46 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020
tastes!” In 2011, Morales tried to push a
highway through an indigenous reserve
in the tropical lowland, inspiring pro-
tests so intense that the government had
been forced to back down. Last sum-
mer, forest fires blazed through eastern
Bolivia, ravaging the wilderness known
as La Chiquitania. For weeks, Morales
sat idle, refusing to accept international
aid and blocking Argentine firefighters
from entering the country. By the time
the fires subsided, more than four mil-
lion acres of forest had been scorched.
In La Paz, I visited Morales’s for-
mer office, which suggested a serene re-
move from the details of governance.
His desk was entirely bare. In contrast,
the adjoining office of his Vice-Presi-
dent, Alvaro García Linera, looked as
if he never went home. The desk
overflowed with reports and papers, and
a suit hung from a hook on a filing cab-
inet. Crayon drawings by a young child
were taped to the window.
I met García Linera in a park next to
Avenida Reforma, Mexico City’s grand
central boulevard. A slim, silver-haired
man of fifty-seven, he was dressed in a
neatly cut business suit. His looks are
deceptive: a Marxist theoretician, he once
spent five years in prison for his involve-
ment in the revolutionary Túpac Katari
Guerrilla Army. Conservative Bolivians
despised García Linera, a university-educated white man, as a traitor to their
class. MAS partisans blamed him for abet-
ting Morales’s excesses; militants sus-
pected him of colonialist sympathies. Ev-
eryone suspected that he was the real
brains behind Morales.
García Linera hoped that the “de-
facto regime” of Áñez would soon be
gone, so that MAS could resume the
projects that he and Morales had left
unfinished. But he would not risk re-
turning home anytime soon—not
openly, anyway. When I asked whether
it had been a mistake for him and Mo-
rales to seek a fourth term, he held my
gaze for a long moment, and said, “I’m
sure we made lots of mistakes, but I
think that now is not the right time to
discuss them in public.”O
ne evening, I walked across the plaza
outside Palacio Quemado to Bo-
livia’s legislature, where Morales’s Clock
of the South was still ticking away in re-
verse. Inside, I met with Eva Copa, the
president of the Senate. Copa, an ethnic
Aymara from El Alto, is thirty-three,
with black hair and glasses. A backbench
politician with only five years’ experience,
she was asked by her party to fill in after
all the senior officials departed. She had
assumed a role resembling that of her
American equivalent Nancy Pelosi, hav-
ing to work with a government to which
she was deeply opposed.
After Morales’s fall, mas had retained
the majority in the legislature, but, in
early December, it began negotiating
with the Áñez administration. Copa
discreetly made it clear to me that her
decision to work with “la señora Á ñ e z ”
had been unpopular with the more mil-
itant members. But, Copa explained,
she had seen no other way to end the
crisis, and ordinary Bolivians were suffer-
ing; she herself had young children, and,
at the height of the violence, the MAS
blockade had kept her from going home
to see them for two weeks. She did not
directly criticize Morales, nor did she
mention him much. Later, a former se-
nior MAS official confided, “The quest
for a fourth term was a mistake, and
this is the consequence. We all know it.
They are going to make us pay for it in
the next elections, too. We’re just going
to have to learn from our mistakes, and
hope to survive.”
Jerjes Justiniano, who served as Áñez’sJeanine Áñez, the interim President, says that she brought “liberation.”