Last Week’s Bolivian Elections Showed the Right Is Up to Its Old Antidemocratic Tricks
Bolivians went to the polls last week for the first local elections since the 2019 coup. Evo Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism party won big — and it would have even performed even better without the undemocratic scheming of the Right.
An indigenous woman casts her vote during regional elections on March 7, 2021 in Laja, Bolivia, thirty kilometers outside La Paz. (Aizar Raldes / AFP via Getty Images)
March 7 marked the first local elections in Bolivia since the coup of 2019 that ousted former president Evo Morales. After a fresh surge of popular mobilization finally compelled Jeanine Áñez’s “interim” regime to hold national elections last October, the Bolivian people voted in a landslide to return to government the same political party — the progressive Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) — that had been driven from power by the coup the previous year.
Since the election of Luis Arce Catacora, MAS has weathered repeated coup plots, but President Arce has held firm. Indeed, the arrest of Áñez and a number of her former ministers and ex-commanders over the weekend — a story causing much scandal in the international press — indicates that justice might finally be seen for those families of the dozens massacred, and many hundreds injured, during the violent ousting of Morales from the presidency.
In local elections, MAS has again had a strong showing, and seems to have swept the country in the vote for governors, regional assemblies, mayors, and city council people. The significant exception is the cities with wealthy enclaves, which identify as mestizo. Final results should be known once rural votes from far-flung hamlets are counted. (The electoral observer mission of Parlasur opposes the quick count of votes because it “generates confusion.”)
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