Eva Copa: the woman who broke with Evo Morales to become Bolivia’s greatest electoral phenomenon

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Eva Copa, the rogue senator who broke with the ruling MAS party, is the newly elected mayor of El Alto, despite the fact that ex-president Morales accused her of being a “traitor” and supported another candidate.

More than 7 million Bolivians went to the polls this Sunday to elect the governors of the 9 departments and the mayors of the 336 municipal governments, among them the city of El Alto, the second most populous in the country and the historical electoral bastion of Evo Morales’ MAS. The mayoralty will now be handed over to the ex-president of the Senate Eva Copa, who recently distanced herself from the ex-president due to disputes over candidacies.

“My exit from MAS has no return,” she has repeatedly said in the tense electoral campaign in El Alto. The young Aymara woman is seen by political analysts as the potential greatest political phenomenon of this Sunday’s elections and as one of Morales’ party’s likely rivals in the presidential elections to be held in five years’ time.

Until 2019 Eva Copa was a MAS senator with a very low profile and virtually unknown in the country. It was with Evo Morales’ departure and with the onset of former president Jeanine Áñez’s transitional government that she became a more public and relevant figure, being elected president of the Senate, when the most relevant leaders of the MAS party stepped down from the main public positions, went into exile or left the country.

In that critical stage of Bolivia’s political life, 15 months ago, Eva Copa was sworn in as president of the Senate and her role was key to reach an agreement with the transitional government to call new presidential elections and the temporary pacification of the country, shaken by the resignation of Evo Morales before the end of his term, after a 21-day protest due to allegations of electoral fraud.

From the Senate, Copa endorsed the transition process and the call for elections of then president Jeanine Añez, while Evo Morales was in exile in Argentina.

The MAS senator then entered the scene and, along with the Executive and Legislative Branches, she enabled the transition, the call for new elections, the acceptance of Morales’ resignation and the pacification of the country.

During this time, troubled by a deep political crisis, Eva Copa also became a factor of opposition and resistance to the transitional government of Jeanine Añez, when the possibility of an extension of the provisional mandate arose due to the deferral of the elections because of the coronavirus pandemic. In line with Evo Morales and MAS, Copa also blocked from the Senate loans secured by the Añez government, such as one from the IMF.

Copa then complained about the lack of coordination between powers due to arbitrary actions of the president and her collaborators, and denounced judicial political persecution. The senator also supported the campaign of current president Luis Arce and since becoming prominent as a leader in the renewal of the MAS, she began to position herself as a potential party candidate for mayor of El Alto, the city where she lives and which she represented in the Senate.

With the return of MAS to power and the inauguration of Luis Arce, Copa entered the pre-electoral race, together with dozens of her party’s other pre-candidates for the mayor’s office in El Alto.

Despite appearing as the MAS pre-candidate with the greatest popular support in El Alto, she was not chosen by the MAS to run for mayor of El Alto. With the support of Evo Morales, the designated candidate was the union leader and Aymara farmer Zacarías Maquera.

This decision was the source of discord that caused Copa to break with Morales and the MAS leadership, leading her to leave the party and accept the invitation of the Jallalla group, whose gubernatorial candidate was the late Aymara leader Felipe Quispe, another who always disputed with Evo Morales for the support of popular indigenous nationalism in Bolivia.

From partner to adversary

Eva Copa has insistently explained that her distancing from the MAS was due to the actions of its leadership, which captured the ex-president Morales after his return from his asylum in Argentina, according to her. In turn, the MAS leaders decided to expel her, while the ex-president challenged what he considers “a betrayal” of former Senator Copa. Other MAS leaders have threatened her with lawsuits and accused her of having supported the transitional government. Copa’s reaction has been to reject these claims.

During the campaign, at least five polls have anticipated a wide victory for Eva Copa in the mayoral election of El Alto, with at least 80% of the voting intention, which would give her absolute power. On the other hand, support for Maquera, who is the candidate endorsed by Morales in the MAS, has not reached 10% of the city’s voting intention, which gave the former president and Luis Arce a vote always higher than 70%.

Morales’ administration as president was always based on the broad support he received from the people of El Alto, which was repeated in the vote of October last year, returning the government to the MAS, with Luis Arce as the new president.

Against this background, Evo Morales himself actively joined the final stretch of the MAS campaign in El Alto, but preference in the polls was widely in favor of Copa.

She complains about a “dirty war”

The ex-senator and now Jallalla’s candidate has angrily protested in the final stretch of the campaign against the “dirty war” of her former political boss, having even accused her of receiving funding from the US embassy and of representing the right-wing opposition parties.

Although some political analysts consider that Eva Copa may become the greatest electoral phenomenon of this Sunday and, therefore, be the MAS’s competing option in the future presidential elections of 2025, she says she is only focused on the present, which is to win the competition for the mayoralty of El Alto.

“In these elections the most notable thing will be the birth of a new political option arising from the same field of popular nationalism, which has been in the hands of the MAS, but which may have Eva Copa as competition. On the other hand, the opposition still does not have a strong alternative,” commented political scientist Carlos Saavedra.

According to other analysts such as Marcelo Silva, Copa’s greatest weakness to become a national political option for the future is that Jallalla is an emerging party structure, unlike the MAS, which is still strong.

Eva Copa is a 34-year-old professional trained as a social worker at the Public University of El Alto, where she was a student leader. At the age of 27 she joined the MAS and was elected senator for La Paz.

In this Sunday’s elections, some opposition leaders, such as Manfred Reyes Villa, who aspires to the mayoralty of Cochabamba, and Luis Fernando Camacho, who is running for the governorship of Santa Cruz, are also running with strong chances of being elected as regional authorities. Another of the political figures running in the election is ex-president Jeanine Añez, as candidate for Governor of Beni.

Source: Infobae