Workers Saved Bolivian Democracy

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While left-wing governments hold power across most of Latin America, ultraright social forces remain a threat. In Bolivia, powerful left-indigenous social movements have managed to keep an insurgent right wing at bay since the devastating coup of 2019. But a growing political crisis for the plurinational state highlights the urgent need to maintain unity in the face of an ever-powerful right.

The coup of 2019 was a catastrophic attack on Bolivian democracy. It saw the rapid ascent of ultraright conservatives from the lowland city of Santa Cruz — the axis of regional-class antagonism to the then President Evo Morales and his party, the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS — directed by businessman Luis Fernando Camacho, the leader of the business group Comité Pro Santa Cruz and former leader of the Nazi youth group Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC).

The coup unfolded when middle-class protesters took to the streets to dispute Evo’s victory in that year’s elections. As the protests escalated, the head of the armed forces “suggested” Morales resign, forcing him into exile in Mexico.

In the resulting power vacuum, the right-wing evangelical Jeanine Áñez seized the presidency, and as social movements resisted, she presided over two mass killings — of nine protesters in Sacaba, Cochabamba, and of ten protesters blockading the Senkata gas plant in El Alto who were shot dead by a military exempted from criminal liability by a sudden presidential decree.

Áñez swiftly reestablished diplomatic ties with the United States and Israel, with whom Morales had had strained relations. Clutching a giant Bible, Áñez declared, “The Bible has returned to the government,” as she paraded through the government headquarters. Soldiers were filmed burning the Wiphala flag, representing highland indigenous peoples, signifying a new turn against the decolonizing policies of the state. A frenzied crackdown on leftists ensued as the coup government issued arrest warrants against journalists and MAS-supporting politicians.

A year later, Bolivia’s left-wing party, the MAS, staged a stunning political comeback. It came after campesinos, indigenous groups, and the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), Bolivia’s major trade union federation, brought the country to a standstill by forming roadblocks to demand that the dictatorship government hold elections. Faced with the insurgent popular forces, the government buckled.

In the elections that followed, the MAS swept to power in a landslide, repudiating the neoliberal and racist policies initiated by Bolivia’s elites. Those elites remain, nonetheless, active and powerful.

In a recent article in Nueva Sociedad, Cristóbal Rovira argues that as in Europe, far-right political projects are on the rise everywhere in Latin America. In the 2019 coup in Bolivia, two key strands of right-wing mobilization emerged, the newest being the self-styled pititas — urban, young, middle-class protesters. Some were students at the universities in La Paz, such as the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA), whose then rector, Waldo Albarracín, was a longtime critic of the MAS.

Their modus operandi was the formation of makeshift string barricades in the streets. They shared memes likening Bolivia to a dictatorship, and their protest chants decried Morales’s “communism” and compared Bolivia to that old bogeyman, Venezuela.

The pititas were joined by a more dangerous element: the ultraright concentrated in the wealthy eastern region of Santa Cruz with ties to Brazilian fascists and Washington, DC. This faction coalesced around Camacho, who went on to become governor of Santa Cruz in the 2021 regional elections. His old organization, the UJC, launched a campaign of terror in Santa Cruz in the wake of the coup, setting off bombs outside the headquarters of the local peasant union.

The coup of 2019 was a catastrophic attack on Bolivian democracy. The formation of the UJC in 1957 is linked to the arrival in Bolivia of German Nazis who fled Europe after World War II. In recent decades, it has functioned as a kind of paramilitary group protecting the interests of loggers and agribusinesses. It seeks to establish an autonomous Santa Cruz state, and it uses racist rhetoric to castigate the highland indigenous “savages” associated with the national government.

The far right also exploits the long-standing cultural divisions between the eastern and western regions, the Andean highlands and the lowlands, respectively. Until the mid-twentieth century, the city of Santa Cruz was an isolated backwater, presided over by white elites who viciously exploited the small and dispersed indigenous populations who lived in the wider region. The discovery of oil and gas deposits in the 1960s generated huge economic growth. Today Santa Cruz is the powerhouse of Bolivia, fueled in the past two decades by the expansion of the agricultural frontier for soy production, logging, and livestock, which are devastating the biodiverse landscapes and usurping indigenous territory.

In these eastern territories, vast tracts of land are still owned by a small wealthy elite, many of them having acquired the land during the dictatorships of the 1970s and ’80s. One of these landowners is Branko Marinkovic, the openly fascist descendant of wealthy Croatian immigrants, who, as minister of economy and public finance under Áñez, was rewarded with 34,000 hectares of land. In 2008, Marinkovic was arrested and went into exile in the United States and, subsequently, Brazil after orchestrating an assassination attempt against President Evo Morales.

Cruceño elites — those associated with the Comité Pro Santa Cruz — have fashioned an identity as cambas to refer to their lowland identity, which they juxtapose with the racialized and often pejorative term collas , meaning highland indigenous peoples. They are well integrated with the far right regionally. Marinkovic, for example, is a close associate of Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president; earlier this year, he was detained at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires, where he was on his way to meet Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, for dinner.

Unlike the right-wing supporters of Milei and Bolsonaro, who were able to win national power at the ballot box, the ultraright in Bolivia remains heavily concentrated in the east of the country and has not yet been able to court wider support translating into electoral success nationally. In June 2022, Áñez was sentenced to ten years in prison for her role in the coup, and that December, Camacho was kept in preventive detention on charges of terrorism and embezzlement of funds. Despite their imprisonment and relative marginality, however, the forces that brought these two figures to prominence remain significant.

The ill-fated coup attempt of June 26, 2024, showcased the commitment of Bolivian movements to resisting threats to democracy. Troops led by an aggrieved army general sent a tank into the presidential palace in La Paz in what many feared was an effort by the military to seize power in the context of an ongoing internal conflict within the MAS. General Juan José Zúñiga demanded the release of Añez and Camacho.

Although the “coup” fizzled out of its own accord within a few hours, Bolivia’s social movements immediately rushed to take a stand. “We will take to the streets. We will defend democracy!” declared Guillermina Kuno, an Aymara leader of the Bartolina Sisas, Bolivia’s national union of indigenous peasant women, at a press conference. Social movements flooded Plaza Murillo in a show of strength against military interference.

Unlike the right-wing supporters of Milei and Bolsonaro, who were able to win power at the ballot box, the ultraright in Bolivia has not yet been able to court wider support translating into electoral success nationally. The incident nonetheless bodes ill for a country still reeling from the 2019 coup. It certainly would not be the first time that military leaders had subverted democratic rule in Bolivia. Amid a litany of military coups, one of the most tragic in recent history was the putsch led by Luis García Meza in 1980. Troops entered the headquarters of the trade union federation and kidnapped socialist party leader Marcelo Quiroga, who was tortured and killed. As a result, almost the entirety of the labor movement leadership was forced into exile.

In the late 1970s and ’80s, the peasant movement was a fierce defender of democracy in Bolivia in the face of authoritarian regimes. The MAS has its early origins in the mobilizing strategy of that peasant movement. It first came to power in 2005 under Morales, on the back of a cycle of uprisings between 2000 and 2004 led by peasants, miners, workers, and indigenous groups against the privatization of the country’s resources and other neoliberal policies.

With revenues from the newly nationalized oil and gas industries in the late 2000s, the economy boomed, and inequality reduced drastically. Social spending transformed the lives of the poor people, workers, indigenous communities, and women. In a country marked by deep racial discrimination against indigenous peoples, the state newly proclaimed the importance of indigenous languages and ways of living.

Today Bolivia’s left is mired in a new crisis. The country’s economic outlook is deteriorating. Diesel and basic food prices are rising sharply, putting pressure on ordinary people and exacerbating social tensions. The economic boom of the 2000s created a new middle class that is now seeing its fortunes turn and the value of its savings tumble.

Marcelo Quiroga once observed that “nonrenewable natural resources are today’s bread and tomorrow’s hunger.” A legacy of the colonization of the Americas by Europeans in the fifteenth century, Bolivia’s economy remains stubbornly reliant on the export of primary commodities. It is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Revenues from hydrocarbons have plummeted since the glory days of the 2000s, and foreign exchange reserves have dried up. Due to the collapse of exports, Bolivia has run out of dollars, which in turn means it cannot import diesel.

Meanwhile, a bitter rift in the ruling MAS party between those loyal to Evo Morales, the ex-president, and Luis Arce, the current president, is crippling the Left. Both Arce and Morales want to run as the MAS candidate in the 2025 elections.

In December last year, the country’s Plurinational Constitutional Court ruled that Morales was not eligible to run again under the constitutional term limits. But this has not deterred Morales from amassing a considerable support base in a massive march to La Paz to demand that he be allowed the candidacy.

Morales has the loyalty of some sectors within the social movements, but he is unlikely to win favor with the electorate as a whole. A recent poll suggests that 65 percent of voters would not vote for him. Indeed, one of the major factors behind the coup in 2019 was Morales’s decision to overturn a referendum in which the electorate decided he should not be able to run for a fourth term in office, then prohibited by the constitution.

The COB, led by Juan Carlos Huarachi, remains loyal to Arce, while the peasant union is split down the middle; there are, in effect, two parallel organizations within it, loyal to Morales and Arce, respectively. These divisions are having a corrosive impact on the unity of workers’ and indigenous peoples’ movements, which is the base of the MAS.

In the context of economic hardship, a number of social sectors have organized blockades to demand action by Arce on the economy. Not all of these sectors are in favour of Morales, however. The Ponchos Rojos, a highland Aymara peasant force, which has historically been highly autonomist, is not pro-Morales but has been protesting vociferously against Arce in recent weeks.

Camacho has recently called for replacing masista — socialism — with the Cruceño model of growth: agrarian extractivism that enriches agribusiness elites without the state redistribution offered by the MAS. There is a deep risk that as the internal conflicts intensify, the right wing will again seize the chance to commandeer democratic institutions, entrench inequality, and reverse the socially oriented policies of the MAS. Bolivia’s leftist movements have trounced the ultraright before. Whether they can continue to do so is uncertain.

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