Bolivia in the 21st century

Sánchez de Lozada won the 2002 presidential elections; however, his term was plagued by a recession and peasant protests. Violence escalated between armed peasants and police in February 2003, resulting in the deaths of 30 people and leading to the temporary toppling of Sánchez de Lozada’s government. More protests later that year demanding nationalization of the country’s natural gas resources reignited social unrest and brought about even more deaths. Sánchez de Lozada was finally forced to resign in October 2003 and was replaced by Vice Pres. Carlos Mesa Gisbert. Mesa’s decision to revise the hydrocarbon law for natural gas deposits did not forestall violent demonstrations, and he, too, resigned.

On Dec. 18, 2005, amid continuing protests, Juan Evo Morales Ayma was elected as Bolivia’s first Indian president. A founder of the left-wing political party Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo; MAS) and a former coca-growers’ union leader, Morales fought for more rights for indigenous communities, for less-harsh restrictions on coca farmers, and for more taxes on the wealthy. In 2006 he nationalized Bolivia’s gas fields and oil industry, and in 2007 he announced plans to nationalize the country’s railroads and mines. In response to Morales’s reforms and his attempts to redistribute wealth in the country, four of Bolivia’s wealthier provinces overwhelmingly approved regional autonomy statutes in referenda, though these were not recognized by the central government. There were political demonstrations, some of which turned violent, by those who opposed Morales’s reforms and by his supporters. A recall referendum on Morales’s leadership was held in August 2008, and two-thirds of those who went to the polls voted for him to continue in office. In another referendum held in January 2009, voters approved a new constitution that would allow Morales to seek a second consecutive five-year term (previously the constitution limited the president to a single term) and give him the power to dissolve Congress. Other changes to the constitution furthered indigenous rights, strengthened state control over the country’s natural resources, and enforced a limit on the size of private landholdings. Most Bolivians in the wealthier eastern provinces of the country opposed ratification of the new constitution.

Under Morales the country remained politically divided between the wealthy provinces and the impoverished indigenous communities. On the other hand, inflation had been brought under control, the economy was growing faster than the regional average, and the Bolivian peso, renamed the boliviano, was stabilized. In April 2009 Morales signed a law authorizing early presidential and legislative elections, set to take place that December. Morales, with the continued support of the indigenous majority, easily won a second term in the country’s presidential election. In the concurrent legislative elections, the MAS gained the majority of seats in both houses of Congress. In his second term Morales presided over an economy buoyed by a surging natural gas market, and he initiated a broad range of infrastructure projects. In 2013 the Bolivian constitutional court ruled that Morales could run for a third presidential term, and the following year he claimed victory in the first round of elections.

Bolivia went to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague in May 2015 to claim sovereignty over Chilean land that would provide Bolivia with access to the ocean. (Bolivian cargo was given preferential treatment by Chile.) Chile argued that the land, lost by Bolivia during the War of the Pacific, was permanently Chilean by virtue of the terms of a 1904 treaty signed by both countries. Bolivia averred that its claim to the land was subject to adjudication by the ICJ, because Chile, a signatory of the 1948 Pact of Bogotá, had pledged to honour the jurisdiction of the international court.

By 2015 the plummeting price of natural gas in the international market had begun to take a toll on the Bolivian economy. As the situation worsened, some critics of Morales were quick to blame him for failing to oversee a diversification of Bolivia’s natural-gas-dependent economy. The struggling economy and a corruption scandal took some of the polish off Morales’s presidency, and in a referendum in February 2016 some 51 percent of those Bolivians who voted chose not to amend the constitution to allow Morales to run for reelection in 2019. In November 2017, however, the constitutional court, responding to a petition from the MAS, removed term limits on the presidency. That ruling was upheld by the Supreme Electoral Court in December 2018, setting the stage for Morales to seek the presidency, yet again, in 2019.

From July to early October 2019, wildfires destroyed huge tracts of forests and grasslands in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz province. Many Bolivians criticized the Morales administration for not responding quickly or forcefully enough to the disaster. There was widespread belief that a decree by Morales in July, allowing farmers to undertake “controlled burning” to increase the size of their agricultural plots, was responsible for the outbreak of the fires.

The fires were among the issues on the minds of voters when the presidential election was held in October. Arguably the most prominent issue was Morales’s refusal to honour his earlier promise to abide by the results of the referendum on term limits, which enraged many Bolivians. Morales was part of a field of candidates that included former president Carlos Mesa Gisbert, businessman-turned-senator Óscar Ortiz, and evangelical minister Chi Hyun Chung.

Early election returns, reported after about four-fifths of the votes had been counted, showed that Morales was the likely winner but that his lead over his principal rival for power, Mesa, had not reached the necessary threshold to prevent a runoff election. A roughly 24-delay followed the release of those results, after which it was announced that Morales had since rallied to achieve a victory margin just over the 10 percent required to eliminate the need for a runoff. Allegations of fraud were widespread and escalated in the coming weeks, during which sometimes violent protest and strikes paralyzed the country.

In the face this tumult, Morales remained intransigent. On November 10, however, the Organization of American States (OAS) reported that it had concluded that irregularities had taken place in the election and called for the results to be annulled. Later that day, Morales resigned, responding to a request from Gen. Williams Kaliman, the commander in chief of the Bolivian armed forces, that he do so. As he left office, Morales continued to maintain that there had been no wrongdoing, and he claimed that he had been the victim of a coup. Soon after, he fled to exile in Mexico. Sen. Jeanine Áñez, the deputy leader of the Chamber of Senators, became interim president in the wake of the resignations of the vice president and the leaders of the Chamber of Senators and Chamber of Deputies, allies of Morales.

Áñez promised to hold new elections within 90 days, but they were not scheduled to take place until May 3. In the meantime, her right-wing administration was accused of brutally suppressing pro-Morales demonstrations, which resulted in the deaths of a number of protesters. When the coronavirus pandemic that was sweeping the globe at the beginning of 2020 hit Bolivia especially hard—overwhelming Bolivian hospitals and generating one of the world’s highest per capita death rates—the election was delayed until September 6. Áñez herself contracted COVID-19 (the disease caused by the coronavirus). Critics accused her of mishandling the health crisis and exploiting it to cling to power and, further, of trying to stymie her political opponents rather than facilitating the fairness of the upcoming election, which was rescheduled again for October 18. At the same time, some international organizations began to question the accuracy of the OAS’s assessment of the November 2019 election.

From his exile in Argentina, Morales played an active role in MAS’s campaign for the 2020 election, handpicking his former finance minister, Luis Arce, as the party’s presidential candidate. When preference polling indicated that Arce was leading the crowded field, Áñez ended her own candidacy, and Mesa, running again, became the most formidable candidate from the right or centre. When all the votes were counted, Arce had garnered more than 55 percent of the vote, compared with only about 29 percent for Mesa, thus precluding a runoff. Arce took pains to stress his independence from Morales, but, with the left ready to retake power, Morales’s return from exile seemed likely.