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The deep political and economic crisis and the popular uprising currently unfolding in Bolivia cannot be understood without analyzing the historical cycle that began more than two decades ago. The streets, which today are once again the scene of clashes, have inherited the lessons and contradictions of prior revolutionary processes, such as those of 2003 and 2005, which did not fundamentally transform the structure of the capitalist system or destroy the bourgeois state, but merely resulted in a change in political leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The year 2003 marked the beginning of a profound crisis of hegemony for the neoliberal model implemented in 1985. Gonzalo S\u00e1nchez de Lozada\u2019s (\u201cGoni\u201d) second term began amid a severe fiscal crisis, high unemployment rates, and deep social discontent stemming from the prior privatization of public enterprises. The trigger for the insurrection was the government\u2019s plan to export natural gas to the U.S. and Mexican markets via Chilean ports. The aim was to halt the plundering of strategic resources by transnational corporations (such as the Pacific LNG consortium), which were robbing the Bolivian state by paying royalties of just 18%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The civilian population saw the export of gas under these conditions as a re-enactment of the historical plundering of Potos\u00ed\u2019s silver and tin in the early 20th century. The unifying slogan of the workers\u2019, peasant, and neighborhood movement became the defense and recovery of natural resources for the country\u2019s own industrialization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The popular uprising adopted radical and communal methods of struggle:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The siege of the cities: Indigenous communities of the Altiplano, led by Felipe Quispe (\u201cEl Mallku\u201d), surrounded the entrances to the seat of government by blocking strategic roads, demanding the cancellation of the gas project and the release of detained leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The armed insurrection in El Alto: The city of El Alto, with a population composed mostly of migrants and Aymara people, became the epicenter of the resistance. Organized through the Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE) and the El Alto Workers\u2019 Federation, thousands of residents brought the city to a standstill with barricades, trenches, and neighborhood watch committees to repel the advance of military armored vehicles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The response of the S\u00e1nchez de Lozada government was to confront the protest militarily, enacting the \u201cDecree of Death\u201d (Supreme Decree 27209), which exempted from criminal liability any military personnel involved in maintaining public order. In October 2003, the army\u2019s attempt to break through neighborhood blockades in El Alto using military convoys loaded with gasoline to supply La Paz triggered the so-called \u201cOctober Massacre.\u201d Troops used military-grade weapons and snipers against unarmed civilians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The brutal state repression left more than 60 people dead and at least 400 wounded. But rather than breaking the resistance, the massacre of civilians sparked a wave of national outrage that garnered the active support of La Paz\u2019s middle classes, university students, and professional sectors, all demanding criminal prosecution of the president. With a fragmented cabinet, lacking parliamentary political support, and discredited by international public opinion, S\u00e1nchez de Lozada fled by helicopter to the United States on October 17, 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Following Goni\u2019s flight, constitutional succession fell to the vice president, historian and journalist Carlos Mesa. In the streets of La Paz and El Alto, the mobilized masses debated whether to move toward a direct seizure of power or allow for an institutional transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Bolivian Workers\u2019 Confederation (COB), led at the time by figures such as Jaime Solares, adopted a stance that proved decisive: it decided to lift the human blockade and the military-popular cordon surrounding the Government Palace. By calling a truce and paving the way for Carlos Mesa\u2019s inauguration, the COB leadership contained the insurrectionary force of the rank and file. This gave the Bolivian bourgeoisie a respite under Mesa\u2019s promise to convene a Constituent Assembly and hold a referendum on gas, diverting the crisis from the streets into institutional channels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 2003 truce did not resolve the structural demands. In 2005, a new wave of protests against Carlos Mesa (who refused to nationalize hydrocarbons) also forced his resignation. The popular movement demanded total nationalization without compensation and a sovereign Constituent Assembly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the revolutionary energy that threatened to dissolve the bourgeois state was channeled toward the electoral route. The Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), led by coca-planter leader Evo Morales, presented itself as the only viable institutional alternative to pacify the country. In the December 2005 elections, Morales capitalized on the discontent and won with a historic 53.7% of the vote. This electoral victory served as a diversion from the insurrectionary process: the struggle for power in the streets was transformed into the management of the existing state apparatus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once in power, the government of Evo Morales implemented reforms that responded to the pressure of the October 2003 Agenda, achieving economic stability unprecedented in the country\u2019s history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nationalization of oil and mining companies: In May 2006, the \u201cnationalization\u201d of hydrocarbons was decreed (Heroes of the Chaco Decree). Through the reestablishment of Yacimientos Petrol\u00edferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), the state took control of resource ownership and demanded the renegotiation of contracts with multinationals, capturing up to 82% of oil revenues in the largest fields. Similarly, the Bolivian Mining Corporation (COMIBOL) was reactivated, and strategic smelters such as the one in Vinto were reclaimed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distribution of oil revenues: The massive inflow of foreign exchange from gas exports (fueled by the commodities boom) was partly allocated to public investment and the creation of universal social benefits. Programs such as the Juancito Pinto Bonus (to reduce school dropout rates), the Juana Azurduy Bonus (for pregnant women), and the Renta Dignidad (an old-age pension) lifted millions of Bolivians out of extreme poverty and stimulated the domestic market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite anti-imperialist rhetoric and the proclamation of the \u201cPlurinational State,\u201d Evo Morales\u2019s government operated as a key factor in social containment. Instead of moving toward the destruction of the landowning and capitalist state, the MAS, in practice, maintained the continuity of dependence and of extractivist capitalism. What Evo Morales\u2019s government did was to take advantage of the commodities boom to capture greater rents and grant welfare concessions to the masses, thereby managing to dampen the class struggle without touching the profits of the landowning oligarchy or transnational corporations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Independent mobilization by unions and indigenous communities was systematically discouraged or co-opted. Every time the rank and file attempted to push beyond the limits of private property or existing laws, the government used its revolutionary prestige to pacify the conflicts, arguing that \u201cattacking the government was playing into the hands of the right.\u201d In this way, worker participation was subordinated to the state bureaucracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Behind the socialist rhetoric, the MAS administration consolidated the traditional economic power structure, sealing pacts of coexistence with the oligarchy of eastern Bolivia (Santa Cruz) and the financial sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alliance with agribusiness: The government halted radical agrarian reform in the lowlands. Laws such as the Economic-Social Function (FES) Act were relaxed, and there were \u201cpardons\u201d for illegal deforestation, guaranteeing the property rights of large cattle and soybean estates. The use of GMOs was promoted, and agricultural frontiers were expanded through decrees allowing controlled burning, which directly benefited traditional landowners in exchange for political peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Record profits for the banking sector: The private financial sector experienced its greatest economic boom. The government guaranteed legal security for private banks, which multiplied their profits year after year thanks to the economy\u2019s liquidity and domestic consumption, without ever facing attempts at nationalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The contradictions of the model erupted when the working class clashed head-on with the interests of the government and its corporate allies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pension Conflict (2011\u20132013): During the regulation of the new Pension Law, the COB and mining sectors took to the streets demanding a pension based on 100% of final wages and a reduction in the retirement age. The government of Evo Morales labeled the protests \u201ccoup-mongering\u201d and \u201cselfish,\u201d mobilizing allied sectors to counter the workers\u2019 marches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Handing over mining to transnational corporations: Despite the rhetoric of nationalization, the Mining and Metallurgy Law consolidated foreign companies\u2019 control (such as Japan\u2019s Sumitomo at the San Crist\u00f3bal mine or the U.S.\u2019s Coeur Mining) over the country\u2019s richest deposits. Furthermore, enormous privileges were granted to traditional mining cooperatives\u2014which operate under a logic of private labor exploitation\u2014to the detriment of state-run mining and the environmental rights of local communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Toward the end of the 2010s, the model began to show signs of exhaustion due to the drop in international gas prices. At the same time, Evo Morales\u2019s stubborn insistence on running for reelection indefinitely led to severe political erosion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His refusal to recognize the result of the February 21, 2016, referendum (21F), in which the majority voted against his new candidacy, undermined his democratic legitimacy and alienated broad sectors of the urban middle classes. This climate of discontent was skillfully capitalized on by traditional right-wing forces and business-led civic committees, which reorganized their forces, using the banner of \u201cdefending democracy\u201d to prepare their assault on power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The political crisis reached its breaking point in the October 2019 elections. Following allegations of electoral fraud promoted by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the interruption of the quick-count system, the radical right unleashed violent urban mobilizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reactionary insurrection took hold when the Bolivian Police mutinied and the Armed Forces \u201csuggested\u201d the president\u2019s resignation. On November 10, 2019, Evo Morales resigned and went into exile in Mexico (and later in Argentina). Two days later, right-wing Senator Jeanine \u00c1\u00f1ez assumed the interim presidency in a legislative session without a quorum, inaugurating a military-backed regime that persecuted union leaders and carried out massacres against the popular resistance in Sacaba and Senkata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u00c1\u00f1ez regime quickly collapsed due to its violent repression, corruption scandals in the midst of the pandemic, and disastrous economic management. The resistance of the working-class and indigenous grassroots reorganized independently, and in August 2020, through a national road blockade that paralyzed the country, forced the government to set a date for elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In October 2020, the MAS returned to power through the ballot box. Luis Arce Catacora, Evo Morales\u2019s former Minister of Economy, won the presidential election with 55.1% of the vote, reflecting the people\u2019s unanimous rejection of the coup-plotting right wing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government of Luis Arce took office with the central promise of implementing \u201ceconomic reconstruction.\u201d As a former Minister of Economy and considered the \u201carchitect\u201d of the previous economic boom, his strategy was based on immediately injecting liquidity into the grassroots through the Anti-Hunger Voucher and launching the ambitious Import Substitution Industrialization Model (ISI). This state plan envisioned the construction of more than 150 public industrial plants (biodiesel plants, NPK fertilizer plants, zinc refineries, and lithium and food processing plants) with the aim of processing local raw materials, reducing dependence on foreign manufacturers, and preventing capital flight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the ambitious state industrialization plan ran headlong into the structural and insurmountable limits of Bolivia\u2019s extractivist model. The sustainability of the entire state apparatus and subsidies had historically depended on natural gas exports to Brazil and Argentina. Decades of underinvestment in hydrocarbon exploration led to the critical depletion and decline of gas reserves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This decline in the country\u2019s main source of revenue triggered a catastrophic domino effect:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dollar shortage crisis: As gas exports contracted drastically, the flow of foreign exchange that fed the Central Bank\u2019s Net International Reserves (NIR) dried up. This caused a chronic shortage of U.S. dollars in the formal market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fuel shortage: Historically, Bolivia has subsidized the price of gasoline and diesel domestically to keep them artificially cheap. Since it did not produce enough crude oil, the government was forced to import increasingly larger volumes of fuel at international prices. With insufficient dollars in the public coffers to pay international suppliers, the state-owned YPFB began to delay payments. This led to a chronic shortage of diesel and gasoline, forcing transporters, agricultural producers, and citizens to wait in kilometer-long lines for days on end at gas stations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the end of his term, his government found itself trapped in a dead-end of fiscal deficit and stagflation, leaving a scenario of deep economic vulnerability and social fracture that paved the way for the subsequent turbulent political landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The political cycle of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) entered its final phase due to an irreversible internal fracture. The violent struggle for party leadership between the \u201cEvoist\u201d wing (loyal to Evo Morales) and the \u201cArcist\u201d wing (loyal to President Luis Arce) divided the country\u2019s main social organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both sides clashed in the courts, at parallel congresses, and through roadblocks in an effort to disqualify one another. The lack of consensus led to the virtual ban on their unified candidacies or calls for abstention. This left the working-class and indigenous base fragmented and without a cohesive political option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Against a backdrop marked by the deep crisis of the MAS and a major economic crisis, general elections were held in August 2025. The electoral process was shaped by an open recession that had been dragging on since 2024, triggered by the depletion of international reserves, chronic fuel shortages, and a severe dollar shortage that sent the black market soaring. This collapse demonstrated that the previous boom was nothing more than a period sustained by the commodities boom; as high international prices dissipated, the MAS model laid bare the persistence of the dependent, extractivist, and subordinate capitalism that Morales and Arce had taken it upon themselves to preserve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this context, the first round on August 17 gave the lead to Senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), with 32.1% of the vote, followed by former conservative president Jorge \u201cTuto\u201d Quiroga of the Freedom and Democracy Alliance (Libre) with 26.8%, consolidating a shift toward the traditional right as a consequence of the government\u2019s deviation from its course and the historic failure of its reformist agenda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On October 19, 2025, the presidential runoff was held. Contrary to many initial poll predictions, Rodrigo Paz Pereira (son of former President Jaime Paz Zamora) and his running mate, Edmand Lara, secured victory by winning 54.5% of the vote against Quiroga\u2019s 45.4%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paz managed to prevail by moderating his rhetoric in the final campaign stretch to capture the vote of the political center and disenchanted progressives, presenting himself as an institutional alternative in the face of the economic crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The MAS\u2019s traditional voter base crumbled. The electorate, battered by inflation, fuel shortages, and a lack of dollars, harshly punished the party at the polls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The official MAS-IPSP ticket obtained a historic and marginal 2.48%, and went from holding a majority bloc of 96 assembly members elected in 2020 to retaining a single representative in Parliament following the official 2025 count.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under the slogan of opening up the economy and implementing \u201ccapitalism for all,\u201d Rodrigo Paz\u2019s government wasted no time in forging political alliances with international far-right governments, expressing rapid and unconditional support for Donald Trump while swiftly adopting an aggressive package of neoliberal reforms in line with his economic program:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Exchange rate and fiscal adjustment: Creation of an Exchange Rate Stabilization Fund to unify the dollar market, accompanied by a total liberalization of exports and imports along with a tax overhaul to lower corporate taxes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
International opening: An immediate diplomatic shift to strengthen financial and political ties with the United States and international credit agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Structural reforms: Proposals for free-market agrarian reform in productive regions and the proposal of a constitutional reform that the opposition denounced as the beginning of the privatization of strategic natural resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Judicial offensive: The announcement of a profound restructuring of the judiciary with direct warnings that leaders of the previous government, especially Evo Morales, would face criminal prosecution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout 2025, the resistance of the Bolivian masses against the currency crisis and the recession inherited from 2024 began to manifest itself through a series of isolated, sectoral, and fragmented struggles across the country. Trade union protests against inflation, drivers\u2019 strikes over fuel shortages, teachers\u2019 strikes over funding, and local peasant blockades initially operated in a scattered manner. However, this scenario changed radically with the enactment of the violent neoliberal package of Supreme Decree 5503, which eliminated fuel subsidies, froze public sector wages, cut government spending, and deregulated the economy to open up strategic resources to transnational capital. The decree served as the definitive trigger that unified the accumulated rage of all the exploited masses. Breaking through sectoral isolation and overwhelming their own leaderships, the various sectors in struggle centralized their forces in the great national mobilization of January 2026, which brought more than 500,000 people into the streets and paralyzed the country through blockades and workers\u2019 strikes. This colossal mass direct action dealt the first major defeat to the government of Rodrigo Paz by forcing it to completely repeal the decree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Social fragmentation was definitively broken in May 2026, converging into a massive nationwide social uprising. The persistent fuel shortages, low wages devoured by inflation, and the resounding rejection of the covert privatization of natural resources united the popular civic committees, independent unions, and rural communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The country\u2019s main highways are blocked, paralyzing logistics and cutting off key access routes to the city of La Paz. While President Rodrigo Paz publicly insists that there are \u201cradical groups that do not want to engage in dialogue\u201d and criminalizes the marches, Bolivia\u2019s working class, indigenous peoples, and popular sectors have once again taken up their historic methods of direct action, opening a new chapter of confrontation in the streets that recalls the insurrectionary days of 2003 and threatens the stability of the new capitalist regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The scenario of confrontation that is currently paralyzing Bolivia marks the definitive exhaustion of reformist illusions. Historical experience has shown that governments of class conciliation, such as those of Evo Morales and Luis Arce, constituted a strategic deception for the working class: changing the political leadership of the bourgeois state without fundamentally transforming the socioeconomic system only served to breathe new life into the landowning bourgeoisie and transnational corporations and facilitate the subsequent return of brutal neoliberal plans like that of Rodrigo Paz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lessons learned leave an irrefutable lesson for the sectors in struggle: the masses only triumph when they unify their scattered demands in the streets, overwhelm the union bureaucracies, and rely exclusively on their own strength in an independent manner. Therefore, the task at hand in the face of the current nationwide upheaval is not to negotiate crumbs or new institutional pacts, but, as the fighters have already stated, to overthrow the starvation government of Paz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the same time, it is essential to build our own revolutionary alternative, so that the working class, together with the peasants, indigenous peoples, and popular sectors, can take the reins of the country, resolve the pending democratic and institutional tasks, and found, on the ruins of the bourgeois state, a socialist Bolivia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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