populerwin @ 77tr pcx56 Evo Morales seeks comeback in Bolivia, sparking battle with former protégé Arce

LAUCA Ñ, Bolivia—Bolivia’s former leader Evo Morales has a campaign pitch for 2025 that has worked elsewhere: Other politicians of recent years have brought you nothing but misery. It’s time for a return to the past.

His supporters are looking to Morales for a rescue from the five tumultuous years since his 2019 resignation. The country’s first Indigenous president, Morales is credited with spreading the wealth of a commodities boom and ushering in a rare stretch of social and economic stability during his nearly 14 years in office.

His detractors say Morales—who built an economy uncomfortably dependent on natural gas reserves and sought to stay in power longer than Bolivia’s constitution allows—bears responsibility for much of the turmoil that followed his tenure.

An ally turned rival

A bitter political battle is looming between Morales, 65, and his former economy minister and once-protégé, President Luis Arce, over who will lead their long-dominant leftist Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, into the August 2025 election.

Arce has unleashed allies in the judiciary against Morales, with the Constitutional Court disqualifying Morales’ candidacy and ousting him from the leadership of MAS, a party he helped found in the 1990s.

Prosecutors in mid-December charged Morales with statutory rape for fathering a child with a 15-year-old girl when he was 56 and president. Morales didn’t deny the relationship but accused Arce of deploying a “dirty, odious” campaign to undermine him.

Fighting from the tropics

Since talk of his arrest warrant surfaced in September, Morales has been holed up in Bolivia’s coca-growing region of Chapare, ringed by loyal supporters.

Here, the former coca farmer and fiery union leader—long considered one of the last of the so-called “pink wave” of leftist leaders who once dominated Latin American politics—is planning his comeback.

Few outsiders are allowed inside his stronghold in Bolivia’s steamy lowlands, but The Associated Press was invited last month for a look from behind the barricades.

“They don’t want me to be the candidate because they know I’ll win,” Morales told the AP. “We’re in a state of total siege, morally, legally and politically.”

The four-hour drive to Chapare from Bolivia’s third-biggest city of Cochabamba is steep and slick with mist.

A narcotics checkpoint from the US-financed war on drugs that wreaked havoc across this jungle is far less intimidating than the makeshift checkpoints manned by Morales’ followers.

In the ‘Land of Evo’

As the van rumbled on, Pedro Cepita, a guide tasked with accompanying the AP, pointed out Morales’ accomplishments in the long-stigmatized Chapare—university buildings, cell towers, an airport, a 25,000-seat soccer stadium.

Morales’ face adorns murals alongside cult heroes like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. “Evo 2025-2030” slogans blanket brick houses.

“We’re in la Tierra de Evo,” Cepita said—the Land of Evo.

At sandbagged checkpoints, Morales’ supporters—some with batons on their belts—waved the van through only after recognizing Cepita.

Security forces, chased out by Morales’ followers, rarely venture here. Door-knocking census workers—even emergency rescuers responding to a deadly landslide last month—said they were harassed and kicked out by Morales’ coca union activists.

Earlier this month and after 40 days of negotiations, police began trickling back.