By Fernando Esteche
The crossroads Bolivia faces on the eve of the August 2025 elections represents much more than a simple electoral situation. It is the deepest crisis of the plurinational project since its constitutional founding in 2009, a crisis that jeopardizes the continuity of a state model that emerged as a decolonizing alternative on the continent. The fragmentation of the historic bloc of social movements, politically condensed in the MAS, exposes the unresolved contradictions of a process that for almost two decades managed to articulate popular, Indigenous, and anti-imperialist demands.
This political crisis cannot be understood outside the redeployment operations that US imperialism has systematically pursued against the region’s progressive governments. The Bolivian experience illustrates with particular clarity how hybrid warfare strategies manage to penetrate and dismantle processes of social transformation from within, exploiting internal contradictions that, without external pressure, could have been resolved through democratic and participatory means.
The current division between the factions of Luis Arce and Evo Morales transcends personal ambitions to reveal structural tensions in the accumulation model and in the articulation of the popular sectors. This fratricidal rupture of the MAS dangerously coincides with the regrouping of reactionary forces that, after the failure of Áñez ‘s coup, are seeking new avenues for neoliberal restoration. The traditional ruling class, supported by business sectors in Santa Cruz and backed by transnational media networks, is eagerly watching the disintegration of the popular camp as an opportunity to regain control of the state.
The induced errors in Evo Morales’s leadership constitute a paradigmatic case of how imperialism manages to create fissures in revolutionary processes without resorting exclusively to direct military intervention. The political and media operation deployed around the 2019 elections, with the active complicity of the OAS and sectors of the “international community,” not only legitimized the coup d’état but also established a narrative of “fraud” that persists in the national political imagination. Although subsequent independent audits categorically refuted these accusations, the narrative damage had already permeated urban middle-class sectors and had sown doubts even in social bases traditionally loyal to the process of change.
Morales’s overreliance on democratic institutional mechanisms, without an adequate defensive strategy against destabilization operations, revealed a limited understanding of the comprehensive nature of contemporary hybrid warfare. Lawfare, massive disinformation campaigns, the manipulation of international organizations, and the activation of local oligarchic networks were part of a coordinated strategy that successfully destabilized a government with broad popular support and solid economic and social indicators.
Luis Arce’s administration has faced a multidimensional crisis that reveals the structural contradictions of the Bolivian economic model. The energy crisis is at the heart of this debacle, manifesting itself in a critical fuel shortage that has paralyzed entire productive sectors. This crisis is not temporary but structural, the result of the depletion of hydrocarbon resources and years of mismanagement and lack of investment. The government has admitted that it cannot meet fuel demand due to a lack of dollars, highlighting the depth of the currency crisis the country has been experiencing since February 2023.
The dollar shortage, which defined the Dollar Crisis during Luis Arce’s administration, is rooted in the erosion of the extractive industry model and the decline in gas revenues, severely compromising Bolivia’s ability to generate foreign currency. In 2024, the government allocated more than US$3.3 billion to guarantee supply, an expense exacerbated by state subsidies that keep prices artificially low and generate annual losses of US$600 million due to smuggling. The crisis intensified when protests by sectors aligned with Morales, already in open opposition to the government, caused the country losses of US$4 billion in 2024, deepening the economic recession.
This economic debacle is fundamentally due to the exhaustion of the extractive model that underpinned the economic boom of the Evo administration. The decline in gas production, attributed to a lack of investment and exploration, left the country without its main source of foreign currency in an adverse international context. Excessive dependence on hydrocarbons, without real productive diversification, made Bolivia a hostage to the fluctuations of the international energy market and its own geological limitations.
The fracture of social movements also reflects the absence of a political formation strategy that would have allowed for a deepening of anti-colonial consciousness beyond charismatic leaders. The excessive dependence on Morales’s leadership, although understandable in the context of hegemonic construction, left the process of change without mechanisms for democratic renewal and without political cadres capable of maintaining programmatic unity in times of crisis.
This dynamic reproduces with mathematical precision what happened in Argentina, where Cristina Fernández de Kirchner made the strategic error of choosing Alberto Fernández as her presidential candidate in 2019, repeating the same pattern that would lead Evo Morales to anoint Luis Arce as her successor. In both cases, long-standing leaders of the popular camp opted for figures considered “moderate” and technically competent, believing they could maintain political control from the shadows while avoiding direct confrontation with conservative forces. The result was identical in both countries: those elected developed their own ambitions, distanced themselves from their political mentors, and ended up foundering on their own egos, just like their mentors; all of them incapable of sustaining the cohesion of the popular camp and the transformative expectations of their social bases.
Arce, like Fernández, demonstrated an erratic management that systematically defrauded the popular sectors that had placed their trust in the political project, a management marked by the inability to resolve structural economic crises. This comparison reveals a recurring pattern in Latin American progressive processes: the underestimation of the importance of political training of cadres and the overvaluation of technical and image solutions over hegemonic construction, errors that invariably lead to the fragmentation of the popular field and the restoration of conservatives.
The reorganization of the Bolivian right represents one of the most significant political phenomena of the 2025 electoral landscape. Former presidents Carlos Mesa and Jorge Tuto Quiroga, along with the governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, and businessman Samuel Doria Medina, signed an agreement in December 2024 to unify the opposition, forming a bloc that seeks to capitalize on the MAS crisis. This unity, according to its protagonists, stems from “listening to the popular voice” and guaranteeing “a single opposition candidacy in the elections.” The strategy of the unified right consists of presenting itself as a stable alternative to the chaos generated by the MAS fracture, while discreetly promoting a program of neoliberal restoration that includes labor flexibilization, unrestricted openness to foreign capital, and the dismantling of the social policies of the process of change.
The electoral situation has become even more complex with the confirmation of Evo Morales’s political ban. The Plurinational Constitutional Court annulled his indefinite reelection in December 2023, definitively disqualifying the former president from running for the 2025 elections. This decision, ratified by the Superior Electoral Tribunal on May 20, 2025, constitutes what Morales calls “a day of mourning” for the implementation of “banning and exclusion.” The judicial persecution intensified with accusations of sexual crimes against minors, constituting a lawfare strategy aimed at neutralizing the historical leader of the process of change.
In this scenario, the candidacy of Andrónico Rodríguez, president of the Senate and once considered a Morales pawn, emerges. He officially announced his candidacy on May 3, 2025, seeking to distance himself from both the economic failure attributed to Arce and the figure of Morales. Paradoxically, Luis Arce confirmed his withdrawal from the presidential candidacy on May 13, creating a leadership vacuum that Rodríguez attempts to fill by running under the banner of the Third System Movement (MST). The apparent reconciliation between Rodríguez and the Arcism, where Arce attempts to form a popular bloc, reveals the desperation of the government camp to maintain any viable electoral option.
pro-Evo sectors has been to promote null votes, a strategy Morales promotes, denouncing that “the Arce government destroyed the economy, divided, and hijacked our political instrument with court rulings.” This tactic of electoral sabotage, presented as legitimate resistance to the ban, objectively constitutes a devastating engineering strategy that favors the unified right. Morales maintains that “without Evo on the ballot there can be no elections,” instilling a narrative of delegitimization that erodes the credibility of the democratic process.
The structural weakening that this crisis has caused in social movements transcends the electoral dimension to affect the organizational and mobilizing capacity of the grassroots. The confrontation between the Arce and Morales factions not only divided the political leadership but also fractured the territorial, union, and community organizations that formed the backbone of the process of change. The blockades carried out by pro-Evo sectors, which caused millions in losses to the national economy, eroded the legitimacy of social protest among broad sectors of the urban population, who now associate popular demonstrations with the economic crisis and ungovernability.
This organizational fragmentation is exacerbated by the leadership crisis facing social movements. The historical dependence on the charisma of Evo Morales, without mechanisms for democratic renewal, left grassroots organizations without leaders capable of maintaining unity and strategic perspective. The economic crisis has forced many social leaders to focus on immediate survival demands, abandoning the long-term transformative agenda that characterized the founding moments of the process of change.
The decomposition of the grassroots organizational structure creates favorable conditions for the penetration of conservative discourses into sectors that traditionally constituted the MAS’s social base. The energy crisis and the shortage of foreign currency have generated a climate of hopelessness and disenchantment that the unified right seeks to channel into a restorative project presented as a technical solution to economic problems, obscuring its true neoliberal and recolonizing nature.
The Bolivian experience demonstrates that processes of social transformation face not only open resistance from the local ruling classes and their imperial allies, but also the complexity of maintaining popular unity in contexts of relative prosperity. The successful management of natural resources during the commodity boom generated rising expectations that, when they could not be met indefinitely, became a source of internal tensions.
The anti-colonialist perspective demands recognizing that the current crisis of the plurinational project is not only the result of internal errors but also the product of a systematic imperial offensive that has succeeded in penetrating and dismantling the transformative experiences of the region from within. The restoration of conservative power in Argentina and Brazil, the intensification of the blockade against Venezuela and Cuba, and the destabilization in Bolivia are part of a continental strategy coordinated from Washington to reverse the progressive cycle.
In this context, rebuilding the Bolivian popular movement requires a deeper understanding of the nature of the enemy and contemporary forms of imperial domination. Recovering electoral unity is not enough; it is necessary to build a historic bloc capable of resisting external pressures and resolving the internal contradictions that have weakened the process of change.
The serious political crisis facing Bolivia highlights the urgency of rethinking strategies for hegemonic construction in the 21st century. Social movements must assume a renewed role, recovering the political initiative that characterized the founding moments of the process of change. The defense of the plurinational and multicultural project paradoxically demands its refoundation on more solid foundations that are more resistant to imperial destabilization.
The August 2025 elections will define not only Bolivia’s immediate future but also the survival prospects of the decolonization project in a continent subjected to growing recolonizing pressures. A potential victory for the unified right in Bolivia would constitute a devastating blow to the popular movements of Latin America, completing the imperial siege against the transformative experiences that still persist in the region.
Bolivia’s geopolitical importance transcends its national borders. As the geographic heart of South America, the Andean-Amazonian country constitutes a fundamental link in the articulation of sovereign regional integration. Its strategic location, connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific and linking the countries of the Southern Cone with the Amazon region, makes Bolivia a key element in any project of continental unity. The loss of this territory to popular forces would mean the definitive fragmentation of the geopolitical map favorable to the peoples of Latin America.
A conservative victory in Bolivia would reinforce the reactionary arc that already extends from Colombia to Argentina, consolidating a continental bloc aligned with US interests. This geopolitical configuration would allow imperialism to complete the isolation of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, intensify pressure on Mexico under President Claudia Sheinbaum, and neutralize any attempt at a progressive resurgence in the region. The domino effect would be inevitable: the fall of the last bastion of so-called 21st-century socialism in South America would weaken revolutionary morale and strengthen conservative discourses throughout the continent.
For popular movements in Latin America, the Bolivian experience represented a model of transformation that combined anti-colonial struggle with the construction of an inclusive plurinational state. The destruction of this model would deprive the continent’s indigenous peoples of their most successful example of political reconstruction, while providing local oligarchies with proof that even the most consolidated processes can be reversed through a combination of external pressure and internal division.
The defeat of the Bolivian plurinational project would have far-reaching economic consequences for the continent. Bolivia, with its vast reserves of lithium, natural gas, and other strategic resources, would be completely subordinated to transnational corporations and the dictates of international finance capital. This subordination would not only deprive the Bolivian people of sovereignty over their natural resources but would also eliminate from the regional scene an actor who had successfully articulated sovereign energy policies and South-South cooperation schemes as an alternative to imperial domination.
The neoliberal reconquest of Bolivia would strengthen the reactionary business networks operating on a continental scale, providing them with an additional platform for their destabilization operations against the remaining progressive governments. The oligarchic sectors of Santa Cruz, historically linked to the Brazilian and U.S. elites, would regain their prominence as articulators of the continental counterrevolution, while the country would become a base of operations for the financing and logistics of regional conservative forces.
History will judge harshly those who, out of personal pettiness or short-sighted calculations, contribute to the definitive fragmentation of the popular camp at one of the most critical moments of the continental anti-imperialist struggle. The historic responsibility to preserve Bolivia’s transformative legacy transcends individual ambitions and becomes a sacred duty to the peoples of Our America who are still struggling for their definitive liberation.