Former Bolivia Presidente Evo Morales. Photo: Internationalist 360°.
By Juanlu González – Mar 4, 2025
The self-coup d’état in Bolivia has been definitively consummated. Jails full of political prisoners, repression in the streets, lawfare at will, usurpation of acronyms, assassination attempts… attest to the lamentable situation the Bolivian people are going through.
A citizenry already absolutely punished by the disastrous economic and social management of the nefarious president Lucho Arce who, instead of taking care of improving the quality of life of its inhabitants, has dedicated most of the efforts of the present legislature to fight against those who brought him to power, both the cadres of the Movement Towards Socialism, as well as its enormous social base.
A few weeks ago he insisted that regional surveys placed Arce at the height of the coup and murderer Dina Boluarte, who is no longer loved even in her own house. However, at this moment, the demoscopic data are even worse for the, for the time being, president. The inertia of heading the MAS and receiving the progressive votes automatically or with his nose plugged will no longer be enough for him.
Evo Morales has just announced the party for which he is going to run for the presidency, the Front for Victory (FPV), which has unleashed a mass desertion of MAS militants. In addition, a new political instrument is on the immediate horizon.
All the cards are now on the table. The quarrels about consensus candidacies were nothing more than vain wishful thinking encouraged especially by Evo’s enemies. Arce would not win the next elections even if he ran alone or against his own shadow. Offering to remove Morales, the undisputed Bolivian leader, from the electoral race in exchange for eliminating a political corpse, was nothing more than an absurd ploy doomed to failure, as it has finally been. The strategy of signing up some promising evista and making her change sides in exchange for the support to bring him to power in cotton wool, has not worked either. Lucho’s capacity of seduction and charisma have never been his forte and, faced with his former mentor, he is less than zero.
What can we expect from now on?
In view of what has been seen, Arcismo is going is going to try by all means at its disposal to prevent Evo from running for a new presidency.
It is nothing new, it has been trying for a long time without success, but it is likely that the dirty war will intensify, especially after April. Instead of letting the citizens speak freely and in good faith, their efforts will be aimed at disqualifying the former president, even if this means the rise of the extreme right and the risk of jeopardizing the social advances and the recovery of sovereignty achieved during Evo Morales’ terms in office.
Fortunately, they are not going to have it easy, the disqualification is an act regulated by law and does not depend on the will of one or two judges, no matter how prevaricating they may be or how much they may have been trained in the new “School of the Americas” for magistrates. To begin with, because candidacies are only disqualified when they have been officially promulgated, which has not yet happened, because the elections are scheduled for August of this year and have not yet been called. The competent institution to disqualify is only the Plurinational Electoral Body, which is activated within the period of validity of a specific call for General Elections.
What are the reasons that may annul a candidacy or a candidate?
They are very clear. As stipulated in the articles of the Electoral Regime Law, in order to accept a candidacy, the candidate must be of legal age (30 years old in case of aspiring to the presidency), be of Bolivian nationality, be registered in the electoral roll, speak at least two of the official languages of the country, have completed the military service and not be serving a sentence of conviction. All these requirements would be met by Evo Morales without any problem.
There is another necessary condition to be a candidate and that is that the candidate does not incur in the incompatibility assumptions established by the Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. These have to do with the rendering of services in national or transnational companies with contracts in force with the Bolivian State, or holding a public office -civilian or military- and not having resigned from it three months before the electoral call .Evo has not been a public servant for more than 5 years, therefore he would not be affected by any of these incompatibilities.
Finally, and this is what the opponents are grabbing at the most, the former president, on December 28, 2023, the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal (TCP) issued SCP 1010/2023-S4 which, supposedly, prevents the discontinuous reelection to the presidency that Article 168 of the current Bolivian Constitution allows.
Would Evo Morales be disqualified for life, as most of the media repeat?
Not at all. In the first place because the TCP cannot usurp competences that are not its own, in this case of the Plurinational Electoral Body.
We have already seen how Evo, if he were to run, would meet all the requirements and would not be affected by any type of incompatibility or ineligibility, which are the basis for any disqualification lawsuit that could be filed.
Therefore, the TSE cannot consider SCP 1010 as a cause for disqualification. Furthermore, the American Convention on Human Rights requires that limitations on fundamental rights may only be applied “in accordance with laws enacted for reasons of general interest and for the purpose for which they were established”. Therefore, if there are no laws regulating it, a judgment could not replace it.
The basic question is whether Evo Morales can run having held the office of president for three consecutive terms, 2006-2010, 2010-2015 and 2015-2019. Well, to begin with, the first of the terms should be excluded from the summation, since it was carried out in accordance with the 1967 constitution. It could also be argued that the last term was not completed in its entirety, since it was interrupted by the Áñez coup d’état.
Furthermore, having spent almost six years since Evo left the Casa Grande del Pueblo, the prohibition of consecutive mandates lapses and it is perfectly possible for him to run again for the presidency if there is no law to prevent it, as is the case. To top off the irregularities, the sentence was not issued by the full chamber of the Constitutional Tribunal, which is the only competent instance to interpret the Bolivian Constitution, but only by two magistrates with their mandate expired, self-extended, who signed the unconstitutional and unconstitutional SCP 1010.
The decisions of both, all of them, should be considered null and void, as should the invention of the concept of discontinuous reelection, a pure legal artifice that seems more like something out of a magician’s hat than a legal text.
