The intervening four decades form one of the more remarkable biographies of the modern era. It is a story that is idiosyncratically Bolivian, but reflects very Latin American currents of boom, bust and revolution — and speaks to a universal theme of power and its corrosive effects.
Morales was born to a poor family of llama herders in , at a time when indigenous people were doused with pesticides when entering government buildings. Twenty years later, he moved to Chapare where his activities as a trade unionist and keen amateur footballer saw Morales grow in stature and shrewdness.
He overcame beatings, arrests, racist abuse and factional infighting to assume the leadership of the Movement for Socialism Mas — a broad bloc of miners, farmers and leftwing urbanites — and entered congress. The so-called Gas War — in which the armed forces killed more than 60 people — fatally discredited the authorities, drawn from the same European-descended elites that had ruled Bolivia for centuries.
Following the flight of one president and the resignation of another, Carlos Mesa, Morales swept to power in elections with over half of the national vote. Morales promised nothing less than a cosmic rebalancing. A reformed constitution made Bolivia a plurinational state , with official status given to 36 indigenous peoples and languages, and an Andean emblem of Technicolor pixels — the Wiphala — flown henceforth alongside the national tricolour. Coca cultivation was legalised and respect for Pachamama — the Andean earth mother — enshrined in the constitution.
Half of the national assembly were women, many of them indigenous, who wore jaguar skins and flowing pollera skirts with newfound pride. Under his presidency, MAS won successive elections with unprecedented margins in and , running on an economic agenda of modest wealth redistribution and partial hydrocarbon nationalization coupled with an evocative discourse of decolonization.
This mattered intensely in a country that has thirty-six recognized indigenous languages, and 42 percent of the population self-identifying as indigenous in the latest census. In , Bolivia was reconfigured by the government as a plurinational state, giving political autonomy to indigenous nations. The Law of Mother Earth enshrined the rights of nature in the Constitution. Morales also broke with US-backed policies toward coca, replacing the militarized eradication of coca crops with a successful community-based coca control program.
The newfound visibility and prominence of indigenous peoples in Bolivia have been the undisputed success of MAS in power. They are now represented as political actors at the state level and across society. For the first time, cholitas — women who wear urban-indigenous dress — can now be seen presenting the news or taking up various public office roles.
As a result of their actions, GDP tripled while income inequality went down by two-thirds and extreme poverty dropped from 38 percent to 17 percent.
Coca growers in the Chapare region — a bastion of MAS support — especially stood to benefit from access to the road. The plans sparked protests from indigenous communities living in the area, who alongside NGOs and environmental groups, feared that the development would invite environmental degradation and encroachment on their lands. Morales also struggled to curtail the power of big agribusiness. Early on, Morales quickly became an implacable critic of the negative effects of global capitalism in Bolivia, an issue he understood as directly connected to his later efforts, as president, to decolonize the state and enfranchise its majority indigenous population.
Indigenous people in what is now Bolivia have been subject to some years of pervasive racial discrimination dating back to Spanish colonialism. Intense poverty and lack of access to the levers of power were innate facts of life for indigenous people into the early s.
But, amid efforts to project their concerns and to build international networks of solidarity, by the mids coca growers were increasingly moved to represent their cause as one of the collective struggle of an indigenous movement.
They began to insist that coca was more than just a cash crop—it was their cultural patrimony. They more proactively took on the trappings of Andean cultural identity and promoted their goals in the terms of international indigenous advocacy, emphasizing collective rights of autonomy and self-determination, including rights to territory and to control over their own economic development. In this environment, for Morales, questions of class and ethnicity were closely allied and in fact deeply intermingled.
Indigenous peoples were at once among the poorest Bolivians but also the most politically marginalized. At the turn of the 21st century, as anti-drug efforts continued unabated in the Chapare, Bolivia was the scene of a succession of spectacular conflicts over the control of resources, beginning with the so-called Water War in and continuing through several Gas Wars in and Morales ably connected issues previously understood as specific to indigenous groups with other hot-button issues of broad concern to Bolivians, such as the defense of national sovereignty—loosely modeled on indigenous self-determination—or a long-standing call by indigenous activists to rewrite the national constitution to make it more inclusive, subsequently taken up by nonindigenous protesters as well.
Morales ably connected issues previously understood as specific to indigenous groups with other hot-button issues of broad concern to Bolivians, such as the defense of national sovereignty. When Morales defied the pundits and won the presidential election with a decisive and unusually high 54 percent of the vote, the day before his inauguration he held a ceremony among the ruins of ancient Tiwanaku.
More than 10, supporters waved wiphalas , the flag of indigenous nationalism. Morales received a blessing from an Aymara ritual specialist, accepted a traditional staff of authority, and offered thanks to the Pachamama, an Andean cosmological figure.
The US authorities accused President Morales of not doing enough to stem cocaine production and trafficking, while he insisted he was combating cocaine production while allowing small amounts of coca to be grown for religious and cultural purposes. Mr Morales' relations with the US were strained throughout his presidency.
Mr Morales was part of the "pink tide" of left-wing leaders which swept to power across South America in the early s , a tide which has since ebbed with most of the left-wing leaders replaced by conservative governments. An avowed socialist, Mr Morales cut his own salary and the salaries of those in his cabinet shortly after taking office. He then began the process of renationalising the oil and gas industries. The increased tax revenue allowed Bolivia to vastly increase its public investment and helped boost the country's foreign reserves.
The administration invested heavily in public works projects and social programmes to fight poverty. However, his critics point out that in the last two years, the levels of extreme poverty have been on the rise again. President Morales's left-wing policies worried and in some cases antagonised many middle-class Bolivians who saw him as too radical. Opposition has been concentrated in the wealthy eastern lowland province of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's economic powerhouse. His critics also accused him of failing to tackle corruption, which many Bolivians named as their main concern in the October presidential election.
One of his main defeats was his failure to secure landlocked Bolivia access to the sea in a dispute with neighbouring Chile, a topic of national pride for many Bolivians. The country lost its access to the Pacific Ocean in after a war with Chile and has tried to regain it ever since. In October , the International Court of Justice ruled in favour of Chile - a major setback for Mr Morales, who had assured Bolivians that victory was "very close". Evo Morales has regularly spoken at international climate conferences, where he has argued for greater respect for "Mother Earth".
However, he has not always been successful in balancing that intention with economic development. One of the most contentious issues of his presidency involved plans for the construction of a major road through the Amazon, which indigenous groups argued would open their territory up to illegal logging and land grabs.
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