THENEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 49
is a constant dialectic, not permanent,
and there are advances and also reverses.”
Morales’s speech had reinforced his
bid to remain the de-facto leader of Bo-
livia. But, from exile, he seemed far more
able to divide the country than to lead
it. I asked Salvatierra what she thought
about his promise to come back, despite
the government’s threat to arrest him.
She said, “The President’s leadership
will not be diminished if he is impris-
oned.” She reminded me that Morales
had always presented himself as a rev-
olutionary, and added, “If he is arrested,
we’ll mobilize.”
T
wo blocks downhill from the Great
House of the People, an unusual
sculpture stands in the median of a busy
street: a memorial to wartime defeat. It
features a bronze tableau of a shirtless
soldier, dying with his gun in his hand.
A message spray-painted on the mar-
ble base dedicates the monument “to
those fallen for democracy.” Next to it,
an embankment planted in multicol-
ored flowers spells out “Honor and glory.”
One evening in La Paz, the former
senior MAS official suggested that his
country’s impasse was rooted in its his-
tory of defeat. Except for a few inter-
nal uprisings—a U.S.-assisted campaign
that crushed Che Guevara’s guerrillas,
in 1967, and a couple of indigenous re-
volts quelled by massacres, in the nine-
teenth century—Bolivia had lost every
war it engaged in. In the War of the
Pacific, in the eighteen-seventies, it lost
its coastline to its neighbor Chile. In
the Chaco War, in the nineteen-thir-
ties, it surrendered another huge swath
of territory to Paraguay. “Our defeats
are what made us different,” the official
said. “It doesn’t matter to us if we lose.
The thing we take pride from is our
bravery in fighting back, in resisting.”
In recent weeks, it has become clear
that neither side intends to give up the
fight. Morales, who has moved to Ar-
gentina, has called for the founding of
civilian militias in Bolivia. (After a media
uproar, he retracted the statement, say-
ing that he had always “defended life and
peace.”) Áñez expelled the Spanish and
Mexican Ambassadors, whom she sus-
pected of conspiring to sneak Morales
loyalists out of the country. Mauricio
Claver-Carone, a Cuban-American who
is the National Security Council’s senior
director for Western Hemisphere affairs,
showed up in La Paz to discuss new aid
agreements with Áñez, while chiding Ar-
gentina’s government for allowing Mo-
rales to “foment violence.” In Washing-
ton, Erick Foronda and Arturo Murillo
posed for photographs with Marco Rubio.
Elections are scheduled for May, and
Morales announced his favored candi-
date: his former economy minister, Luis
Arce. Áñez, who had invited USAID back,
to give “technical aid” with the elections,
announced that she, too, would run for
President. There was backlash from the
political class: her minister of commu-
nications quit, saying that Áñez was fol-
lowing Evo’s playbook, and the former
candidate Carlos Mesa protested. But
the military, under a new commander
appointed by Áñez, expressed no con-
cern as her “interim government” tried
to make itself permanent.
Morales’s alleged electoral fraud, and
his party’s acceptance of new elections
without him, makes it difficult to call
his ouster a coup. Añez’s behavior makes
it hard not to. In addition to the vio-lence committed by security forces, her
government announced early this year
that it would investigate nearly six hun-
dred former members of Morales’s ad-
ministration. According to the United
Nations, at least a hundred and sixty
people, including senior officials, have
been prosecuted or detained, on accu-
sations that range from corruption and
terrorism to “making illegal appoint-
ments.” In January, Áñez, urging unity
in the elections, warned the country not
to allow “the savages to return to power.”
Marcela Araúz, the former MAS com-
munications director, complained of the
“blindness of Bolivia’s middle class,”
who supported the new status quo “but
who don’t seem to get that Evo’s fraud
doesn’t mean there wasn’t a coup.” There
was real persecution happening in Bo-
livia, she said, and she was outraged at
the media silence about it. Like others
I spoke to, Araúz felt certain that a right-
wing regime would do whatever was
necessary to triumph in the elections:
“Now that they have the control, they
are not going to let it go.”