Until last week, Evo Morales was the longest standing Latin American political leader in recent decades. Now, due to pressure from Bolivia’s armed forces and the police, he has been forced to resign, and to flee to Mexico where he is currently taking refuge. Interim president Jeanine Áñez, Christian opposition politician who has expressed a desire to reform the Bolivian political system, has replaced him.
Protests for and against Bolivia’s ex-president Evo Morales erupted after the declaration of the Supreme Court on the 26th of October, when they announced that Morales was the winner of the latest presidential elections and therefore there was no need to hold a second round. Reports of electoral fraud from the Organisation of American States (OEA) later indicated that there were “serious irregularities” throughout.
Morales, who would be completing his fourth term in office as the first indigenous president of Latin America, became a transnational symbol of the indigenous fight against neoliberalism, racism and extractivism in the region.
