Image by Lesly Derksen.

Preliminary results of first-round voting for president of Bolivia on August 17 determined that centrist Rodrigo Paz, with 32.1% of the vote, and right-winger Jorge Tuto Quiroga, with 26.9%, will advance to second-round voting on October 19. Not making the cut were conservative billionaire politician Samuel Doria Medina, who gained 20%; leftist Andrónico Rodríguez with 8.1 %, and Eduardo del Castillo, candidate of the Movement for Socialism Party (MAS) with 3.1 % of the vote.

Evo Morales, a founder of the MAS Party and its standard bearer as president from 2006 until 2019 had sought election as an independent contender. Facing overwhelming obstacles, he urged followers to submit a null vote signifying rejection of all candidates. Null votes represented 19.1% of the total.

Current MAS President Luis Arce, former finance minister under President Morales did not run for president. He had scored a 55% majority win for the MAS Party in October 2020.

Rodrigo Paz Pereira, candidate for the Christian Democrat Party, was the election surprise; his ratings in pre-election polling had been low. The U.S.- educated Paz served as mayor of Tarija city and senator for Tarija department. His father, Jaime Paz Zamora, a prominent leader of Bolivia’s Revolutionary Left Movement, democratic socialist in orientation, served as Bolivia’s president in 1989-1993.

Perennial presidential candidate Jorge Tuto Quiroga took undergraduate and graduate degrees in Texas. Formerly vice president of Bolivia, he served as president for a year ending in 2002.

We suggest the dismal performance of the MAS Party, really its collapse, resulted from three highly adverse processes, specifically: insurmountable divisions within the Party, popular discontent over terrible economic conditions, and the intrusive power of dominant sectors of Bolivian society. Any one of these might have led to defeat. Together, they were poison.

Splintering

Evo Morales’s election victory in 2005 was extraordinary. He won overwhelmingly, without a second-round, and was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president. On a roll, he took 64% of the vote in 2009 and 61% in 2014.

Then he stumbled. Morales sought reelection for a constitutionally forbidden third term, despite the failure in 2016 of a constitutional referendum that would have allowed that third term. Even so, in 2019 he ran and won re-election. (The counting of terms had begun with Bolivia’s new Constitution taking effect. Another term, uncounted, had taken place beforehand.)

Troubles multiplied. Morales’s reelection provoked charges of electoral fraud. Violent street protests continued for two weeks. Military pressure on November 10, 2019 forced Morales to abandon the presidency. This was a U.S.-assisted coup carried out by rightwing extremists. Meanwhile, Morales was facing charges of corruption and accusations of having abused an underage female in his care.

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