The Whites Return to Govern Bolivia: A U-turn with an Uncertain Ending

Marcos Salgado

The photo of the new president on the balcony of the Palacio del Quemado speaks for itself. There was no Aymara skin there, much less women in traditional skirts. The blondes have returned to Bolivia’s presidency.

Bolivia is beginning another moment; it cannot be said to be a new era. What comes from now on, after the inauguration of the right-wing Rodrigo Paz Pereira as president until 2030, is familiar to Bolivia and to all of Latin America: a government serving concentrated economic interests, redistributing income by squeezing workers.

“This is the new Bolivia that opens itself to the world. Never again a Bolivia isolated, subjected to failed ideologies,” began Paz in his speech to parliament, to the approval of some attendees, among whom the far-right Argentine Javier Milei stood out.

“They leave us a broken country. A tired, divided, morally and materially indebted country. They leave us with the worst crisis of the last four decades,” he added in another part of his inaugural speech, in which he promised “capitalism for all.”

Rodrigo Paz (58) was born in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in exile during the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer, with whom his father, Jaime Paz Zamora, later allied to reach the presidency between 1989 and 1993. During his term, the father of the now Bolivian president made it clear that nothing remained of the young man who flirted with Marxism while reading Debray, Althusser, Weber, and Mao.

If Paz Zamora’s presidency was the typical neoliberal approach of the 1980s to manage the crisis for the benefit of minorities, Paz Pereira’s will lean even further to the right, in tune with the current times and winds blowing through parts of Latin America.

At the outset, he restored diplomatic relations with the United States, which had been canceled in 2008 by Evo Morales. In line with Washington, he did not invite the presidents of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela to his inauguration. The presidents of Brazil, Lula Da Silva, and Colombia, Gustavo Petro, were also absent.

Present were Milei, Paraguayan right-winger Santiago Peña, and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa. Also seen walking in the rain in Plaza Murillo were the progressives Yamandú Orsi from Uruguay and Gabriel Boric from Chile.

A Parenthesis Government?

This same week, former de facto president Jeanine Añez was acquitted and released after being convicted for the 2019 coup d’etat. Rehabilitated, she was at the official act for Paz Pereira’s inauguration. Añez’s administration was a parenthesis in MAS governance. Could the same happen with Paz Pereira?

Political analyst and former Evo Morales minister Hugo Moldiz raises this in an article in La Época. He wonders whether “the process of change was a parenthesis in the long history of colonial and imperial bourgeois domination in the country, or whether Rodrigo Paz’s government is simply, as Añez’s was, a parenthesis within the process of change.”

It’s impossible to know. But the question is legitimate. For now, it is clear that Paz Pereira secured victory against the far-right Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga in the runoff because Evo did not call for a null vote as in the first round. It’s evident that Bolivia’s broad and disappointed popular and progressive base turned out in the second round to ensure Quiroga’s defeat.

Does this imply any kind of commitment for the new president? Initially, it does not seem so. But ever since his father Paz Zamora’s time, and more so in the immediately subsequent governments, it’s clear that in Bolivia it is difficult, if not impossible, to govern against the organized majorities: miners, coca workers, peasants.

Rightfully, the Pequebú Magazine collective asked this week, in response to the promised “capitalism for all” of the new president, whether all Bolivians want to be capitalists. The answer is simple: no.

Paz Pereira will not have an easy time. One of the big questions is whether he will push ahead, and with what force, in dismantling the Plurinational State. In the cities, the highlands, the tropics, and among the peasants of eastern Bolivia, the air does not suggest a change of era. After all, it is, once again, a contest with an open ending.