Abstract
Evo Morales rose to power on the shoulders of Bolivia’s most powerful social movements, ostracizing the neoliberal elite with a progressive-left populist discourse that swept through Latin America. After nearly 14 years in power, Morales’s caudillo-style leadership shifted toward authoritarianism and a politics of division that ultimately led to his ouster as president. While many have been quick to adopt the narrative of a coup d’état, this perspective plays directly into the oversimplified binary politics used by the Morales administration, overlooking the complexity and fluidity of social forces and the changing state-society dynamics over time. Evo Morales suffered a crisis of legitimacy that was years in the making. His authoritarian tendencies, alliances with capitalists, and reliance on the extractive economy ultimately led to his downfall as he lost support from his social bases and was unwilling to give up state power. The electoral scandal in October 2019 and the subsequent departure of Evo Morales into political exile were only the tip of the iceberg.
Evo Morales accedió al poder gracias a los movimientos sociales más poderosos de Bolivia, en conflicto con la élite neoliberal y utilizando un discurso populista de izquierda progresista que se extendió por América Latina. Después de casi 14 años en el poder, el liderazgo caudillista de Morales viró hacia el autoritarismo y una política divisoria que finalmente llevó a su destitución como presidente. Si bien muchos se han apresurado a adoptar la narrativa de un golpe de Estado, esta perspectiva se enfila directamente con la política binaria simplista utilizada por la administración misma de Morales, pasando por alto la complejidad y fluidez de las fuerzas sociales, así como la dinámica cambiante estado-sociedad a través del tiempo. Morales sufrió una crisis de legitimidad que se gestó durante años. Sus tendencias autoritarias, sus alianzas con las clases capitalistas y su dependencia de la economía extractiva finalmente llevaron a su caída: perdió el apoyo de sus bases sociales sin estar dispuesto a renunciar al poder estatal. El escándalo electoral de octubre de 2019 y su posterior exilio político fueron tan solo la punta del iceberg.
Prior to the election of its first indigenous president, Bolivia was in crisis. From 2000 to 2005 Bolivia went through five different presidents, culminating in the election of Evo Morales, who promised radical reforms with an anti-imperial and anti-neoliberal discourse. At the turn of the twenty-first century, over 60 percent of the Bolivian population was living in poverty, with more than 80 percent of the poor living in rural areas (INE, 2017). After 20 years of neoliberal reforms, preceded by nearly two decades of political instability and military dictatorships, social movements converged against a neoliberal state-capital alliance demanding inclusion in the political arena and a more equitable distribution of the country’s resource wealth (McKay, 2018a). Inspired by other left regimes such as that of Venezuela, Morales launched an “agrarian revolution” in 2006 with a divisive populist statement: “The great landowners of the Oriente are crying. They are hysterically crying because they know that their glory days are over. . . . We will seize their unproductive land and give it to poor campesinos!” (quoted in Fabricant, 2012: 140).
Taking control of the state apparatus, Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS) ostracized the capitalist and landowning elite and nationalized or quasi-nationalized key sectors of the economy. Indigenous and peasant populations were empowered symbolically and materially as one of their own became head of state. Social movement leaders and former coca growers became legislators, ministers, and state managers. New social welfare programs were established to reduce inequalities and poverty. Diverse social movements representing indigenous, originarios, peasants, women, and landless people converged to form the Unity Pact—a powerful national movement of movements that helped rewrite the constitution, launching the proceso de cambio (change process) that would decolonize Bolivia (Postero, 2017). 1 Rejecting the neoliberal model of development, the MAS proposed a new vision of “communitarian socialism.” vivir bien (living well), and the rights of Pachamama (Mother Nature) and promised to restore sovereignty over its natural resources and redistribute the wealth to “the people.” A new political concept—indigenas originarios campesinos 2 —emerged that united diverse ethnic, identity, and class-based groups representing “the people.” After the 2006 election, the economic and political elites in Santa Cruz and, more broadly, in the region known as the Media Luna (Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, and Tarija), as well as the traditional political parties of the past (e.g., the Revolutionary Nationalist Movemement, the Revolutionary Left Movement, and Nationalist Democratic Action) became the people’s “common enemy,” held responsible for the injustices that had impoverished the Bolivian majority.
Once in power, Evo Morales adopted a polarizing binary politics combined with an “all-or-nothing” approach. He rewrote the constitution in his first years of government (2006–2008), filled the halls of political power with indigenous and popular representatives, and formed what he called a “government of social movements.” He embraced progressive-left claims through his discourse, promising agrarian, cultural, and productive revolutions. His repeated electoral successes caught the attention of the world, and when he pushed the limits to centralize control of all the powers of the state (executive, legislative, judicial) as well as the Supreme Electoral Tribunal he met no major obstacles and kept his political legitimacy almost intact.
In 2009, Morales was reelected for a second term, while the Constitutional Court accepted the interpretation of the MAS that its first term be reinitiated with the implementation of the new constitution. In 2014, Morales and vice president Álvaro García Linera were elected once again for a second (read: third) term. In 2016 Morales proposed a constitutional amendment that would allow him to run again in 2019. He lost this referendum, known as 21 F (for February 21, 2016), but managed to manipulate the courts by invoking the supremacy of his human right to participate in politics against the co-opted judicial and electoral powers. The courts ruled in his favor, overturning the outcome of 21 F and reinterpreting the constitution to allow Morales and García Linera to run for the 2020–2025 term. Confident of the outcome, the president of the Senate, Adriana Salvatierra, proclaimed that “Evo can be elected as many times as the people decide” (Correo del Sur, 2019).
On October 20, 2019, Bolivia held its general election. In a highly controversial electoral process plagued with delays and inconsistencies, the unofficial, preliminary vote count inexplicably stopped at 84 percent. At this point, no candidate had a clear majority, and all indications were pointing to a second electoral round that would have likely resulted in an alliance among oppositional parties in support of Carlos Mesa and the ouster of Morales. The organization in charge of the rapid count said that it had been ordered to stop counting by the president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and were left without electricity and Internet (see Solón, 2019). After much uncertainty about the results, the Organization of American States and numerous other independent researchers found “irregularities” in favor of the MAS. Violence erupted in the streets across the country, and it soon became apparent that Morales had lost the widespread support of this mass base. The last straw that forced him to flee to Mexico into exile came from the pressure by General Williams Kaliman, who refused to militarize the streets without a signed presidential order and suggested that Morales should resign in the best interests of the country, which was on the brink of civil war. This, of course, sparked outrage among the international left, which concluded that Bolivia’s indigenous president, defender of Mother Nature and committed to helping the historically marginalized indigenous peasants, had finally been ousted by the military in a U.S.-backed coup, freeing up the world’s largest lithium deposits for foreign exploitation (Higgins, 2019; cf. Fundación Solón, 2019). This narrative was reinforced by a report by two MIT researchers using computer simulations to predict voting patterns that found no evidence of irregularities in the election (Williams and Curiel, 2020). For some, quick to adopt the narrative of anti-imperialism without delving into the nuances or analyzing the class dynamics and state-society relations over time, this narrative was appealing and would suffice. Yet a computer simulation based on prior voting patterns cannot grasp the deeply qualitative and complex sociopolitical dynamics of a country like Bolivia.
Going beyond binaries, we argue that the MAS as a political party and project underwent an internal transformation because of caudillo-style leadership and an insatiable quest for power under Evo Morales that changed the principles of its political project and ultimately resulted in a crisis of legitimacy. Morales’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies, alliances with classes of capital, and dependence on the extractive economy ultimately led to his demise as he lost support from his social bases and refused to give up power. The electoral scandal in October 2019 and his subsequent departure were only the tip of the iceberg. This type of binary politics is characteristic of a type of populism that attempts to aggregate disparate class interests into a homogenized voice (“us” versus “them”) for strategic political purposes (Borras Jr., 2020). In the context of a “new political moment” characterized by what some call “authoritarian populism” (Scoones et al., 2018), how do we make sense of what transpired in Bolivia? In the remainder of the paper, we provide some context on the origins of the term “populism” and this “new political moment.” We then interrogate rural politics in Bolivia, the turn toward authoritarian tendencies, and the politics of division under Evo Morales—a common populist strategy to divide and conquer in the name of “the people.” The fourth section provides an analysis of the political void left by Morales and the rise in national politics of the rentier class, with its own authoritarian tendencies. The final section discusses some of the implications for rural politics and emancipatory alternatives.
Populism and the New Political Moment
Elements of populist politics are said to be on the rise from the United States to Latin America, Europe, India, Turkey, and elsewhere. This shift in antiestablishment politics and turn toward nationalism, trade wars, and xenophobia has surfaced in the heart of liberal democracies around the world and indeed signals a new political moment (Mamonova and Franquesa, 2020; Roman-Alcalá, Graddy-Lovelace, and Edelman, 2021; Scoones et al., 2018), albeit with features that vary dramatically across contexts. Populism can span the left-right political spectrum and is used as an umbrella term to characterize the likes of Trump, Sanders, López Obrador, Maduro, Morales, Le Pen, Wilders, Modi, Erdogan, and Duterte, among others. The lack of conceptual clarity can often lead to misinterpretations and false assumptions. As Müller (2016: 22) puts it, “Are we not facing complete conceptual chaos, as almost anything—left, right, democratic, antidemocratic, liberal, illiberal—can be called populist, and populism can be viewed as both a friend and foe of democracy?”
The origins of the term “populism” can be traced to the ideology of the Russian Narodniks in the late nineteenth century, who idealized the “peasant way” and saw peasants as a revolutionary class necessary to overthrow the tsar. Largely politically conscious urban middle- and upper-middle-class intellectuals, they saw the peasants as representing “the people” and as a force for change against the injustices brought about by the monarch. Around the same time a form of Midwestern populism emerged in the United States in the form of the People’s Party. “Primarily an agrarian movement, it also contained significant support from industrial labor, social reformers, and intellectuals . . . [with] . . . a common ideology stemming from a shared critique of existing conditions” (Pollack, 1962: 11). The People’s Party allied itself with the labor movement and was highly critical of the economic and political elites who controlled the banks and the railroads and of large-scale landowners. At the forefront of this movement was Mary Elizabeth Lease, whose famous statement, circa 1890, rings true today: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master” (quoted in Müller, 2016: 134–135). This American populism emerged as a movement against the elites and oligarchs and for a more democratic society based on citizen participation and socially just representation. Populist movements necessarily create a collective identity diametrically opposed to “the other”— a common enemy (e.g., ethnic minorities, immigrants, crony capitalists, and political elites) responsible for the injustices suffered by “the people.”
Populists tend to be (at least discursively) against a corrupt elite (cue Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of crony capitalism in U.S. politics) and the political and economic institutions they control (antiestablishment). Populists further claim that they and only they represent “the people” (however defined) and those who do not support them are “the other” and part of the problem. The conception of “the people” emerges from a subtle form of exclusionary identity politics that homogenizes the plurality of society and leads to polarization with an “us” versus “them” mentality—a politics of division. “The people” can be defined both in relation to a corrupt and powerful elite at the top and in relation to those at the bottom, who “may be represented as parasites or spongers, as addicts or deviants, as disorderly or dangerous, as undeserving of benefits and unworthy of respect, and thus as not belonging to the so-called decent, respectable, ‘normal,’ hard-working ‘people’” (Brubaker, 2017: 363). Further, “the people” can also be construed by their “bounded collectivity,” in terms of “insiders” versus “outsiders” (foreigners/foreign influence), invoking nationalist-populist sentiments (Brubaker, 2020).
Recognizing the term’s open-endedness and ideological flexibility, Borras Jr. (2020: 5) proposes two types of populism. The first is right-wing populism, defined as “a regressive, conservative, or reactionary type of populism that promotes or defends capitalism in the name of the ‘people’; in its current manifestation, it is also xenophobic, nationalist, racist, and/or misogynistic.” The second is agrarian populism, defined as “that political bundling of various rural-based or rural-oriented social groups and class interests and issues into a homogenized category, ‘the people of the land’; many variants of agrarian populism are anti-capitalist and try to advance a ‘peasant way’ or alternative development.” This distinction is useful, the more so when considered in connection with the broader characteristics of contemporary populism: (a) that it is a matter of degree; (b) that it is largely a politics of appearances, creating a spectacle to gain political support; (c) that it varies with regard to democracy and authoritarianism; (d) that it oscillates between rhetoric and reality; (e) that it is internally differentiated and layered in terms of groups and political tendencies; (f) that it is politically volatile and capricious; and (g) that it is relevant whether in or out of state power (Borras, 2020). These characteristics provide a more nuanced account of populism as a relational, fluid concept.
The relationship between authoritarianism and populism is of particular importance for our discussion here. Müller (2016: 66) suggests that “populist parties are particularly prone to internal authoritarianism,” often relying on a charismatic, strongman-style leader who promises to get things done. Populist leaders tell “the people” what they want to hear—disparaging the political and economic powers that be and its corrupt elites—while generating slogans that people can easily identify with, support, and adopt as their own. For Müller (2016: 12), populist leaders tend to exhibit three key features: “attempts to hijack the state apparatus, corruption and ‘mass clientielism’ (trading material benefits or bureaucratic favors for political support by citizens who become populists’ ‘clients’), and efforts systematically to suppress civil society.” This characterization is undoubtedly far from the ideas of the Narodniks and the People’s Party of the late 1800s or those of Chayanov and La Via Campesina today, but it refers to populist leaders in power, not populism or agrarian populism per se, and within that category to those with authoritarian tendencies. Nonetheless, it is not hard to observe such features among those considered populists today who have taken control over the state apparatus, whether on the right or the left. Many populists in power exhibit similar authoritarian features, but populist parties are able to justify their actions by claiming to represent “the people.”
The term “authoritarian populism” has been revived by Scoones et al. (2018: 3) to describe populism that “frequently circumvents, eviscerates or captures democratic institutions, even as it uses them to legitimate its dominance, centralise power and crush or severely limit dissent. Charismatic leaders, personality cults and nepotistic, familial or kleptocratic rule combined with impunity are common, though not essential, features of authoritarian populism.” Here we see the parallels with Müller’s key features of populists in power. Authoritarian populism was originally characterized by Stuart Hall (1985: 118) as “a movement towards a dominative and ‘authoritarian’ form of democratic class politics—paradoxically, apparently rooted in the ‘transformism’ (Gramsci’s term) of populist discontent.” Hall was building on Poulantzas’s concept of “authoritarian statism” to analyze the new forms of hegemonic politics under Thatcherism. Evidently, the “new political moment” under way in the current context is emerging from a reaction to and rejection of the kind of authoritarian populism Hall meant.
As Akram-Lodhi (2018: 6) puts it, “the current crisis is a crisis of the authoritarian populism that legitimated neoliberalism.” Rather than authoritarian populism, he suggests that the current moment is better understood as a regressive countermovement to neoliberal globalization, which largely manifests itself as right-wing nationalist populism. Saad-Filho (2018) describes the current political moment as “a mounting tide of authoritarian neoliberalism,” which for him is paradoxical because “it promotes the personalization of politics through ‘spectacular’ (often fleeting) leaders, operating in the absence of intermediary institutions (parties, trade unions, social movements and, ultimately, the law), and who are strongly committed both to neoliberalism and to the expansion of their own personal power.” “Authoritarian populism,” “right-wing nationalist populism,” and “authoritarian neoliberalism” have important commonalities based on a disregard for democratic institutions.
Populist movements and politics vary, especially with control over the state apparatus. According to Borras Jr. (2020: 5), “most of these populist currents have a strong tendency towards authoritarianism, but again, it is a matter of degree, and a regime may dynamically oscillate towards and away from populism and authoritarianism.” What the Bolivian case demonstrates, for example, is a movement characterized by a type of left-wing, anti-neoliberal populism with discourses of social justice, redistribution, food sovereignty, vivir bien, and the rights of Mother Nature that, when in state power, gradually shifted toward more authoritarian and procapitalist (extractive) politics. The challenge is how variants of left-wing or agrarian populism can avoid developing such authoritarian tendencies. Understanding this new political moment as scholars and activists requires us to focus on the changing dynamics and reconfigurations of class alliances and state-society relations while also considering how ideology, identity, and discourse produce a popular political project (see McKay, Oliveira, and Liu, 2020).
Borras Jr. (2020) advances the notion of a class-conscious left-wing populism whereby agrarian movements play an important role in the struggle against right-wing and authoritarian populism. This requires going “beyond the comfort zone of class purism” and calls for a critical engagement between Marxist agrarian politics and progressive, anticapitalist agrarian populism (Bernstein, 2018: 1146). Here Borras Jr. refers to “populism” as “the deliberate political act of aggregating disparate and even competing and antagonistic class and group interests into a homogenized voice or unified stance for tactical or strategic political purposes” (5). There is nothing inherently authoritarian about this definition, and it does not entail a class-blind framework. What Borras Jr. puts forward is a way for class-based and populist politics to converge, complement each other, and be mutually reinforcing. This is a call to synthesize elements of class-based and radical agrarian populism politics and take advantage of the “analytical superiority in addressing the class dynamics of agrarian change” of Marxism and the “more vital ideological and political force” of agrarian populism (Bernstein, 2018: 1146). Combining elements of the two may help us understand the conditions necessary for an emancipatory alternative.
Next, we interrogate the authoritarian turn in Bolivia’s left-wing populism and reveal how a politics of division was employed to maintain state power at all costs. The result has been disastrous, as right-wing forces moved quickly to fill the power void left by Morales and installed a corrupt, self-serving interim government that only intensified the violence, ethnic discrimination, and class divisions within the country. In a perhaps surprising turn, however, the MAS, under new leadership, has once again regained state power, taking advantage of the inept interim government of Jeanine Áñez and the weaknesses of the competing political parties and promising to reinvigorate the party and the political project that Morales had abandoned. The election victory of the MAS shows that the party still enjoys widespread support and never depended solely on the charismatic personality of just one leader fixated on maintaining state power.
Authoritarian Tendencies and a Politics Of Division
Populism in Bolivia took an authoritarian turn during the second term of the Morales administration for a number of reasons: (1) a state-capital alliance between Morales and the elites of Santa Cruz as the former sought to expand his control over the Eastern lowlands, largely controlled by the opposition (see McKay, 2018b; Tilzey, 2019; Webber, 2017); (2) the decline of commodities prices on international markets, which strained state revenues and led to the expansion of the extractive frontier to increase production and exports; (3) the conflict over the highway through the Isiboro Securé Indigenous Territory and National Park, particularly the state’s use of violence against indigenous people marching to defend their land and territory, which fractured the strong state-society relations that had developed between the MAS and the Unity Pact (Fabricant aand Postero, 2015; Fundación TIERRA, 2018); (4) the state’s suppression of criticism by nongovernmental organizations, the media, and academics of the neo-extractivist development model, which saw key intellectuals of the original political project of the MAS such as Alejandro Almaraz, Raúl “Chato” Prada, Pablo Solón, and Rebeca Delgado labeled librepensantes (free-thinkers) and expelled them from the party; (5) the state’s refusal to accept the results of 21 F, which revealed its attempt to circumvent democratic institutions and centralize power; (6) the appointment of Supreme Court justices who were well-known party affiliates of the MAS; and (7) the multiple personal scandals concerning Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera and the way they were dealt with in the media and politically. 3 The politics of division that Morales adopted and perfected over the years was useful for gaining and maintaining popular support and legitimacy but came to serve a different purpose over time: to keep Evo Morales in power regardless of how far from the popular agenda he and the party had moved in terms of implementing economic policies or weaving alliances. Examining this element can contribute to counteracting the setbacks in the political inclusion of majorities—the indigenous population and the popular sectors.
The politics of division under Morales separated Bolivia into two antagonistic fronts, characterized by both the vertical (top and bottom) and horizontal (insiders and outsiders) dimensions outlined by Brubaker (2017; 2020): neoliberal versus anticapitalists, the conservative right versus “the people,” whites/mestizos versus the indigenous. Morales perpetuated the narrative of the “two Bolivia’s,” which had a long history (Ticona Alejo, 2010). A common enemy was constructed, and this image was used to articulate and galvanize support among social and popular movements with promises to represent their historically neglected demands. At first, the binary discourse was a lethal weapon for nullifying the prominence of traditional political parties and opposition leaders. When Morales hegemonized the political arena, the binary gaze remained but this time to feed people’s fear of the return of the ghosts of the past—the vendepatrias or the neoliberal right that conspires against the process of change. The polarization reached an unprecedented level when the concept of “the people” was charged only with positive connotations and, finally, used as synonymous with Evo Morales himself: @evoespueblo (Evo is “the people”).
This narrative gave the party leadership a powerful language for communicating with the masses. Economic, political, and social issues lost their complexity, and Evo Morales’s words gained greater value. The economic growth rate of nearly 5 percent per year during the Morales government (2006–2018), in large part due to the commodities boom, provided palpable support for the narrative of the great material achievements resulting from the (quasi-)nationalization of natural resources and the process of change. While some sectors crticized Morales’s costly expenditures, images of him descending from a helicopter to visit forgotten populations have been seen by many as concrete proof of peasant-indigenous inclusion and, of course, economic prosperity. For many, Evo Morales became a revered figure, a demigod.
Second, Morales’s politics of division, while increasing the political power of a government with popular roots, could not avoid internal contradictions that became unsustainable over time. The development model had little or no anticapitalist character (Cordoba and Jansen, 2014; Webber, 2017), and the Morales government understood early on that his political power emanated from the revenue generated by the extractive economy. As Postero (2017: 436–437) writes, “because the state has continued to tie its economic policies to a capitalist model of natural resource extraction, it continues to sacrifice those indigenous people whose lands and livelihoods are ‘obstacles’ to national development.” The dominant position of private capital (transnationals) in the extractive sector was justified as they became partners rather than employers or owners of natural resources (see Krommes-Ravnsmed, 2019). Further, as Marston and Kennemore (2019) argue, natural resource extraction became part of a revolutionary narrative necessary for the construction of the plurinational state. Private bankers became a silent and powerful ally of the government, and Morales did not hesitate to abandon the environmentalist and propeasant banners to enter into high-risk alliances for the implementation of megaprojects in protected areas and indigenous territories (Fundación TIERRA, 2018) and deepen the (agro)extractive model (Gandarillas Gonzáles, 2016; McKay, 2017; 2020) rather than pursue alternatives based on food sovereignty and the rights of Mother Nature (McKay, Nehring, and Walsh-Dilley, 2014; Solón, 2017).
Third, the politics of division and the centralization of power consolidated the caudillista image of Evo Morales. He became an anticapitalist hero embodied in an indigenous person, an international icon of the left who had not only reaped political achievements but also exhibited economic success by way of an international commodities boom. Contrary to numerous binary analyses of intellectuals committed to left-wing Latin American governments, Morales put his own personal ambitions for power over the popular-peasant-indigenous project of state transformation from below and from within. Indeed, he sacrificed a deeper and continuous process of change in order to maintain state power. It was his insatiable quest for power that ultimately led to his downfall, resulting in violent conflicts and opening the opportunity for the rise of a conservative right wing. 4
Unlike other progressive-left leaders in the region such as Rafael Correa, Cristina Kirchner, and Lula da Silva, Evo Morales ruled, in part, armored with his identity as a marginalized indigenous peasant. As Canessa (2012: 204) puts it, “in Evo’s Bolivia political legitimacy rests on being indigenous,” since “indigeneity is the foundation of a new nationalism.” Members critical of the MAS’s policies or the divisiveness of the indigenous leader, such as the party founders Román Loayza or Filemón Escobar, were systematically marginalized, accused of being traitors and racists. Other left-wing intellectuals and activists who held key positions in the MAS government during its first and second terms, such as Alejandro Almaraz, Raúl Prada, and Pablo Solón, among others, left the party due to Morales’s authoritarian tendencies and the shift away from the original process of change based on left-wing agrarian populism (to use Borras Jr.’s term). Indigenous people who sought to exercise their right to be consulted were expelled from the party and publicly mistreated. In other words, “despite its discourse of decolonization, the MAS state has utilized co-optation, police violence, and legal mechanisms to silence its opponents, including indigenous groups” (Postero, 2017, 437). The gap between official state discourse of “rule by listening to the people” and a regime that was increasingly prone to authoritarianism widened with the imposition of the unconstitutional decision to ignore the 2016 referendum and allow Morales to run for office for a third (read: fourth) time.
True to his politics, Evo Morales explained his fall in binary terms: the fascists, racists, and coup plotters conspired against the peasants, the indigenous people, the working class, and the popular sectors. “My sin is to be an indigenous, union leader, coca grower,” he told reporters in an interview with the BBC from Mexico (BBC, 2019). He accused the opposition leaders Carlos Mesa and Luis Fernando Camacho of plotting a coup but intentionally ignored the leading role of the indigenous union leader from Potosi, Marco Pumari, whose identity did not fit his simplified dichotomy. He received solidarity from the international left comparable to the overwhelming support of the Bolivians during the first half of his government. Although the popular and rural sectors did stage massive protests against the so-called coup d’état in the days after Morales fled to Mexico, calls for his return quickly lost strength and legitimacy among the masses. Evidence of electoral fraud became insurmountable and Morales’s attempts at casting himself as a victim and publicly calling for peaceful protests were undermined by videos of him privately instructing his followers to engage in violence and to cut off the cities from receiving essential goods and services, such as food (El Deber, 2019). In rural areas, people were even prevented from receiving essential services from hospitals as those loyal to the MAS blocked roads (personal communication, 2019).
The politics of division put Bolivia on the verge of an internal confrontation with widespread violent conflict erupting throughout the country’s major cities. The dualistic narrative was losing relevance because of its inability to interpret reality. Certainly, new dangers lurk. The paths of political participation will be narrowed from below, but new scenarios are also opened, for example, so that legislators of indigenous or peasant origin cease to be decorative objects or levantamanos (yes-people). In contrast to the polarizing discourse that homogenizes and unifies large sectors of the population, accepting complexity implies dealing with heterogeneous demands and visions. Popular and local leaders will probably lose the direct contact they once had with the president, but co-optation will give way to greater social control of the state. The regionalism of collas and cambas remains a latent problem (like racism or machismo) that the MAS government failed to seriously address and even used for political calculations rather than building bridges of integration.
In short, Bolivian democracy faces complex problems. Despite his effort to maintain state power at all costs, Evo Morales and the MAS brought about real and important symbolic and material gains for the historically marginalized that cannot be ignored or discounted. Those forms of empowerment will not disappear overnight, but the societal and class forces that brought Morales to power are fractured. Their ability to set aside and reconcile such differences will be crucial to opening new horizons for democratic processes based on inclusion and social justice.
Filling the Void: Rebirth of Bolivia’s Far Right
After the departure of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s class of rentier elites quickly abandoned the low political profile it had maintained for more than a decade. This social stratum had been displaced from politics with the rise of the MAS to state power but remained relevant in the rentier economy with its control over vast swaths of land. Toward the end of 2010, an alliance emerged between the MAS and this rentier class, as both entities were able to increase their political and economic power, respectively (Tilzey, 2019; Webber, 2017). For both sides, this was seen as a necessary and practical division of power (Colque, 2019).
Prior to this alliance, this class of rentier elites was almost defeated. The growing state control of extractive revenues and the determined attempt to reform the unequal landholding structure expressed the intentions of the government to disrupt the extractive pattern controlled by small power groups. But a combination of factors including the precariousness of state development projects, the power and influence of the rentier elites and their alliances with other classes of capital, and the sudden commodity price “bust,” especially the price of natural gas, pressured the government to embrace the easy way out—to deepen the extractive model. In addition, Morales discovered that he did not need to translate his anticapitalist discourse into real, structural changes. The radicality of his discourse was enough to keep his popularity almost intact.
The elites that have been reborn politically have their reasons for remaining in the rentier economy. Their economic privileges do not originate in the productive sphere or from generating value added but in their appropriation of resource rents. In a strict sense, they differ from productive capitalists because the former accumulate fortunes from the private appropriation of natural resources, subsidies and state favors, and custom tenders for public works and services or through monopolistic control. This explains why they are concerned with preserving channels of access to political power rather than improving productivity and economic competitiveness.
One of the most representative social groups is anchored in the agricultural sector in Santa Cruz. Many of the large-scale landowning elite are the same landowning families that existed decades prior to the Morales government. Surprisingly, they not only managed to preserve the concessions of the previous governments but also reached an unprecedented public-private pact for the expansion of the agricultural frontier. After the infamous Isiboro Securé Indigenous Territory and National Park conflict, Morales did not hesitate to sign hundreds of land titles, granting rights to several million hectares in favor of medium-sized and large landowners (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés, 2016). In addition, the MAS consolidated the contentious use of transgenic crops, softened sanctions against burning and deforestation, tightened restrictions on land occupations, opened export markets, and approved the large-scale production of biodiesel—all to appease the capitalist and rentier elites, with their empty promises that the agro-extractive sector would be the new economic locomotive in the face of the decline of the natural gas sector. However, rather than industrializing the countryside, the agricultural sector in Santa Cruz is highly extractive in character, controlled predominantly by foreign market oligopolies, excluding and displacing peasant and smallholder farming, and leading to widespread environmental degradation, including deforestation, water contamination, and declining soil fertility (Colque, 2014; McKay, 2020; McKay and Colque, 2016).
The pact between the Santa Cruz elite and Morales is probably best described as a toxic opportunistic relationship that quickly shifted when the transitional government of Interim President Jeanine Áñez took control of the state. Añez was a senator from the Department of Beni and represented the Democratic Unity party, which was founded by the governor of Santa Cruz, Rubén Costas, the main right-wing opponent of the MAS since 2006. This interim government was supported by the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, a right-wing, probusiness association led by Fernando Camacho, who then became a presidential candidate. This unelected transitional government took swift action on important issues without due democratic process. The result was a shift to right-wing authoritarianism with racist and classist undertones, with Áñez, upon claiming the presidency, announcing that “the Bible is returning to the Presidential Palace.”
Large-scale landowners quickly realized their sectoral demands under the guise of reactivating the agricultural economy. The transitional government fully liberalized soybean exports, overriding established restrictions that prioritized domestic supply. It ratified a public-private agreement for state biofuel investments and purchases. In the fight against land trafficking, the transitional government took control of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform and implemented measures to accelerate the delivery of property titles to medium-sized and large-scale landowners in Santa Cruz. For example, the minister of development and planning under Áñez, Branko Marinkovic (who in 2010 was charged with an alleged plot to kill Morales and forced into exile), received over 34,000 hectares and has now been denounced for land trafficking (TIERRA, 2020). Further, on May 7, 2020, Áñez approved Supreme Decree 4232, which authorizes the National Biosafety Committee to established expedited procedures for the evaluation of genetically modified maize, sugarcane, cotton, and wheat. This has triggered major pushback from social movements across the country, both urban and rural, since these measures have gone against the interests of the country’s majority, particularly the rural poor. Any moderately reasonable democratization project would affect the interests of the powerful and call into question their rentier privileges. Yet something like that is incompatible with the very existence of this elite, since it would require cutting the umbilical cord that joins them to the extractive economy. With the power void left by Morales, the political landscape has opened up, with many forces vying for state power.
Conclusion
Populism, while politically attractive and strategic, is nonetheless susceptible to authoritarian tendencies over time. This often becomes apparent and radical when a populist movement takes state power and must navigate groups of influence among classes and balance the two basic and often contradictory state functions of capital accumulation and political legitimacy (O’Connor, 1973; Poulantzas, 1978). The authoritarian tendencies, however, are much more prominent and likely when leadership is caudillo-style. Understanding forms of populist politics requires analysis of social classes, alliances, and state-society relations over time and, in particular, whose interests are served by the populist project, with what implications, and for whom (see Bernstein, 2020). Evidently, in Bolivia, the type of fluid populism employed by Morales ended up serving the class interests of capital by sacrificing the original left-wing (agrarian) populist project and support among his social base that ultimately resulted in his demise. While the coup narrative may be convenient for some supporters on the left, a deeper understanding of class and state dynamics reveals a much more complex story. 5
We have argued that the rural politics that gave rise to Evo Morales’s grassroots agrarian populism shifted toward authoritarianism as a state-capital alliance developed. This does not mean that Evo Morales and the MAS represented an authoritarian regime or dictatorship, as some on the far right claim. Nor does it suggest that the left-wing populism that brought the MAS to power continued when it took control of the state apparatus. Such binaries oversimplify complex (intra)class dynamics and fluid state-society relations. The Morales presidency came to an end because of widespread protests, a legitimacy crisis, and discontent among its social bases that coincided with the presence of conservative forces eager to take advantage of the situation but until then incapable of mobilizing effectively.
The political challenge for the MAS (now under the leadership of the former finance minister Luis Arce) is not only to reestablish alliances across class, ethnic, gender, and generational lines such as the Unity Pact but to persuade the majority that it can truly, as Evo Morales put it, “govern obeying the people.” This requires recognizing the value of participatory democratic principles as a general framework in the political arena. While political tactics such as the radicalization of social protests may ease tensions or help reconstruct more unified movements, they also remind the broader voting population of the movement’s authoritarian tendencies when in power.
The post-Morales era in Bolivia is anything but a story foretold; uncertainty looms, and the next cycle in the political economy will indeed be the product of multiple and dynamic politics between, across, and within various groups vying to fill the power void (see Alonso-Fradejas, 2015). In the years prior to 2006, social movements played a pivotal role in bringing the MAS to state power, and they will certainly be a decisive political power in the years to come. The challenge for these movements representing classes of labor across ethnic, gender, and generational lines is to evade divide-and-conquer strategies by the right and reclaim their progressive and even populist agenda as it was originally conceived but without authoritarian trappings. This type of political project will need to build “strength in unity” and “unity within diversity” along the lines of the popular left-wing mass mobilizations prior to 2006—a movement of movements among peasants, rural workers, women’s associations, indigenous groups, miners, and key factions of the urban working class, what Borras Jr. (2020: 29) calls a “reconstituted, class-conscious, left-wing populism.” While such diversity within a movement may be filled with tensions, what is important is that “these class dynamics are actually flagged and are being addressed even if unevenly and inconsistently within and between many of these movements across societies, across political spaces and over time. This is a necessarily tension-filled and conflict-ridden process, an arena of struggle within and among movements” (Borras Jr., 2020: 15). Recognizing and dealing with individual differences in order to unite against common challenges and injustices will be crucial for overcoming the rise of the conservative right and ultimately building a more democratic society based on citizen participation and socially just representation. However, simply returning to the original MAS agenda or rhetoric will not suffice to fill the vacuum of political representation from below. A new project must be constructed and will have to demonstrate that, once in power, its populist rhetoric will not mutate once again toward an authoritarian and caudillo-style form of governance.