Bolivia’s Massive Interconnected Network of Grassroot Worker Cooperatives Created Underlying Push for Dominant MAS Victory

On October 18, the voice of the Bolivian people echoed internationally as Bolivians elected former economy minister and socialist Luis Arce, over neoliberal candidate Carlos Mesa and far-right nationalist Luis Camacho. In November 2019, allegations of electoral fraud committed by Arce’s party, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), created some doubt as to whether MAS would be able to regain the people’s confidence in 2020. However, these allegations posed against former president and leader of the MAS party, Evo Morales, have since been proven false. Arce’s resounding 20-point victory in the presidential race, in which he won 98 of the country’s 112 provinces, and the subsequent MAS legislative wins in Bolivia’s Lower and Upper Houses suggest that Bolivians, too, reject these allegations of previous fraudulent conduct. 

There have been many hypotheses regarding the cause behind such a clear MAS victory just 11 months after the party was removed from power by a military-led coup. Alejandro Werner, Director of the Western Hemisphere Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), points to Arce’s successful 11-year term as economy minister under Evo Morales (2006-2017). During this time, a balance of payments surplus and solid economic growth contributed to a sharp 25% decrease in the poverty rate, from 60% in 2006 to below 35% in 2019. Arce’s astute economic maneuvering also helped Bolivia avoid an economic collapse due to the fall of natural gas prices, and many Bolivians are hoping he can repeat this success to dig the country out of the fiscal hole created by the coronavirus. 

Another possible factor lies in the utter failure of the far-right interim president, Jeanine Áñez, in leading the country out of social and economic turmoil. In an attempt to silence dissent, the Áñez regime’s brutal and violent racism against indigenous Bolivians culminated in a decree allowing armed forces to kill protesters “in defense of society.” This decree resulted in the massacre of more than thirty, mostly indigenous, coca leaf growers, in what MAS officials called a severe violation of Bolivians’ constitutional rights. The new Bolivian legislative body, meeting for the first time on November 8, will vote on whether or not to prosecute Áñez for her role in the murder of protesters. 

These human rights abuses and attacks on democratic institutions—elections were delayed three times, for instance—have resulted in numerous critical reports from international institutions, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Furthermore, the Áñez regime’s negligence and corruption in handling the coronavirus crisis resulted in a death toll five times that officially recorded from March to June, making Bolivia one of the world’s worst hot spots according to analysis from the New York Times. The arrest of ex-health minister Marcelo Navajas, who was accused of purchasing ventilators that were unsuitable for Bolivian intensive care units at over twice their unit price, highlights the outrageous levels of corruption. 

While the conservative sect of Bolivian politics blames an “irrational allegiance to Evo Morales” for the MAS presidential victory, this view is misguided. Many within the MAS base of urban working-class and rural peasant voters had been critical of Morales’ policies, including his focus on economic growth through the environmentally-damaging extraction of natural resources from indigenous lands. In 2019, Morales was running for a fourth term, ignoring constitutional limits that prohibit more than two successive presidential terms.  MAS success in the 2020 elections has less to do with popular reverence of Morales and more with MAS’ intricate connection to a storied history of Bolivian collective organizing, indigenous social movements, workers unions, and rural peasant collectives. MAS political policy that favors nationalizing natural resources, guaranteeing workers rights, and increasing political pluralism by including Bolivia’s diverse indigenous communities within decision-making bodies, speaks to a mass vision for class and ethnic solidarity. 

Non-MAS presidential candidates fell in the polls due to their close connections with the United States and a willingness to sell Bolivian resources to the highest bidder. Former president Morales claims that he was strong-armed into vacating his presidency by a U.S.-backed coup intent on accessing Bolivia’s enormous lithium deposits through a reversal of resource nationalization. This claim is backed by the timing of the coup, which occurred just as Bolivia’s nationalized company, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB), was beginning to successfully industrialize the processing of final lithium product. Following the coup, unions and interconnected social movements in the town of Uyuni found themselves combatting the injection of foreign capital and competition into a privatized system, threatening local control of Bolivian resources. Local unionized workers grew increasingly concerned after acting chief of YLB operations, Juan Carlos Zuleta, reneged on a Morales-era deal with German firm ACI Systems, which would have allowed the Bolivian state to keep majority control over lithium deposit profits. In July, culminating tensions led union leader Ramiro Huayta, of the Federación Regional Única de Trabajadores Campesinos del Altiplano Sud (FRUTCAS), to lead a protest against Zuleta's visit to Uyuni. 

Collective organizing and the steady incorporation of indigenous culture within national political structure have created a mechanism by which the Bolivian people have historically combated privatization and the white-washing of the indigenous experience. Bolivian Aymara sociologist, Pablo Mamani Ramirez, calls this process the “new aymaquechua social subjectivity”. He describes this movement as the subversion of the dominant white-European perspective and the subsequent ascension of indigenous social struggles in forming a new Bolivian plurinationalism. This modern movement towards a new national identity sprung as a resistance to the entrenched neoliberal institutional order imposed in the early 1980s after years of military dictatorship. Neoliberal-era structural adjustment and economic reform policies, imposed by the IMF and World Bank as conditions for loans, sacrificed workers rights in favor of trade liberalization. As seen during the Water Wars of April 2000 in Cochabamba and the Gas Wars of October 2003 in El Alto, where worker pay cuts and privatization threatened labor welfare, national strikes and nationwide roadblocks organized by a coalition of grassroots social movements and trade unions under the Bolivian Workers’ Center (COB) helped force new elections during the Áñez regime. 

The broad coalition of indigenous peasant and worker collectives powering a MAS victory through popular protest has broad implications for the region. The triumph of socialism in Bolivia is a huge blow to the perceived rise of conservative governance throughout Latin America, such as with Bolsonaro in Brazil and Duque in Colombia. Paired with the recent successful popular movements in Chile to reform their constitution, the formation of a new progressive, socialist block in South America is within reach. In order for Arce to effectively lead this new movement he must first succeed in moving Bolivia out of its worst recession in history. Redistribution of wealth and neo-protectionism of domestic industry will be key to encouraging economic growth. Fiscal redistribution could include new progressive taxes on large companies that would net the Bolivian people an estimated $400 million per year. Increasing investment in domestic manufacturing, agriculture, and large infrastructure projects would not only boost employment, but also encourage the kind of union and collective organizing that won MAS this year’s election. 

Furthermore, Arce must not repeat the Morales-era mistake of alienating the organized highland indigenous population by refusing to rotate leadership—a basic tenant of direct democracy—and maintaining a concentration of power within the corporatist trade union structure. The new MAS government must concentrate on upholding workers rights through the union structure, while also granting a political voice to the diverse array of non-unionized rural grassroot coalitions. In order to maintain a thriving representative democracy and retain the nation’s powerful alliance of worker organizations, the government must once again limit trade liberalization, privatization of resources, and reliance on Western-led multilateral lending institutions.