[Bolivia’s MAS party will confront numerous challenges when
returning to power. But its resounding victory against the
authoritarian right and its roots as a party of social movements
represent a radical vision of hope at a time when we need it most. ]
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BOLIVIA HAS PROVIDED US A RADICAL VISION OF HOPE  
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Nicole Fabricant
October 24, 2020
Jacobin
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_ Bolivia’s MAS party will confront numerous challenges when
returning to power. But its resounding victory against the
authoritarian right and its roots as a party of social movements
represent a radical vision of hope at a time when we need it most. _

Luis Arce claims victory and celebrates with supporters during a
press conference following the general election of MAS (Movement
Toward Socialism) on October 18, 2020 in La Paz, Bolivia., Gaston
Brito Miserocchi/Getty Images)

 

October 18th, eleven months after the right-wing coup against Bolivian
president Evo Morales, his MAS (_Movimiento al Socialismo_) party won
a landslide victory with 55 percent
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of the vote. MAS presidential candidate Luis Arce needed at least 40
percent of the vote and a ten-point lead over his nearest rival to win
outright. He cleared that bar
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surpassing Carlos Mesa — a right-leaning historian
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who served as president from 2003 to 2005 after Gonzalo Sánchez de
Lozada resigned following the massacre of indigenous protesters — by
more than twenty points.

The credit for MAS’s resounding victory must go to Bolivia’s
social movements
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historically some of the strongest in Latin America. They faced down
the coup-makers
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and voted MAS back into office. As Arce proclaimed
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in his first speech following the election, “We have recovered
democracy.” This is no small accomplishment.
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And while MAS will confront serious challenges once in office,
they’ll have some room to maneuver: not only did Arce win the
presidency, but his party also appears to have netted a majority in
the Senate. Their task will be to return to the roots of MAS as a
political party of social movements, advancing future policies and
politics by building sustainable power alongside indigenous peoples,
trade unionists, leaders of federations, and neighborhood
associations.

MAS and the Coup

Evo Morales entered the 2019 election still popular, but having lost
some of his luster after being in office since 2006. His popularity
suffered after he narrowly lost a 2016 national referendum to do away
with term limits (51 percent of the electorate voted no) and then
turned to the courts to overrule the result. In the lead-up to the
2019 election, he received criticism not just from right-wing
opponents, but from some supporters on the Left.

Left-wing critics of Morales took issue with his retreat from the
party’s most sweeping electoral promises in 2016 — radical land
redistribution, supports for small-scale agroindustry, diversifying
the economy — and his decision to continue pursuing an extractivist
agenda. They noted that the failure to transform Bolivia’s economy
(still largely dependent on gas, mining, and soy) constrained the
possibility for radical change and that concessions to the right-wing
agro-industrial elites gave them more power inside the MAS state.
Morales, for his part, insisted that these concessions and
developmental projects were essential to enabling the government to
enact its agenda and to reduce poverty levels.

Whatever its shortcomings, Morales’s MAS government made tremendous
strides in economic development, national sovereignty, women’s and
indigenous rights, respect for the environment, and raising living
standards, education levels, and health care coverage. The percentage
of people living in poverty fell from 59.9 percent in 2006 when
Morales came to power to 34.6 percent in 2017,
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with extreme poverty more than halving from 38.28 percent to 15.2
percent over the same period, according to government figures. For the
first time in Bolivian history, indigenous people could hold their
heads high and participate as equals in politics.

The Right always opposed MAS’s rule, rightly seeing it as a threat
to the country’s racist, plutocratic order, which for decades had
locked the country in underdevelopment while consigning indigenous
people to the margins. When the Right insisted that Morales was
autocratic, it was pure opportunism. But in the wake of the disputed
2019 election — which the US-backed Organization of American States
helped undermine
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— the Right seized the moment of instability and launched a coup.
Under the threat of police and military violence, Bolivia’s
three-term president was forced to flee to Mexico and then seek asylum
in Argentina
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Right-wing senator Jeanine Áñez declared herself interim president.
There was no quorum in the Senate to approve this move
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was, at the very least, legally questionable. Nonetheless, a uniformed
military officer draped her with the presidential sash on November 12,
legitimizing the coup government. She promptly presided over a
military massacre
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killed dozens of Morales’s indigenous supporters and granted
immunity to the soldiers involved.

Over the last several months, workers and indigenous people went on
strike and braved repression to ensure there would be a free and fair
election. They restored democracy to the country.

In the ensuing eleven months, Áñez attacked human and civil rights
and slashed state support for housing and food introduced under
Morales. She reopened Bolivia’s economy to intensified economic
exploitation for the benefit of transnational companies by boosting
gas, minerals, and lithium extraction. She opened the door to the use
of five genetically modified (GM) crops,
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including soy, which threatens to exacerbate ecological and climactic
threats while deforesting more of the Amazon through the expansion of
monocultures.

And on top of reimplanting neoliberalism, Áñez far-right government
pushed a hard-right religious agenda that viewed indigenous people
with contempt. After swearing herself in as president, Áñez declared
with a mega-sized bible in hand, “The Bible has returned to the
palace.” [[link removed]]

The Challenges Ahead

Over the last several months, workers and indigenous people went on
strike and braved repression to ensure there would be a free and fair
election. They restored democracy to the country. This victory — so
inspirational to socialists and movements around the world — is
theirs.

To speak of the enormous challenges ahead risks raining on the victory
parade. But challenges there will be. For starters, the economy is in
near free fall, contracting 7.9 percent
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between March and September. The state deficit has expanded, and
unemployment has grown. Pandemic-related shutdowns of small and large
businesses are partly to blame, but the economic contraction can also
be traced to Áñez’s neoliberal policies. Arce, a former finance
minister under Morales, argues that Áñez’s policies triggered a
5.6 percent drop in Bolivia’s economy between November 2019 and
March 2020, even before the pandemic hit the region. How to rebuild
the economy in a moment of global recession and low commodity prices
will be an urgent question for MAS.

Arce plans to confront the economic crisis by expanding biodiesel
production and industrializing Bolivia’s lithium reserves, some of
the largest in the world. While these economic development strategies
would deliver benefits to Bolivian workers, both raise serious
environmental and social concerns. Biodiesel worsens deforestation.
Lithium extraction, which requires exorbitant amounts of water in a
region already experiencing drought, raises environmental concerns
such as water contamination and overuse. Others within the new
administration have argued that Arce should look to alternative
economic development options
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Less controversially within MAS, Arce has vowed to resurrect
Morales-era poverty reduction programs and social supports — cash
handouts or “bonos”
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— with particular focus on the elderly, pregnant women, and
low-income families with children. Unfortunately, Arce will not have
the revenue from the commodity booms that previously fueled these
social programs. Meanwhile, he’ll also face an exacerbated climactic
and environmental crisis: forest fires in the Amazon are likely to
worsen as Brazil continues to intensify development policies driving
deforestation, and droughts and flooding will persist. Amid a global
recession, Bolivia will have to try to press its historic demand for a
right to climate justice and payment of international climate debts,
urging the countries most responsible for the climate crisis to help
nations like Bolivia deal with the consequences.

Back at home, Arce will have to find a way to quiet if not stamp out
the growing right wing in Santa Cruz, which is now bubbling up in
resistance to the election results. This will be a formidable task.
While many described Áñez as a homegrown form of Bolivian right-wing
resistance, there is a long history of right-wing separatism in Santa
Cruz dating back to the Cold War era and US interventionism in the
form of agribusiness expansion.

During the election, presidential candidate Luis Fernando Camacho, a
forty-year-old lawyer and head of the Pro–Santa Cruz Civic Committee
who finished in third place, stirred the pot of racism in Cochabamba,
Santa Cruz, Beni, and Tarija. Groups of young men on motorcycles
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known as “_motoqueros_,” resembling the neofascist Proud Boys in
the United States, harassed and intimated indigenous peoples,
suppressing their voting rights. After the election, on October 21,
middle- and upper-middle-class Bolivians marched in the Plaza Avaroa
in La Paz, protesting the vote and shouting “Arce _cabrón_,
you’re a son of a bitch and fuck your mum for giving birth to
you.” The far-right Santa Cruz Civic Committee
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out a statement demanding that the electoral commission immediately
suspend the official vote count. These local reactionary forces are
supported by transnational right-wing groups in Brazil, Argentina, and
the United States
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In taking on the Right, Arce will need to forge a new relationship
with social movements. A major breaking point in this relationship
came in 2011, when a controversial project to build a massive highway
through the TIPNIS national park pitted Morales against indigenous
movements and other left organizations. The TIPNIS conflict and state
repression of lowland indigenous movements fed opposition to Morales
and the MAS from the Left. The second effect of the TIPNIS conflict
was the breaking apart of many popular-sector organizations that had
previously been aligned with the government. Arce will have to carve
a new path for MAS and work toward reunifying these movements.

Internally, there’s much discussion in MAS about policies that can
decentralize power — avoiding the concentration of influence and
attention that prevailed around Morales and, instead, training and
expanding the next generation of MASistas to take on their political
project. Given MAS’s roots and political commitments, there’s
enormous potential for a more participatory form of democracy that
decenters presidential power and expands decision-making to local
bodies of government, that provides spaces where social movement
activists can debate and reach agreements, if not consensus.

MAS’s landslide victory in the face of a US-backed coup and a
repressive, right-wing state is remarkable. It should be celebrated as
a huge victory for Bolivian social movements and the international
left. All eyes are now on MAS’s political project, which is offering
a radical vision of hope while tackling tough questions about how to
address economic and environmental crisis. Bolivia is poised to teach
us; we should watch and envision how we might bring some of their
lessons home.

 

_Nicole Fabricant is an associate professor of anthropology at Towson
University in Maryland. She is an editorial board member of NACLA
(North American Congress on Latin America) and has written for New
Politics, Dissent, and Catalyst._

_This article was co-published with NACLA._

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