The following article was published in the magazine “Relato” Nº17 (September 2025), and I wrote it at the suggestion of my Uruguayan colleague Federico Irazábal. The full issue can be read here.
Contrary to predictions and polls that had Samuel Doria Medina (who served as minister of planning in the early 1990s) as a shoo-in for the runoff, the results produced a disruptive outcome: Rodrigo Paz Pereira (senator from Tarija and son of former President Jaime Paz Zamora) leads with 32.06%, followed by Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga (former president, who governed from August 2001 to August 2002) with 26.7%. Samuel Doria Medina, in third place with 19.69%, was eliminated from the runoff. The one stealing the spotlight, surprisingly, is Paz Pereira’s vice-presidential running mate: former police officer Edman Lara, the only one among all those mentioned who has no political background. How is it possible that the Paz Pereira-Lara ticket took first place without a single public opinion poll even mentioning their potential advancement to the runoff? How is it possible that the Movement for Socialism (MAS)—which won 55% of the vote in the 2020 presidential election—has practically disappeared?
One of the keys is to trace the votes that once belonged to the MAS, which is now fragmented. Andrónico Rodríguez, the former coca growers’ leader and president of the Senate—who was seen as the strongest candidate for renewal within the MAS movement—barely reached 8.51% (and had to use a borrowed party label, that of Alianza Popular). Eduardo del Castillo, associated with outgoing President Luis Arce and serving as Minister of Government, plummeted to 3.17% (running under the MAS banner). The null vote promoted by Evo Morales accounted for 19.87%: null votes typically make up 3.6%, so if we take the liberty of attributing 16.27% of the null vote to Morales’s stance and add that to the votes for Andrónico Rodríguez and Eduardo del Castillo, we arrive at 27.67%.
Evo Morales, by directly calling for a null vote and refusing to support Andrónico Rodríguez, completed the dismantling of his own political camp. Alianza Popular won no representation in the Senate and only 8 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Morales’s gamble was to prevent his former political protégé from inheriting the MAS movement. This was something akin to the “Bachelet strategy”: preferring an opponent of one’s own political camp to take power, in order to (try to) alternate with him in the future. It was undoubtedly a risky game, one Morales played with little subtlety, accusing the young Rodríguez of being a “traitor,” even though Rodríguez had offered him the vice-presidential slot on his ticket. Evo Morales reached an unusual level of sectarianism when he declared García Linera, his vice president during his 3 terms, “just another enemy” (as early as April 2023). In any event, Morales emerged stronger by obstructing the renewal of his own political progeny. In Cochabamba, the null vote came first, and in Potosí, second.
In 2020, the polls underestimated Arce by nearly 13 points—one of the biggest errors in Latin America, according to CELAG. In 2025, the result came as another shock: Paz-Lara captured the majority of undecided voters, that 13.3% who had not made up their minds in previous polls (Ipsos Ciesmori, 4th pre-election poll). It’s possible that Paz-Lara also took votes away from Samuel Doria Medina and Manfred Reyes Villa in last-minute shifts. In that final Ipsos Ciesmori poll before the election (2,700 interviews conducted), Paz Pereira stood at 8.3%, behind Doria Medina (21.2%) and Quiroga (20%), and ahead of Manfred Reyes Villa, a former military officer and mayor of Cochabamba (7.7%).
Between 2015 and 2020, Rodrigo Paz Pereira was mayor of Tarija, capital of the department of the same name: his administration there is not remembered as particularly distinguished. In the presidential election, he came third in the department of Tarija. He is currently a senator, having been elected in 2020 as part of Comunidad Ciudadana (led by Mesa Gisbert). Paz Pereira is not only the son of former president Paz Zamora, founder of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), but also the grandnephew of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the most important Bolivian politician of the 20th century (four times president!), founder of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR). These facts, which could place him on the side of Bolivia’s “political caste,” do not appear to have counted against him, possibly because the public was unaware of them and/or because he contrasted with the rest of the field: this was his first presidential run (unlike Quiroga, Doria Medina, or Reyes Villa), and he received almost no media coverage.
Paz and Lara’s campaign has features that set them apart: both dress simply (checkered or short-sleeved shirts, vests, work clothes), which contrasts with “Tuto” Quiroga, Doria Medina, or Reyes Villa, who usually wear suits. Their approach is austere: they toured 220 municipalities, meeting voters face-to-face; they spent almost nothing on advertising; and their rallies do not feature paid attendees. What is disruptive in this case is its authenticity and simplicity, although that does not make it polarizing or aggressive—at least not in Bolivia.
From a narrative perspective, the concept of “money for everyone”—sometimes also referred to as “capitalism for everyone”—stands out in Paz and Lara’s rhetoric. Paz promotes “lower tariffs, lower taxes, and plenty of credit,” resonating with Bolivians who want to be able to earn a living through a combination that involves less government burden on the one hand but also more support on the other. He calls for a leaner state, in contrast to what they call the “Estado tranca” (the “blocking state”), one that makes it easier for both formal and informal entrepreneurs to develop on their own. He advocates for the elimination of subsidies while maintaining the social programs of Bolivia’s MAS. Paz promotes privatizations “under Bolivian control” and declares himself “opposed to any loans from the International Monetary Fund,” since “in Bolivia, we have enough money to revive our economy.” Seen in this light, upon closer inspection, it is not surprising that Paz and Lara have attracted a portion of the MAS vote. The ticket led by Paz Pereira took the lead in La Paz, Oruro, Chuquisaca, Potosí, and Cochabamba—departments where the MAS won in 2020.
Edman Lara rose to fame by exposing corruption within the Bolivian police force. He was fired from the force and became a folk hero. Without a job, he had to make a living as a gig worker and began sharing his adventures on TikTok. The result was the creation of a massive audience, outside of traditional media.
Fixed broadband penetration reaches 42% of households in Bolivia, compared to a regional average of approximately 60%. The urban–rural gap is critical: 80% coverage in cities compared to just 26% in rural areas. However, Bolivia has almost one cell phone per inhabitant. A rural family may not have Wi-Fi at home, but it may have a prepaid cell phone with WhatsApp, Facebook, and TikTok, the most widely used apps. Taking this into account allowed us to tell various political actors in advance how central digital platforms—and especially the vertical short-form video format that emerged on TikTok—would be to this election, although many of them did not understand it.
“Tuto” Quiroga, who is advised by Ecuadorian strategist Jaime Durán Barba, won in the departments of Santa Cruz and Pando, and trailed Doria Medina in Beni and Tarija. His campaign platform seeks to capitalize on his experience and his clear opposition to the MAS over the past two decades, while embodying a 180-degree shift away from the Arce-Morales alignment with countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. His electoral vehicle is “Libre.” Under its banner, Quiroga proposes “law and order,” a reform of the legal framework to attract investment in lithium, and an agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
The Collapse of the MAS
The election landscape can be explained by a divided MAS: a hollowed-out party label, a national government without dollars, and a party without leadership. Evo Morales and Luis Arce—who vied for the party’s presidential nomination throughout Arce’s term—were not even able to run.
Luis Arce had become president with Evo Morales’s blessing (2020-2025) and for a time maintained a positive image thanks to the economic stability Bolivia enjoyed during the first half of his administration. But he never managed to establish a governing narrative or a solid support base truly his own, independent of Morales. While the economy showed no obvious signs of strain in citizens’ daily lives, Arce devoted himself to boasting about his approval ratings and preparing for another presidential term. The Bolivian government had incorporated a flagship phrase into its official communications: “The country in Latin America with the lowest inflation.” The shortage of dollars demolished that foundation and left him without political capital.
Evo Morales tried to control the government, and in the face of Arce’s resistance, he set out to wear him down. It was often said that Argentina’s problem during Alberto Fernández’s administration was that he never broke free from Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and simply waited for his vice president to chart the course for him. In Arce’s case, it was different: he made his own decisions and had the ability to lead on his own, even if that meant upsetting Morales. Why wasn’t that enough?
Curiously, Arce’s government—which was built on the “Andean miracle,” a model of macroeconomic stability and redistribution (between 2005 and 2014, more than 20% of Bolivians were lifted out of poverty), and which managed to keep inflation in check when it was rampant worldwide (exacerbated by the war in Ukraine)—limited itself to managing what had already been achieved, unable to implement a proactive policy to replenish the reserves that were running low. With the nationalization of natural gas in 2006, the MAS movement succeeded in capturing the revenue and dollars that Bolivia received from natural gas. In 2015, the gas boom faltered, and it became clear that the MAS—during the boom years—had reinvested barely 10% in well maintenance and the exploration of new fields. Foreign exchange earnings from gold and soybean products—which gained prominence in exports—did not flow directly into the state coffers, since those businesses are in private hands. The industrialization of lithium was not effectively managed, resulting in a missed opportunity.
The first tensions arose during the 2021 subnational elections, when the MAS generally fared well and Arce emerged stronger—with the exception of regional defeats in Santa Cruz and Beni, where Evo Morales saw an excuse to criticize Arce’s candidates. This shows that Morales is acting recklessly. Arce responds by attempting to take control of the party label and seeking a judicial ruling in his favor. Morales has launched a crusade against certain ministers in Arce’s cabinet, whom he accuses of orchestrating a “dark plot” against him (including Eduardo del Castillo, Minister of Government, and Iván Lima, Minister of Justice, among others).
Meanwhile, all expert observers could see that Luis Arce’s government lacked a solid direction, a dominant vision, and a narrative. It was a drifting government, spoken for by others, that occupied the political space due to the opposition’s weakness. Perhaps the only ones who did not see this were the officials whose salaries Arce paid, who were too excited by the idea of perpetuating themselves in power.
When Evo Morales and Luis Arce escalated their hostilities, Álvaro García Linera—Evo Morales’s former vice president and leading intellectual—broke his silence (between February and March 2023) with a series of interviews in which his main message was a warning to his party’s leaders: “we run the risk of losing the upcoming elections” if existing tensions deepen (La Razón). García Linera also noted: “I am very fond of Evo; I would like to see another Evo, but he has to be more national in outlook and less parochial” (Bolivision). At that time, the economic backdrop put Arce on the defensive: for the first time, a parallel dollar market emerged, similar to Argentina’s “blue dollar.”
As Arce’s decline accelerates due to shortages of foreign currency and gasoline, and he is besieged by the opposition and by Evo Morales, who criticize his mismanagement of the economy, on June 26, 2024, military tanks are deployed by the Army commander, General Juan José Zuñiga, in what appears to be an attempted coup d’état. Arce confronts General Zuñiga and orders him to stand down, and receives international support. The Evoist camp, by contrast, denounces the incident as a “self-coup” orchestrated to regain popularity. If that were the case, according to the Ipsos Ciesmori Public Opinion Monitor, it did not work (it should be noted that this was an online survey of 400 respondents).
Evo Morales: A Victim of His Own Making
Evo Morales entered the 2025 election severely weakened by his own behavior. He has steadily eroded his own political authority since 2016. This erosion was overshadowed by the 2019 coup d’état, which allowed him to contrast himself with racist and discriminatory sectors that acted against the MAS and to downplay his own responsibility for the country’s institutional decline.
Evo Morales is undoubtedly the most significant figure in Bolivia’s recent political history. He was a leader who embodied the expansion of social and political rights for the majority of his compatriots, as a result of a series of struggles he championed during a specific historical period. Of course, Morales had to contend with reactionary and conservative forces, as have almost all leaders who have challenged interests held by a minority, as was evident during “the Media Luna crisis” in 2008, when opposition prefects rose up against the constitutional order and perpetrated the “Pando Massacre” against peasants who were defending democratic institutions. At that time, Evo Morales skillfully thwarted the coup attempt.
Evo Morales’s first problems began with the “gasolinazo” (gas price hike) of 2010 and the TIPNIS highway controversy in 2011, where he clashed with segments of the population that represented his own electorate. However, in October 2014, he was elected president for the third time with more than 60% of the vote. Evo Morales would not face a setback at the polls until February 2016, when he called for a referendum to amend the Constitution (which he himself had drafted and approved in 2009, amid unprecedented electoral support). The goal of this referendum was to secure a fourth term. Unfortunately for him, the referendum resulted in a victory for the “NO” vote (51.3%) over the “YES” vote (48.7%). Morales did not respect the results of the referendum he himself had called and managed to get the Court of Justice to rule that he could run again, since indefinite reelection constituted a “human right.”
The MAS Congress itself—supposedly the party’s highest governing body—was sidelined from decision-making by Evo Morales and by García Linera himself, who at the time supported him by arguing that “Evo Morales is irreplaceable.” Ultimately, the weakening of the MAS itself was perpetuated by García Linera as its ideologue, who, upon seeing the consequences of this behavior, attempted to appeal to Evo Morales’s reason. In fact, it was not the MAS party congress that chose Luis Arce as the presidential candidate in 2020, but rather Evo Morales, who handpicked him. In January 2020, a congress of social movements affiliated with the MAS voted for David Choquehuanca (a party leader of indigenous descent and former foreign minister) to be the presidential candidate. Evo Morales, from exile, refused to recognize this decision. Choquehuanca did not assert the mandate he held and silently accepted the vice presidency, from which he contributed nothing, until he faded completely into insignificance. Those who interpreted Choquehuanca’s actions claimed that his behavior reflected immense wisdom and strategic patience: all that poetry is now dead and buried. What was passed off as intelligence was simply an inability to act.
In a ruling by the Plurinational Constitutional Court (TCP) dated December 28, 2023, the 2017 interpretation that had allowed for indefinite reelection was revoked, and it was concluded that only two constitutional terms (whether consecutive or non-consecutive) are valid. In turn, on November 14, 2024, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) resolved the internal dispute in favor of the “Arce-aligned” leadership, granting it legal control of the party label. The Evoist camp explored the possibility of using other legally registered party labels, without success, since the courts were prepared to revoke the legal status of any party that gave Morales its acronym.
Bolivia’s “red circle” watched it pass by
Ever since it became clear that a split within the MAS might occur, the usual candidates began testing the waters: Carlos Mesa Gisbert, Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, Samuel Doria Medina, and Manfred Reyes Villa. Some new faces also emerged: Vicente Cuéllar, Chi Hyung Chung, and Jaime Dunn, who sought to pull off an upset and reflect, within the Bolivian context, the emergence of disruptive phenomena such as that of Javier Milei in Argentina.
On December 18, 2024, the Unity Bloc was formed with Carlos Mesa Gisbert, Quiroga, Doria Medina, and Luis Fernando Camacho as signatories, with the goal of establishing a selection process to arrive at a single opposition candidate. This amalgamation of politicians who stand for very different things could only demonstrate that these figures fail to understand that the public display of backroom deals epitomizes traditional politics and that votes belong to no one but the voters themselves; therefore, the goal is to build a relationship with them, not with other politicians. Vicente Cuéllar, a university president from Santa Cruz, had surged in the polls from outside the party machinery. However, he lacked a strategy focused on building his own identity; instead, he devoted himself to maneuvering among empty political labels and meetings with mediocre figures, and he faltered. He ended up signing the Unity Bloc agreement as a supporter, after having flirted with Manfred Reyes Villa, who did not sign the agreement.
Mesa Gisbert, a highly talented journalist whose work spanned film, soccer, and history, was the vice-presidential candidate for the neoliberal Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada and assumed the presidency after Sánchez de Losada was ousted during the 2003 protests, leading the transition until Evo Morales was elected president in 2005. He became the spokesperson for the Bolivian government’s maritime claim against Chile in 2013 (at the suggestion of Evo Morales). On October 18, 2020, when Arce won, Carlos Mesa Gisbert (running for the Comunidad Ciudadana party) came in second with 28.83% of the vote. His party held 39 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 11 seats in the Senate during Arce’s administration. Mesa Gisbert promoted “responsible opposition” in contrast to Luis Fernando Camacho’s Creemos party.
Camacho is a central figure throughout the process that led to the 2019 coup d’état against Evo Morales and what followed. He represents Christian fundamentalism and for a time was known as “the Bolivian Bolsonaro.” A longtime member of the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee, he was elected president of that body in 2019. When Morales and García Linera ran for a fourth time, Camacho led a social bloc that called for military intervention and proclaimed that “the Bible returns to the Palace. The Pachamama will never return to the Palace again.” Camacho then backed the coup-installed transitional government led by Jeannine Áñez. With Camacho’s support, Áñez oversaw two massacres in November 2019: on the 15th, against coca growers from Chapare in the city of Sacaba, in the department of Cochabamba; and on the 19th, against workers at the Senkata hydrocarbon plant in El Alto. When the coup fell apart, Camacho ran in the election with Creemos: he came third, behind Arce and Mesa Gisbert, with just 14%. In the 2021 subnational elections, he won the governorship of Santa Cruz, but had little time to enjoy it. His clumsy strategy of constant provocation quickly isolated him, and Arce had no trouble carrying out his arrest. A week ago, in the context of the results of the first round of the presidential election, the Bolivian judiciary released him after 3 years (which attests to its limited autonomy and independence of judgment).
Samuel Doria Medina was probably the candidate who invested the most money in this election. As vice president of the Socialist International for Latin America and the Caribbean (although he said he currently identifies more with the PP than with Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE), he is one of the leading businesspeople in Bolivia and the subcontinent and has a very long political career. He began his career in Jaime Paz Zamora’s Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR); Paz Zamora is the father of his rival Rodrigo Paz Pereira. He ran for president several times: everything suggested that 2025 would be his year, but it was not to be. Doria Medina also had the support of Marcelo Claure, Bolivia’s most important businessman and one of the most brilliant business figures worldwide, as shown by his record at the helm of Brighstar Corporation. In soccer, Claure is the owner of Club Bolívar (under his management, it became the first Bolivian club to reach a semifinal of the Copa Libertadores de América), a co-founder of Inter Miami, and a shareholder in Girona FC.
The Unity Bloc ultimately anointed Doria Medina, but not before it fell apart. Mesa Gisbert decided to leave in the face of the obvious conflict between Doria Medina and “Tuto” Quiroga, who accused the former of attempting to manipulate the poll that would determine the candidate. This led to a strange situation in which Doria Medina, who described himself as “extreme center,” ended up being supported by Camacho, a misogynistic and racist coup plotter. If we consider that all this backroom dealing was taking place while Paz Pereira was surging to first place in the elections, it becomes clear that Bolivia’s “red circle” didn’t have the slightest idea about the social and political dynamics of the ongoing process.
A Shift to the Right?
The defeat of all factions of the MAS opens up uncharted territory: the issue is no longer how the opposition vote is distributed, but how a system will be reconfigured without the force that has shaped politics over the past twenty years. Some analysts speak of a “shift to the right.” As we have seen, the picture is not that simple. Undoubtedly, the MAS model has run its course and new social values are at play, but there does not appear to have been a complete break with the past in public opinion.
Although Arce’s government ran aground and Morales isolated himself, many of the key ideas from the MAS’s four terms in office still appear to enjoy legitimacy. According to an Ipsos Ciesmori survey (400 cases, June 2025), 67% want “a strong leader willing to break the rules to fix the country” (7% more than in 2023), and 79% believe Bolivia “is in decline.” Education, health, and infrastructure are 3 areas in which more than 70% of respondents believe more investment is needed. 45% believe there should be investment in “reducing poverty and inequality” (Ipsos Ciesmori, July 2025).
Rodrigo Paz Pereira and “Tuto” Quiroga will face off in the runoff election on October 19, 2025, after advancing by narrow margins in an electorate that is not bound by historical loyalties. The fragmented MAS is reduced to a marginal role. And businessman Doria Medina, who seemed destined to take the lead in the opposition, learned the hard way that his political project failed to connect with voters left orphaned by the MAS movement. Whoever wins, any candidate who believes they have a blank check will face serious problems governing.
