For most of its history, the poor, landlocked South American country of Bolivia has been regarded as a last refuge for outlaws. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were run to ground there, in 1908, and Che Guevara fought his final battle in the Bolivian mountains, in 1967. After the Second World War, the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie found refuge in Bolivia and lent his services as an interrogator to the security services, earning the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1980, the Army officer Luis García Meza seized power, in what became known as the “cocaine coup,” and installed the world’s first narco-dictatorship. His regime lasted only a year, but about a thousand people died in the ultra-rightist repression that he unleashed, assisted by Barbie and an international gang of fascist thugs known as the Bridegrooms of Death.
García Meza ended his days in prison, but no fewer than thirteen of Bolivia’s sixty-five Presidents have died violently, in office or afterward. Bolivia has long been regarded as the world’s most politically unstable country; in the hundred and ninety-four years since it won independence from colonial Spain, it has had a hundred and ninety coups, attempted coups, and revolutions. Last week, when President Evo Morales fled to Mexico, that number arguably increased to a hundred and ninety-one. The country remains consumed by a debate over whether he was ousted in a coup, as Morales and his loyalists allege, or in a democratic uprising against his misrule.
Some facts are undisputed. On November 9th, as Morales insisted that he had won a fourth Presidential term in highly flawed elections, an auditing team sent in by the Organization of American States announced that fraud had occurred and recommended that a new election be held. Morales, surprisingly, acquiesced—but then the head of the armed forces appeared on camera to publicly request his resignation, “for the good of Bolivia.” Morales instantly grasped the implications. He summoned the Presidential jet to fly him and several close aides to his stronghold city of Cochabamba, and then alerted his followers, thousands of whom assembled at the airport to shield him from arrest. After tendering his resignation, by video, he went into hiding. As chaos spread through Bolivia, Morales announced that a military coup was under way, then remained concealed until the Mexican government sent a small passenger jet to take him into asylum.
With Morales gone, the conservative politician Jeanine Áñez quickly swore herself in as interim President, under irregular circumstances. Áñez was the second Vice-President of the Senate, and therefore fifth in the order of Presidential succession, but several of Morales’s more immediate successors had resigned with him. She also did not have a quorum in Bolivia’s legislative assembly, a legal requirement for such proceedings. But the security forces supported her, and also fought against pro-Morales protesters, in violent conflicts in which several people were killed.
In Mexico City, the left-of-center government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador received Morales as an official “distinguished guest.” Last Thursday, two days after he arrived, he spoke with me by telephone. I asked him for his reaction to the chaos and violence that had followed his departure, and to the swiftness of the political changes. Morales was defiant. “Because I had been President a long time, they called me authoritarian—‘the dictator Evo Morales,’ ” he said. “Now the Bolivian people can see what it’s really like to live in a dictatorship, what it’s like to live under a state of siege.”
Morales’s Presidency had been controversial since he first took office, in January, 2006. Now sixty years old, he is the son of llama herders and a former head of the coca-growers’ union. An ethnic Aymara, one of the country’s main Andean indigenous groups, Morales was the first indigenous leader to hold power in Bolivia, where half of the population is either wholly or partly indigenous. That identity, as well as Morales’s leftist tilt, was a source of resentment for some of his critics, especially among European-descended “white” Bolivians.
In office, Morales allied himself closely with socialists, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Brazil’s Inácio Lula da Silva, and with fellow-leftists Rafael Correa, of Ecuador; Daniel Ortega, of Nicaragua; and Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, of Argentina. They were at the forefront of the so-called Pink Tide, which surged during the commodities boom of the last decade. But then, in the past six years, Chávez and Castro died; Lula was imprisoned on corruption charges; Cristina Kirchner was displaced by a conservative rival; and Correa was succeeded by his Vice-President, who moved Ecuador to the right. As of a few weeks ago, Morales was among the last vestiges of the Pink Tide.
Morales was polarizing, but his nearly fourteen years in power—the longest tenure of any Bolivian President—were a rare period of political continuity and economic growth, with the poverty level falling from sixty per cent to thirty-five per cent and the per-capita G.D.P. nearly tripling. His ousting came after a strenuous attempt to hold on to power. In 2016, when Morales was in his third term and approaching the legal limit of his time in office, he held a referendum asking voters to do away with Presidential term limits. When the vote went against him, he appealed to the constitutional court, arguing that forbidding him to run would violate his human rights. The court, a pliant body, ruled in his favor. The opposition was furious, but Morales retained significant support, especially among poor and indigenous Bolivians. On October 20th, Election Day, he took a slight lead in the electronic vote tallies, but apparently not enough to avoid a second round. The counting was halted without explanation, and then resumed twenty-four hours later. This time, Morales had secured a margin sufficient to claim victory. The suspicious circumstances triggered protests, and culminated, three weeks later, with his flight into exile.
In our interview, Morales, discounting the evidence of electoral problems, referred to Áñez as a golpista, someone who had come to power through a coup. He blamed the United States for unspecified involvement in his ouster, pointing out that the Trump Administration had been the first government to recognize Áñez, despite the questionable legality of her mandate. (In fact, the first recognition came from Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right President of Brazil, quickly followed by Trump). He said that, when he first became President, political comrades told him to keep an eye on the U.S. Embassy. If there was a coup against him, they warned, that was where it would originate. “They pointed out to me that the only country that never had coups was the United States, and it was also the only country that did not have a U.S. Embassy,” he said. Two years later, he recalled, he had heeded that advice and protectively ousted the U.S. Ambassador.
The new Administration quickly signalled a complete reversal in governing philosophy. Áñez, a fifty-two-year-old lawyer and a former television presenter, belongs to the conservative Democratic Unity Party. Although she had been a critic of Morales, her views were not widely known when she assumed the Presidency. Last week, journalists reported on tweets that she had deleted from her account, in which she excoriated indigenous Bolivians as Satanists and mocked Morales as a “poor Indian” who was “clinging to power.” On the day she swore herself in, Áñez carried a huge Bible into the Presidential residence and declared, “the Bible has returned to the palace.” Other Bolivians celebrated Morales’s departure by publicly desecrating the Wiphala, a multicolored flag dear to indigenous Andeans, which he had turned into one of the country’s official patriotic symbols. Morales’s supporters, many of them indigenous Bolivians, were furious, and also afraid of losing the gains they made during his tenure.
“It pains me to see what we have built with such effort and sacrifice being destroyed,” Morales said. “The problem here is a class difference; they cannot stand to see an Indian as President.” He went on, “I remember that, when I got the Presidency, some groups said, ‘Poor little Indian, let’s let him have fun as President for four or five months, but he won’t be able to govern, and then we’ll get him out of there.’ But then, after my first year in power, they realized they had made a mistake and said to each other, ‘This Indian is going to stay in for a long time, so we have to do something.’ ” In 2008, his opposition encouraged a recall referendum, which he beat; afterward, he thwarted a conspiracy to overthrow him. “Everything they did to get rid of me failed, but now those opponents are back,” he said.
Morales noted that the legislative assembly was required by law to vote on his resignation. “If they approve it, then I am no longer President,” he said. “But if they reject it, then I have the right to return at any moment and reassume my responsibilities as President.” He pointedly reminded me that he enjoyed majorities in both houses of the legislature.
Meanwhile, as the violence of the protests intensified, Áñez blamed Morales for stirring things up. She declared that her “only wish is to pacify the country” and swore to abide by the constitution, which states that she must convene new elections within ninety days—but she said that Morales could not be a candidate. When I asked him what he saw as the solution to the unrest, he replied, “Look, the people are mobilized at this moment, saying, ‘Return, Evo.’ So, let me finish my mandate.” Of his opponents, he said, “They are frightened—frightened of the people, of this process, frightened of Evo. If they don’t want me to be a candidate, O.K., I won’t be, but let me finish my Presidential term. If the assembly rejects me, I’ll resign. I’m happy to return, despite any risks. We are fighters—we come from that fight. We have absolutely no fear.”
On Thursday, the news broke that Áñez had signed a decree exempting the armed forces from charges “for carrying out necessary actions in their legitimate defense while performing their constitutional duties.” Morales loyalists accused her of giving soldiers “carte blanche” to shoot protesters. On Friday, protesters clashed with police outside Cochabamba, and as many as nine Morales supporters were killed; more than a hundred were wounded. Morales expressed bitterness toward the commanders of the security forces. He talked at length about the state funds that he had invested in order to turn them into a modern force. “I didn’t equip them so they could shoot at the people,” he said. “History will judge them. The new generations will identify those who have been enemies of the people and the social movements.”
By the end of the week, Áñez had broken off diplomatic relations with Venezuela and had ordered the expulsion from Bolivia of Venezuela’s diplomats and Cuba’s official cooperantes, accusing them of involvement in the country’s unrest. Some eight hundred Cubans, mostly medical workers, began leaving, in an atmosphere of threat and intimidation. Áñez told Morales that he was welcome to return but that he would not enjoy political immunity, and so he would have to face the possibility of punishment for any crimes he committed in office.
When I asked Morales what he would do if his exile became permanent, he seemed taken aback. “The people will triumph, I am convinced of that,” he assured me. “The peasants and Indians, the original people of Bolivia, they will keep up the struggle, and they have all my admiration and my respect. I want to tell you something. Back in 2002, I was expelled from Congress, but I was returned the following year, and not just with one deputy on my side but twenty-seven. Now, in 2019, I’ve been expelled from Bolivia, but I will return with millions and millions” of supporters, “and with the power to continue serving the people of Bolivia. Don’t doubt it.”
