From hope to disillusionment: Bolivia after 20 years of the Movement Towards Socialism

First published at NACLA.

A nearly two-decade era of Indigenous-oriented governance and anti-neoliberal politics has come to an end in Bolivia. The Movement towards Socialism (MAS) government, which launched in the early 2000s with great hopes and optimism, is closing with disappointment and economic chaos.

In a reversal as drastic as the MAS’s landslide victory in 2005, three right-wing presidential candidates — from center-right to far-right — won a combined 77 percent of the vote in the August 18 national election. Far from commanding a majority in both the Congress and Senate as it has since 2006, the MAS lost all its seats in the legislature but one.

Rodrigo Paz Pereira of the Christian Democrats, along with his popular vice-presidential candidate Edman Lara, defied opinion polls and stunned observers by surging into the lead. They will advance to a runoff vote against far-right candidate Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga on October 19.

Though Paz presented himself as a populist outsider promoting “capitalism for all,” he is hardly new to politics. He is a sitting senator representing the department of Tarija and the son of Jaime Paz Zamora, a neoliberal president from 1989 to 1993, closely tied to Bolivia’s traditional ruling elite. Yet it was his running mate, Edman Lara, who propelled Paz to first place. Lara, 39, is a former police officer from rural Cochabamba whose denunciations of police corruption have earned him a large and enthusiastic following on TikTok, Bolivia’s most popular social media platform.

Disenchantment with the MAS was palpable after the vote, when hundreds gathered in the streets of La Paz to celebrate Paz and Lara’s unexpected success. Zuleyka Pinto, a pharmaceutical chemist from El Alto who had knocked on doors for their campaign for months, saw their ticket as representing something new. “El MAS nunca más” (“the MAS never again”), the crowd surrounding her chanted on election night.

“The MAS no longer guaranteed any possibility of surviving economically, so people went to the other side,” says political analyst José de la Fuente, a former employee of the MAS-controlled Cochabamba departmental government. Indigenous and working-class voters “will never choose the neoliberal right,” he explains, “so many of them opted for what they thought was the middle.”

Exploding political and financial crises

Other voters heeded a call by former President Evo Morales— barred by term limits from running again — to spoil their ballots. Approximately 19 percent of ballots were marked null, nearly six times above average. Yet not all of these votes can be interpreted as support for Morales; voting is mandatory in Bolivia for those under 70, and null and blank ballots have long been used as a form of resistance against traditional party politics. Even so, with the number of null votes a whisker above perennial conservative candidate Samuel Doria Medina, Morales triumphantly declared victory, asserting on the coca growers’ radio station, “if you add in the blank ballots and the absentee vote, we’re in first place.”

Morales’s maneuvering eliminated any chance for 36-year-old MAS Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez, who ran on an independent left ticket. Once considered Morales’s political heir, Rodríguez garnered only 8.4 percent of the vote. Rodríguez had been the hope of Bolivia’s left for months, but Morales’s fierce antipathy towards him, his perceived indecisiveness in public appearances, and an unpopular vice-presidential pick all combined to sink his campaign.

With President Luis Arce deciding not to run for re-election amid low approval ratings, former Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo ran as the MAS candidate. In a reflection of Arce and Rodriguez’s unpopularity, he scraped by with only 3.16 percent of the vote, just barely above the 3 percent threshold required to maintain the party’s legal status.

This fracturing of the left echoed the infighting that has plagued the party since 2020, when Arce — Morales’s longtime finance minister — won a resounding victory with 55 percent of the vote, one year after Morales was ousted in a coup following his unconstitutional bid for a fourth term. Morales always viewed Arce as a placeholder, believing he could run again in 2025, and soon clashed with Arce and his Vice President, David Choquehuanca, as they asserted their independence.

Now facing statutory rape charges, Morales has sought to destroy every Left rival, including his former ministers and social movement allies. Morales even turned on his closest ally: in 2023, when former Vice President Álvaro García Linera proposed mediating the MAS leadership conflict, Morales called him “my newest enemy.”

“I would have been open to supporting the MAS if it had been another person,” says Óscar Paco, a former Morales’s supporter who spoiled his ballot this time, unconvinced by the contenders, including Rodríguez. “Evo already had his moment — he should make space for young people.”

Beyond the MAS divide, disillusionment stemmed in large measure from Bolivia’s faltering economy. After 2013, falling global commodity prices and dwindling natural gas reserves eroded state revenues. The burden of costly fuel subsidies — which the MAS government failed to curb in 2010 after a near-uprising over proposed price increases that fell most heavily on the poor — has deepened the strain. Meanwhile, the dollar-pegged currency has steadily weakened, with the black-market exchange rate now about twice the official one.

As people struggled to put bread on the table — and with bread size decreasing as prices rose — memories of MAS-era social welfare gains faded from view.

The Fall of the MAS

Over two decades in power, the MAS party, which grew out of Bolivia’s powerful social movements, achieved astounding gains for poor people, particularly in its early years. Under Morales, the country’s first Indigenous president, poverty was reduced by half, natural gas contracts were boldly re-negotiated with powerful multinationals, and rural infrastructure expanded dramatically. There was hardly a village or low-income barrio that didn’t boast a new school, road, or health clinic. These advances brought the MAS unprecedented popularity and sustained its electoral dominance for 14 years.

But a steady concentration of power centered on Morales weakened the country’s grassroots movements. Social movement leaders were absorbed into the government, their loyalty ensured through perks such as union headquarters funded by the state, while critical social movement voices were sidelined. “The MAS became distant from social organizations and from ordinary people,” explains analyst de la Fuente. “It abandoned its agenda and focused only on re-election.”

MAS’s successes were not only material. For many Bolivians, the most profound transformation was the decline of everyday racism. During the 2019 protests in defense of Morales, a common refrain heard in the streets was, “we don’t want to go back to the racism of the past,” as a street vendor said through tears at a rally in La Paz.

While the government’s investments proved successful at stimulating the economy and lifting about 10 percent of the population into the middle class, they were built on the extraction of the country’s abundant natural resources — the same model in place since the Spanish invasion over 500 years ago. The boom-and-bust cycles that have plagued Bolivia ever since brought the left-wing experiment to its knees. When commodity prices collapsed after 2013, the government’s carefully accumulated reserves, among the highest in Latin America, were drained as it maintained spending to shore up political support.

Bolivia’s deeply entrenched patterns of extractivist dependence were never shaken. If anything, more advanced technologies and China’s surging demand for natural resources accelerated exploitation, leaving ecological devastation in their wake. By 2024, Bolivia ranked second only to Brazil—a country eight times its size — in tropical primary forest loss, much of it driven by soy expansion and cattle ranching in the eastern lowlands.

Corruption scandals have further eroded trust in MAS governance. One case diverted millions of dollars earmarked for Indigenous development projects; others have tainted Arce’s administration directly. “There’s been so much corruption with Arce’s current government,” says Máxima Laura, a street vendor in traditional Aymara dress and former MAS voter. His kids have profited,” she adds. Though Laura voted for Paz and Lara, she is skeptical of their promises. “I don’t believe in politicians anymore. They say one thing, but when the time comes, they change their mind.”

What’s next for the Bolivian left?

The rise of Paz and Lara, and Morales’s enduring influence, leave the Bolivian left with few immediate paths forward. Since most political parties in Bolivia revolve around individual leaders, MAS’s failure to renew its leadership does not bode well for the future.

Morales’s top-down governing style still shapes political culture at every level beyond the local. Bolivia’s Indigenous and working-class unions have long relied on charismatic male leaders, corporatist structures, and close ties between leader and base. As president, Morales famously helicoptered into rural communities almost daily, launching public projects and cultivating loyalty.

But the generational terrain has shifted. Most young Bolivians, raised in relative middle-class security thanks to the MAS’s own achievements, never experienced the poverty or struggles that defined their parents’ lives. One consequence of neoliberalism is that for many young people today, the primary focus is on individual rather than collective well-being.

According to Iveth Saravia, who coordinates a children’s foundation in El Alto, “a lot of young people talk about the need for new people, and for them that new person is Tuto.” She sees it as ironic that “Tuto” Quiroga, who served as vice-president under former dictator Hugo Banzer and briefly as president more than two decades ago, is now embraced as fresh leadership. “It’s striking how much historical memory has been lost,” she observes.

This shift also shaped how Morales’s rhetoric was received. His grand narratives of anti-imperial struggle increasingly rang hollow for younger Bolivians, whose priorities centered on more immediate, everyday concerns. The MAS discourse came to have “an ideological overemphasis,” notes de la Fuente. For him, the future of the Bolivian left lies outside the MAS: “Another left has to emerge, one that’s more mature and more savvy.” That includes more seriously addressing environmental issues, a cause the right has skillfully co-opted as the MAS — like every government before it — prioritized economic development over sustainability.

This is Bolivia’s great conundrum: how to improve living standards through value-added industries, rather than perpetuating historic patterns of resource extraction. It is, in many ways, the perennial dilemma of the Global South.

Before formally gaining power, the resurgence of the right is already taking shape through court rulings favoring key figures from the 2019 coup and subsequent massacres. In response to a rare Supreme Court order, a judge annulled charges against former interim president Jeanine Áñez for her role in the Sacaba and Senkata massacres, sending the case back to Congress for approval before it reaches the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, another judge ordered that former Santa Cruz governor Fernando Camacho be moved to house arrest and that Marco Antonio Pumari, another central figure in the coup, be released from preventive detention. “These politicized court decisions will inevitably pave the way for more political violence like the massacres Áñez oversaw,” says Thomas Becker, a human rights lawyer working with the families of 2019 massacre victims.

Yet amid the crisis, one achievement stands out. In the year of Bolivia’s bicentenary of independence from Spain, the only apparent winner in the recent election is electoral democracy itself—no small feat in a nation that has endured more coup d’etats than almost any other. This time around, Arce appears committed to a democratic transition, even at the cost of dismantling his own party and the legacy of the self-styled “government of social movements.”

But this is Bolivia: a country where social movements have repeatedly risen — against colonial powers, military dictatorships, and neoliberal governments alike — to demand a more equitable and inclusive society. It may take time, but there is little doubt they will rise again.

Linda Farthing is a journalist and independent scholar who has co-authored four books on Bolivia. She has written extensively on Latin America, including for the Guardian, the Nation, Al Jazeera, and Ms. Magazine.

Benjamin Swift is a journalist based in La Paz, Bolivia. His stories focus on climate change, the environment, and LGBTQIA+ themes. Find more of his work at www.bswiftcreative.com