Evo Morales

Evo Morales (born October 26, 1959, Isallavi, Bolivia) is a Bolivian labour leader who served as president of Bolivia (2006–19). A member of the Aymara people, Morales was Bolivia’s first president of indigenous descent.

Born in a mining village in Bolivia’s western Oruro department, Morales herded llamas when he was a boy. After attending high school and serving in the Bolivian military, he migrated with his family to the Chapare region, in eastern Bolivia, where the family farmed. Among the crops they grew was coca, which is used in the production of cocaine but is also a traditional crop in the region.

In the early 1980s Morales became active in the regional coca-growers union, and in 1985 he was elected the group’s general secretary. Three years later he was elected executive secretary of a federation of various coca-growers unions. In the mid-1990s, when the Bolivian government was suppressing coca production with assistance from the United States, Morales helped found a national political party—the leftist Movement Toward Socialism (Spanish: Movimiento al Socialismo; MAS)—at the same time serving as titular leader of the federation representing coca growers.

Morales won a seat in the House of Deputies (the lower house of the Bolivian legislature) in 1997 and was the MAS candidate for president in 2002, only narrowly losing to Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. During the presidential campaign, Morales called for the expulsion from Bolivia of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents (his campaign was bolstered by the U.S. ambassador’s comment that aid to Bolivia would be reconsidered if Morales was elected). In the following years, Morales remained active in national affairs, helping force the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 and extracting a concession from his successor, Carlos Mesa Gisbert, to consider changes to the highly unpopular U.S.-backed campaign to eradicate illegal coca production.

As the MAS presidential candidate again in 2005, Morales was elected easily, winning 54 percent of the vote and becoming the country’s first president of indigenous descent and the first Bolivian president since 1982 to win a majority of the national vote. Sworn in as president in January 2006, he pledged to reduce poverty among the country’s indigenous peoples, ease restrictions on coca farmers, renationalize the country’s energy sector, fight corruption, and increase taxes on the wealthy. Morales strongly supported efforts to rewrite the Bolivian constitution to increase the rights of the country’s indigenous population, enshrine his policies of nationalization and land redistribution, and allow a president to serve two consecutive terms, though in a referendum in July 2006 the MAS failed to win a majority in the Constitutional Assembly. Morales then nationalized Bolivia’s gas fields and oil industry, and in November he signed into law a land reform bill that called for the seizure of unproductive lands from absentee owners and the lands’ redistribution to the poor. His reforms faced opposition from the wealthier provinces of Bolivia, four of which overwhelmingly approved regional autonomy statutes in referenda held in 2008. The Morales government dismissed the referenda as illegal. Tensions escalated, and demonstrations, some of which turned violent, increased throughout the country. A recall referendum on Morales’s leadership was held in August 2008, and two-thirds of the voters supported the continuance of his presidency.

The constitution that Morales had envisioned and planned for nearly three years was approved by voters in a national referendum held in January 2009. It allowed him to seek a second consecutive five-year term (previously the constitution limited the president to a single term) and gave him the power to dissolve Congress. Other changes to the constitution furthered indigenous rights, strengthened state control over the country’s natural resources, and enforced a limit on the size of private landholdings. Its passing, however, further aggravated tensions between the country’s indigenous majority and wealthier Bolivians from the gas-rich eastern provinces, who strongly opposed its ratification. In April 2009 Morales signed a law authorizing early presidential and legislative elections, set to take place that December. With the continued support of the indigenous majority, Morales easily won a second five-year presidential term. Moreover, in the concurrent legislative elections, the MAS won control of both houses of Congress.

In April 2013 Bolivia’s constitutional court ruled that because Morales’s first term as president had preceded the constitutional reform that prevented the chief executive from serving more than two consecutive terms, he would be allowed to run for a third term in 2014. In that event, Morales claimed a clear victory in the first round of elections, in which exit polls gave him more than 60 percent of the vote. Especially notable was his strong performance in wealthier regions, which had traditionally sided with the opposition.

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By 2015 the robust Bolivian economy had begun to slow significantly, largely in response to declining world petroleum and natural gas prices, and some of Morales’s critics blamed him for having failed to diversify the country’s natural gas-dependent economy. Morales also found himself at the centre of a corruption scandal when it was revealed that a woman with whom he had once been romantically involved had obtained a prominent position in 2013 with a Chinese company that received some $500 million in no-bid contracts from the Bolivian government. Morales stridently denied having engaged in any impropriety. Nevertheless, that scandal and the sagging economy put a dent in his popularity, and, in a referendum held in February 2016, Bolivians rejected (by a vote of about 51 percent to 49 percent) a constitutional change that would have allowed Morales to run for another term as president in 2019.

Morales appeared to be resigned to the results, but in September 2017 the MAS asked the constitutional court to remove term limits for the presidency, and in November the court did just that. In December 2018 the Supreme Electoral Court upheld that decision, prompting widespread street protests but paving the way for Morales to run for reelection in 2019.

When they went to the polls in October 2019, many Bolivians appeared to still be angered by Morales’s refusal to honour the results of the referendum. Others blamed the wildfires that had devastated huge tracts of Bolivian forest and grassland on a July 2019 decree by Morales allowing farmers to undertake “controlled burning” to increase the size of their agricultural plots. Morales’s principal opponent in the election was his predecessor as president, Carlos Mesa Gisbert. The field of candidates also included businessman-turned-senator Óscar Ortiz and Evangelical minister Chi Hyun Chung.

With some 80 percent of the votes counted on election night, October 20, Morales had garnered about 45 percent of the vote and Mesa about 38 percent, which portended the need for a runoff. Under Bolivian election law, for a presidential candidate to win outright in the first round, the candidate must capture either more than 50 percent of the vote or at least 40 percent of the vote with a 10 percent lead over the nearest challenger. Those early results were followed by a roughly 24-hour delay before it was announced that Morales had extended his margin of victory to just over 10 percent, thus precluding the need for a runoff. The response to the announcement was swift and violent, as opponents of Morales attacked election-related buildings, setting fire to some of them. Accusations of fraud escalated over the coming weeks as the country was paralyzed by widespread protests and strikes.

On November 10 the Organization of American States, which had monitored the election, released a report alleging that there had been irregularities and calling for the election to be annulled. The embattled Morales promised to hold new elections, but the commander-in-chief of the Bolivian armed forces, Gen. Williams Kaliman, requested that Morales resign. Morales obliged, leaving office that same day, while insisting that there had been no wrongdoing and claiming that he was the victim of a coup.