The victory of Evo Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo party in Bolivia is a triumph for democracy and a rebuke to the right-wing coup plotters. But Bolivia now faces some serious questions: How will the country engage with these recent atrocities perpetrated by the Right? And what will happen to those who committed them?
Bolivia is still reeling from the coup that unseated Evo Morales last November. Amid repression and intimidation from a fortified Right now in power, the Left is preparing itself for new presidential elections.
Controversy over Bolivia’s election reflects deep fissures in the country.
In today’s election, Evo Morales is running for another term as Bolivian president, after almost fourteen years of sweeping economic and democratic reforms. But his Movement for Socialism is also handing power to young Bolivians to keep the revolution going.
It’s been two years since the right-wing coup against Evo Morales’s socialist government. One of his former ministers tells Jacobin about how the US war on drugs helped create a Bolivian military free from popular control.
In November, the Bolivian military forced Evo Morales to step down: the classic definition of a coup. Despite the evidence, some commentators — even on the Left — have failed to identify it for what it was: an elite plot to oust a progressive president whose program of reforms had transformed the lives of many of the country’s most excluded people.
When Trump hyped bogus claims of election fraud as a pretext to overturn an election he lost, the media portrayed it as the gravest threat to democracy in the history of the Republic. When exactly the same thing happened in Bolivia, they said it was actually good.
After the Bolivian ultraright launched a coup in 2019, a mass movement restored the country’s socialist government — proof that it isn’t elites that protect democracy but organized workers.
In November, Evo Morales was forced out of office in a right-wing coup. He was trying to avoid a campaign of terror from the Right — but under Bolivia’s new ultraconservative president, Jeanine Áñez, that terror, now carried out by paramilitaries, is still escalating.
In today’s Bolivian election, Evo Morales is running for a historic fourth term as president. Vice President Álvaro García Linera spoke to Jacobin about how their Movement for Socialism can make their revolution permanent — and stop the rise of the far right in Latin America.
We're still waiting for the full results of the Iowa caucus. In Bolivia, the United States backed a violent coup against Evo Morales for even less.
Bolivia’s ousted vice president Álvaro García Linera told Jacobin about last Sunday’s coup d’état and the murderous violence now being unleashed against Evo Morales’s supporters.
Almost a year since the military coup against Evo Morales, today Bolivians will finally get to vote on a new president. But the forces that overthrew Morales have done everything they can to stop his Movement Toward Socialism to return to power through a free and fair election.
The Bolivian military forced President Evo Morales to step down — the classic definition of a coup. Now, the country is caught in a spiral of horrors as the far-right regime of terror consolidates its rule.
Bolivia's coup government has announced that elections slated for September will be pushed back yet again. It's another reminder that the right-wing coup-makers care nothing about democracy — they only want to institute neoliberal policies and repress Evo Morales's leftist party, who they know would win a free and fair election.
Nine months after the right-wing coup that ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales, elections still have not been held and popular discontent with the coup regime is boiling over. Democracy must be restored, no matter what the golpistas and their allies in Washington want.
A clumsy, short-lived coup last month couldn’t bring Bolivia’s discredited conservative forces back to power. But the divide between Luis Arce and Evo Morales over the legacy of the Movement for Socialism could give those forces a bigger opening.
The conflict between Evo Morales and Luis Arce for the Bolivian presidency in 2025 has not only split the ruling MAS party but also the social movements and labor unions that form its base.
Fifteen years after Evo Morales was first elected president of Bolivia, his socialist party has returned to power. The far right hasn’t given up — but the indigenous masses that reversed the right-wing coup and forced elections have proven themselves a formidable force for justice and democracy.
Massive protests last month forced Bolivia’s postcoup government to pledge that elections will take place on October 18. But Luis Arce, presidential candidate for Evo Morales’s MAS party, told Jacobin that democracy is still in danger, with powerful private interests standing to gain from the continuation of the current regime.