Evo Morales wants to govern Bolivia again. The former president (2006-2019) announced that he intends to run in the 2025 elections, when the term of Luis Arce, who was once his Economy Minister and is now a political rival, ends.
Evo and the leadership of the ruling Movement to Socialism (MAS) party have been exchanging barbs with ministers from the Arce government. In recent months, the former president accused the Government ministers, Eduardo del Castillo, and Justice, Iván Lima, of trying to involve him in corruption cases.
::Internal dispute threatens to split the governing party in Bolivia::
Evo made his intention public this Sunday (24), through a post on the social network He even accused the current government of attempts to physically eliminate him.
Forced by the government’s attacks, its plan to ban the MAS-IPSP and defenestrate us with political processes, even physically eliminating us, we have decided to accept the requests of our militancy and of so many sisters and brothers who attend rallies throughout… pic.twitter.com/H37m78wLL2
— Evo Morales Ayma (@evoespueblo) September 24, 2023
In an interview with the radio station Kawsachun Coca, the former president also mentioned a “dirty” campaign against him. He said that the opposition calls him a “drug trafficker” and that, from within the government itself, he is nicknamed the “cocaine king”.
The former president is the first Bolivian politician to announce his intention to run for President of the country in 2025. The current president, who has tried to stay away from the debate, said that the issue of re-election is not yet on the agenda.
MAS has scheduled a congress for next week (3 to 5 October) in which the organizing committee for the party’s primaries will be formed, in which, in December or January, candidates for the presidency and vice-president of the party will be chosen. acronym.
The congress is scheduled for Cochabamba, one of Evo’s political bases. The “arcists” (Arce’s allies) tried to arrange for the meeting to be held in El Alto, near the capital La Paz, and to serve to renew the party’s leadership, starting with Evo himself. The “evistas” warn that the agenda will be the expulsion of Arce and vice-president David Choquehuanca, considered “traitors”.
In his post, Evo states that, if they are unable to prevent the congress from taking place, his opponents will use a woman to attack him, “just as the right has already done”. In 2019, when he left power after suffering a coup d’état, the person who assumed the interim presidency was Jeanine Áñez, who was later convicted of organizing the coup and is now in prison.
After Áñez’s provisional government, Luis Arce was elected president in 2020. It was never the name of the MAS bases’ dreams, but it ended up being the one chosen by Evo in a “Solomonic solution”. During the beginning of the Arce government, Evo focused his criticism on ministers and the choices of the new president, but the situation escalated, to the point that on June 25th he said that the government had gone to the right.
In another post made after the announcement of his candidacy, Evo thanks the support shown by “so many sisters and brothers who confirm their support for our candidacy to face a campaign against lies and sabotage”. And he states that “the government and the separatist extreme right coincide in opposing this candidacy promoted by the people”.
In programmatic terms, Evo Morales accuses Luis Arce of not having advanced anything in relation to the agenda created by them with 13 pillars of actions on the occasion of the bicentenary – Bolivia’s independence was proclaimed on August 6, 1825, in the city of Chuquisaca, today Sucre.
* With information from EFE, Reuters and Folha de S.Paulo
Editing: Patrícia de Matos
