THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020 41
“I’m not a metaphor.”• •
ace, as it is known, earned its name in
1875, when an angry mob torched it in
an attempted coup. Its replacement, a
pink-and-white neocolonial structure,
has survived intact, but in 1946 the re-
formist President Gualberto Villarroel
was murdered there in another mob at-
tack, his body hurled from a balcony
and then hanged from a street lamp in
the plaza below. The street lamp still
stands, flanked by a plaque commem-
orating Villarroel’s death. The plaza, a
quiet place with shade trees and balloon
venders, is named for Pedro Domingo
Murillo, a Creole patriot who sparked
Bolivia’s war of independence against
Spain, in 1809. Soon afterward, he was
captured by royalist troops and hanged.
As if to repudiate this ugly history,
Morales built a skyscraper, called the
Great House of the People, to serve as
a headquarters for his “democratic and
cultural revolution.” A gleaming rect-
angle of glass and steel, the Great House
rises twenty-nine stories above the old
palace, and contains the Presidential
offices and living quarters, along with
several government ministries. Morales’s
political opponents criticized the con-
struction, which cost some thirty-four
million dollars, as an extravagant van-
ity project. After he fled, the new com-
munications minister led a press tour
of his chambers, which she derided as
“worthy of an Arab sheikh.” News pho-
tographs showed a spacious but rather
sterile bedroom and a marble-lined
bathroom with a Jacuzzi—a nice place,
but not much more luxurious than a
Sheraton Four Points.
Áñez had rejected the Great House
and installed herself in the Palacio Que-
mado. I waited for her there in a receiv-
ing room, watched over by a gilt-framed
portrait of Simon Bolívar, the country’s
namesake. As Áñez and her entourage
arrived, a soldier and a plainclothes
bodyguard took up protective positions:
one behind her, the other by a window
overlooking the plaza. A man in a busi-
ness suit introduced himself as Erick
Foronda, Áñez’s private secretary. When
I said that he looked familiar, he dead-
panned, “That must be because I am a
C.I.A. agent.” Foronda had been an ad-
viser at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz for
more than two decades. Morales, who
often accused the U.S. of covertly med-
dling in Bolivia, expelled the AmericanAmbassador and the Drug Enforce-
ment Administration in 2008, and the
U.S. Agency for International Devel-
opment in 2013. That year, Morales
claimed that, while he was returning
from an official visit to Russia, the U.S.
government ordered his Presidential jet
diverted to Vienna, on the suspicion
that he was sneaking Edward Snowden
into Bolivia with him. (He wasn’t.)
During the first two years of the
Trump Administration, Foronda lived
in Washington. Now Morales’s allies
were portraying his presence in the pal-
ace as indisputable evidence that the
U.S. had supported a coup. In January,
Radio Habana Cuba ran a story titled
“Áñez’s Private Secretary Insures the
Subordination of Bolivia to Washing-
ton.” Although the story was full of im-
plausible assertions—it suggested that
the U.S. had forced out Morales in order
to secure Bolivia’s supply of lithium—
Áñez’s government was unabashedly
right-wing. She had swiftly expelled
Venezuelan diplomats and Cuban doc-
tors, accusing them of financing pro-Mo-
rales mobs. The first ruler to congratu-
late her on her Presidency was Brazil’s
far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro; the sec-ond was Donald Trump. (In the U.S.,
left-leaning sympathizers such as Ber-
nie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez decried what they saw as a coup.)
The palace was chilly during our
meeting, and Áñez wore a black coat
over a black dress. She spoke in a soft
but firm voice, explaining that she had
a sore throat from talking too much.
What happened in Bolivia, she said, had
been a “liberation” from Morales’s pol-
itics of class division and hatred. “This
was fourteen years of dictatorship, four-
teen years of lies, fourteen years of op-
pression, from which we are trying to
free Bolivians, to bring about a transi-
tion that can become a new starting
point, a place where no one prohibits
us from thinking differently,” she said.
I asked Áñez if her appearance with
the Bible at the Palacio Quemado might
have alarmed Morales’s loyalists by sig-
nalling her allegiance to the far right.
“I am a woman who is close to the Bible,
and I am close to God,” she said fer-
vently. “If that means I am an ultra-right-
ist, then I must be one.” She asserted
that more than eighty per cent of Bo-
livians were also “people of faith,” and
MA accused Morales of “not believing in