Bolivia enters a multi-sided and violent crisis as the former president, facing sexual abuse charges and gunfire, presses to appear on the ballot again
From nacla
Bolivian President Luis Arce (left) and former president Evo Morales (right) are engaged in a violent dispute over who will represent the MAS party in the 2025 presidential elections. Image has been modified. (Brasil de Fato / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The split within Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party took a violent turn in October, amid an extended campaign of blockades by supporters of former president Evo Morales. The blockades added a political dimension to the sense of national crisis in Bolivia, where collapsing foreign reserves have undermined the national currency and threatened fuel supplies. Morales’ faction is pressing the government of Luis Arce to control the MAS ballot line in the upcoming August 2025 election, and to end criminal investigations into the ex-president’s conduct, which it terms “judicial persecution.”
Beginning in mid-October, blockades were eventually installed in twenty-three locations on major highways across the country, stranding thousands of trucks, isolating the central city of Cochabamba, disrupting internal trade, and causing fuel shortages in major cities. The disruption has aroused counterprotests and drew other forces into what had been an internal conflict on the left.
By the end of the month, the Bolivian police, a right-wing mob in Cochabamba, and grassroots movements had all participated in new clashes across the country. Most dramatically, Bolivian narcotics police opened fire on two vehicles carrying Morales on October 29. Morales was unharmed in the attack and quickly accused the Arce government of orchestrating an assassination attempt. The government, in turn, suggested Morales had staged a “self-attack.” Strategies of violence last seen during the November 2019 coup are now active in a multi-sided conflict with no obvious end in sight.
On November 1, after a day of confrontations with police at major blockades, Morales began to shift his approach, urging followers to adopt an “intermediate truce” and announcing a hunger strike in order to pressure Arce to agree to political dialogue. “My fight is to improve the situation in the country and to start a dialogue without conditions on two fronts, one economic and one political,” he told The Associated Press. His supporters announced a 72-hour pause in the blockades on November 6.
Carwil Bjork-James is a cultural anthropologist who studies political violence and strategies of grassroots protest in Latin America. He is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.