Survival Tips for Latin American Leftist Leaders
Running for a constitution-bending fourth term, Bolivia’s Evo Morales is still going strong.
Still riding high.
Photographer: Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images
Latin America’s left-wingers are in a rut. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro presides over a collapsing economy behind bayonets. An Ecuadoran court has ordered the arrest of former president Rafael Correa, who is living in Belgium. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was impeached for cooking the books and her iconic predecessor and Workers’ Party mentor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is in jail for graft.
Sure, Mexicans swoon to old-school lefty Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, but he’s the new caudillo on the block. So how to explain President Evo Morales of Bolivia? The three-time socialist leader is favored to win a fourth term in this October’s election. No matter that the constitution that Morales himself had rewritten banned presidents from serving more than two consecutive terms, and that a majority of Bolivians seconded that hard stop in a national referendum. Leave it to the Morales-friendly Plurinational Constitutional Court to finesse those obstacles.