“Democracy is in danger in Bolivia as the result of legitimate pressures from the poor. We cannot generate economic growth and well-being for a few and then expect that the large majorities that are excluded will watch silently and patiently.”
A recent president of Bolivia said that, but it wasn’t Evo Morales (who has just quit). It was Carlos Mesa, the man whom Morales tried to cheat out of the presidency in last month’s election. Mesa said it in 2005, the last time he was president, just before he quit and Morales won a landslide victory in the election triggered by his resignation.
Most outside commentators used to stick to a simple script when talking about Bolivia. Morales was the good guy because he was the country’s first Indigenous president (he grew up speaking Aymara, and learned Spanish only as a young adult) and because he looked like and seemed to care about the poor majority of Bolivians.
Whereas Mesa belongs to the privileged white minority (15 per cent of the population) who have always controlled both the politics and the wealth, so he must be the bad guy.
But he doesn’t fit the frame: he is a historian and television journalist, and he resigned from the presidency in 2005 after trying and failing to nationalize the country’s gas industry.
For the rest of this article: https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-morales-manoeuvred-himself-out-of-bolivias-presidency