The political dispute between Evo Morales and the president, Luis Arce, is played out in the courts. This Wednesday, a prosecutor requested the arrest of the former president in a case of alleged rape and trafficking of minors. The order was immediately voided, because the prosecutor was dismissed by her boss, Juan Lanchipa, a man close to Morales. The defense said that the investigation is based on “data from social networks” and denounced that their client is being harassed by the justice system. Added to the failed arrest request was another investigation into the origin of the Toyota truck that Morales uses for his transportation. Former Minister of Justice Iván Lima denounced, before leaving office days ago, that the vehicle was acquired by the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) for $90,000 and immediately resold to a 21-year-old girl for less than a sixth of her worth. Lima spoke of a “foreign intervention in Bolivian politics.” Bolivia lives day by day the consequences of the fracture between Morales and Arce, its political dolphin.
Morales used the van to travel from the coca-growing region of Chapare, where he lives, to the March to Save Bolivia, the protest he organized two weeks ago to show mass strength before the Government and demand his authorization for the 2025 elections. During this march, which took seven days to travel 189 kilometers and reach La Paz, several leaders of the ruling party and the opposition called for the arrest of Morales, certain that the majority of the population would support this outcome. In the end, the entry into La Paz of Morales’s faithful, who were applauded in the peripheral neighborhoods, was peaceful, their leaders avoided confronting the police and the former president was able to return calmly to his home in Chapare.
The fight between Morales and Arce has been escalating incessantly since he did not mention his mentor in his inauguration speech as president, on November 8, 2020. Arce maintains that the rift occurred due to Evo’s “uncontrollable ambition for power.” ” and his desire to turn him “into a puppet.” For his part, Morales compares Arce to Lenin Moreno, the Ecuadorian president who came to power at the hands of his predecessor, Rafael Correa, and then broke. “I was wrong about Lucho,” he said several times.
In the third edition of his book on the Bolivian economic model, published in 2020, Arce, then a presidential candidate, recognized Morales as “the executor” and “the one who made the political decision to make a change… which meant discarding the old model.” neoliberal and implement one made in Bolivia”. The person who had “made” this new model was Arce himself, Morales’ companion in the Economy portfolio from 2006 to 2019. Such was the identification between the two that they spoke interchangeably of “Evonomics” and “Arcenomics” to describe the extraordinary results. financial institutions of a country that was not used to standing out for its success in this matter.
Four years later, and with the Bolivian economy failing, both leaders blame each other: “When I was Minister of Economy [Luis Arce] “He valued and recognized the successes of the model implemented by our government… and now he ignores them to justify the dismal economic results of his administration,” Morales posted in X on September 11. For his part, Arce attributes the current economic disasters to the fact that Morales “did not take care of the nationalization” of hydrocarbons and allowed the oil reserves to dry up. Bolivia today has to import around 3 billion dollars of fuel each year and that is why it suffers a trade deficit that, added to capital flight, has wiped out foreign currencies. Without dollars, Bolivia is very tight. There is a semi-corralito on bank deposits denominated in dollars and an incipient but unequivocal rise in prices. Until now, the country has been saved from entering default of its external debt, but cannot access unconditional external financing.
Neither of the co-authors of the economic model has proposed changing it, but Morales is the more pragmatic of the two: he has spoken of reviewing fuel subsidies, which increase demand and promote smuggling of gasoline to neighboring countries, where its price is three times larger. Morales also has better relations with businessmen, who did very well during his 14 years in office. The memory of that time of prosperity keeps him strong in the polls, although locked in the lower-income sectors, while Arce’s approval has plummeted.
The underlying issue is that both Arce and Morales are vying for the leadership of the Bolivian left. Arce assures that Evo Morales is constitutionally prevented from running in new elections. He defends the thesis, which appears tangentially in a 2023 ruling by the Constitutional Court, that discontinuous reelection (leaving a period of time between two terms) is prohibited by the Constitution. The only reelection allowed, according to Arce, is “a continuous one.” This enables him, who has not ruled out running despite his current weakness in the polls.
Morales considers the TCP ruling inconclusive and remembers that discontinuous re-election was always allowed in Bolivia before the approval of the 2009 Constitution. At the same time, he has pointed out that the “arcistas” want to “kill the MAS”, the governing party. . Both wings seek that the electoral and judicial institutions recognize them as the only ones with the right to use the acronym. Since Morales has the party leadership, his rivals have not achieved their goal so far. At the same time, the former president cannot call congresses, because he needs the agreement of the social organizations that are in the hands of “arcism.” The result is that the party’s acronym may be eliminated from next year’s electoral competition.
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