“I broke him, but now he wants to pursue a career in standup.”badges from their uniforms and burn-
ing them. “Naturally, a great uprising is
under way to restore the honor of our
patriotic symbols,” he said.) But they ac-
counted for only a handful of deaths—
roughly equal to the number of Morales
supporters killed by opposition mobs.
The security forces killed at least nine-
teen people, and reports suggest that the
total could be considerably larger.
Amid the violence, nine senior offi-
cials took refuge in the Mexican Em-
bassy in La Paz, while others with links
to Morales fled the country. When I
asked Murillo about reports of perse-
cution of MAS members, he grew testy.
“We aren’t going after just anybody—
just the terrorists, seditious people, those
who want to hurt our country,” he said,
his voice rising to a menacing shout.
“We are going to persecute them, with
a very hard hand.” He went on, “What
is persecuting them most is their own
conscience, no? They know they’ve
killed, they know they’ve burned. They
know they’ve stolen and they know
they’ve cheated the people. There are
many that have to pay a debt to the fa-
therland. And debts are paid, sooner
or later.”
In Murillo’s view, the person who
owed the greatest debt to Bolivia was
Evo Morales. He said that his intelli-
gence services had uncovered evidence
that Morales had turned the country
into a “narcoterrorist state.” He spoke
of Venezuelan agents sent in as terror-
ist provocateurs, part of a vast hemi-
spheric conspiracy run out of Cuba.
Drug arrests had increased since Mo-
rales left, he said, showing that his ad-
ministration had “only detained those
who weren’t friends with the govern-
ment.” Murillo said, “We’re going to do
everything we can so that he pays for
his crimes in prison.”I
n December, Áñez’s attorney general
accused Morales of sedition and ter-
rorism, and asked Interpol to issue a
warrant for his arrest. As evidence, the
government released a recording of a
phone call, allegedly made during the
crisis, in which Morales could be heard
ordering a union leader to tighten the
MAS blockade. “No food should be get-ting into the cities,” he said. “Let’s block
them, really cut them off.”
When I met Morales in Mexico City,
later that month, he waved away the
news of the Interpol warrant. “They have
done everything to me that’s possible to
do,” he said, laughing dismissively. When
he was a cocalero leader and a congress-
man, the government had tortured him
and imprisoned him for his activism.
“What more can they do—throw me in
jail?” he said. “I’ve been there already.”
Morales was being housed on a Mex-
ican military base with restricted access,
so we met instead at a villa that dou-
bled as the headquarters of the Vene-
zuelan state television station. We sat
under a tree in a small walled garden.
Morales, dressed in a wool jacket and
chinos, spoke volubly but wore a watch-
ful expression. He seemed unable to
conceive of a life away from Bolivia, es-
pecially one in which he no longer had
a role in steering its destiny.
When Morales became President,
many people in the business commu-
nity feared that he would install an un-
compromising revolutionary regime. In
his office, a painting of the Aymara guer-
rilla Túpac Katari hung on the wall,
along with portraits of Fidel Castro and
Nelson Mandela. Instead, his adminis-
tration had focussed on development.
Morales explained to me that, early in
his political life, “I once had a long meet-
ing with Comandante Fidel Castro.”
From midnight until five or six in the
morning, Castro lectured him about so-
cial policies, as Morales grew increas-
ingly bored. “Finally, I dared to ask him,
‘Fidel, where do you buy weapons from
for the revolution?’ And he said, ‘Evo,
no, no, no!’” Instead of armed insurrec-
tion, Castro wanted him to concentrate
on education and health. “It made me
think,” Morales said.
Morales pointed out that, in 1978, the
year he performed his compulsory mil-
itary service, there were three different
Presidents, and the following year there
were four. “Without political stability,
it was impossible to think of develop-
ing Bolivia,” he said. Under his admin-
istration, he boasted, “we became the
first country in economic growth in all
of South America. Before, Bolivia had
only ever been first in poverty and cor-
ruption.” He nationalized the country’s
natural resources, and tried to bring