Looking at the sweeping successes for Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in the October 18 general election, one can easily find parallels with its first successful presidential campaign back in 2005. As with the clashes leading up to the recent election, the years preceding Evo Morales’s success in that earlier contest saw a series of crises, which helped propel the coca growers’ leader to the highest office in the land.

Back then, the neoliberal economic model introduced by Hugo Banzer Suárez’s military dictatorship and developed by subsequent right-wing governments had reached the height of its unpopularity. Bolivia was reeling from economic crisis following the imposition of IMF debt and subsequent “reforms.” And the 2003 gas war — a mass revolt against government bids to export large quantities of natural gas to the United States via Chile — detonated whatever remained of neoliberalism’s perceived stability.  When Bolivia went to the polls in 2005, the “Black October” massacres against social movements in the city of El Alto remained fresh in the popular memory. The country was set for a radical change under a new, socialist government that also incorporated indigenous and so-called “Katarist” political traditions.

Turning to today, and the eleven months preceding Luis “Lucho” Arce’s election win last Sunday appear as a fast-forward repeat of the disastrous years of neoliberalism that preceded Morales’s initial victory. The Bolivian economy had been the fastest growing in the region prior to the November 2019 coup against Morales, but this year it suffered a 6 percent drop as the COVID-19 pandemic and economic mismanagement under Jeanine Áñez’s regime took their toll. The post-coup massacres in Senkata and Sacaba, even deadlier than those in El Alto in 2003, revealed the repressive nature of the new regime and its apparent continuation of the traditions of past military dictatorships.