EL ALTO, Bolivia (AP) — After nearly two decades of one-party rule, three years of an accelerating currency crisis and too many months of mind-numbing fuel lines, Bolivia is lurching to the right.
For the first time since Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism party, or MAS, came to power in 2005 under maverick former union leader Evo Morales, Sunday’s presidential runoff pits two conservative, pro-business candidates against each other. The MAS received so few votes in the August 17 elections that it nearly lost its legal status as Bolivians expressed a predominant desire for change.
Now the question is how much change Bolivians want and how quickly.
The next president’s immediate task should be to attract dollars to Bolivia and import enough fuel to alleviate the shortage. Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, a right-wing former president who ran and lost three times before, foresees an International Monetary Fund bailout and a shocking fiscal adjustment.
His rival Rodrigo Paz, a centrist senator, says he will make money by legalizing the black market, phasing out wasteful subsidies and luring Bolivians’ hoarded dollars back into the banking system.
Amid the country’s worst economic crisis in four decades, several ambivalent voters interviewed Thursday in El Alto, the sprawling city overlooking the capital of La Paz, doubted that either candidate could pull Bolivia out of its hole.
“It’s not going to be solved quickly, it’s going to take time,” said Luisa Vega, 63, a teddy bear seller at a frigid open-air market, knitting out of boredom because she had no customers. “Almost no one had confidence in previous politicians. Who is going to have confidence now?”
From the border, a look at the monetary chaos
Before dawn, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, rafts full of bread, fuel, cooking oil and eggs cross the border into Peru, where state-subsidized products cost three times what they cost at home.
Smugglers in the border town of Desaguadero, two hours from La Paz, make few attempts to hide. The border guards look the other way.
With the official exchange rate between the Bolivian and the dollar almost collapsed, it has become very cheap for Peruvians to buy in Bolivia and lucrative for Bolivians to sell in Peru. One Peruvian sol is worth almost four bolivianos on the black market.
“Crises are opportunities,” said Ronald Vallejos, who travels twice a week to sell flour and sugar in Peru. Dollars are sold at a very high premium, so Vallejos arrives with wads of bolivianos to exchange them for soles and then hides the bills under his mattress and the floor.
Due to strict price controls and a shortage of dollars, Bolivia cannot raise enough cash for imports. Food shortages have become a part of life. Queues snake in front of subsidized bakeries. Empty shelves send shoppers on a scavenger hunt for oil and rice.
Authorities blame smugglers for shortages and sky-high prices of basic goods, even though the black market is more a consequence of the shortage than the cause.
“Free spending, speculation and smuggling are making the situation worse, increasing prices by up to 300% in some cases,” said Jorge Silva, vice minister of consumer protection. It’s hard work in this bankrupt country; Silva said he was recently kicked out of a street market when he tried to monitor prices.
Paz walks a tightrope between left and right
Paz, 58, is struggling to strike a balance between appeasing Bolivians’ desperation for change and courting working-class voters, many of whom are disillusioned MAS supporters who see Quiroga’s austerity as a recipe for recession.
Instead of focusing on foreign investors as key to development, Paz hopes to uncover hidden money by fighting corruption and formalizing the black market. It proposes legalizing smuggled vehicles, offering tax amnesties to Bolivians who declare their hidden dollars, and allowing cross-border smugglers to register as sellers.
“There will be no more smuggling, everything will be legal,” he declared on Wednesday at his campaign closing ceremony.
Paz’s running mate, Edman Lara, has become the real star of the campaign, helping the senator achieve a surprising victory in the first round of the election. He came in first place after weeks of polls, far behind Quiroga.
Looking ahead to Sunday’s vote, Quiroga once again leads the opinion polls.
The underdog status has helped win the affection of the privileged son of former president Jaime Paz Zamora (1989-1993).
“Everyone is against him, the big media, the pollsters, they want him to lose,” said Salomé Ramírez, 37, waiting at a bus stop in the center of La Paz. “That means you get my vote.”
Captain Lara, as the vice presidential candidate is known, became something of a folk hero a few years ago after being fired from the police force for exposing corruption in viral TikTok videos.
The former officer has no political experience and has a strange habit of making populist promises – such as universal income for women – in stirring speeches that contradict Paz’s goal of restoring fiscal order.
Although Paz has backed away from some of Lara’s most expensive proposals, such as quintupling pensions, both insist on balancing tough free-market reforms with MAS-style social protections.
“Paz and Lara are visiting places that other presidents have not visited, they are reaching the poorest people who need their help the most,” said José Torres Gómez, a 28-year-old student in El Alto.
‘Tuto’ promises a bitter pill
As the country’s inflation rate reaches its highest level since 1991, Quiroga, 65, is betting that Bolivians want the opposite of MAS.
“We will change all the laws,” he told supporters at his final campaign rally. “We are going to change Bolivia.”
If elected, Quiroga (who graduated from Texas A&M University and worked for IBM in Austin, Texas) would trigger a major geopolitical realignment in a country that for the past two decades has shunned the United States and cozied up to China and Russia.
Last month, Quiroga flew to Washington for what he said were meetings with “people who can get us out of this rut,” promising progress in talks on a $12 billion bailout from the IMF, Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank that would restore public confidence in the boliviano and allow Bolivia to immediately obtain more fuel.
At rallies, he raises the potential windfall from foreign investment in gas exploration and lithium production in Bolivia, a contentious issue due to indigenous communities’ opposition to water-intensive extraction on their lands.
Some Bolivians, fearful of American meddling in their affairs since the bloody US-led drug war, resist these gestures. Others are reassured by Quiroga’s commitment to a 180-degree change and speak of Paz and Lara as the latest incarnation of ruinous left-wing populism.
“There are big differences between the candidates,” said Antonio, 58, a struggling textile importer who declined to give his last name for fear of reprisals from the outgoing government. “With Paz and Lara we will continue the last 20 years of economic disaster.”