THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020 47
chief of staff during the transition pe-
riod, said that he had noted a rift among
Morales’s followers, “between the
hard-liners who opposed any negotia-
tions and those who were open to dia-
logue.” He had been in constant nego-
tiation with the pro-dialogue faction,
which had quickly agreed to help stop
the violence; later, a majority of mas
legislators voted to ratify Morales’s res-
ignation. Justiniano gloated, “They’re
negotiating because they could see there
was no chance of success in persisting
with the violent confrontation, and that
is also a tacit acknowledgment of the
legitimacy of this government.”
Before working for Áñez, Justiniano
was a prominent lawyer from the op-
position stronghold of Santa Cruz.
(Controversially, he led the defense for
two members of the Wolfpack, a group
of five young men who were accused of
a gang rape.) I asked him about the ac-
cusations that, even if Morales had com-
mitted electoral fraud, the new admin-
istration had responded with what
amounted to a military putsch. Justini-
ano laughed and said that the com-
plaints reminded him of a passage from
“Don Quixote”—apocryphal, it turns
out—in which the knight-errant tells
his sidekick, “Let the dogs bark, San-
cho. It’s a sign that we’re advancing.”
I
n La Paz, politicians seemed ready
for a grudging compromise, but in
the indigenous country of the altiplano
the mood remained defiant. Evo’s home
village of Orinoca lies six hours by car
from La Paz. Orinoca comprises only
a few hundred people, but on its out-
skirts looms a massive concrete-and-
glass building of sharply angled geom-
etry: the Museum of the Cultural and
Democratic Revolution, which Morales
built, at a cost of seven million dollars,
to present the country’s history from
the indigenous point of view. On a dirt
lane outside the museum, I met an an-
cient woman, who was tending a herd
of llamas. She wore an Evo campaign
T-shirt that read “The people say yes.”
She had lived her whole life in Orinoca,
she said, but she had been to La Paz a
few times, to show support for Morales
in rallies and demonstrations. When I
asked how she felt about the political
change that Áñez had brought to the
country, she replied with a baseless but
widespread insult: “That whore. I hear
she used to sell her body for money.”
She hoped Evo would be back in power
soon. He had been good for the people
of the altiplano.
Morales’s opponents accused him,
not unfairly, of favoring the altiplano,
but his efforts also helped redress a his-
toric injustice. After the brutal Spanish
conquest, indigenous Bolivians were
subjected to a feudal labor system that
remained in place until the nine-
teen-fifties, and were effectively denied
the vote. Even after laws changed, ra-
cial attitudes remained deeply en-
trenched, and indigenous citizens lived
mostly in poverty, without access to land
titles, bank loans, university education,
or government jobs.
Morales made such reforms his pri-
ority. But, as indigenous Bolivians pros-
pered, the white population felt ex-
cluded. Albarracín suggested that
Morales had overseen a clash of basic
ideals: “Western values versus the in-
digenous cosmovision.”
El Alto is effectively the capital of
indigenous Bolivia. A bare-bones sprawl
on the brown plain that begins at the
La Paz crater’s edge and extends to the
horizon, the city is predominantly
Aymara, and largely populated by mi-
grants from poor rural areas. It reflects
Bolivia’s indigenous highland culture,
with many of the women dressed in
bowler hats and the bright-colored,
bunched-out skirts called polleras; there
are open-air food markets, hard-drink-
ing bars, and a rough red-light district.
Thirty-five years ago, El Alto was
little more than a huddle of adobe dwell-
ings and market stalls. After the boom
of the Evo years, it has a million inhab-
itants, and an exuberant local architec-
ture, with façades covered in colorful
glass and rooflines that jut out at ec-
centric angles. One new apartment
building that I walked past had a tow-
ering replica of the Statue of Liberty
incorporated into its upper floors.
Alexis Argüello, a thirty-three-year-
old bookseller, told me that for most of
his life he was ashamed to tell people
that he was from El Alto. Gradually, the
shame had been replaced by something
like pride. A few years ago, he launched
a small publishing imprint to showcase
local writers. “For all of Evo’s despotism
and his government’s faults, he helped
create a new middle class from among
people with more copper-colored skin,”
Argüello said. He had all but forgotten
the indignities of life before, “such as
the need to explain myself to police.”
Under the new administration, though,
policemen had again begun antagoniz-
ing young men from El Alto.
For Áñez, antagonizing the indige-
nous is a significant risk. Although in-
creasing numbers of Bolivians identify as
mestizo, the population remains heavily
indigenous, and the community’s parti-
sans are not easily intimidated. On El
Alto’s streets, effigies dangle from nooses
attached to street lights, with placards
that warn potential criminals of “popu-
lar justice.” One sign said “Rats Who Are
Caught Will Be Hanged and Burned.”
Bolivia has a long history of orga-
nized protest, notably by miners and by
the cocaleros whom Morales once rep-
resented, who assert their influence with
marches, blockades, and street battles
with police. Demonstrating miners often
throw dynamite sticks, and deaths and
injuries are not uncommon. In 2016,
Morales’s vice-minister of the interior
went to a roadblock to negotiate with
striking miners; they kidnapped him
and tortured him to death.
In recent months, some of these same
uncompromising partisans have come
to Morales’s defense. When he accused
Áñez of fomenting a coup, hundreds of
Aymara militants wearing red ponchos
swarmed down the mountainside into
La Paz, chanting, “Civil war now!” After
the massacre at the Senkata gas facil-
ity, pro-Evo mobs destroyed seven of
El Alto’s eight police stations.
The city’s policemen regrouped in
the surviving station, in a middle-class
neighborhood on the southern edge of
town, where a sign over the gate read
“Against Evil, for the Good of All.”
During my visit, hundreds of police-
men from the burned-out districts were
there, readying for patrols or taking shifts
sleeping on the floor of an auditorium.
A new police commander, Colonel Juan
Carlos Alarcón, had been brought from
the mining town of Oruro to impose
order on the convulsed city. “It is with
some pain that I take over here,” he told
me. “The job now is to reconcile this
fracture that has opened up between the
society and the police.” I asked him about
the neighborhood around Senkata,
