On 18 October 2020, Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) won a landslide victory in the country’s long-delayed elections. The sustained struggle of Bolivia’s working class and indigenous communities ensured that the election not only went ahead, but delivered such an unassailable lead for the socialist presidential candidate that the coup leaders and their imperialist backers were forced, temporarily at least, to concede defeat. The result is also a resounding vindication of the electoral victory last year of MAS President, Evo Morales, in the face of efforts by the imperialists, the right-wing coup leaders and the bourgeois media worldwide to fabricate fraud allegations as a pretext for forcing him from office. It is those mass popular mobilisations which will now be crucial in ensuring that victory at the ballot box translates into real gains for Bolivia’s working class and rural poor.
The MAS presidential candidate, Luis Arce (‘Lucho’), won 55.1% of the vote – the highest proportion MAS has ever received, on a turnout of more than 88%, easily avoiding the need for a second-round vote in November. The pro-US ‘centrist’, Carlos Mesa, was second with 28.83%. The far-right coup leader and darling of the violent, reactionary Santa Cruz elite, Luis Camacho, trailed on just 14%. MAS also won a majority in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, with seats from every department in the country, and a record number of women and indigenous representatives. Among them is senator-elect Patricia Arce, the indigenous MAS mayor beaten, shorn, doused in red paint and paraded through the streets of Cochabamba by fascists shortly after the coup.
MAS had a significant lead in every major opinion poll in the run-up to the election. It was only the bourgeois media, including the BBC and The Guardian in Britain, that parroted the coup government’s fantasy that the race between Arce and Mesa would be tight enough to necessitate a run-off. In this way they were preparing the ground to query the result and try to force a second vote in which the forces of the right could rally around a single candidate. Prior to the election, international observers and journalists seen as anything less than sympathetic to the coup government faced harassment and even detention. Right up to the last minute, there were attempts to get MAS banned from standing at all. On the night of the election, army tanks rolled into areas like El Alto and Cochabama where support for MAS was strongest. The official ‘quick count’ was cancelled and exit polls were delayed by hours, no doubt as the coup leaders consulted their imperialist backers as to what to do next. But the scale of the MAS lead left them no choice. Even the Organisation of American States – which greenlit last year’s takeover of power – announced the vote had been free and fair. The forces of reaction have officially accepted the MAS victory – for the moment.
But the situation remains volatile and fraught with dangers. There is the very real threat of violence and disruption from the right-wing elite in Santa Cruz, who have denounced the results as fraudulent, saying MAS should never have been allowed to stand. The neo-fascist Union Juvenil Cruceñista has set up roadblocks and has vowed to prevent Arce being sworn in on 8 November. What now for the army and police, who played a key role in forcing Evo Morales from power last year and have since carried out violent acts of repression against the working class, including the massacre of indigenous protesters at Senkata and Sacaba last November? Will Arce and his new government be prepared to totally restructure the security forces so that they serve the people and not the forces of reaction, for example by creating people’s militias? Will those who carried out the massacres face justice?
Control over Bolivia’s vast lithium reserves were central to last year’s coup – as billionaire Elon Musk, whose production of electric Tesla cars relies on lithium, tweeted in July: ‘We will coup whoever we want!’ The process of privatising lithium production – which had been nationalised under Morales – is already underway. Will the new MAS government be prepared to reverse the measures enacted by the Añez regime? It will also have to deal with an economy ravaged by the coup government’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Many in the pro-imperialist media would like to think that Luis Arce, the middle-class, British-educated economist who has spoken of a ‘government of national unity’, might be someone they could do business with. But Arce, who is from a Marxist background, may be less pliant than they hope. He served for twelve years as finance minister under Evo Morales. During this time he oversaw Bolivia’s nationalisation of hydrocarbon, telecommunications, and mining companies, and the rapid expansion of the Bolivian economy, with GDP increasing by 344% and poverty reduced from 60% to 36%. He has already announced he will restore Bolivia’s ties – broken by Añez – with Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, and says his government’s first act will be to pay the ‘hunger bonus’ promised to poor families during the coronavirus crisis but withheld by Añez.
More importantly, he is president of a coalition party whose greatest strength rests in the social movements that created it. The organisations of indigenous and rural workers, particularly in mining and the coca industry, are its backbone. It is they who have mobilised all year in their hundreds of thousands against the coup government and they who delivered this electoral victory. The new Bolivian vice-president, David Choquehuanca, is like Morales of indigenous descent, and was until recently Secretary-General of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).
It is these forces which will be the guarantors that the new government delivers, and the best line of defence against the machinations of the Bolivian bourgeoisie and its imperialist backers who may briefly have retreated, but only better to organise their next onslaught against any government that promotes socialist or even progressive policies. As the Cubans warned following last year’s coup, there can be no more compromise.
Cassandra Howarth
