RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The return of Evo Morales‘ party to power in Bolivia redesigns the map of political balance in Latin America. Although the country – with only 11 million inhabitants and a very modest economy compared to its neighbors – does not carry enough weight to rattle the region, the electoral victory of ex-Minister Luis Arce carries great symbolic significance. His victory redefines alliances and lends a boost to left-wing projects.
The general elections held on Sunday, after almost a year of Jeanine Áñez’s interim government, returned control to the MAS (Movement to Socialism) political party. And if this formation succeeded in winning without Morales and his vice-president, Álvaro García Linera, both of whom are in exile in Argentina, the vote was somewhat of a plebiscite on the ex-president who stepped down in 2019, amid accusations of electoral fraud.
One of the messages posted by the indigenous leader on social media after the announcement of the preliminary results is a photograph of such alliances, in which names with sometimes radically different trajectories are featured, but which have a common denominator: their opposition to the conservative bloc in South America, headed by Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Colombian President Iván Duque.
“In addition to the people, several presidents and ex-presidents saved my life,” Morales said, before thanking Argentina’s Alberto Fernández, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
The first two were critical in November last year when the Bolivian Armed Forces pushed the ruler to resign after 14 years in power and hastened his departure from the country. Morales first traveled to Mexico and later settled in Argentina, where he has remained ever since. On Monday evening he had dinner with Fernández, who predictably did not hesitate to describe the events that have convulsed Bolivia in recent months as a “coup d’état”. The other leftist rulers expressed their views along similar lines.
However, there is a chasm between the Argentine president or López Obrador and Nicolás Maduro, for instance. Venezuela has been plunged deep into an unprecedented institutional and economic crisis for years, and the management of the Chavista regime, which is also troubled by U.S. government sanctions, has already led to the exodus of almost five million people, according to the United Nations.
A year ago, several opposition politicians saw the fall of Morales as a kind of itinerary or model for a transition in Venezuela too. Juan Guaidó, president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, promptly praised the process in Bolivia as a model. In a conversation with the interim president Jeanine Áñez, he went so far as to say that “we are inspired by you, by the model of the liberator’s daughter, of the strength you have shown, particularly your attachment to your Magna Carta and to leading a transition. Your model is not just a breeze, it is a hurricane of democracy to free Venezuela, but also Nicaragua and Cuba.”
This position aroused suspicions in more moderate sectors of the Venezuelan opposition. Moreover, the parallel between the MAS’ political project and the paths of chavismo is not sustained. Morales made the mistake of disregarding the referendum result on indefinite reelection, which he lost in 2016, and decided to run for elections again. This led to a legitimacy crisis. However, his economic management leaves no room for comparison with the catastrophe that has struck millions of Venezuelans.
In any event, Maduro, increasingly alone on the international stage, exploited Arce’s victory to issue a warning to his opponents. “Bolivia and Venezuela are bound together by a centuries-old historical struggle that is not yet over,” he proclaimed. Hugo Chávez’s successor, who called for parliamentary elections in December – which will be boycotted by most opposition forces, alleging lack of guarantees – also considers that “the united and conscientious Bolivian people defeated the coup with votes.”
In Morales’ list of acknowledgments are other names. Among these are the former head of the Spanish government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who remains very active in Latin America with his involvement in the Puebla Group’s initiatives, as well as former presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Ecuadorian Rafael Correa, and Colombian Ernesto Samper. They have all been highly critical of the Organization of American States (OAS) and its Secretary General, Luis Almagro.
The return of the MAS represents a hard blow to the strategy of the multilateral organization, precisely because it was a denunciation of electoral fraud by the OAS that triggered the 2019 crisis. However, the OAS electoral audit was later challenged by other studies. In repeating the election a year later, and with a renewed Electoral Court, Morales’ party actually obtained a better result than it did a year previously.
Source: El País