This Monday (23), the March to Save Bolivia, which began last Tuesday (17) and had been called by former president Evo Morales (2006-2019), arrived in the capital, La Paz.
The coca grower leader aims to push for his candidacy for president in 2025 and to protest against the economic crisis under the government of his former ally and now enemy, Luis Arce.
Both are members of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party, which is split due to their ambitions to be the party’s candidate in next year’s election.
The coca grower leader accused his political godson of corruption and of deviating from the socialist precepts of the MAS. In October 2023, Arce was expelled from the party at the same congress in which Morales was acclaimed as presidential candidate.
Months later, Bolivia’s Constitutional Court declared Morales ineligible, stating that the former president could no longer run for office as he had already served two terms as president.
Morales wants the congress in which he was nominated as the MAS candidate to be recognized, and clashes between his supporters and Arce’s allies during the march have already left dozens injured.
On Sunday (22), when the group approached La Paz, eight people were injured. Police presence was reinforced at Plaza Murillo, where the Government Palace is located, for the arrival of Morales supporters on Monday. However, they said they would not go to the location.
Media professionals reported attacks by protesters. In one case, Irene Torrez, a reporter for a national television network, told the Unitas Human Rights Defenders Observatory that she was beaten by seven Morales supporters in Vila Vila, in the department of Cochabamba.
“I told them I was a journalist and they started pushing me, hitting me and trying to steal my cell phone,” Torrez said, in statements reproduced by the website Infobae. The journalist said that after receiving a blow to the back that made her fall to her knees, the protesters forced her to delete the images she had recorded on her cell phone.
Arce has called the mobilization of Morales’ group an attempted coup d’état, but on Sunday (22) he called for dialogue.
“Despite all this climate of confrontation, the government ratifies its decision to summon them [para conversar] within the framework of mutual respect,” Arce said on Sunday, in a message broadcast on national television.
In La Paz, Morales denied talks on Monday. According to the newspaper El Deber, the former president made a series of demands to be met by Arce within 24 hours (that is, by early Tuesday evening), including the dismissal of ministers and the return of union offices closed by the police.
“This march is to say, brothers, enough of betrayal, enough of corruption and protection of drug trafficking and enough of mismanagement, and if Lucho [Arce] If he wants to continue governing, in 24 hours, he must replace the drug-dealing ministers, the corrupt ministers, the lazy ministers, the racist and fascist ministers,” Morales said in a speech to supporters, without naming who these ministers would be.
Movements that support him gave the same deadline for the Bolivian Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) to reverse the former president’s ineligibility.
Self-coup? Bolivia’s June mobilization remains unexplained
The disputes between the two socialists over the last two years have generated a political crisis, the most dramatic chapter of which occurred in June. On the 26th of that month, a military mobilization surrounded the headquarters of the Bolivian Executive in La Paz.
General Juan José Zúñiga, former commander general of the Bolivian Armed Forces, was arrested for leading the movement, but later said that the mobilization had actually been planned by Arce to increase his popularity.
Opposition members and the wing linked to Morales in the MAS corroborated the hypothesis of a self-coup, in an incident that has not yet been fully clarified.
In this fight between former allies, the Bolivian population is the one who suffers, said businessman Samuel Dória Medina, former Minister of Planning and former presidential candidate, defeated three times by Morales.
“One orders public officials to take to the streets to defend him. The other orders coca growers to march so they can enable him.” [politicamente]. Both use people as mere objects of their ambitions. They don’t care if [as pessoas] are cold, whether they are fed or not, whether they are injured,” wrote Doria Medina in X, according to a report by El Deber.
“MAS members take advantage of people’s needs to make them act against their will. They are oppressors of their own followers,” he said.
In an interview with the Associated Press, analyst and university professor Marcelo Silva pointed out that, almost 19 years after coming to power (with a brief interruption between 2019 and 2020, after Morales resigned due to evidence of fraud in his reelection), the political group that governs Bolivia finds itself in an impasse that could be decisive for its end.
“This seems like a terminal crisis for the MAS, which no longer has a proposal for the country and demonstrates an inability to renew itself,” said the expert.
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