40 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
O
utside a sports stadium in Co-
chabamba, Bolivia, three men
stood on a plinth, tearing down
a statue of Evo Morales, who until a
few weeks before had been the coun-
try’s President. One man diligently
whacked away with a sledgehammer,
while another shoved at the statue’s
head—crowned, like the man it por-
trays, with a mushroom-shaped mullet
that is distinctive among world leaders.
Finally, the statue came loose, and with
a contemptuous heave the men threw
it to the ground. The sports minister of
the new government, who had helped
with the demolition, told reporters af-
terward that stadiums shouldn’t be
named for delinquents.
Morales had fled Bolivia in Novem-
ber, after he was accused of trying to
steal an election, and the country’s mil-
itary chief publicly suggested that he
resign. Since then, Bolivia had been
fiercely, sometimes violently divided.
Many people spoke of a coup, but there
was enduring disagreement over whether
it had been perpetrated by Morales or
by his opponents. Whoever was to blame,
his departure brought an abrupt end to
one of Latin America’s most remark-
able Presidencies. The son of impover-
ished llama herders, Morales was an
ethnic Aymara, the first indigenous Pres-
ident in a majority-indigenous country.
Although he left school before college
and speaks in rough, heavily accented
Spanish, he managed to hold power for
almost fourteen years. He was a protégé
of Fidel Castro, and perhaps the last
surviving exponent of the Pink Tide—
the leftist leaders who dominated Latin
America’s politics for more than a de-
cade. During his time in office, he trans-
formed Bolivia, reducing poverty by al-
most half and tripling the G.D.P.
Evo, as everyone calls him, is a sturdy,
youthful-looking man of sixty, who
prides himself on outlasting opponents
in soccer matches in Bolivia’s Andean
high altitudes. (During one game, in
2010, he was captured on video delib-
erately kneeing a distracted opponent
in the groin.) As recently as last year,
he claimed to stay fit by doing more
than a thousand sit-ups a day. In the
Presidency, he was tireless, beginning
his workday at 4:45 A.M. and continu-
ing late into the evening. A charismatic
populist, he could also be arrogant and
divisive, given to crass and at times ec-
centric proclamations. On one occasion,
he suggested that eating genetically
modified chicken made people gay. On
another, he had the Congress building
equipped with a “Clock of the South,”
with hands that spun to the left, to sym-
bolize Bolivia’s efforts to “decolonize”
itself. A longtime leader of the coca
growers’ union, Morales used his office
to expound the medicinal properties of
the plant; behind the Presidential desk,
he hung a portrait of Che Guevara,
made out of coca leaves.
After Morales’s contested election,
several of his highest-ranking officials
resigned along with him, including the
three people after him in the line of
Presidential succession. The office was
claimed by a member of the conserva-
tive opposition: Jeanine Áñez, a fifty-
two-year-old former television presenter,
who was then serving in the largely cer-
emonial post of second vice-president
of the Senate. Within two days, Áñez
had been endorsed by the military and
proclaimed herself President, donning
the sash of office as generals looked on
approvingly. She alienated the indige-
nous population just as quickly, leading
a scrum of followers to the Presidential
palace, where she raised an outsized
Bible and declared that she was “return-
ing the Bible to the palace.” Áñez, a
light-skinned blond woman, made
things worse by naming an all-white
cabinet. Following an outcry, she added
an indigenous minister, but by then Mo-
rales’s loyalists had branded her “la mujer
teñida” (“the dyed woman”) or, simply,
“the whore.”
In office, Áñez signed a decree pro-
hibiting “personality cults” in Bolivia’s
institutions, and made it clear that she
intended to purge Morales’s legacy and
his presence from public life. A Presi-
dential employee told me that Áñez had
toured Morales’s former offices, accom-
panied by a man dressed in native robes
and another carrying a Bible. While she
prayed before portraits of Bolivia’s na-
tional heroes, the robed man blew a horn,
as if to chase off evil spirits. The em-
ployee told me that when Áñez encoun-
tered the coca-leaf portrait of Che she
grew visibly upset and ordered it removed.
Áñez and her allies argued that Mo-
rales had turned the country into a so-
cialist autocracy, and that only by remov-
ing him could it heal. Morales, from exile
in Mexico, insisted that he had created
modern Bolivia—that the nation effec-
tively didn’t exist without him. When I
spoke to him this winter, in one of a se-
ries of conversations, Morales described
Bolivia’s tradition of political instability.
In a hundred and ninety-five years as an
independent republic, it has seen no fewer
than a hundred and ninety revolutions
and coups; Morales’s ouster was argu-
ably the latest one. “They said my gov-
ernment was authoritarian because I was
President for a long time,” he told me.
“They called me ‘Dictator Evo Morales,’
but now the Bolivian people can see what
it’s like to live in a dictatorship, what it
is to live with a coup d’état.” Morales ar-
gued that he should be allowed to come
back and finish his term. Failing that, he
assured me, his bloc—the Movement
Toward Socialism, or MAS—would re-
sume control of Bolivia one way or an-
other. “I will return, and we will be mil-
lions,” he said. He was paraphrasing the
last words of one of his heroes, the
eighteenth-century anti-colonial rebel
Túpac Katari, just before he was pulled
to pieces by four Spanish horses.
O
ne afternoon, as I waited outside
the Presidential palace to meet
Áñez, a young man walked up and os-
tentatiously spat on the ground next to
me. He seemed, perhaps understandably,
to have mistaken me for an American
official, there to assist the new regime.
It was early December, three weeks
after the collapse of Morales’s govern-
ment, and Bolivia remained polarized.
In the wealthier neighborhoods of La
Paz, the graffiti called Morales an assas-
sin, a dictator, a narco; in the poorer, more
indigenous districts, slogans proclaimed
“Evo Sí” and “Áñez Fascista.” Two blocks
from the palace was a spray-painted mes-
sage, “Alert: They are killing us,” which
could have come from either camp.
The Palacio Quemado, or Burnt Pal-
