LA PAZ, NO PEACE
Evo Morales has turned standard turmoil into a terrorist siege in Bolivia
Coordinated protests and blockades over the last three weeks have turned La Paz, the administrative capital of Bolivia, into a city under siege. In the last week, the blockades have escalated and become more violent, due in large part to the arrival of activist forces loyal to former president Evo Morales. Fuel, food and other basic staples have run scarce for average citizens, leading to rising prices, rationing and fears of critical shortages in medical supplies. The Morales supporters say they will not allow the blockades to be lifted until President Rodrigo Paz, elected last October, resigns and Morales is given legal immunity against prosecution.
Outraged at the chaotic conditions, average citizens have themselves taken to the streets, calling for action to end the blockades. Public discontent with some of the effects from the “shock treatment” austerity reforms introduced by Paz had already been percolating when more radical elements from regions previously loyal to Morales launched the blockades. Paz has refused to resign and called repeatedly for dialogue and negotiations to end the protests and restore order, distancing himself from calls to declare a state of emergency and order a security crackdown.
What is underneath?
In last year’s elections, Morales’ leftist party, Movement for Socialism (MAS), was roundly defeated and ousted after decades in power. In the October runoff, Paz ran as a well-known moderate center-right reformer in contrast to his populist opponents. He went on to win 55% of the runoff vote, gaining the support of rural farmers and indigenous people who had formerly been part of Morales’ base, as MAS was largely blamed for the spiraling economic and fiscal crisis gripping the country.
By January, those groups began to express loud discontent over Paz’s first major steps in office. He did not include leaders from their ranks in his cabinet, and proposed a land mortgage policy without a corresponding political strategy to consult the small agricultural producers in the rural areas facing increased economic stress. This provoked the first serious mobilization of protests in early May. A general strike by the peasant unions was joined by transport workers who started blocking dozens of critical highways in the country. The roadblocks slowly converged on La Paz, while the government began negotiations with the various factions involved or threatening to join.
Against this backdrop was the decision by Paz in December to end fuel subsidies as an urgent fiscal measure to control the country’s runaway budget deficits and stabilize its finances. He had inherited a broken economy, with inflation running at double digits and no dollar reserves left. The country’s energy sector had been hollowed out by horrendous mismanagement and the flight of foreign investment under MAS and fuel shortages were already a reality.
But the end of subsidies quickly led to tripling prices at gas pumps, provoking an immediate general strike by the national labor umbrella organization. Paz negotiated a settlement in January that revised his subsidy decree with some union concessions but kept the country on a market-price path to help attract new foreign investment. It was an early sign of governability despite the inevitable turmoil that any reformist - light or heavy - would face in a post-MAS environment.
But Paz also faced a separate political headache when it was learned gasoline supplies distributed by the state-owned YPFB oil company contained contaminants like magnesium and gum lingering in storage tanks that had long been poorly maintained. More than 10,000 vehicles around the country were damaged by the contaminated fuel. This has fed the discontent among Bolivians throughout the country as the more expensive fuel was of such low quality and came with added economic harm. While it wasn’t Paz’s doing, he has to saddle the responsibility of solving it.
The latest round of protests, however, have a much more ideological and political tone. Paz negotiated a repeal of the land mortgage policy with rural farmers early on, but some of them kept pressing towards the capital. Their demands became more indignant and divisive no matter what concessions were offered, and this level of disruption was not resonating well with the broader population.
While this was happening, Morales has been facing a long and intensive investigation into his role in a human trafficking ring that involved his own alleged statutory rape of minor girls. He has been holed up in a rural radio station compound in Chapare, surrounded by legions of armed supporters threatening violence if the civil authorities move to arrest him.
On May 12, a court issued an arrest warrant on criminal charges that Morales committed statutory rape of a 15 year-old girl during his presidency, leading to the birth of his biological child. He immediately ordered his forces to mobilize and march into La Paz to join the blockades. Violence escalated at the hands of what local residents of the capital call “an invasion of criminals”.
In addition to tightening the siege of the city and demanding Paz’s resignation, Morales’ faction is also threatening to strangle off access to the city until all investigations and judicial proceedings against him are ended and he is given immunity. In interviews with foreign TV crews, poor residents banging empty pots in the street have expressed a fear of hunger setting in for their families because of the blockades, and report they’ve been threatened by masked activists to stop speaking out against the blockades and either oppose the government or remain silent.
Our take:
Many observers and international experts watching the events unfold agree that the public is unhappy, but the various groups who have persisted with the blockades have become radicalized and disconnected with the broader public mood. There is even wider agreement that the influx of violent Morales shock troops were pure opportunism at the hands of a cornered man seeking to exploit the chaos at the expense of the public health and safety.
By accelerating the severity and the violence of the protests, Morales pushed it into the headlines in the foreign media while attempting to blend into the background. Morales no longer has the national popularity he had years ago when he could launch widespread disorder on his own. So, he latched onto the current disorder and merged his personal interests into a legitimate economic crisis that was turning political.
The long history of criminality by and on behalf of Evo Morales is a complex one. While his core of militant supporters yearn for a return to his crony autocracy that economically wrecked the country, the rest of the public has few illusions about his role in corruption, political violence, attacks against constitutional norms, and the ever-present specter of sexual trafficking of minors. It is no wonder the MAS got only 3% of the vote last year.
Indeed, the May 18 arrest warrant against Morales is linked to the culmination of investigations that have followed Morales for over a decade. Feminist groups in Bolivia have long demanded investigations into what they describe as a systemic pattern of the former president’s sexual abuses.
The current prosecution alleges that in 2015, a then-57-year-old Morales fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl whose parents had enrolled her in the MAS youth wing as a “transaction”. The case file alleges they were sex trafficking their daughter in exchange for government jobs. It follows widely reported evidence obtained from cell phone text messages that Morales had a long affair with a 19 year-old woman that started when she was a minor, and another affair with an 18 year-old who parlayed the relationship into a senior executive job at CAMC Engineering, a Chinese company. She went on to land over US$500 million in contracts through her direct access to the then-president.
Then there was how he left office in 2019. He’d run roughshod over the constitution to run for an illegal fourth term and then tried to steal the election. During the vote count, he engineered the shutdown of the data livestream and still claimed victory. An independent audit by the Organization of American States (OAS) concluded there was “intentional and malicious manipulation” of the vote, forcing Morales to resign and flee to exile in then-Peronist Argentina, chased by charges of sedition and terrorism. (In 2024, the government of President Javier Milei revoked Morales’ refugee status.)
No one should be surprised Morales’ masked goons are tightening the cordon around La Paz today. In 2019, he was caught on an audio recording ordering his forces to “not let food into the cities” and to choke off the capital before he fled. As the child sexual abuse investigation proceeded, his supporters started carrying out armed reprisals against the military and state institutions.
Now, Paz is dealing with multiple political bombs that need to be meticulously deactivated. His appeal to dialogue and negotiation has made progress on some fronts with different aggrieved groups. Such is a systematic process that needs time. But the injection of Morales’ people has made the situation more critical for the residents of La Paz who have gone sour on both the protesters and the government.
It is no wonder that the conservative governments of Chile and Argentina have offered humanitarian aid to Bolivia to help relieve the suffering of the residents of the capital. Both countries have seen civil disorder in recent years at the hands of leftist militants. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted that “the United States stands squarely in support of Bolivia's legitimate constitutional government. We will not allow criminals and drug traffickers to overthrow democratically elected leaders in our hemisphere.”
There is no upside for Paz to make concessions to Morales or his shock troops. Any aggressive steps to execute the arrest warrant now would make dialogue with other protesters more complicated. Paz also faces divisions inside his own government, including with his erratic Vice President, as well as the lack of a majority in the legislature to lean on in a crisis. He will have to separate and peel those with legitimate grievances away from the Morales gangs with precision while trying to restore some of the confidence of the people most affected by the blockades. That will be the greater test of his political skills than how he eventually handles the desperate gangster currently barricaded in Chapare.