Capitalism for All

Bombing seven boats allegedly laden with drugs in the Caribbean, killing at least thirty people, Donald Trump hints at a repetition of Operation Just Cause, this time in Venezuela. (In December 1989, President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama and captured the president and former CIA contract agent, Manuel Noriega, on the pretext of combating international drug trafficking.) Never mind that the United States’ close ally in South America, Ecuador, is a major player, while Venezuela is not. Trump also hints at following the path forged by Woodrow Wilson and General John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, who, in 1916, led US troops in a futile invasion of Mexico in search of Pancho Villa.

In Bolivia, meanwhile, the far-right presidential candidate, Jorge Quiroga, who pledged fealty to Trump, the IMF and the US Treasury, came second in the first round of voting in August, with 26.7 per cent, and advanced to the run-off promising to bring in Brazilian Federal Police to fight the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital), South America’s largest and best organised criminal conglomerate, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra and the Amazonian lowlands.

He also said he would ditch contracts with Russia and China so the US could exploit Bolivia’s lithium; arrest the socialist former president Evo Morales (2006-19) and his inner circle; bring the DEA back in; repair relations with Israel; and copy Javier Milei’s ideas about the complete privatisation of public goods and services.

Polls from late September and early October showed Quiroga with an 8 per cent lead. On Sunday, 19 October, however, he took only 45.4 per cent of the vote to the Christian Democratic Rodrigo Paz Pereira’s 54.6 per cent, on an 86 per cent turnout.

Quiroga was vice-president under General Hugo Bánzer, the former dictator (1971-78) elected president in 1997 with only 22 per cent of the vote; in 2001, Bánzer resigned for health reasons and Quiroga served out his term as interim president. He is close to Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was president from 1993 to 1997 and elected again in 2002, also with 22 per cent of the vote, narrowly defeating Morales, only to be overthrown in an Indigenous-led insurrection in 2003.

Sánchez de Lozada took off for the US and now lives outside Washington, DC. His one-time defence minister, Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, is active in Spanish-language media in Miami. In April 2021, a US federal court ordered the two to pay $10 million to the families of the victims of extrajudicial killings committed in 2003. (Attempts to extradite both men to Bolivia failed.)

Quiroga is a restorationist of the militarised neoliberal regime. He lost the 2005 election to Morales (who won nearly 54 per cent of the vote) and ran unsuccessfully against him again in 2014. He has lost once more. Even with the splintering and near-disappearance of the Movimento al Socialismo, Quiroga and his backers in the east will not be able to roll back MAS policies.

Everyone knew the MAS era had come to an end. Morales tried to run although he was barred from doing so, campaigning instead for the casting of null votes, which amounted to nearly 20 per cent in the first round. The incumbent, Luis Arce, Morales’s former finance minister, lacked a broad constituency, in part because of his record in office.

Aside from a brief jump in 2022, gas exports have been in decline since 2014. Foreign currency reserves have fallen by 93 per cent since 2022. There are food and fuel shortages. In May, Arce decided against running for re-election, and in June Bolivia had the highest monthly inflation rate in Latin America – worse than Argentina or Venezuela – not seen since the hyperinflationary period of the early 1980s. The price of staples has gone up by over 18 per cent this year.

MAS lost all 21 of its seats in the Senate and held onto only two in the lower house (down from 75, a commanding majority). Its presidential candidate took 3.1 per cent in the first round. A new left-wing opposition is more likely to regroup and rebuild around Andrónico Rodríguez and his supporters in the Alianza Popular, who include Morales’s former vice-president Álvaro García Linera and Félix Patzi, a former governor of La Paz.

As for the new president, Paz Pereira was educated by Jesuits in Spain and holds an MA in Political Administration from American University in DC. His father, Jaime Paz Zamora, was president from 1989 to 1993 and his great-uncle, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, served three terms (1952-56, 1960-64 and 1985-89). Like them, Paz is a political chameleon; an outgoing senator, he has previously been a deputy in the lower house and mayor of Tarija. He started out with a financial adviser as his running mate, and no political history in the western districts of La Paz, Oruro and Potosí (with a large Aymara population), which he carried by margins of 20 to 30 per cent, or the mostly Quechua-speaking highland valleys in Cochabamba and Sucre, which he took by 8 to 15 per cent.

Part of Paz’s success lies with his ultimate choice of running mate, Edmand Lara, a forty-year-old lawyer and former police captain in Santa Cruz, who was raised in a small town in Cochabamba. He became famous for his TikTok videos about police corruption, and knows how to speak a different language from that of either the middle-class doctores or the coca growers’ leaders.

The two ran a strong campaign in El Alto and La Paz, as well as the cities, small towns and hamlets of the western highlands and highland valleys more generally, in part by appealing to voters’ material interests. They call their platform ‘capitalism for all’ – ‘national, democratic and popular’ – and it represents partial continuity with MAS policies rather than a clear break. Although neoliberal austerity is likely to make a comeback, Paz has rejected the idea of turning to the IMF and says he intends to renegotiate Bolivia’s debt.

Paz is promising pension increases as well as benefits for schoolchildren and for stay-at-home mothers, but he wants to end fuel subsidies and to sell off unprofitable state enterprises (to Bolivian rather than multinational corporations). He’s also offering more tax breaks and subsidies for business, lower tariffs on imports, and demanding greater transparency about the lithium deals that Arce signed with China and Russia.

Lara’s reach among young alteños was key to Paz’s success. The heterogeneous urban vote, with a new Aymara-Quechua bourgeoisie that is partly the product of MAS policies, was up for grabs. MAS and Morales did well among these constituencies in their first decade in power, but support has since fallen away. Unlike the other candidates – Rodríguez’s background, like Morales’s, is in the coca growers’ trade union confederation – Paz and Lara spoke a language, and suggested specific policies, that resonated with these urban majorities, and rural pluralities, in the western highlands and highland valleys. These voters continue to define electoral outcomes in Bolivia.