Bolivia's judicial crisis deepens as Morales-led blockades paralyze Arce government

Bolivia's main artery—the highway connecting the administrative capital of La Paz to the prosperous eastern city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra—has been impassable for eleven days. Peasant farmers loyal to former president Evo Morales have sealed it off. Smaller blockades dot other routes across the country. The stoppage has drained fuel from pumps, sent prices climbing, and cost the economy an estimated six hundred million dollars. It has cornered President Luis Arce, once called "brother Lucho" by the movement he helped lead, now branded a traitor by the man who shaped him.

The blockades are a weapon in a larger fight over power and legitimacy. Morales and his followers are demanding the resignation of every judicial tribunal in the country, beginning with the Constitutional Court. What they really want is to overturn a ruling handed down in December—Decision 1010/2023—which bars anyone from serving as president more than twice, whether the terms are consecutive or not. Morales has already held the office three times. The court's logic was clean. The constitution says so. But the court itself has become the flashpoint in a deeper institutional crisis that threatens to unravel Bolivia's democratic machinery.

The constitutional court's members had their mandates expire on December 31st, 2023. Days before that deadline, the court approved the decision disqualifying Morales and issued other rulings that favored the Arce government. Then it extended its own term—and the terms of other courts—until the legislature could organize new judicial elections. The opposition sees a bargain: the court disabled Morales in exchange for the government allowing it to stay in power beyond its legal limit. Morales's supporters call it a conspiracy. The government, for its part, has refused to break up the road blockades, calling them part of Bolivia's political culture. Officials are betting the demonstrations will dissolve on their own as carnival season approaches, a holiday Bolivians hold sacred.

One protester, standing on a road littered with rocks hurled to stop traffic, told television cameras: "We are tired of Bolivian justice, which only cheats." In most countries, blocking highways with debris is a crime. In Bolivia, it has never been prosecuted—until now. The business community has drafted legislation to criminalize road blockades and jail those responsible, arguing the stoppages destroy commerce and devastate producers and merchants. The government's vice minister of coordination countered that blockades are almost woven into Bolivia's fabric. "The problem," he said, "is why you block. If it's against a dictatorship, the people have every right. But if it's a personal matter, like Morales's disqualification, it's wrong."

The real tangle is judicial elections. Bolivia has held them every six years since adopting a new constitution in 2009—it is the only country in the region to elect its highest judges this way. The elections scheduled for last year never happened. The legislature lacked the two-thirds majority needed to call them. That supermajority became impossible when the MAS party, once dominant, fractured into two camps: one behind Morales, one behind Arce. A multiparty legislative commission recently began drafting consensus legislation to hold the elections quickly. Then the constitutional court issued a ruling ordering lawmakers not to consider the bill unless they first accepted the court's self-imposed extension. That single decision poisoned the negotiation. The parties that had been seeking common ground split irreconcilably over whether to accept the court's continued tenure.

The constitutional court has used a barrage of unconstitutionality rulings to block every legislative attempt to organize the elections. Opposition leaders argue the court is not trying to facilitate the vote—it is trying to prevent it, with the government's tacit support, because Arce benefits from the court's current composition. Former president and opposition leader Carlos Mesa wrote on social media that the court had "exceeded every limit of legality, ethics, and reason," that it was "determined to keep its de facto positions while violating the Constitution and laws," and that it was trying to "annul the legislative power of the Assembly." He called it an "aberration, unprecedented in history, that puts the democratic system in serious danger."

What began as a dispute over one man's eligibility has metastasized into a constitutional standoff. The blockades continue. The court remains in place. The elections remain unscheduled. And the two men who once governed together—Morales as president, Arce as his finance minister—now face each other across a widening chasm, each convinced the other has betrayed the revolution they built.