Bolivia’s ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party ousted the president of the country, Luis Arce, during a meeting on Wednesday and declared former President Evo Morales its candidate in the 2025 election – officializing a growing rift between the incumbent and the party’s former leader.
Arce became president in part as a result of Morales resigning from the presidency. After serving 13 years, Morales chose to vacate the presidency and flee the country in the aftermath of the 2019 presidential election, which he claimed to have won. Morales was on the ballot despite being term-limited out of serving again because he had successfully pleaded to the nation’s top courts that term limits were a violation of his human rights. His resignation was in response to the Organization of American States (OAS) revealing that its international observers had found significant evidence of “irregularities” in the vote count that led to Morales’s unconstitutional alleged win.
The political crisis that erupted from Morales’s resignation resulted in an exodus of MAS leaders from the country. As per the nation’s legal line of succession, hardline conservative Sen. Jeanine Áñez took over the presidency. Her rule ended rapidly as she chose not to run for president in the elections she had organized as part of her constitutional duty as an interim leader.
Bolivian then-interim President Jeanine Anez speaks during the ceremony in which Bolivian Salvador Romero Ballivian was sworn in as a member of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), ahead of new elections at the Quemado Palace in La Paz on November 25, 2019 (JORGE BERNAL/AFP via Getty Images).
Arce won that election, in 2020, as one of the few MAS leaders who chose not to flee with Morales. Among his administration’s first acts in power was to arrest Áñez for doing her constitutional duty and succeeding Morales, accusing her of staging a “coup.”
Luis Arce, Bolivia’s president, during the South America Summit at the Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, Tuesday, May 30, 2023 (Ton Molina/Bloomberg via Getty Images).
Arce’s victory allowed Morales to return to Bolivia – Áñez’s government repeatedly sought to prosecute Morales for crimes both while in office and abroad – which facilitated Morales’s usurpation of the party and move to oust Arce.
The MAS held a congress on Wednesday to decide the future of the party. Its members announced after their meeting that they had chosen Morales as its official presidential candidate for the 2025 race. It also announced the “self-expulsion” of Arce and Vice President David Choquehuanca on the grounds that they did not attend the congress.
Arce and his remaining sympathizers in the MAS party responded to the news on Thursday by declaring that the congress itself, and, therefore, what the candidates agreed to at the event were invalid on the grounds that the unions and civil society organizations supporting Arce did not participate. The Arce supporters filed a legal request to declare Wednesday’s congress illegal, which the Constitutional Court is expected to address on Thursday. Morales, as the new president of the MAS, is the lead defendant in the case.
One of Arce’s most ardent supporters in the Bolivian Congress, Felipa Montenegro, filed the legal request, describing the entire MAS congress on Wednesday as “illegal” and causing “irreparable” damage to the party.
“We have to respect our base. There is no leader without the base and the base makes the leader,” Montenegro said, identifying the congress as illegitimate due to lack of participation of a material number of base organizations. “They will never be able to overcome the organic [support], because we are the base.”
Arce himself described the convention on Wednesday as an “assault against the social organizations who are really being expulsed from their own political instrument,” the Argentine news outlet Infobae quoted the president as saying.
“There is disrespect for social organizations, they are not taking into account the foundational character [of these],” Arce denounced.
The Arce faction is seeking to schedule another MAS congress – apparently now a dissident event – for October 17. Montenegro claimed, according to the Bolivian newspaper El Deber, that more than 50 civil society organizations were seeking to join the second congress. Arce supporters have also publicly expressed support for the president to seek reelection on a ticket outside of the MAS if necessary, meaning Arce and Morales will likely split the nation’s socialist voters.
Héctor Arce (no relation), a lawmaker supporting Morales, dismissed the possibility of the president running.
“Luis Arce can go with whatever party, he has the right to do that, but not with the MAS,” Héctor Arce reportedly said.
Morales’s public comments following his questionably legitimate nomination and return to the fore of his party were celebratory, applauding the “historic tenth ordinary congress” of the MAS and treating it as uncontroversial. Morales condemned Arce and Choquehuanca, however, in separate remarks claiming that Arce’s government was worse than Áñez’s brief conservative tenure because “until the last minute they tried to postpone the congress, from La Paz.”
“Thanks to unity, thanks to the delegates, the congress officially ended. Congratulations!” Morales asserted.
At the event, however, following his nomination on Tuesday, Morales described opposition to his return as bigoted. According to Infobae, Morales claimed that any rejection of his candidate was the result of socialist partisans not “accepting that the indigenous movement leads this revolution,” adding, “That is our crime.”
Morales was Bolivia’s first-ever ethnically indigenous South American president.
In reality, Morales faced a long list of real crimes following his resignation. Áñez’s government revealed in 2020 that it had found evidence that Morales had engaged in pedophilia, naming the birth certificate of an infant whose mother was 16 at the time of birth; Morales was named as the father on the document.
The revelation was met with collective disinterest on the Bolivian left.
“All that issue about rape and pedophilia, everybody knew that when Evo Morales was president,” Rubén Costas, the then-governor of Santa Cruz, said in 2020. “We knew and it was all covered up.”
Arce froze legal proceedings against Morales, allowing him to return to the country without fear of prosecution.