Bolivia’s former leader Evo Morales seeks a political comeback from his stronghold in the tropics

LAUCA Ñ, Bolivia (AP) — Bolivia’s former leader Evo Morales has a campaign pitch for 2025 that has worked elsewhere: Other politicians of recent years have brought you nothing but misery. It’s time for a return to the past.

His supporters are looking to Morales for a rescue from the five tumultuous years since his 2019 resignation. The country’s first Indigenous president, Morales is credited with spreading the wealth of a commodities boom and ushering in a rare stretch of social and economic stability during his nearly 14 years in office.

His detractors say Morales — who built an economy uncomfortably dependent on natural gas reserves and sought to stay in power longer than Bolivia’s constitution allows — bears responsibility for much of the turmoil that followed his tenure.

An ally turned rival

A bitter political battle is looming between Morales, 65, and his former economy minister and once-protégé, President Luis Arce, over who will lead their long-dominant leftist Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, into the August 2025 election.

Arce has unleashed allies in the judiciary against Morales, with the Constitutional Court disqualifying Morales’ candidacy and ousting him from the leadership of MAS, a party he helped found in the 1990s.

Prosecutors in mid-December charged Morales with statutory rape for fathering a child with a 15-year-old girl when he was 56 and president. Morales didn’t deny the relationship but accused Arce of deploying a “dirty, odious” campaign to undermine him.

Fighting from the tropics

Since talk of his arrest warrant surfaced in September, Morales has been holed up in Bolivia’s coca-growing region of Chapare, ringed by loyal supporters.

Here, the former coca farmer and fiery union leader — long considered one of the last of the so-called “pink wave” of leftist leaders who once dominated Latin American politics — is planning his comeback.

Few outsiders are allowed inside his stronghold in Bolivia’s steamy lowlands, but The Associated Press was invited last month for a look from behind the barricades.

“They don’t want me to be the candidate because they know I’ll win,” Morales told the AP. “We’re in a state of total siege, morally, legally and politically.”

The four-hour drive to Chapare from Bolivia’s third-biggest city of Cochabamba is steep and slick with mist.

A narcotics checkpoint from the U.S.-financed war on drugs that wreaked havoc across this jungle is far less intimidating than the makeshift checkpoints manned by Morales’ followers.

In the ‘Land of Evo’

As the van rumbled on, Pedro Cepita, a guide tasked with accompanying the AP, pointed out Morales’ accomplishments in the long-stigmatized Chapare — university buildings, cell towers, an airport, a 25,000-seat soccer stadium.

Morales’ face adorns murals alongside cult heroes like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. “Evo 2025-2030” slogans blanket brick houses.

“We’re in la Tierra de Evo,” Cepita said — the Land of Evo.

At sandbagged checkpoints, Morales’ supporters — some with batons on their belts — waved the van through only after recognizing Cepita.

Security forces, chased out by Morales’ followers, rarely venture here. Door-knocking census workers — even emergency rescuers responding to a deadly landslide last month — said they were harassed and kicked out by Morales’ coca union activists.

Earlier this month and after 40 days of negotiations, police began trickling back.

Almost divine reverence

Coca farmers drying their leaves proudly recount how Morales kicked out U.S. anti-drug agents almost in the same breath as they extoll the benefits of the coca plant, cherished by Indigenous communities and maligned by the West as the raw material for cocaine.

“Brother Evo was in these fields with us,” said Jose Luis Calicho, 39, nodding toward Morales’ own plot of land. “He knows we’re not criminals, we’re not narco-traffickers.”

Since October, when gunmen opened fire at his convoy, Morales, who was unharmed, has slept inside the fortress-like compound of his coca-growing union. He says the shooting was an assassination attempt and blames Arce’s government, which denies involvement.

Outside the high walls, dozens of his followers lounge on tarps blocking the street. Some rest after all-night security shifts, others keep watch, their cheeks bulging with wads of coca — a mild stimulant.

“It’s our responsibility to Evo, we can’t take chances,” said Reyna Peñaloza, 44. “With us, he’ll return to power.”

A stark disconnect

Those who believe Morales’ comeback can close the door on years of political and economic paralysis are less clear about the kind of future he could bring.

“When I came to power in 2005, the nation was suffering, and I transformed it,” Morales said. “Now our crisis is even worse. We don’t have fuel, we don’t have dollars.”

Most Bolivians, stinging from surging inflation and waiting in long lines to fill their tanks, agree on that.

But attitudes toward Morales are starkly different in his remote redoubt in Chapare and the rest of the country of 12 million — especially when it comes to the 2016 statutory rape case that indelibly tarnished his reputation.

In the upscale districts of La Paz, the capital, residents say they’re repulsed by his actions. Freshly painted graffiti asks: “Would you vote for a pedophile?”

“The political damage to Evo’s good image is devastating,” said Romer Alejo, a criminal lawyer in La Paz.

Informal efforts to gauge public opinion in La Paz suggests that two or three out of every 10 Bolivians would vote for him.

His critics condemn Morales’ constitution-bending efforts to hold onto power longer than any leader in Bolivia’s modern history.

“We’re at a breaking point,” said Martín Sivak, the author of a biography on Morales. “There’s a verdict from Bolivians on this idea of staying in power for too long.”

A long way to go

Legal troubles aside, whether Morales can reclaim his party and the country’s top job is unclear. His supporters say he’ll find a way around the court ban — perhaps by launching a new party.

But the packed crowds of 2014 are no longer there.

A recent MAS congress in Chapare declared Morales was the party’s “only legitimate candidate,” but a “Viva, Evo!” chant faded quickly in the half-full auditorium.

Still, Bolivia’s right-wing opposition is fractured. Protests are mounting over Arce’s failure to halt a currency collapse. Morales’ supporters threaten to convulse the country if he’s not on the ballot.

“We’ll win through our struggle,” Morales loyalist and lawmaker Alina Canaviri Sullcani said. “There’s no alternative.”

Even if Morales has become too divisive, without him, many fear the long unstable Andean nation could veer back toward chaos.

Morales’ 2019 ouster elevated a right-wing interim president, Jeanine Áñez, who cracked down on her political opponents and sought to purge Morales’ legacy.

On a hot, sticky morning last month, Morales emerged from his hideout with heavy security, to check on his fields. As he hunched over to cut weeds, his aides pulled out their smartphones to film him — a throwback to the early 2000s, when videos of the son of llama famers in his humble alpaca sweater were a magnet for foreign media.

But Morales didn’t seem to notice. When everyone had gone, he kept on working. He said he wasn’t close to finishing.

Isabel Debre And Juan Karita, The Associated Press