An Opportunity Squandered? Elites, Social Movements, and the Government of Evo Morales

• Author: Linda Farthing
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18798797
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 224, Vol. 46 No. 1, January 2019, 212–229

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18798797

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

212

An Opportunity Squandered?

Elites, Social Movements, and the Government

of Evo Morales

by

Linda Farthing

Over its 12 years in power, Bolivia’s MAS government has made significant advances

in expanding inclusion and reducing poverty. In the process, it has steadily been trans-

formed into a hegemonic force that is increasingly dependent on expedient and pragmati-

cally based compromises with economic elites. Concurrently, social movement influence

and participation in the government have steadily declined. After 2009, when an uprising

by Eastern elites had been quashed and MAS gained a congressional majority, the MAS

missed an opening to advance its original project of structural change, opting instead for

a more expedient strategy that has kept it in power at the cost of accommodating elites and

debilitating social movements.

Durante sus 12 años en el poder, el gobierno MAS de Bolivia ha logrado avances

significativos en expandir la inclusión y reducir la pobreza. En el proceso, se ha transfor-

mado continuamente en una fuerza hegemónica que depende cada vez más de compromi-

sos oportunos y basados en pragmatismo con las élites económicas. Al mismo tiempo, la

influencia y la participación en el gobierno de los movimientos sociales ha disminuido

continuamente. Después de 2009, cuando un levantamiento de las élites del Este se

suprimió y el MAS ganó una mayoría en el Congreso, el MAS perdió una oportunidad

para avanzar en su proyecto original de cambio estructural, optando por una estrategia

más conveniente que lo mantuvo en el poder a costa de acomodar a las élites y debilitar

los movimientos sociales.

Keywords: Bolivia, Elites, Social movements, Left governments, Evo Morales

At the end of November 2017, Bolivia’s Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal

declared an end to term limits, ruling that all elected officials could run for

office indefinitely rather than for the two consecutive terms authorized by the

2009 Constitution. The announcement had enormous implications for President

Evo Morales, who has held Bolivia’s highest office since 2006 and can now seek

reelection in 2019 for a fourth term (Farthing, 2017b).

The court’s move invalidated the results of a February 2016 referendum in

which 51.3 percent of Bolivians voted against changing the constitution so that

he could run again. These results stood in stark contrast to Morales’s first three

Linda Farthing is a writer and policy analyst. Her most recent research report is The Left in Power:

Progressive Bureaucrats’ Perspectives on the Challenges to Effective Governance in Bolivia (Transnational

Institute, 2018). She has written for the Guardian, Ms. Magazine, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, and the Nation.

She thanks Angus McNelly, Steve Ellner, and Harry Vanden for their comments on this article.

798797LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18798797Latin American PerspectivesFarthing / Elites, Social Movements, And The Morales Government

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Farthing / ELITES, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND THE MORALES GOVERNMENT 213

elections, which he won by comfortable margins of 54 percent, 64 percent, and

61 percent respectively. In part, the loss in the referendum can be understood

as motivated by voter fatigue with Morales’s party, the Movimiento al

Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism— MAS) (Watts, 2016). The downturn

also mirrors the process under way with self-defined left governments through-

out the region, fueled by declining commodity prices and public disgust over

often media-manipulated accusations of corruption.

But beyond these immediate tribulations, the MAS project is suffering from

more profound disjunctures. Drawing on Steve Ellner’s framing of this collec-

tion, my article explores two of the processes that have limited the MAS gov-

ernment’s ability to transform Bolivian society into a more horizontal and

participatory one. The first is the administration’s rapprochement after 2011

with economic elites, particularly in the eastern lowlands, built on mutual

interests centered on the expansion of resource extraction, the economic activ-

ity that has been at the core of Bolivia’s export economy for over 500 years. The

second is its steadily increasing reliance on a vertical caudillismo rather than

the social control and participation by social movements1 that was a central

commitment of its original project. Taken together, they signal the MAS’s shift

toward the political center. Understanding how this occurred is critical because

after it won the 2009 election the MAS was in a position to introduce more

radical changes because it controlled both houses of Bolivia’s legislature, but it

generally failed to do so.

Bolivia under Evo Morales has frequently been characterized as radical left

by mainstream researchers (see, for example, Castañeda, 2006; Weyland,

Madrid, and Hunter, 2010), a position most often reflected in Morales’s inter-

national pronouncements and policy initiatives (for example, climate change

justice for low-income countries and opposition to U.S. meddling in local

politics). In practice, economic and social policies have been moderate:

expanding many formal rights for women and indigenous people2 in the

Americas’ most indigenous country and increasing social and infrastructure

spending significantly. Fiscal policies are consistently conservative, with only

relatively minor adjustments to underlying economic structures (Levitsky

and Roberts, 2011; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2011). The MAS government has

been fundamentally a political rather than an economic project (Wolff, 2016).

As such, it has brought about impressive social changes in Bolivian society.

This includes shepherding through one of the world’s most radical constitu-

tions, an extensive if incomplete land reform, and incorporating indigenous

people into government. Social relations have changed dramatically: when I

first went to Bolivia 35 years ago, a campesino, unless he was union leader,

would always walk a few paces behind me, a white woman. In my experi-

ence, this no longer happens.

Even though Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera are widely

reviled for their sexist jokes, women’s rights have also advanced signifi-

cantly under Morales. Bolivia now has the second-highest number of national

women legislators in the world (after Rwanda), a significant accomplish-

ment in a country where women won the vote only in 1953 (Farthing, 2015;

IDEA, 2015).3