The split within Bolivia's Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party took a violent turn in October, amid an extended campaign of blockades by supporters of former president Evo Morales. The blockades added a political dimension to the sense of national crisis in Bolivia, where collapsing foreign reserves have undermined the national currency and threatened fuel supplies. Morales' faction is pressing the government of Luis Arce to control the MAS ballot line in the upcoming August 2025 election, and to end criminal investigations into the ex-president’s conduct, which it terms "judicial persecution."
Beginning in mid-October, blockades were eventually installed in twenty-three locations on major highways across the country, stranding thousands of trucks, isolating the central city of Cochabamba, disrupting internal trade, and causing fuel shortages in major cities. The disruption has aroused counterprotests and drew other forces into what had been an internal conflict on the left.
By the end of the month, the Bolivian police, a right-wing mob in Cochabamba, and grassroots movements had all participated in new clashes across the country. Most dramatically, Bolivian narcotics police opened fire on two vehicles carrying Morales on October 29. Morales was unharmed in the attack and quickly accused the Arce government of orchestrating an assassination attempt. The government, in turn, suggested Morales had staged a “self-attack.” Strategies of violence last seen during the November 2019 coup are now active in a multi-sided conflict with no obvious end in sight.
On November 1, after a day of confrontations with police at major blockades, Morales began to shift his approach, urging followers to adopt an “intermediate truce” and announcing a hunger strike in order to pressure Arce to agree to political dialogue. “My fight is to improve the situation in the country and to start a dialogue without conditions on two fronts, one economic and one political,” he told The Associated Press. His supporters announced a 72-hour pause in the blockades on November 6.
The Political Divide
During his successful presidential campaign in 2020, Morales' hand-picked successor Arce promised voters a renewal of the socialist governing project without the political baggage of Morales's 14-year presidency. An economist and Morales’ former finance minister, Arce and his Aymara vice presidential candidate David Choquehuanca gained a half-million more votes than Morales had won the previous year. Still, Morales returned to Bolivia from exile as the head of the MAS party and an undeniable international symbol of the movement.
A formal break between the two figures happened in October 2023, when Morales convened a factional National Congress of the MAS in Lauca Ñ, his stronghold in the Chapare coca-growing region. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal withdrew recognition of Morales' faction in late 2023, and the former president was ruled ineligible to run for president by the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal in December of last year. The ruling re-instated a two-term limit on the presidency that had been lifted by the same court in 2017.
From September 17 to 23, Morales led a march of his supporters from Caracollo, Oruro to the seat of government in La Paz in a "March to Save Bolivia" that demanded the revocation of some of Arce's unpopular economic policies as well as a ballot line for Morales. The march saw some initial clashes with movements supporting Arce, both in Caracollo and El Alto.
By that time, however, Morales' political future was becoming clouded by renewed allegations of sexual impropriety and corruption.
Morales Under Investigation
Four years after the allegations first surfaced, Morales is now facing a criminal investigation into his apparent sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl beginning at the height of this presidency in 2015, resulting in a child who was born in 2016. The allegations cover the illegal and coercive nature of the relationship as well as allegations that the girl's parents traded sexual access to their daughter for political favors.
The charges were revived by prosecutors in Tarija in September, who convened the alleged victim, her parents, and Morales to testify in early October.
The alleged victim, Cindy Sarai Vargas, has gone into hiding but released a series of audio statements to the press while her lawyer negotiates guarantees for her safety. These statements openly call for Morales's arrest and identify his conduct as abuse. They also implicate Arce's current Minister of Government Eduardo Castillo for allegedly taking her to Morales in Argentina during his exile. Prosecutors claim that her parents were repaid with multiple benefits from the Morales administration, including a failed nomination for the victim's mother to be a regional legislative candidate.
The case of Sarai Vargas was first made public in 2019 by Rafael Quispe, an Aymara political leader who was critical of the Morales government. It was then put under investigation by then Vice Minister of Transparency Guido Melgar, just three weeks before the end of Jeanine Áñez's right-wing interim government.
This month, a new witness has stepped forward from within Morales' support base: Angelica Ponce, a former leader of the National Confederation of Intercultural Women of Bolivia. Ponce campaigned in 2019 for Evo Morales' re-election and led an environmental agency in the Arce government. In 2022, she publicly broke with Morales and was expelled from the Confederation.
Speaking to the press on October 14, Ponce recalled her visits as a leader to Morales' residence-in-exile in Argentina. "It's important to recognize that Evo Morales, yes, was living with minors in Argentina,” said Ponce. “I am a witness to that… He was with [then 19-year-old] Noemi [Meneses] and with three minors." She also alleged a pattern of favor trading: "If we can speak of it—the former organizational leaders, the former officials, those of us who passed through there—Evo publicly said: all of those who needed public works done should give him a girl. And so, no one can stay silent any more. God is going to see us, God is going to judge us, brothers and sisters."
Senior MAS leaders had addressed the issue during the 2020 campaign as something Morales had to answer for. “I have said there there is machismo, and that we have to struggle against it,” Choquehuanca said in an interview at the time. But for Morales and his closest allies, the charges constitute political persecution, and the threat of an arrest warrant to compel him to testify has only added urgency to the blockade campaign.
Officials in the Arce government have now begun to publicly attack Morales on the issue. Presidential Minister María Nela Prada challenged Morales to go on the record: “I don't know if Evo—and this is what the people expect him to do in a firm and clear manner—not only responds to justice, but can also tell the people that he has never touched a minor in his life, which is exactly what we would all expect,” Prada told reporters in mid-October.
Asked directly at a press conference if had a child with the 16-year-old, Morales deflected: “Let me ask you, how many children do you have …You don’t mess with family. The family is sacred.”
Violent Patterns Return
The blockade campaign by Morales' supporters, like other protests in Bolivia, began as a test of will and mobilizing capacity. Would his followers be able to shut down the entire country, and would they persist amid the economic disruption they were using as leverage? Throughout the 24 days of blockades, it has been clear that Morales' support has largely been in rural Cochabamba, but extends to other rural regions.
In some places the Bolivian police, sometimes joining with pro-Arce movements, have confronted the blockades and forcibly cleared them from the roads. In the heaviest of these confrontations, including at Parotani in the department of Cochabamba and Mairana in Santa Cruz, police and protesters have sustained serious injuries alongside dozens of arrests. In two locations—Bulo Bulo in eastern Cochabamba on October 22 and an Oruro highway near Challapata on October 23—shots were fired at police.
Meanwhile in urban Cochabamba, a broad set of organizations including unionized labor, shopkeepers, and the right-wing mayor Manfred Reyes Villa convened an October 25 mass meeting to denounce the blockades. Following this rally, the far-right Resistencia Juvenil Cochala (RJC) re-emerged on October 27 to sack the Six Federation coca grower's headquarters and attack the car of Morales' lawyer Nelson Cox, who recorded the assault. The RJC emerged as a vigilante paramilitary group during the political crisis of 2019, engaging in street battles with Morales supporters, attacking Indigenous politicians on the street, and setting fires to homes and offices aligned with the former president.
The most life-threatening event so far came Sunday, October 29, when Morales and his entourage were traveling in two vehicles in the Chapare region that were struck by gunfire. Despite some inconsistencies in the opposing accounts of the attack put forward by Morales and by the government, it is now clear that the shooters were members of the Special Anti-Narcotics Force of the Bolivian National Police. Morales reports that he was forced to change vehicles amid the shooting and pursuit, and that four and fourteen bullet holes, respectively, were found in the vehicles.
In a video posted by Morales after the attack, he denounces an attempted assassination and immediately calls for protective mobilization from his supporters. The narcotics police retreated to an army base and were evacuated by helicopter. After several initial statements suggesting the incident was political theater orchestrated by Morales himself, Government Minister Castillo re-framed the incident as a justified response to Morales' caravan running a checkpoint and injuring a police officer.
These violent events raise the haunting possibility of multiple patterns of violence reactivating in ways that echo the 2019 crisis. Are the National Police operating under the control of Arce, as the Morales camp alleges, willing to violently execute a rival candidate? Or are they taking independent violent action? Will there be further violence by armed rural movements as happened before Morales' 2019 ouster, or by violent urban right-wing movements like the RJC?
Finally, will the Morales camp further resist efforts by law enforcement in the Chapare to clear the blockade, as they did during the interim coup government? Dozens of protesters and police were injured in attempts to clear the blockades in recent days, and three military bases were surrounded and occupied by crowds of Morales supporters. It remains to be seen whether the main highway through the Chapare will be reopened and for how long.
The sudden incursion of forces from the political right and by security forces into the MAS political deadlock should give both sides pause. The Morales faction may have to reckon with the fact that their mobilization to get on the 2025 ballot may make them less likely achieve an electoral victory. And the Arce government, too, risks providing an opening for its opponents if it can't quickly negotiate a climbdown from this divisive conflict. As the faceoff continues and the impacts of instability and shortages are more acutely felt, the political deadlock may both hurt everyday Bolivians and alienate them further from both wings of the Movement Towards Socialism.
Carwil Bjork-James is a cultural anthropologist who studies political violence and strategies of grassroots protest in Latin America. He is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.
