Bolivia Has Moved On From Evo Morales. He Should See That.
The former socialist president is making another run even after his failed effort to cling to power ended in exile.
Bolivia doesn’t need more of Evo Morales.
Photographer: Aizar Raldes/AFP/Getty Images
Nearly four years after a failed effort to cling to power, Bolivia’s socialist icon Evo Morales is running for president again. For all of his accomplishments, the palpable anxiety about his attempted return is well placed.
About 15 years ago, I started my journalism career covering Morales during an 18-month stint in La Paz starting in 2008. In 2005, he had been elected as Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and he was overseeing what became a remarkably successful period for South America’s poorest economy. His landslide victory brought stability to a tumultuous society; his redistribution programs helped reduce poverty and inequality; and his personal story — as an Aymara coca farmer turned head of state — resonated with audiences worldwide. At the time, he oversaw an economy about 1/100th the size of neighboring Brazil’s, but he seemed to stand for something bigger (and knew how to push the foreign media’s buttons), so he regularly made news at the United Nations and elsewhere.