Above photo: Leonardo Loza, center, candidate for governor of the department of Cochabamba, in the heart of the most organized left in Bolivia.
Only Lawfare Prevents the Return of Indigenous Democracy.
Bolivia’s capitalist elites are losing their grip this week in their efforts to crush socialist candidates in “sub-national” elections to be held on March 20. Socialists, most of them Indigenous and campesino, have been elected in assemblies to run as candidates at all levels of local government. The rightwing is terrified of competing with the poor in elections, and to avoid that eventuality, it is illegitimately disqualifying leftist candidates and their parties. The twentieth-century oligarchy won the presidency last November in exactly this fashion, via illicit court rulings. The conservatives’ task was made easier with the help of junior partners who jumped ship when Evo Morales was driven from power in a 2019 coup d’etat. Their sworn enemy is Evo Morales, the immensely competent Indigenous president who first emerged as a leader of coca-growers. One of the strangest lessons of these recent histories is that Indigenous resistance today —with congresses of tens of thousands every few months and marches of millions— is so little-known outside of Bolivia. As in Venezuela where the Afro Indigenous are calmly carrying on the revolution, the future likely lies in the hands of the organized masses.
Rodrigo Paz, a right wing senator roundly hated in his home territory, was a surprise candidate for the presidency. He promised he would not borrow from international finance agencies but that was his first move when sworn in. He used cultural violence to underscore the point. At his inauguration, the portraits of Indigenous heroes Tupac Katari and Bartolina Sisa were removed from the main chamber where the ceremony was held, the Hall of Freedom built in 1621. Historically, the Indigenous rebellion that the couple Sisa and Katari led —in 1781— takes us to the origin of the modern political freedoms of the ancient peoples of the Andes. In effect, they had been enslaved since the invasion of Europeans in the 1530s. Under Katari and Sisa, eighty thousand Aymara and Quechua troops laid siege to the city of La Paz, for many months, nearly driving Spain out of the Andes. Bolivia remains majority Indigenous thanks in large part to the memory of the crushed revolution of the 1780s.
The poor put Rodrigo Paz in office as the lesser evil because his vice president, Edmand Lara, criticizes corruption and racism. In late December, Vice President Lara declared himself in opposition to the president’s shift to the hard right. To crush Lara, Paz created a ministerial position that duplicates the duties of the vice president, then issued a decree, 5515, which prohibits Lara from exercising executive powers when the president travels abroad. It allows the president to govern from other countries through digital technologies, in violation of the Constitution. Paz just went to Miami, to join Donald Trump’s Latin American entourage of twelve right wing presidents.
The Wiphala banner of rainbow squares symbolizes the unity of Indigenous peoples and is constitutionally protected as national patrimony, but it was also removed from Paz’s inauguration. During the overthrow of the Indigenous head of state in 2019, the desecration of the Wiphala ignited mass protests. Indigenous women were the symbolic target of the right in that coup-year. While more men suffered death and torture, Indigenous women were systematically attacked and raped. Those memories are only 5 years past. The following president, Luis Arce Catacora, entered office thanks to campesino road blockades. Arce received the overwhelming vote of the left. Not all Washington’s mennor the paramilitary right could prevent that outcome.
Strangely, by the second year of Arce’s 5-year term, growing government hostility to the organized Indigenous movement was evident. Leaders were bought for huge sums, protestors killed, and over one hundred demonstrators jailed on charges of treason. Those close to Luis Arce dedicated themselves to ambitious graft while ignoring the platform of the left. Some of the radical intelligentsia of the Evo years could be found among them; others held their silence. Government forces tried to seize Ex-president Morales on charges that have been dismissed in courts of law. Then they tried to assassinate him in late October of 2024, after a march he led that was joined by millions of people.
Colonialism in contemporary garb
Called Judas by the poor, Arce departed in November of 2025 in alliance with the traditional right. President Paz swore absolute loyalty to the 2009 Constitution, the only one enshrined by the vote of the population, but from his first day in office he has eviscerated it. Paz comes from a political family known for its alliances with the United States. His father and great uncle were presidents who participated in neoliberalism (after the populist stage of the first Paz president). His father, Jaime Paz Zamora, was accused by the United States of illicit proceeds from drug trafficking, for which reason they denied him a visa. According to the Constitution, Rodrigo Paz does not possess the right to be president because he was born in Spain to a Spanish mother, a condition that imposes Spanish citizenship and fidelity to the monarch of Spain. He does not speak an Indigenous language of Bolivia, which also should have disqualified him from the presidency. The king of Spain just visited Bolivia, and campesino trade unionists commented that it was a meeting of two Spaniards, both of them hereditary rulers.
Ex-president Arce, for his part, told his unelected son to develop Bolivia’s lithium reserves, the largest on earth. The son dedicated his time to Olympian corruption and he was just arrested for money laundering. Arce’s sons and the former president have been charged with failure to recognize paternity, violence against a partner, and dramatic theft from state coffers. With few exceptions, the legal system changes colors like a chameleon. After putting people behind bars for committing the 2019 coup —but not for the massacres the coup government carried out— judges have now released those individuals into the loving arms of the oligarchy.
Most of the former president’s allies, such as the young Andrónico Rodríguez who was once admired as a union man faithful to the project of the coca-growers, have now gone over to the neoliberal ranks of former president Tuto Quiroga or the current president, Rodrigo Paz. To be fair, in the stratosphere of impunity, individuals who should be tried for crimes against humanity in international courts continue to reign, like the repeat assassin and carpet bomber Donald Trump who blocks fair elections in his own country and others, or the richest man on earth, Elon Musk, who promotes white supremacy and mass exploitation. During the coup regime of 2019 to November of 2020, Musk claimed the right to invade Bolivia or any country he chose to, and Trump’s daughter Ivanka joined the surrounding rightwing governments in arming and advising the coup-plotters.
Paz’s Decree 5503 provoked the greatest indignation among all his initiatives. To rule without interference, he has muzzled the legislature. Decree 5503 sought a return to the capitalist free-for-all that existed in Bolivia before Evo Morales won the vote in landslide elections. Morales nationalized the nation’s resources and cut poverty in half, turning Bolivia into one of the most successful economies in Latin America. President Paz announced Decree 5503 just before Christmas, hoping that no one would take action. Instead, by mid-January, marches and road blockades of hundreds of thousands of workers and Indigenous forced a temporary halt in Paz’s rule by decree. Decree 5503 was described as worse than the neoliberal program of the 1980s, when the country was praised by Washington as the poster child of structural adjustment.
Bolivia’s rightwing actors will never abandon the content of 5503 since its proposals constitute the existential core of conservative belief. Rather, the neoliberals of the 1990s and their new supporters are inventing a thousand traps and ruses to impose their agenda. President Paz has been reintroducing sections of Decree 5503 piecemeal.
Neoliberalism versus the Indigenous
A number of recent drug busts point to government corruption, and Paz has responded in knee-jerk fashion that Evo Morales is responsible. The geography of criminal drug production and commerce correlates with the bastions of the rightwing in Santa Cruz and Beni. Their elites work hand in glove with Paz. He favored the rich by eliminating four taxes, exacerbating fears of the return of the narco-state associated with his family dynasty. Bolivia’s 260 richest citizens are exonerated from the obligation to pay commensurate taxes on their fortunes as compared to the taxes paid by the rest of citizens. Millionaires are no longer subject to government scrutiny when they repatriate large sums of money. Paz’s actions establish conditions for creating a fiscal paradise in Bolivia, always attractive for illegal drug economies. The lost revenue for the State could have financed for one year the cost of the government bond created by Morales that subsidizes impoverished women who are pregnant or nursing, and their children. That bond had radically improved the indices of maternal and child health and survival. On a different front, Paz’s Decree 5509 opened Bolivia to transnational internet corporations, without protections for the poor, after a long process of weakening Entel which is the nationalized telecommunications giant. Entel provided excellent service during the years of the anti-imperialist Indigenous president.
Journalist Sergio de la Zerda, assemblymember in the Cochabamba parliament elected by the popular classes in 2021, speaks to what he calls “the most serious issue: a mechanism for transnationals to immediately begin exploiting our lithium in Uyuni, our rare earth elements in Ayopaya, and even the freshwater reserves in our national parks.” The right plans to overturn “the requirement of environmental licenses that mandate a series of procedures that must be followed to achieve a more or less rational exploitation of natural resources.”
“In addition,” the Cochabamba assemblyman said, “there is the question of the supposed autonomy granted to the Central Bank of Bolivia, allowing it to contract millions of dollars in loans” without oversight. On these grounds alone, “The decree is an absolute betrayal” of the people’s Plurinational Constitution.
Partisans of the 1990s status quo are blocking the election of leftist governors, mayors, and local parliamentarians this Sunday. Their instrument is lawfare. The protagonists are the rich and middle-class professionals willing to ignore the Constitution for personal gain. The right pulled off the same feat at the last possible moment before the first round of presidential elections. Had they failed in that criminal effort, Evo Morales would likely be the president of Bolivia today.
“We think that the Bolivian people have entered a new process of rebellion,” said de la Zerda. “If the regime really stands firm, who knows what consequences will ensue.” The right holds power nationally only due to its use of violence, its guile, and its exclusion of legitimate candidates. As in 2019 and again in 2020, a non-leftist political program is incapable of attracting the majority of voters. Bolivia’s rural and working-class masses are irreversibly conscious. They are mature political actors. To find similar proportions of organized and mass movements within a nation, one has to turn to Venezuela and Cuba, and likely Nicaragua. Bolivia’s workers and Indigenous may well lead the way out of the current morass of repression across that part of South America that stretches from Ecuador to Tierra del Fuego.
Cindy Forster lives in Bolivia and is a member of the Chiapas Support Committee
