Bolivia suffers the political divorce between Luis Arce and Evo Morales

Luis Arce and Evo Morales during a meeting of the Movement Towards Unionism party, in Buenos Aires, in February 2020. AGUSTIN MARCARIAN (Reuters)

More than 1,600 Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended this week in Bolivia.

The owner of both companies, Meta, made the decision for having detected an alleged "coordinated activity" to disseminate messages related to the Government and silence opposition accounts.

Among the rain of criticism that fell on the Government of Luis Arce, from the Movement for Socialism (MAS), the most notorious came from the president of his party.

Evo Morales, president of the country between 2006 and 2019, accused the government that today is led by his former Minister of Economy of maintaining these accounts to attack him.

According to Morales, the government that he himself promoted after his overthrow in 2018 not only seeks to discredit him, it also does so illegally by triangulating funds with companies that were supposed to be allied with him.

Bolivia is experiencing a factional struggle in the ruling party that only continues to deepen.

The balance is complicated: there are presidential elections in 2025 and the most popular party in the country must define its candidate between the fights between the followers of Morales, today the head of the party, and the followers of President Luis Arce, who occupy the majority of the Government. .

The fight intensifies with threats and mutual accusations, and parliamentarians loyal to Evo Morales have come to block laws requested by the president to deal with the effects of the global economic crisis, which are currently worrying Bolivians.

The fight "is political suicide," as defined by Álvaro García Linera, who was vice president of Morales for 13 years and today is far from politics.

The dispute dates back to the 2020 elections. At that time, Morales was in exile in Argentina and, persecuted by the Bolivian Justice, he could not be a candidate.

He himself chose his former Economy Minister, Luis Arce, a middle-class professional, as his dolphin, going over the "organic" decision of the party.

The MAS rank and file preferred the indigenous leader David Choquehuanca, a declared rival of Morales, who ended up being a vice-presidential candidate.

The presidential campaign showed that Arce and Choquehuanca were compatible: they won the elections with more than 55% of the votes, accepting the widespread demand of the MAS militants for a "renewal", which in fact meant moving away from the "old guard" that accompanied Morales for more than a decade.

Today they are known, precisely, as the "renovators": in the Arce Cabinet there is no important figure from the environment that accompanied Morales during his three governments, between 2006 and 2019.

For Morales' unconditional supporters, who have become strong in party structures, the renovators are "traitors" for questioning the "historical leadership" of the founder and "president for life" of the MAS.

Morales has gone from organizing a massive “march for the homeland” in support of Arce – which for some observers was an attempt to influence him, showing him who possessed the “mass force” – to joining the opposition with denunciations against the ministers. and constant criticism of all areas of government management.

He has even managed the attack by one of his group's deputies against the president's son for allegedly having lobbied

favor of foreign companies interested in Bolivian lithium concessions.

At one point in this process of progressive distancing from both sectors, the followers of the former president began to call themselves "radicals."

Today they denounce alleged government conspiracies to disqualify Morales as a candidate in 2025 and mark ideological differences with respect to Arce, whom they accuse of being "right-wing" and far from the "process of change" led by the MAS.

Unlike Evo Morales, who continually tweets and gives interviews, Arce tries to refer as little as possible to this topic.

He only spoke publicly to claim himself as a convinced MAS militant and to deny that he wants to form another political party.

He has also said that the problems stem from a "personal lust for power."

He is supposed to be talking about Morales.

Division at the bases

An important peasant leader, Omar Ramírez, recognized that the division extends to the bases of the network of unions that make up the organizational skeleton of the MAS.

"We continue to insist that the leaders sit down and talk about these issues because when the grassroots clash it will be difficult to bring them together again later and that is what the right wants," he told local press.

These days, there was a scandal that shows the generalization of the schism.

Martín Choque, a municipal official from the mining town of Uncía, threw a chair away from a stage to prevent former President Morales from sitting on it, while telling him: "You cannot sit next to me, because you have divided."

Subsequently, this official and his wife were beaten by members close to Morales.

Choque had to resign her municipal position and she lost the baby she was expecting.

Although in Bolivia there must be primary elections for the parties to define their candidacies, it is uncertain whether the MAS will resort to them.

At the same time that Morales's control of the party apparatus is ironclad, legal complaints are already being filed against the statutes that give him such control.

The contributions of public officials to the political organization, which were previously, in practice, mandatory, have also been suspended.

The dismissal of officials who sympathize with Evo Morales from state departments has also been denounced.

These allegations have not been officially denied.

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