(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In his 13-plus years in office, Bolivian President Evo Morales was often heralded as the good Bolivarian. He tempered his unapologetic socialist rhetoric with mostly pragmatic economics. He ran budget surpluses for many years, contained inflation and presided over an export boom. True, the seller’s market for natural gas helped top up government coffers and vote-trawling social programs, while expanding coca production kept the off-books economy humming. Yet while he was no friend to capitalism, Morales was astute enough not to smother private initiative. On his watch, jobs multiplied and inequality fell.
That’s a record any Latin American leader would envy, never mind the hapless companeros from the ebbing socialist Pink Tide inspired by the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. And yet in the Andes, where power is cocaine, he wanted more — Bolivia’s constitution and voters be damned. Even as he packed off Monday to Mexico for safe haven, his country careening toward chaos over his scandalously rigged reelection, Morales showed no sign of letting go, much less repentance. “The coup-mongers are destroying the rule of law,” Morales tweeted on the eve of his farewell, vowing to soon return “with more force and energy.”
Such defiance once stirred pride and loyalty, especially among the neglected indigenous peoples whom Morales, himself of Aymara Indian descent, had championed. Today those words have the more familiar cant of vanity, hubris and populist leaders who have lingered beyond their sell-by date.
It’s hard to say exactly when Morales started the slide from suffragist to supremo. Maybe it was in 2015, when he ordered highway contractors to rip through an indigenous reserve against community wishes. It might have been the 2016 referendum, in which he asked Bolivians to vote down term limits, only to ignore their votes and run for a fourth term anyway, with the blessings of his hand-picked constitutional court. Or was it finally his claim to outright victory in the October 20 election, which 36 independent auditors from 18 countries concluded was riddled with irregularities, from torched polling stations to digitally defrauded vote tallies?
Civil discord quickly flaring into street confrontation, violence and anomie: It’s a disturbingly familiar tableau for this mostly poor and chronically conflicted nation with a soft spot for regime change. Bolivia has always served as the Latin American benchmark for political dysfunction. More coups than years of independence, goes one of the many tropes. And yes, if the armed forces didn’t overtly remove Morales from power, then by declining to punish police who refused to repress anti-government demonstrators, they effectively showed him the door.
The military had good reason for reticence. Bolivians will not soon forget the Gas Wars of 2003, when soldiers deployed to contain mass protests over the market-minded government’s policy to ship natural gas to the U.S. through Chilean ports tragically overreacted. Sixty-seven people died in the streets, forcing then-President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada to resign and flee. In 2011, the Bolivian high court found several high-ranking public officials, including five former military commanders, guilty of human rights abuses.
In that light, Morales’s ouster looks neither like the reactionary coup decried by regional allies such as Argentine president-elect Alberto Fernandez or Cuba’s Miguel Diaz Canel or fellow travelers like U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar and U.K. Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, nor the “liberation” cheered by right-wing leaders Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
Instead, the military’s role seemed more like an attempt to prevent another deadly confrontation and so salvage constitutional order. “Most people would say that the military is not the institution to arbitrate a situation like this,” said Amherst College political scientist Javier Corrales. “But in Bolivia, where the courts are packed and there’s no legitimate state arbiter, there’s a complete inability to solve emergencies through constitutional mechanisms. It’s complicated.”
Through years of accumulated abuse of power and privilege, Morales clearly wrote his own ticket to exile. What’s more troubling, he leaves behind a polarized country and toxically empowered grievants, including militant, bible-thumping civic groups, who have stormed homes and government buildings in the ensuing chaos. It’s no help that Bolivia’s entire line of constitutionally-designated successors resigned when the streets erupted, opening an Andean-sized power vacuum. “At first, I felt hopeful that Morales’s departure would help restore democracy,” Jaime Aparicio Otero, Bolivia’s former ambassador to Washington, told me. “Now we don’t know who is in charge and how to quell the fear and anarchy.”
One encouraging sign: Instead of clinging to power and muting congress, the armed forces are backing a civil workaround. Senator Jeanine Anez Chavez, from the eastern Beni province, a harsh critic of Morales though not a member of the leading opposition party, has been designated interim president and will take charge until a new election can be organized.
It’s not a by-the-books solution. But in a country prolific in coups, where the constitutional controls have failed and successors have gone missing, it may be the best way forward.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”
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