Dated posters depict former president Evo Morales along a sidewalk in El Alto, Bolivia, Oct. 17, 2020, the day before an election that will choose a new president. Photo / Tyler Hicks, New York Times
Dated posters depict former president Evo Morales along a sidewalk in El Alto, Bolivia, Oct. 17, 2020, the day before an election that will choose a new president. Photo / Tyler Hicks, New York Times
Adalid Zelada fully supported Evo Morales when Bolivia chose him as the country's first Indigenous president in 2005.
The way many saw it, large numbers of Bolivians were painfully poor, society was deeply unequal and power was overwhelmingly concentrated among the white elite. Morales, a socialist and former llama herder,spoke of equality, ending discrimination and recovering the nation's resources from foreign hands.
"They were very good ideas," said Zelada, 47. "But over time, it all became an authoritarian strategy to co-opt power. And those good ideas became just words."
As Bolivians went to the polls Sunday to choose a new president, the election is widely viewed as a referendum on the 14-year political project of Morales, a towering figure in Bolivian politics who lifted hundreds of thousands out of poverty but whose policies and rhetoric often divided the country.
In recent years, even supporters began to abandon him amid allegations of misuse of funds, abuse of power and, more recently, a sexual relationship with a minor.
He fled Bolivia last year after his attempt to win a fourth term ended in a contested election and deadly protests. Morales called it a coup. Others accused his government of trying to rig the vote.
Voting in Bolivia is mandatory, and on Sunday lines began to form outside schools converted into precincts before polling places opened at 8 a.m. Soon, patios filled with voters, who entered classrooms one by one to fill out paper ballots then dropped their votes in cardboard boxes, to be counted by hand later that night.
The line outside a polling station at a school in El Alto, Bolivia. Photo / Tyler Hicks, New York Times
Many called the moment critical, and said they had arrived despite fears of the coronavirus. "This is going to define our country's destiny," said Enrique Huanca, 58.
Sunday is a redo of last year's election and comes at a time of deep polarisation, at a level notable even for a country accustomed to division and unrest. In the weeks leading up the election, the United Nations has documented at least 41 acts of political violence.
In the streets of La Paz, the administrative capital, there is little agreement about whether there was electoral fraud last year. And Morales' party, the Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS, is casting doubt on the voting system, warning supporters of almost certain "electoral fraud" and a process stacked against them.
A recent poll by the nongovernmental organisation Fundación Jubileo found that just 40% of Bolivians trust the country's electoral body, despite major efforts to overhaul it since last year.
It could take days for results to come in.
And when the count is announced, large swaths of the country is likely to be angry, political observers say, and violence is a real possibility.
The vote is largely a choice between Morales' hand-picked successor, his former economics minister, Luis Arce, and Carlos Mesa, a centrist former president.
Arce's appeal to voters is that he can continue the socialist movement his predecessor started — while being very different from Morales.
In the back of his campaign car just before the election, he called Morales' decision to run for a fourth term "an error," insisted that he would run for only a single term and said he considered himself a transitional candidate.
"I have no interest in power," he said. "I want to move the country forward, leave it in the hands of young people, and I'll go."
Morales, he added, would have no part in his government. "We see him as a historical figure."
Mesa is running as the anti-Morales candidate, promising a return to peace after years of political and social division.
Morales' wrongdoings, he added, had been papered over by journalists and left-wing politicians "who have a fascination with the fact that he was the first Indigenous president."
"We are the only political force in this country with the ability to begin reconciliation, heal the wounds and construct a space of unity," he said.
Military police in La Paz, Bolivia, on Saturday, Oct. 17, 2020, the day before an election that will choose a new president. Photo / Tyler Hicks, New York Times
A third candidate, Luis Fernando Camacho, threatens to split the conservative vote, pushing Arce and Mesa to a potential runoff.
In the streets of La Paz last week, much of the conversation was not about Arce, Mesa or Camacho — but about the legacy Morales leaves behind.
During Morales' time in office, he promised to lift many living on the margins, and in some places fulfilled that promise, building schools, hospitals and roads. The country's poverty rate fell to 35% of the population from 60%, according to World Bank figures.
But Zelada, the disillusioned Morales supporter, said he ultimately felt that the former president wasted his chance to truly transform the country. Morales ran Bolivia amid a commodities boom — with money pouring into the country — and his party controlled Congress for all 14 years of his presidency.
The president could have done so much more, Zelada said. He plans to vote for Mesa.
In the city of El Alto, a MAS stronghold perched above the capital, there were plenty of people who said they were voting for Arce and said they remained faithful to Morales. "He governed well," said Luisa Álvarez, 40.
But at one precinct, Miguelina Sanabria, 59, sat in a wooden chair on the second floor, explaining how she had gone from longtime MAS supporter to Mesa voter. She grew up in Chapare, the jungle region of Bolivia where Morales got his political start, and appreciated that he was from the countryside and that he had tried to help women like her.
In his third term, though, she began to turn against him when, she said, he seemed unwilling to give up power. This year, she is jobless and angry, and looking for something new.
"He just kept going," she said of Morales. "He didn't leave space for younger leaders. He wanted to run everything."
She raised her voice. It seemed she wanted voters around her to hear. "I decided to switch to Mesa," she went on. "I hope he doesn't let me down, too."
