LA PAZ, Bolivia — Bolivia’s hugely popular former leftist president, Evo Morales, on Monday called on supporters to take to the streets in protest against his bitter political rival, current President Luis Arce, who hours earlier accused Morales on national TV of trying to overthrow him.
Morales’ appeal to Bolivia’s farmers, miners and peasants followed President Arce’s unprecedented televised speech late Sunday lambasting his former mentor. Accusing Morales of trying to sabotage his administration and undermine democracy, Arce escalated a high-stakes power struggle that has pushed Bolivia to the brink.
“Enough, Evo!” Arce exclaimed. “Until now, I have tolerated your attacks and slander in silence. But putting the lives of the people at risk is something I cannot tolerate.”
Arce, who took office in 2020 and has struggled to govern with his ruling party riven by disagreements, alleged that Morales’ attempts to mobilize popular support and run in Bolivia’s presidential election next year was “putting democracy at risk.”
“You are threatening the entire country,” Arce said, alleging Morales sought to return to power by “means fair or foul.”
His dramatic speech dredged up the chaos and bloodshed of 2019, when Morales ran for an unconstitutional third term and won. After accusations of fraud sparked mass protests, Morales resigned under pressure from the army, in what his supporters call a coup, and went into exile. At least 36 people were killed in the ensuing crackdown by security forces.
Morales, who served as Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, has vowed to unleash unrest if he is stopped from running in the elections scheduled for August 2025.
Ever since the constitutional court last year barred the leftist icon from running for president, the coca cultivators, Indigenous groups and miners — whom Morales represented during his presidency from 2006 to 2019 — have repeatedly come to his defense with street protests, marches and road blockades.
Morales encouraged the international community to follow his so-called “March to Save Bolivia” on Tuesday from the southeast village of Caracollo to Bolivia’s administrative capital of La Paz. He described the march — 85 kilometers (53 miles) by foot along a highway — as a natural expression of protest against the failure of Arce’s government to fix the worsening economic crisis.
Firing back at Arce, he insisted Monday he had no selfish ulterior motives.
“The march is the response of a people fed up with their unthinking government, which has maintained absolute silence in the face of the crisis, corruption and the destruction of stability,” Morales wrote on social media platform X. “President Arce is not only desperate, but also confused.”
Over the past year, the Arce-Morales rift has increasingly polarized the country, tainting Bolivia’s politics and creating a sense of turmoil that soldiers sought to seize upon in June in an alleged coup attempt.
On Monday, peasants and workers flocked to the main road leading to Bolivia’s tourist hotspot of Lake Titicaca, cutting off traffic under the watchful gaze of riot police and calling on Arce to resign.
“It’s an incompetent government that we have, and it won’t solve the economic crisis,” said Pablo Merma, a peasant leader of the so-called Red Ponchos, radical Indigenous activists from the high plains who rallied Monday against the president. “We are not afraid of you, Arce.”
Although Arce was Morales’ former economy minister and his candidate in Bolivia’s 2020 elections, the erstwhile allies began vying for power after Morales’ 2021 political comeback.
Bolivia’s political stagnation and profound economic crisis — with fuel scarce and and the central bank dangerously short on foreign currency reserves — has caused some Bolivians once outraged over Morales’ strongman tendencies to grow nostalgic for the ex-leader’s transformation of Bolivia’s economy and remarkable reduction of poverty.