia that begins with the Indianista movement in the 1970s and which concludes with the MAS coming to power in 2006, suggesting a progression from discursive emancipation to concrete organizing in the 1980s and 1990s. According to this trajectory, “the Indigenous identity that has decolonized and brought to power the popular subject in Bolivia is a trans-class and urban-rural identity, with an indigenous articulatory nucleus.”[47] This identity and this indigenous nucleus are the basis of plurinationality, in this conception, and are to be defended against anything which would dilute their power. Linera argues that TCOs and indigenous territory rights more generally represent such a threat. Thorough recognition of TCOs would see “the indigenous majority conquered as emancipation and as a revolutionary national political project would see itself dissolved into a few small dispersed populated nuclei.”[48] The distinction he makes that TCOs are only a juridical and not a social structure or identity unto themselves is an important one. So to is the distinction made that they practice individual familial property and production.  

Linera argues that Indigenous nations should not be “dispersed into TCOs” because to do so would “eliminate the greatest political effect of decolonization at the state level which the country has had: the construction of an Indigenous political forcé as a majoritarian, urban-rural forcé.”. Despite the implications of Linera’s argument, I feel compelled to admit that he has a point: the construction of the Indigenous political force he describes is most probably the biggest step in the direction of decolonization in Bolivia’s history. That is indisputably an achievement of the Plurinational State. But the construction of such an Indigenous political force and the economic model which sustained it necessarily elevated certain Indigenous populations and territories above others, most specifically Aymara and Quechua communities in the highlands and “intercultural” settlers from those communities who farm in lowland Indigenous territories and displace those communities. To date, only three indigenous communities in Bolivia have managed to hold the necessary referendums to pursue the forms of autonomy outlined in the plurinational constitution, and many more have been frustrated by the bureaucratic bottleneck the process implies or have had to organize over many years to table the topic.[49] The tensions regarding the extension of indigenous autonomous governance and the remaking and remapping of the Bolivian state are a local reflection of the global crisis of the “nation” as a unitary and all-encompassing term.[50]

The  New Social Communitarian Productive Economic Model proposed constructing a “plural economy.” As Luis Arce Catacora (then Minister of the Economy, now President) wrote in 2011, “all the new attributions of the State are aimed at turning Bolivia into an industrialized country through the coordinated action of four fundamental actors: the State, itself, and the private, community and cooperative sectors, whose integration configures a clearly plural model; that is, of Plural Economy”. He affirms that this is intended to be a model for the transition towards socialism (it’s the name of the party, after all) and that it identifies two key sectors in the Bolivian economy: “the strategic sector that generates surpluses and the sector that generates income and employment”. 

In Bolivia, the industries that produce large surpluses are hydrocarbon extraction and mining. The role of the state in the plural economy is to manage and redistribute the surplus generated by these sectors. The necessary compulsion for continually intensifying exploitation of these natural resources then becomes quite obvious. In Arce’s words, the functioning of this model requires: “taking the surpluses from the mining, hydrocarbons, and electrical energy sectors to the sectors where it is necessary to lay the foundation stone, the seed of a productive country, that is, in the manufacturing, industry, tourism, and agricultural development sectors. The State is the redistributor, the one that must have the capacity to transfer the resources of the surplus sectors to the generators of employment and income”. 

Of course, one can and should evaluate this model on its merits: while the MAS’s economic model has dramatically reduced poverty and inequality via income redistribution, 15 years on it has generated little in the way of industrialization. The economy is actually far more dependent on hydrocarbon and mineral production than it was before, and more than 80% of the economy (the actually existing employment sector) remains informal. We should also touch on what makes accumulation by extraction different under the MAS. The party and the government’s discourse frequently celebrates the nationalization of hydrocarbons, but this is not quite an accurate characterization. Despite Evo sending soldiers to commandeer a gas drilling facility for a photo-op, his nationalization seized no property from the transnational corporations that drilled (and continue to drill) for Bolivian gas. In what some scholars have sarcastically termed a “neoliberal nationalization”, the state simply renegotiated contracts with the gas companies. Although all subsoil resources now nominally pertain to the state, in practice the change is that the state receives a higher percentage in royalties. As I’ve heard it put in MAS political education meetings in El Alto, this is important because it is now the state and not the transnational corporation which is the owner of the resource when it comes out of the pump. As Bret Gustafson[51] put it in his seminal work on the gas industry in Bolivia, “Morales’s decree was really just a rewrite of the contracts—a modest rearrangement of the relationship between the landed capital of the state (Bolivia) and the extractive capital of the foreign companies. Simply put, it meant that the foreign companies would receive less of the superprofits that gas activities generate. More rents, taxes, and royalties would stay in Bolivia. It made good economic sense. It was a historic shift away from the past, given that historical colonizers and modern capitalists had been bleeding Bolivia dry for centuries. Morales, and the Bolivians who reelected him three times, invariably referred to the bounty generated by the gas, and its control by Bolivians rather than foreigners, as a revolutionary victory and a gift from the Pachamama, or Mother Earth”. 

The 2019 Coup

The far-right coup that overthrew Evo Morales in 2019[52] and massacred Indigenous protesters in the streets was a tragedy but far from a novelty in Bolivian history. Indeed, such a racist and violent reaction (or counterrevolution, arguably) was bubbling beneath the surface at varying intensities from the moment Evo took office. I would argue that a necessary precondition of the 2019 coup was Evo’s decision to ignore the term limits inscribed in the new constitution and run for re-election as president. He called a referendum on the matter in 2016 and promised to retire quietly to his farm in the Tropic of Cochabamba if he lost. After losing a close national vote (51% No vs. 49% Yes), he nevertheless refused to concede defeat and appealed his case to the Bolivian Constitutional Tribunal, which ruled that he had not only a political but a human right to run for president. The Constitutional Tribunal notably reversed this decision several months ago, with the goal of proscribing Morales’s participation in the 2025 elections—the constitution is now interpreted as expressly forbidding more than two terms in office, and Evo’s argument that term limits don’t apply to non-consecutive terms has nowhere left to go. 

Had Evo identified and groomed potential successors from the start, rather than letting his leadership become “indispensable”, it is likely that Bolivia would have been spared at least the political aspect of the present crisis. I think that the coup that overthrew Morales after the disputes over alleged election fraud would have been less likely to occur had Morales not been on the ballot in the first place–although Evo led the polls in the 2019 election, the question of his candidacy’s legitimacy was omnipresent and an unnecessary distraction which arguably primed the world to initially receive favorably the allegations of electoral fraud. On the night of the election the fast count system relaying results as the votes were counted failed and went offline with about 84% of the vote reported, results in line with polling that appeared to confirm a run-off election between Evo and center-right unity candidate and former president Carlos Mesa. When the system came back online 20 hours later, the late arriving vote (and thus also the disputed vote) brought Evo above 40% and 10 points clear of Mesa, enough for a first-round victory according to Bolivian election law. While the Organization of American States joined the Bolivian right in denouncing massive fraud, various later investigations suggest that there actually was none.[53] In any case, the right wing and the middle class–a coalition that came to be called the “pititas”--mobilized rapidly against the alleged fraud and occupied the streets across the country for 21 days following the election. This movement launched the far right, Cruceño revanchist Fernando Camacho to national stardom as a key leader; after a failed presidential campaign in 2020 he won the gubernatorial election in Santa Cruz, governing until his arrest for his role as a coup-leader by Arce’s government in December 2022[54] (he has been in prison since). The ideological driving force of the pitita movement was anti-Indigenous racism and a desire to undo the social gains of the plurinational state–racist violence and harassment of traditionally dressed Indigenous women was especially commonplace. This was a reactionary white middle class movement that resented the ascension of many Indigenous Bolivians to their ranks, and which resented even more being governed by Indigenous leaders.[55] Another key motivation for this right-wing mobilization was a conservative articulation of environmentalism wrapped up in the #SOSChiquitania movement; at the time the Chiquitania was burning in an unprecedented forest fire, and Bolivia has struggled with severe forest fires ever since Evo signed into law decrees which made it much easier to burn and clear agricultural land. After 21 days of protests the police mutinied (and were paid to do so by Camacho) and the army then “recommended” that Evo resign; after initially offering to re-do the elections, Evo and vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera did resign and flee the country, along with many other MAS leaders, to Mexico and later Argentina. The entire line of succession within the MAS resigned, and unknown far right senator Jeanine Áñéz claimed a dubiously legal (really illegal) succession and was sworn in by the army in front of a mostly empty legislative chamber; she was also arrested early in Arce’s government for her role in the coup and has been in prison since. The most sincere expression of her government’s politics were its hasty, racist discourses against the plurinational state (proclaiming that the bible had returned to the presidential palace, for instance) and, even more so, the massacres of Indigenous protesters in Sacaba and Senkata. The Áñéz regime was also laughably corrupt, and in general pleased not even its far right supporters. 

 Ignoring the referendum result is one of the primordial mistakes at the root of Bolivia’s contemporary political crisis. Evo’s inability to imagine the MAS beyond himself harmed his own image and was the first domino to fall in the path towards the MAS’s demise. Bolivia in the timeline where Evo did retire to his farm after losing in 2016, perhaps to become a Pepe Mujica-style elder statesman of the South American left, would be a more politically stable country. Moreover, it is possible that in this timeline the MAS would have managed to successfully renovate itself rather than tear itself apart, and thus maintain some semblance of the political hegemony they once enjoyed. 

The lithium coup thesis[56] with respect to Evo Morales’s overthrow in 2019 needs to never be spoken of again because there is no material basis to support its key claims. The actual events in El Alto and La Paz, as well as Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, have little in common with the anglophone Left’s popular interpretation of the events leading up to and after Morales’s fall is that he was the victim of a CIA-backed coup engineered by the United States (and perhaps Elon Musk) in order to commandeer and privatize Bolivia’s lithium reserves; more liberal commentators managed to have initial optimism about a “movement for democracy”. While we would be naïve to think that nefarious foreign actors had nothing to do with the Bolivian coup, 2019 cannot be explained by a desire on the part of the United States or transnational capital to appropriate Bolivia’s lithium reserves. The Jeanine Áñez regime quite notably did almost nothing to develop lithium or court foreign investment, and the prior Morales government had invested only in a pilot project that produced at no grand scale and had been largely unsuccessful and secretive about negotiations with foreign companies for lithium extraction. Of course, the lithium coup theory overlooks that there was no lithium industry to directly appropriate—Bolivia has never been an important lithium exporting country, whereas it borders two of the world’s most important producers with well developed industries and appealing investment environments (Chile and Argentina).

Arce vs. Evo, and New Crises

The feud between Evo and Arce and the disastrous nature of the latter’s government destroyed what little institutionality the MAS had left and meant that the recovery from the 2019 coup was ultimately abortive at best. The attempted military coup against Luis Arce in 2024, lasting all of about an hour, is also worth mentioning–if 2019 was a tragedy, 2024 was a farce. Not in the sense that it was a self-coup, as Evo Morales and the Bolivian right both claim, but in the sense that it barely registered on the Richter scale in a country that has experienced as many military coups as Bolivia. It was rather odd to see president Arce and general Zúniga come face to face without violence or one calling to arrest the other, but the argument that Arce put Zúniga up to the coup to boost his own popularity simply don’t make sense. The most obvious point: why would Zuniga agree to take a decades long prison term just to help Arce’s poll numbers? That Zuniga hasn’t been able to keep his story straight (on the day of he said that Arce put him up to it, more recently he has said he was drugged and not in control of his actions) suggests that Occam’s Razor provides the most likely explanation: the stupid general did a stupid, hastily planned coup that never had a chance in hell of succeeding and the entire spectacle looked so ridiculous that calling it a charade seemed an appropriate classification. Correspondingly, Zuniga has offered several different stories, all implausible, to excuse his guilt for his act of rash bravado. Arce’s “victory” over the coup and the triumphant photos of him celebrating with a packed Plaza Murillo (given the composition of pro-government rallies generally under Arce, most likely all government functionaries) ultimately did nothing to help him in the polls and were not representative of any significant popularity or mass support. 

More than likely Eduardo del Castillo’s MAS-IPSP ticket will not even crack 3% in the election, and according to Bolivian election law it will thus cease to exist. So not only will the MAS badly lose the upcoming elections, also likely getting shut out of the senate and the parliament, it will also cease to be a political entity. The MAS-IPSP will not live to fight another day nor stage a comeback in 2030; the social movement bases have been robbed of the political instrument they struggled so long and hard to create. 

As I understand it and as I experienced it in ~2022, the early period of the Arce government was a heady time when the MAS and the Bolivian left in general felt as though it had successfully beaten back the right-wing coup and reestablished sociopolitical hegemony after winning the election in the first round with a commanding 55% of the vote. In this early period Arce clearly sought to mark his own path as the executive, and Evo occupied a background cheerleading role (with which  he was never satisfied). Evo also remained the official leader of the MAS-IPSP, and in general his public working relationship with Arce and Vice-president Choquehuanca was fine if not good. This began to change by 2023, as Evo seemed to grow frustrated with his lack of influence in Arce’s government and Arce’s apparent unwillingness to step aside at the end of his term to allow Evo to return to the presidency. 

 Why, exactly, are Arce and Evo fighting and dividing the MAS between them? This is a question whose answer will vary tremendously based upon with whom you are speaking. I will give you mine, prefaced by a bit of context about who Luis Arce Catacora is and how he came to be president, given that despite his being president for a number of years, he arguably still has a far lower international profile than Evo does. 

Arce is an economist who was Evo’s Minister of the Economy (essentially equivalent to a Secretary of the Treasury) for all 14 years of his presidency. Prior to his time in the cabinet, he enjoyed a long and apparently successful career as an accountant and banker at Bolivia’s National Bank, while also teaching economics at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres, the largest public university in the country. In the aftermath of the far-right coup in 2019 and Evo’s (forced) resignation and flight from the country to asylum in Mexico, Arce also resigned his post and sought asylum in Mexico and later Argentina, following Morales. When the “interim” Áñez regime was finally forced to hold elections in 2020 (this topic meriting several other paragraphs to itself as well), Evo hand-picked Arce to be the MAS’s presidential candidate despite the clamors of the party’s bases for other candidates—notably ex-Foreign Affairs Minister David Choquehuanca, who wound up on the ticket as its vice-presidential candidate and has been an even more resounding disappointment than Arce. 

Hand-picked is the important part here, we could perhaps even say “imposed”, the point being that it would not be incorrect to say that prior to his ascension as presidential candidate Arce had a rather low independent political profile and little of his own loyal base of support. What votes he would get, he would get because he was the MAS’s candidate (first of all) and because Evo had told the people to vote for Arce (most of all). I imagine that this is at least how Evo saw it, and it makes sense to me–at this point, Evo was still a very popular figure amongst the MAS’s bases, and the party was still unified. I identify this as a root of the conflict between them. Evo always intended Arce’s presidency to be his own shadow term, with Arce meekly stepping aside as candidate in the 2025 elections to allow (and perhaps orchestrate) Evo’s return to office.

 Of course, it’s worth noting that asserting his independence from Evo was a major emphasis of Arce’s campaign. And Evo campaigned vigorously for Arce, telling everyone who would listen that Lucho was the genius behind his government’s successful socialist economic model. Arce won the election with 55% of the vote, which we can attribute principally (in my view) to the utter failure that was the far-right coup regime’s year in government, evidenced by the regime’s brutality, corruption, and disastrous mismanagement of the COVID pandemic. While I cannot state certainly one way or another, the size and relative strength of the middle and upper class pitita movement in its moment suggested a real, mobilized and maybe even coherent large-scale opposition movement to the MAS. In other words, there was a real and significant mass of support for the coup and enough of an openness to right-wing governance that a competent regime could easily have called and won elections to legitimize its government. This did not happen, and the right-failed to unify around a single candidate, and Arce won the elections handily in the first round with 55% of the vote. Say what you will about the Bolivian left, the Bolivian right is arguably even more of a mess. Had the right unified around a single candidate in 2019 or 2020, they could have won those elections. Had the right managed to finally unify around a single candidate in the upcoming 2025 election, that candidate would likely cruise to a first-round victory. 

Evo was never going to be satisfied without being able to return to the same political roles he had before the coup, and so despite his support for Arce’s election the unity in the MAS was only ephemeral. After being shut out of political influence in Arce’s administration, Evo concentrated on reasserting his control over the MAS-IPSP, an initiative that was successful for a time insofar as it expelled Arce and Choquehuanca and became the leading opposition to their agenda in the legislature. Nonetheless, a later legal case established the Arcista faction of the MAS-IPSP as the legitimate, organic party (recall the partiality of the justice system in Bolivia, perhaps), and this is how Eduardo del Castillo has the MAS-IPSP ballot line. The Evista movement in the legislature and senate essentially broke the MAS delegation in two, and this voting bloc was able to consistently defeat or paralyze government priorities, chiefly through voting against international loans and other financing for projects (where they occasionally found common cause with right wing parties). 

Nonetheless, the Evistas do have a point about something: Arce’s government’s practices have shifted such that he can now be described as a right wing president. This is despite the fact that I don’t think he has taken measures to re-neoliberalize the  economy, as Evistas claim—my argument is that the economic crisis/collapse that Bolivia is entering is due primarily to problems intrinsic to the economic model, such that it is possible (and the case) that Arce is following the economic model that he supposedly innovated to its bitter end. Correspondingly, his government refuses to consistently acknowledge that there is an economic crisis despite the clamoring of nigh every other social and political sector. 

I say that Arce is right wing now because he and vice president Choquehuanca have betrayed the social movements which brought them to power and have actively engaged in the co-option, division, and repression of such movements in order to instrumentalize their inorganic sectors in service of the government. It is however worth noting that Arce learned these techniques from none other than Evo himself, given the latter’s fondness for creating parallel organizations and awarding them offices and recognition from the state over the protests of their organic bases. As it applies to Arce and the current conjuncture, I am most familiar with this in the case of the “Tupak Katari” Federation, whose movement, led by David Mamani Quispe, is active as I write. I will continue to take Mamani at his word that he genuinely supports Indigenous autonomy and self-governance in Bolivia brought about by an ideology by and for the Indigenous peasantry, and that his being anti-Arce does not mean he is secretly an Evo supporter. This message certainly resonates with his bases—which are the organic leaders and working masses of the federation—who will certainly feel betrayed if he turns out to be lying to protect his image and further a political career.

Returning to the point, Arce is clearly a right-wing leader for dividing the Tupak KAtari union and repressing its organic sectors when they marched to reclaim their usurped union hall. I witnessed how the police were set up and waiting for the marchers with fences that they put up to stop them from entering the street where the hall is. And the government had the nerve to lie that a march of thousands of leaders from all 20 provinces of La Paz was a minority sector from one malcontent province. With that said, this movement was somewhat impulsive and arguably shortsighted in opting rather immediately to escalate to roadblocks starting September 16th at the departmental level. This was a show of force before significant enough force had been attained, and the blockades were nowhere near as resounding as the Federation had hoped. 

At the same time (coincidentally?), Evo Morales was leading his followers on a march from Oruro to La Paz to make popular demands against Arce’s government (officially) and to pressure Arce and the country in general to acquiesce to Evo’s desire to be a presidential candidate once again (actually). Unsurprisingly, upon the march’s arrival in La Paz, Evo threatened Arce by saying that he would give him 24 hours to replace unspecified corrupt narco ministers and resolve the problem of the gasoline shortage before taking more drastic actions. Evo’s march was always an anti-Arce show of force (although its numbers weren’t awe-inspiring) that made the most sense if its aim was to try to cut short Arce’s presidency and/or force elections to be moved forward. In other words, the “People’s March to Save Bolivia” was always simply a march for and about Evo’s candidacy. He is one minority among many fighting for power (to say that there is no individual political force which can be truly said to constitute even a plurality), and I think among one of the smaller ones.

The 2023 party congress of the MAS-IPSP, held in Lauca Ñ from October 3-5, saw Evo Morales officially declared as the party’s candidate for the 2025 elections. It also marked the party’s definitive split into two, as president Arce and vice-president David Choquehuanca were formally expelled from the party. Alternatively, we can say, as Evo did, that they “expelled themselves” by not attending the congress.[57] Arce defended his decision not to attend by pointing to the Pact of Unity’s (a coalition of five of Bolivia’s largest social movement organizations) criticisms that the congress included fewer spots for social movement representation, saying that “It is very difficult for us to attend a congress where the owners [social movements] are not going to be there ...  It is clear, they are questioning a congress, where they no longer have representation and as a Government we cannot attend a congress where social organizations are being dispensed with”.

The Coming Election

The 2025 Bolivian General Elections will be carried out on August 17th. Incumbent president Luis Arce Catacora, of the MAS-IPSP, is arguably the most unpopular president in South America, and will not be running for reelection. Evo Morales’s attempts to force the legal recognition of his candidacy despite being term-limited have resulted in nothing, and so he will not be on the ballot. The MAS-IPSP’s official candidate is Arce’s former Security Minister Eduardo del Castillo, perhaps an even less popular figure than the president himself. He’s polling between 0.5 and 1%. Evo Morales’s young protégé of sorts, Andronico Rodriguez, is running for president (which Evo considers a betrayal) and is polling in a consistent third place; he could be considered the only viable left-wing option, if only ostensibly so. 

The top two contenders are two far right, white Bolivian oligarchs who have been perennial candidates for the past two decades. They are Bolivia’s second richest man, Samuel Doria Medina (a former corrupt Finance Minister in the 1990s), and Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, a former vice-president (to none other than a democratically elected Hugo Banzer) and president. Both were vocal supporters of the 2019 coup that overthrew Evo Morales and both were intimately involved with the Jeanine Anez regime that governed in its wake. In the most recent polls Doria Medina has narrowly edged out Quiroga to finish in first place by a couple percent, but no poll has shown a margin that would have any candidate winning the first round by enough to avoid a second-round runoff election. Thus, at the moment, we appear to be headed for an intra- right-wing runoff between Doria Medina and Quiroga, which is a truly frightening prospect. Samuel promises to solve the crisis ailing Bolivia in his first 100 days (damn it!), while Tuto is promising “radical change”. His most prominent supporter is Bolivia’s richest man, Marcelo Claure (who lives in the United States, is a naturalized citizen there, and rarely visits Bolivia). Doria Medina and Quiroga had initially committed to an electoral alliance, where after a set of opinion polls were taken the second place finisher would drop out and support the leader. Unsurprisingly the two could not agree on which polls to include and the alliance failed; Claure however followed these rules and announced his support for Samuel ostensibly because he had been leading the most different polls. Claure has only recently rediscovered his apparently passionate interest in his home country and its affairs, becoming a prominent public opponent of the MAS and a political pundit of sorts. The role he’s trying to carve out for himself appears somewhat analogous to Elon Musk’s cozying up to Donald Trump, and Claure surely expects to have significant influence in a possible Doria Medina administration. 

Doria Medina’s platform promises to “stabilize” the Bolivian economy within the first 100 days of his presidency, which for him means stopping inflation, re-assessing the currency exchange rate (which is officially essentially pegged to the dollar), guaranteeing the supply of fuel and other basic necessities, and significantly cutting “unproductive” spending.[58] More specifically, he is proposing at least a 20% cut to government spending. While many state industries would be privatized and several government ministries shuttered according to this plan, certain strategic industries such as the national gas company (YFPB), the national telecommunications company (ENTEL), the state airline (BoA), and the national lithium company (YLB) would remain state-owned. This plan also calls for reestablishing the independence of Bolivia’s central bank. 

Tuto Quiroga’s platform is to the right of Doria Medina’s. His first act in office would be to come to an agreement with the IMF to restructure Bolivia’s economy and inject it with liquid foreign currency.[59] According to his platform, the IMF is the only international organization capable of making a significant investment in restabilizing the Bolivian economy, which would be a positive signal for attracting other international financial cooperation.[60] Like Doria Medina, a central component of his plans include taking steps to make Bolivia attractive to foreign investment again; the net inflow of FDI in Bolivia peaked at 12.2% in 1999 and has declined mostly steadily since then, although it increased from 2005-2013 before falling to a current level of 0.5% of GDP.[61] 

The prominence of Doria Medina and Quiroga specifically as the leading right-wing candidates is troubling because it suggests a potentially widespread absence of historical memory. Both men have been intimately involved in past governments (and in the privatization of state companies and natural resources for bargain bin prices), and Quiroga is a former president himself. Doria Medina, for instance, rose to prominence as a cement magnate after buying the state-owned cement company SOBOCE for pennies on the dollar during the wave of privatizations in the late 1980s. He served from 1991-1993 as the Minister of Planning and Coordination in Jaime Paz Zamora’s government, and in the 2000s emerged as a perennial presidential candidate. Having since sold his majority stake in the cement company SOBOCE, he is more known today for being the owner in Bolivia of such restaurant franchises as Burger King and Subway. He also owns the Green Tower (its name is actually in English)  in La Paz, which is Bolivia’s tallest building (residential and business use—I must admit that the restaurant and bar on the top floor are excellent). Nonetheless, he described the sale of his stake in SOBOCE (for approximately $300 million) as motivated by his desire to focus fully on politics. In the 2020 election he ran as Jeanine Añéz’s vice-president, before the poorly polling binomial dropped out of the race so as not to divide the right-wing vote. Interestingly enough he is actually a current vice president of the Socialist International, and describes himself as a centrist and a social democrat. 

It goes without saying that the state directed economic model that Bolivia has maintained for the past ~20 years is not long for this world should either candidate prevail. Moreover, I think that relatively fewer Bolivians would lament significant changes in the economy than many might expect. Although the average working class Bolivian is leery of the privatization of state industries for pennies on the dollar, as happened in the late 1980s and 1990s, for instance, it has become impossible to deny the dire financial straits that most of Bolivia’s state owned enterprises find themselves in. More still would express anger at the hefty salaries the directors of these companies and other public functionaries receive without producing any tangible results for the masses. 

Arguably there were earlier signs in the post-coup subnational elections that suggested that the MAS’s political hegemony was still waning despite Arce’s dominant victory in the presidential election. MAS candidates for governor of Bolivia’s nine departments and mayoral candidates in major cities lost their elections to other left-wing and or Indigenous candidates, although these candidates have been largely unsuccessful in office. Most notably, Santos Quispe, son of the late Felipe Quispe (who he replaced as candidate), won the governorship of La Paz, defeating prominent MAS candidate Franklin Flores, and Eva Copa[62] won the El Alto mayoralty in a landside running as an independent candidate after the MAS denied her its nomination. Nevertheless, both have been rather poor executives in office, and Eva Copa in particular has almost no popular support left; she launched a new party (MORENA) and a presidential campaign but just recently bowed out of the election after consistently failing to crack even 1% in the polls. Santos Quispe has actually cultivated what appears to be relatively significant organic support across the Aymara countryside, and so while he is nowhere near the radical ideologue and leader that his Indianista icon of a father was, he will likely win re-election. For instance, I was at the inauguration ceremony of a new section of paved highway near the communities I work in in Jesus de Machaca where Quispe was present and witnessed the paramount Indigenous and municipal authorities of the region proclaim their support for his re-election.

The only notable left-wing candidate (i.e., who is polling higher than 1%) is Andrónico Rodriguez, the closest thing Evo Morales has ever had to a protégé (although he now denounces Andronico as yet another traitor). According to Andrónico, he wishes to still be on good terms with Evo (who he respects quite a bit), but Evo feels betrayed by his choosing an independent candidacy.[63] He was formed and rose up the ranks in the 6 Federations Cocagrowers’ union in the Tropic of Cochabamba before becoming a senator and later president of the senate.  Rodriguez has run a strange, very low energy campaign that has mostly avoided taking strong public political positions, and he’s skipped both presidential debates and various other privately hosted candidate forums since announcing his candidacy. He did, however, attend the first debate officially organized by the Plurinational Electoral Organ, but skipped the final one (as did Tuto and Samuel) on August 12th. In most respects his rhetoric has been in keeping with that of the past MAS administrations, and he is the candidate least likely to significantly depart from the MESCP—in any case, his ten-point governing plan is little different from the past and includes few real details.[64] Andronico also plans stricter price controls to fight price speculation[65], which is one of the explanations for Bolivia’s significant inflation. Under Andronico, price gouging would be illegal in strategic sectors, such as food, but it’s unclear how “price gouging” would be defined. At present it’s not rare for trucks full of allegedly contraband food products, either illegally imported or in process of being illegally exported, to be seized and their products requisitioned for sale in the state subsidized supermarket EMAPA.[66] 

Andronico’s rhetoric focuses on him and his vice-president representing a youthful renovation of the Process of Change, one which respects the prior leadership of Evo Morales and seeks to build on his governments’ gains while also being critical of his errors. He is running on the ticket of Alianza Popular, and the party’s official platform puts it like this: “Bolivia lived a Spring of Dignity. But historical cycles are not eternal. Today a new time begins. A time in which the same plans are no longer sufficient…It is in this context that we present this governing proposal: a proposal for renovation with memory…We do not come to break what has been constructed, but rather to give new life to the historical process that began in 2006, learning from its errors, recuperating its most important advances, and projecting it into the 21st century.”[67] Although he began his campaign with much fanfare and potential, his numbers in the polls have only fallen since then, although he remains in the same third place in which he started. In Unitel’s polls, for instance, Andronico began his campaign with 14.2% and most recently polled only 5.5%.[68] His selection of the wildly unpopular former Minister of Development Planning under Evo Morales, Mariana Prado, ostensibly to appeal to the urban mestizo middle classes (as Evo had once done by selecting Alvaro Garcia Linera as his vice-president), has blown up in his face and cost him the support of two major Indigenous peasant unions, both of which criticized her lack of connection to organic peasant syndicalism. Andronico’s odds are not good. However, the Bolivian right-wing opposition is far from unified around a single candidate; nor is there really a candidate on the right currently who appeals to the entire country or represents a break with the traditional (including pre-MAS) right. Doria Medina and Quiroga are perennial candidates who have done poorly in government before. There was an attempt from younger, very online right-wing activist types to run a Milei style economist named Jaime Dunn as an “outsider” candidate, but he (somehow) was unable to get his paperwork in order to file his candidacy and was ultimately barred from running. 

Evo’s strategy, given that all his legal avenues to try and run as a presidential candidate now appear exhausted, is to lead a campaign encouraging people to cast null or blank ballots. His argument is that these are illegitimate elections due to the denial of his participation (he is term-limited). Given this campaign and the fact that the leading candidates are unpopular retreads, as well as the generally low level of legitimacy that Bolivian politics has at the moment, it seems likely that null votes will be cast by a relatively significant portion of the electorate; this is borne out by opinion polling. It is worth adding that Morales is also surrounded by what are in my opinion very serious and credible allegations of the sexual abuse and sex trafficking of minors. There have been rumors to this effect surrounding him for many years now, and although it has mostly been a charge levied by his right wing opponents there is also (in my opinion) a disturbing pattern of evidence that has emerged. To be more specific, I believe Cindy Sarai when she says that Evo Morales initiated a relationship with her while she worked in the Casa Grande del Pueblo when she was 15 and got her pregnant[69]; her daughter was born in 2016 and is now 8 or 9. Since the formalization of charges against him for statutory rape and human trafficking of minors Evo has scarcely left his home base in the Chapare, where he remains under guard by his remaining loyalists, and has not attended any of the hearings in the case or appeared to testify. Another woman Morales was alleged to have begun a relationship with while she was underage reportedly accompanied Evo during his exile in Buenos Aires, per his biographer Martin Sivak.[70] Other former members of his inner circle have since said publicly that this behavior was an “open secret” in the halls of power.[71] This feels an important detail to mention, even if only to contextualize Evo’s fall from grace and the changed view of MAS in the public eye. 

Conclusion

Of course, all of this begs another question: what does this current conjuncture of economic and political crisis imply for the future of plurinationalism in Bolivia? Does that project of social inclusion, limited and contradictory as it may be, end here as well? I am not so certain. In the same way that the Indigenous masses rose up in defense of the wiphala and the significance of the plurinational project—though not necessarily the MAS—in the aftermath of the 2019 coup, I think it is possible to talk about a substantial mass base that wants to take the meaning of plurinationalism back into their own hands. I do not know that this would mean a revolution in the meaning of plurinationalism as the demand for Indigenous autonomies all over Bolivia. What it would represent at the very least is a continuance of the commitment to inclusion and anti-racism that marked the Process of Change in clear contrast to a racist, Christo-fascist coup regime as that of Jeanine Añez from 2019-2020.

I fear that North American discourses about the Process of Change overlook its important driving contradictions. There are roughly two moments to the Process of Change: the first of Plurinationalism and decolonization, and the current one whose discourses celebrate economic development and stability above all else. I almost cannot stress enough how little plurinationalism and furthering the more radical aims of decolonialism matter nowadays in official discourse. Decolonization, when employed in this discourse, signifies everything, anything, and nothing. Perhaps the decolonial moment in Bolivia in general has passed, but if not it certainly is in a serious ebb. And, to be honest, after seeing “decolonization” and its rhetoric so horrifically tortured in the years I’ve lived in Bolivia, I’m not sure I could define it for myself. Perhaps it was a serious pursuit of the MAS at one point in the beginning, although you can find many dissenting opinions, but it certainly ceased to be one despite discourses to the contrary. 

At its core, plurinationalism is a noble ideal that has not been implemented. It arose as a social movement demand, and if it is to be sustained (and I think that it will be, albeit perhaps to an even lesser extent) it will be sustained by the same Indigenous social movements that developed the concept. In my experience attending Aymara political meetings and social gatherings in El Alto and in rural communities, the plurinational state is the advance that they most zealously claim as their own and are willing to defend. In work I’ve published elsewhere[72], that was much my argument to explain the mobilizations in El Alto in the aftermath of the 2019 coup, which burned the wiphala and openly threatened the continued existence of plurinationality. People were motivated less by a specific desire to defend Evo and the MAS than they were by a general interest in protecting the perceived social gains from the Process of Change. While protests raged against the alleged election fraud in other cities after the 2019 election, El Alto remained calm until the burning of the wiphala.[73]
What was the decolonial moment in Bolivia, really? It is quite easy to find serious criticisms from any Bolivian Indigenous nation levied at the Process of Change for its entire duration. Bolivian anthropologist Pavel Camilo Lopez Flores argues that the neoextractivist economic policies enacted by the MAS government are either perpetuating or recreating internal colonialism, rather than working towards decolonization.[74] As he points out, the economic processes underway in Bolivia are not all that different from those taking place elsewhere in South America with respect to the continuing expansion of extractive frontiers (broadly defined to include other environmentally destructive practices such as forest resource exploitation and industrial agribusiness) into areas deemed otherwise “unproductive”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a rather direct overlap between such “unproductive” areas and Indigenous land claims, meaning that these expansionary processes are replicating age-old colonial projects premised on accumulation by dispossession; in Bolivia this has been especially problematic for Indigenous peoples such as the Guarani in the eastern lowlands, whose ancestral lands are under siege from natural gas extraction[75] and a seemingly endless proliferation of monocrop soy bean plantations.  

To conclude this piece it seems appropriate to talk more about what comes next, and what lessons socialists the world over can learn from the highs and lows of the Process of Change. All that is certain is that most everything has changed, and the heady times of a decade ago may as well be a lifetime ago. I think the most important lesson that can be taken from this period is to never put all of our eggs in one basket with regards to leadership, and along the same lines to never hesitate to kill your idols. The social movement integration and the authentic leadership from below which buoyed the MAS in its early days was co-opted and folded into the state, and the so-called social movement state came to be inseparable from the person of Evo Morales himself. I would argue in general that a tendency for the revolution to become wrapped up in charismatic individuals has debilitated many a revolution across Latin America, and uncritical support for such leaders has become too important a measure of anti-imperialist solidarity amongst foreign observers. The original point of the MAS was to lead by obeying—the second part of its name is “Instrument for the Political Sovereignty of the People”. This conception of the MAS not as a political party but as the political instrument of the social movement organizations for their incidence in national politics was and is compelling. Of course, it was betrayed, and the investment of the revolution solely in the leadership of what became concretely a conventional political party precipitated the individualist, factionalist infighting between Evo and Arce that ultimately destroyed the party. 

It is also my opinion that Bolivia in particular has become something of a fetish object for many leftists in the imperial core, promoted as an example of successful Indigenous leadership and socialist transformation which merits uncritical support and defense. In the good times it was certainly easier to paper over the many contradictions that were apparent in the process, and most paid attention only to the successes before paying renewed attention in 2019 during the coup. But after the dust had settled there and after a brief period of interest when the MAS won the 2020 elections, Bolivia was forgotten about yet again as the MAS and the economy disintegrated. 

I’m sure that for many readers my description of the omnipresent economic, political, and social crisis in the country may come as a surprise, accustomed as many were for so long to read good news coming from the Indigenous socialist revolution. But Bolivia has always been much more complicated than that, and although even I was at one point swept up in the good times, signals of decline have been evident for some time and obviously are now coming to a head. I suppose then that I would encourage us all as socialists in the imperial core to pay more consistent attention to the peripheral countries at the forefront of the global struggle against capital. We should learn other languages, read widely and in translation, and in general value local perspectives on these issues even when those go against our received wisdom on what makes a principled anti-imperialist. We don’t all have to go live in these countries or even travel to them, but we should investigate in depth before we speak about them. Important individual leaders are very often not the best sources for accounts on the successes and failures of the political processes they lead. We should always question the notion that the leader speaks for the masses, and train our attention on the masses instead. 

Following this advice in hindsight allows for the growing fragility of Bolivia’s process of change to become apparent. Evo’s share of the vote declined nationally in his second and third re-elections, and it declined more significantly over the rural Aymara altiplano over that same time period. The continued distancing of Indigenous and peasant social movements and prominent left-wing intellectuals from Evo’s government as time went on should have been telling. An ample body of work exists criticizing the decolonial failures of the Plurinational State from a left/Indianista point of view.[76] The macroeconomic warning lights have been flashing since 2014. And, of course, Evo narrowly lost the referendum he called on whether or not he could run again in 2016. It was naturally more important and urgent to denounce the violence and racism of the 2019 coup than it was to immediately understand its context, but that doesn’t mean the context was lacking.  As we view these events in retrospect it becomes more important to be ruthlessly critical than it is to be nostalgic and defensive. At some point it behooves us to understand how and why certain things are possible despite that process forcing us to accept hard truths. 

Arguably we should aspire to always hold critical support for leadership, recalling the original conception of the MAS as a political instrument by and for the social movements rather than a party, and unreserved support for the initiatives of the masses. It was the organized rural and urban Indigenous working class that made the MAS, and it will be incumbent on the next generation of this same majority of the Bolivian population to rearticulate a new, organic social movement politics capable of heading off the wave of reaction that is coming and constructing the base of a new electoral hegemony. This process will take years. Consider that the MAS-IPSP, the closest thing that Bolivia has ever had to a genuine Indigenous mass party, formed nearly 50 years after the 1952 National Revolution that ended formal Indigenous servitude and introduced Indigenous enfranchisement. While some of the most important social and economic gains of 1952 were never reversed, the Bolivian left and the Indigenous masses of the country nevertheless experienced harsh racism, discrimination, and oppression at the hands of the right-wing military dictatorships and later right-wing neoliberal governments that transpired from 1964 on. Indeed, the MAS years until 2019 constituted one of the longest periods of stable democratic governance that Bolivia had ever experienced. It took decades of Indigenous and peasant organizing to arrive at the imperfect but successful political instrument that was the MAS–it took just 20 years for it to fall apart. 

I do not foresee the next five to ten years going well for Bolivia politically or economically. The incoming right wing government, whether it be Samuel or Tuto, will not have an easy time governing despite the likely right-wing supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. This is because I expect there to be popular struggle against attempts to revert the social and societal gains of the Plurinational State, and likely against attempts to radically reform the economic model, particularly if Bolivian natural resources are sold off for a pittance. The history of right-wing governance in Bolivia, which both Tuto and Samuel have been involved in, suggests that neither would hesitate to use police and/or military force against such protests, as happened in 2019 resulting in massacres. Given that both can only poll around a maximum of 25% right now, we can’t say either have significant popular support, even though one will win a majority in the runoff. So despite the incoming right-wing’s expected institutional advantage, they will not be able to win in the streets without significant use of state violence. I worry that this will come to pass; in any case, governance will be difficult and contested, as I’ve said. 

Ultimately, Bolivia had 20 mostly good years under a stable left-Indigenous-popular government for the first time in its history and experienced an unprecedented economic boom that brought many people out of poverty. It is a shame that it could not last longer, or at least implode less completely, but it is an example to study and learn from. All signs suggest that this is the end of a chapter of Bolivian history and of a chapter in the Bolivian left’s history of struggle, but I trust that new ones will be written, and I hope to be here to see that happen. 

Notes

1. Desiderio Paredes, EL MALLKU, EN AGOSTO 2020, n.d., accessed August 15, 2025, https://temascbba.com/el-mallku-en-agosto-2020/; Franco Limber, “¿QUÉ ES LO BUSCA EL MALLKU?,” Jichha Portal Indianista Katarista, August 12, 2020, http://jichha.blogspot.com/2020/08/que-es-lo-busca-el-mallku.html.
2. Franco Limber, Wiphala: historia real de un símbolo de lucha (Jichha, n.d.).
3. Alejandra Tapia, “Felipe Quispe, Dirigente Campesino Boliviano: ‘Evo Quería Eternizarse En El Poder,’” La Tercera, November 12, 2019, https://www.latercera.com/mundo/noticia/felipe-quispe-dirigente-campesino-boliviano-evo-queria-eternizarse-poder/897038/; Fabiola Escárzaga, “Comunidad Indígena y Revolución En Bolivia: El Pensamiento Indianista-Katarista de Fausto Reinaga y Felipe Quispe,” Política y Cultura, no. 37 (January 2012): 185–210; Felipe Quispe Huanca, “EN BOLIVIA HAY DOS BOLIVIAS,” Jichha Portal Indianista Katarista, December 12, 2019, http://jichha.blogspot.com/2019/12/en-bolivia-hay-dos-bolivias.html; Editorial, “El Legado Del Mallku Felipe Quispe Huanca,” Periódico Pukara 174, no. 174 (2021): 1–2.
4. "El Mundo Indígena 2024: Bolivia - IWGIA - International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs,” accessed August 15, 2025, https://iwgia.org/es/bolivia/5477-mi-2024-bolivia.html.
5. “Indicadores de Inflación | Banco Central de Bolivia,” accessed August 10, 2025, https://www.bcb.gob.bo/?q=indicadores_inflacion.
6. Albaro Benedicto Laime Mamani, “Bolivia registró un déficit comercial de $us137 millones en abril de 2025,” INE, June 21, 2025, https://www.ine.gob.bo/index.php/bolivia-registro-un-deficit-comercial-de-us137-millones-en-abril-de-2025/.
7. “Fitch Downgrades Bolivia to ‘CCC-,’” accessed August 8, 2025, https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/fitch-downgrades-bolivia-to-ccc-24-01-2025.
8. John Brown, “Party-Base Linkages and Contestatory Mobilization in Bolivia’s El Alto: Subduing the Ciudad Rebelde,” Latin American Perspectives 47, no. 4 (2020): 40–57, https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20918608; Santiago Anria, When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge university press, 2019); Luis Tapia and Marxa Chavez, Producción y reproducción de desigualdades. Organización social y poder político, Desigualdades y pobreza multidimensional (CEDLA, 2020), https://cedla.org/publicaciones/obess/produccion-y-reproduccion-de-desigualdades-organizacion-social-y-poder-politico/.
9. Policarpio Rojas Ramirez, Historia de Levantamientos Indigenas En Bolivia, Second (Editorial Ideas Unidas, 2009).
10. Carmen Soliz, Fields of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964, Pitt Latin American Series (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).
11. Waskar Ari Chachaki, Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia’s Indigenous Intellectuals, Narrating Native Histories (Duke University Press, 2014); Roberto Choque Canqui, Jesús de Machaqa: la marka rebelde, 1. Cinco siglos de historia (Plural Editores, 2003), http://biblioteca.cipca.org.bo/explorar/jesus-de-machaqa-la-marka-rebelde-1-cinco-siglos-de-historia.
12. Gustavo Rodríguez Ostria, La Acumulación Originaria de Capital En Bolivia, 1825-1885: Ensayo Sobre La Articulación Feudal-Capitalista, Primera edición (Plural Editores, 2021).
13. Carmen Soliz, Fields of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964, Pitt Latin American Series (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).
14. René Zavaleta Mercado, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia (Plural, 2011).
15. For the history of the revolution and its aftermath see: James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952-82 (Verso, 1984).
16. Carlos Macusaya Cruz, Batallas Por La Identidad. Indianismo, Katarismo y Descolonización En La Bolivia Contemporánea (NoPatria Editorial, 2019); Carlos Macusaya Cruz, “La Influencia Del Indianismo En El Proceso Politico Boliviano,” Lecture, Módulo 6, Jichha Curso de Indianismo y Pensamiento Andino, 2021; Daniel Calle, “En El Actual Gobierno Los Kataristas Estamos Excluidos,” in Historia, Coyuntura y Descolonización: Katarismo e Indianismo En El Proceso Político Del MAS En Bolivia, Edicion Electronica, Historia, Coyuntura y Descolonizacion (Fondo Editorial Pukara, 2010); Odín Ávila Rojas, “Sumak Qamaña versus Indianismo-Katarismo. Una Disputa Ideológica Por El Proyecto Político de Nación En Bolivia,” Revista Temas Sociológicos, January 26, 2017, 167, https://doi.org/10.29344/07196458.17.171; Odín Ávila Rojas, “El Indianismo y La Discusión Vigente Sobre La Constitución Política Del Indio En Bolivia,” Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 37 (October 2019): 139–59, https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda37.2019.07.
17. Forrest Hylton et al., Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso, 2007); Jeffery R. Webber, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket Books, 2011).
18. Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis, Cochabamba!: Water War in Bolivia (South End Press, 2004).
19. Odín Ávila Rojas, “Dos interpretaciones anticoloniales sobre centralidad política de los pueblos colonizados: el sujeto político negro de Frantz Fanon y el sujeto político indio de Fausto Reinaga,” Revista CoPaLa. Construyendo Paz Latinoamericana 3, no. enero-junio (2017): 21–31.
20. Nancy Grey Postero, The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia (University of California Press, 2017), 14.
21. Esteban Ticona Alejo, “La Rebelion Aymara y Popular de Octubre 2003: Una Approximacion Desde Algunos Barrios de La Paz - Bolivia,” Textos Antropologicos 15, no. 1 (2005): 77–83; Pablo Mamani Ramírez, Microgobiernos Barriales Levantamiento y Resistencia de El Alto (Octubre 2003 y Noviembre 2019), 1st Digital (NoPatria Editorial, 2020).
22. A memoir of El Alto in this period: Quya Reyna et al., Los hijos de Goni, Primera edición, ed. Alexis Argüello Sandoval (Sobras Selectas, 2022).
23. Nicole Fabricant and Bret Darin Gustafson, eds., Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory, and Indigeneity in a Plurinational State, 1st ed, School for Advanced Research Global Indigenous Politics Series (School for Advanced Research Press, 2011), 5.
24. Postero, The Indigenous State.
25. See: Benjamin Dangl, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia (AK Press, 2019).
26. “Pueblos Indígenas de La Amazonía Boliviana Buscan Soluciones Para La Intoxicación de Sus Territorios Por Mercurio | Fondo Para El Desarrollo de Pueblos Indígenas de América Latina y El Caribee,” accessed August 3, 2025, https://www.filac.org/pueblos-indigenas-de-la-amazonia-boliviana-buscan-soluciones-para-la-intoxicacion-de-sus-territorios-por-mercurio/.
27. Luis Alberto Arce Catacora, Un modelo económico justo y existoso: la economía boliviana, 2006-2019, Sección de obras de economía (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2023).
28. Rene Zavaleta Mercado, The National-Popular in Bolivia., trans. Anne Freeland (Seagull Books, 2017).
29. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: Una Reflexión Sobre Prácticas y Discursos Descolonizadores (Retazos : Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2010).
30. For a thorough discussion of this, see: Penelope Anthias, Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco (Cornell University Press, 2018).
31. Arce Catacora, Un modelo económico justo y existoso, 41.
32. Ibid, 71.
33. Ibid, 87.
34. “Fundación TIERRA: Pacto Evo-Agro Es El Sueño Neoliberal de Los Empresarios,” accessed August 15, 2025, https://www.ftierra.org/index.php?view=article&id=792:fundacion-tierra-pacto-evo-agro-es-el-sueno-neoliberal-de-los-empresarios&catid=33.
35. Jeffery R. Webber, “Evo Morales, Transformismo, and the Consolidation of Agrarian Capitalism in Bolivia,” Journal of Agrarian Change 17, no. 2 (2017): 330–47, https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12209.
36. Bret Gustafson, “Continuity and Change in Bolivian Land Politics and Policy,” in Bolivia at the Crossroads (Routledge, 2021).
37. World Bank Open Data, “World Bank Open Data.”
38. “Pip.Worldbank.Org/Country-Profiles/BOL,” accessed July 29, 2025, https://pip.worldbank.org/country-profiles/BOL.
39. “Poverty & Inequality Indicators,” accessed July 29, 2025, https://pip.worldbank.org/poverty-calculator?src=BOL.
40. Nico Tassi, The Native World-System: An Ethnography of Bolivian Aymara Traders in the Global Economy, Issues of Globalization : Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2017); Juliane Müller, El comercio popular globalizado: mercado, reciprocidad y acumulación en los Andes bolivianos, Primera edición (Plural Editores, 2022); Juliane Müller, “Webs of Fiesta-Related Trade: Chinese Imports, Investment and Reciprocity in La Paz, Bolivia,” Critique of Anthropology, n.d., https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20908297.
41. Juan Antonio Morales, “La economía boliviana de los últimos cincuenta años: reflexiones sobre el desarrollo de largo plazo,” Revista Ciencia y Cultura 18, no. 33 (2014): 107–35.
42. Guillermo Alexander Arévalo Luna, “Economía y política del modelo boliviano 2006-2014: evaluación preliminar,” Apuntes del Cenes 35, no. 61 (2016): 147–74.
43. Coy 494 - Una tormenta perfecta amenaza al sector de hidrocarburos - Economía de Bolivia, Informe Nacional de Coyuntura, September 25, 2023, https://fundacion-milenio.org/coy-494-una-tormenta-perfecta-amenaza-al-sector-de-hidrocarburos/.
44. El Deber, “Desequilibrio fiscal de 10 años es de $us 38.790 millones y se financia con deuda pública | El Deber,” January 27, 2025, https://eldeber.com.bo/economia/desequilibrio-fiscal-de-10-anos-es-de-us-38790-millones-y-se-financia-con-deuda-publica_502285.
45. “Bolivia Public Sector External Debt,” accessed August 8, 2025, https://tradingeconomics.com/bolivia/external-debt.
46. Álvaro García Linera, Geopolítica de La Amazonia: Poder Hacendal-Patrimonial y Acumulación Capitalista (Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2012).
47. Ibid, 80.
48. Ibid, 81.
49. Magali Vienca Copa Pabón, “Contradicciones Plurinacionales: La Marcha de La Nación Qhara Qhara y Otras Naciones,” Periódico Pukara Año 12, no. Número 151 (2019).
50. Pablo Mamani Ramírez, “Cartographies of Indigenous Power: Identity and Territoriality in Bolivia,” in Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory, and Indigeneity in a Plurinational State, 1st ed, ed. Nicole Fabricant and Bret Darin Gustafson, School for Advanced Research Global Indigenous Politics Series (School for Advanced Research Press, 2011), 63.
51. Bret Darin Gustafson, Bolivia in the Age of Gas (Duke University Press, 2020), 15.
52. For arguably the most detailed breakdown in English: Linda C. Farthing and Thomas Becker, Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia (Haymarket Books, 2021).
53. John Curiel and Jack R. Williams, “Analysis | Bolivia Dismissed Its October Elections as Fraudulent. Our Research Found No Reason to Suspect Fraud.,” The Washington Post, February 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/26/bolivia-dismissed-its-october-elections-fraudulent-our-research-found-no-reason-suspect-fraud/; Julie Turkewitz, “M.I.T. Researchers Cast Doubt on Bolivian Election Fraud,” World, The New York Times, February 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/world/americas/bolivia-election-fraud.html; “New Report Debunks Claims That Bolivia’s Equivalent of the US Electoral ‘Blue Shift’ Must Be Fraudulent,” CEPR, November 10, 2022, https://cepr.net/newsroom/new-report-debunks-claims-that-bolivias-equivalent-of-the-us-electoral-blue-shift-must-be-fraudulent/.
54. “Camacho Preso, Otro Episodio de La Polarización Boliviana | Nueva Sociedad,” Nueva Sociedad | Democracia y Política En América Latina, December 30, 2022, https://nuso.org/articulo/Bolivia-Camacho-arce/.
55. Reyna M. Suñagua Copa, “El Alto, ¡la Configuración Del ‘Otro’!,” in Whipala, Crisis y Memoria. Senkata, No Te Merecen (Grupo Jichha, 2020); Grupo Jichha, Whipala, Crisis y Memoria. Senkata, No Te Merecen (Grupo Jichha, 2020).
56. Jake Johnson, “Evo Morales Says He Is ‘Absolutely Convinced’ US Led Coup in Bolivia to Exploit Lithium Reserves,” Common Dreams, December 25, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/25/evo-morales-says-he-absolutely-convinced-us-led-coup-bolivia-exploit-lithium; Vijay Prashad, “After Evo, the Lithium Question Looms Large in Bolivia,” CounterPunch.Org, November 13, 2019, https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/13/after-evo-the-lithium-question-looms-large-in-bolivia/; Vijay Prashad and Alejandro Bejarano, “Elon Musk Is Acting Like a Neo-Conquistador for South America’s Lithium,” Peoples Dispatch, March 10, 2020, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/03/10/elon-musk-is-acting-like-a-neo-conquistador-for-south-americas-lithium/.
57. “Presidente Arce Descarta Asistir al Congreso Del MAS Porque No Estarán Los Sectores Sociales,” La Razón, n.d., accessed October 11, 2023, https://www.la-razon.com/nacional/2023/09/27/arce-cuestiona-la-convocatoria-al-congreso-del-mas-y-anuncia-que-no-asistira/; “El MAS determina la ‘autoeexpulsión’ de Arce y Choquehuanca,” EFE Noticias, October 5, 2023, https://efe.com/mundo/2023-10-05/el-mas-determina-la-autoeexpulsion-de-arce-y-choquehuanca/.
58. Opinión Bolivia, “El plan económico de Unidad: recorte del 20% al gasto público y cierre de empresas estatales,” Opinión Bolivia, June 18, 2025, https://www.opinion.com.bo/articulo/pais/plan-economico-unidad-recorte-20-gasto-publico-cierre-empresas-estatales/20250618165319974879.html.
59. Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga Ramirez, “Plan de Gobierno 2025-2030 Ing. Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga Ramirez - 7 Propuestas Para Salvar Bolivia,” Alianza Libre, n.d.
60. Quiroga Ramirez, “Plan de Gobierno 2025-2030 Ing. Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga Ramirez - 7 Propuestas Para Salvar Bolivia,” 10.
61. “World Bank Open Data,” World Bank Open Data, accessed July 29, 2025, https://data.worldbank.org.
62. Jesús Humerez Oscori, “Indianización de Eva Copa y Por Qué Venció Electoramente En El Alto,” Periódico Pukara 176, no. Abril 2021 (2021): 7–10.
63. Opinión Bolivia, “Andrónico habla y responde sobre Evo, combustibles y plan de Gobierno en entrevista,” Opinión Bolivia, July 7, 2025, https://www.opinion.com.bo/articulo/pais/andronico-habla-responde-evo-combustibles-plan-gobierno-entrevista/20250707005356975909.html.
64.  El Deber, “Andrónico resume su propuesta de gobierno en 10 compromisos | El Deber,” June 29, 2025, https://eldeber.com.bo/pais/andronico-resume-su-propuesta-de-gobierno-en-10-compromisos_521819.
65. Agencia de Noticias Fides, “Plan de Gobierno de Andrónico propone mayores confiscaciones y controles a márgenes de ganancias - Agencias de Noticias Fides,” Agencia de Noticias Fides - Bolivia, August 1, 2025, https://www.noticiasfides.com/nacional/politica/plan-de-gobierno-de-andronico-propone-mayores-confiscaciones-y-controles-a-margenes-de-ganancias.
66. Redacción central, “Entregan a Emapa 400 quintales de azúcar incautada al contrabando,” ABI, March 14, 2025, https://www.abi.bo/index.php/component/content/article/37-notas/noticias/sociedad/61625-entregan-a-emapa-400-quintales-de-azucar-incautada-al-contrabando; Redacción central, “Emapa venderá 270.000 huevos decomisados al contrabando a Bs 0,80 la unidad,” ABI, May 31, 2023, https://www.abi.bo/index.php/component/content/article/36-notas/noticias/economia/37779-emapa-vendera-270-000-huevos-decomisados-al-contrabando-a-bs-0-80-la-unidad; “El VLCC Entregó Aproximadamente 1.380 Pollos de Contrabando a Emapa | Ministerio de Defensa,” accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.mindef.gob.bo/node/1434.
67. Alianza Popular, “Programa de Gobierno de La Alianza Popular,” Organo Electoral Plurinacional, May 19, 2025, 5, https://web.oep.org.bo/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PROGRAMA-DE-GOBIERNO-ALIANZA-POPULAR.pdf.
68. “Última Encuesta: Andrónico Vuelve a Caer y Exministro Dice Que Es Difícil Que Cambie La Tendencia,” accessed August 13, 2025, https://unitel.bo/noticias/asi-decidimos/ultima-encuesta-andronico-vuelve-a-caer-y-exministro-dice-que-es-dificil-que-cambie-la-tendencia-OL16954794.
69. Habla Por Primera Vez La Joven Supuestamente Embarazada Por Evo Morales - DNews, directed by DNews, 2024, 30:09, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc-vUF6umcg.
70. Daniel Gigena, “Martín Sivak: ‘La respuesta de Evo Morales no alcanza para despejar las dudas frente a una denuncia tan grave,’” LA NACION, October 18, 2024, https://www.lanacion.com.ar/cultura/martin-sivak-la-respuesta-de-evo-morales-no-alcanza-para-despejar-las-dudas-frente-a-una-denuncia-nid18102024/.
71. Redacción central, “Exdirigenta intercultural revela que es testigo de que Morales vivía en Argentina con tres menores,” ABI, October 14, 2024, https://abi.bo/index.php/component/content/article/35-notas/noticias/politica/56177-exdirigenta-intercultural-revela-que-es-testigo-de-que-morales-vivia-en-argentina-con-tres-menores-2?Itemid=101.
72. Jordan Cooper, “Qullasuyu Rising: Indianista-Katarista Politics, Paradoxes of the Plurinational State, and the Fall of Evo Morales. | EBSCOhost,” January 1, 2024, 30:68, https://doi.org/10.5195/bsj.2024.331.
73. Linda C. Farthing and Thomas Becker, Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia (Haymarket Books, 2021), 49.
74. Pavel Camilo Lopez Flores, “Territorialidades indígenas y la recreación extractivista del colonialismo interno en Bolivia,” REMS - Revista de Estudios Marítimos y Sociales, July 27, 2018, https://estudiosmaritimossociales.org/archivo/rems-13/dossier-lopez-flores/.
75. Anthias, Limits to Decolonization; Penelope Anthias, “Ch’ixi Landscapes: Indigeneity and Capitalism in the Bolivian Chaco,” Geoforum 82 (June 2017): 268–75, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.09.013.
76. Jesús Humerez Oscori, Racialización Del Poder: Dominación Jailona En Bolivia (2009-2020) (Editorial Nina Katari, 2020); Pablo Mamani Ramírez, El estado neocolonial: una mirada al proceso de la lucha por el poder y sus contradicciones en Bolivia (2017).