Until 2019, Evo Morales only had enemies on the right of the ideological spectrum, those he fought in the streets and at the polls, and whom he does not recognize as legitimate.
However, since 2019, opponents from their own base (MAS) have emerged, opponents recognized as legitimate because they are elected officials, as is the case of vice president, David Choquehuanca.
The root cause of this scenario is his interest in running again for the presidency of Bolivia in 2025.
Therefore, Evo is constantly dealing with internal opponents, or renovators, and external ones, or enemies of the right, with drug trafficking as a backdrop in his discursive agenda.
Internal opponents: the renovators
For many years, Evo and Choquehuanca shared a common symbolic space constituted between the political party (MAS), the State and social organizations.
However, according to unofficial reports, the friction between the two leaders has been more evident – for public opinion – since Morales returned to Bolivia in November 2020, shortly after the MAS won the general elections again, with Luis Arce.
Choquehuanca has support in several places in Bolivia, such as La Paz (a natural stronghold), El Alto, north of Potosí and in several regions of Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando. Meanwhile, Evo continues to have complete control over his historic social base: the Chapare (Cochababamba).
The impulse that Choquehuanca gives to schools of leaders in different parts of the country, under the aegis of the discourse of renewal, is what bothers Evo and his faction in the MAS.
In the words of the vice president, “the world has to renew itself. There is global disorder. There is uncertainty, there is chaos. We need changes, a revolution of ideas. And who should be the protagonists? to spark their creativity and not wait for older people to tell them what to do”.
For Evo, on the other hand, the renovators are the new “degeneration working towards a new political project”.
In the face of these differences, in recent months there have been arguments, jostling and insults between followers of both leaders, such as what happened in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in June, which gives the feeling of being in the middle of an election campaign.
Despite the friction between the organizations that support the vice president and the former president and the accusations on social networks and in the media, in a recent meeting between the two leaders, plus President Arce, ministers of state and representatives of social organizations, they took a picture together to demonstrate their “commitment to unity”.
External enemies: the right
Antagonism is a substantial element of Evo Morales’ political nature.
After what happened in 2019 – when irregularities were committed in the Electoral Court to avoid a second round with Carlos Mesa, and Evo resigned from the presidency and fled to Mexico, with Jeanine Áñez constitutionally assuming the presidency on a transitional basis – the former president reached a discursive paroxysm against everything that moves to its right.
He dreams, eats and plays football on the premise that what happened to him three years ago was a coup engineered by his historic enemies.
This obsession, permanently fueled by his speeches against party-political, social and civic opponents, influences the judiciary to the point of using it to imprison, under the justification of the coup, right-wing enemies.
The deprivation of liberty of Áñez is an example of how it is possible to domesticate a countermajoritarian (judicial) power to keep in force the friend-enemy antagonism that translates into an intermittent political polarization that undermines the institutional foundations of representative democracy.
With the ex-president’s sentence to ten years in prison for non-compliance with duties and resolutions contrary to the Constitution, the thesis of the coup d’état was reinforced politically and ideologically.
Indeed, his opponents Mesa and Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga were called “confessed scammers”.
In the case of Luis Fernando Camacho, despite the social bases of the MAS asking for his incarceration, a process against him for the alleged coup has not yet started.
Drug trafficking as a backdrop in Bolivian politics
In the context of an international football championship, the “Copa Evo”, to be held in Chapare in August, parliamentary representatives of the political organization Comunidad Ciudadana (CC), led by Mesa, opposed the event.
In this way, the objective is to discourage invited clubs from participating, considering that Evo is playing the same role as Colombian Pablo Escobar, in the 1980s, in a series of irregularities linked to drug trafficking.
From a historical perspective, drug trafficking and party politics (MIR, ADN, MNR) had an underground intertwining that left permanent marks on Bolivian society. A backdrop that we’ve practically grown used to living with.
2019 unforgettable, 2025 inscrutable
The verbal fight between Evo and his renovating opponents, on the one hand, and his enemies on the right, on the other, is almost normalized in the current political conjuncture.
With the former, frictions are motivated by the hegemonic control of the party (MAS), facing 2025. With the latter, their enmity is of historical-ideological origin and has been aggravated since 2019.
Only fate knows what will happen in 2025 with Evo and his conjunctural adversaries.
The only certainty is that the events of 2019 will be exploited again by Evo to victimize himself in front of his social bases with the narrative that he was expelled by a coup maneuver.
Translation of Giulia Gaspar
