Bolivia's Paz Faces Deepening Crisis as Morales-Backed Marches Reach La Paz

Six months into his presidency, Rodrigo Paz is fighting for political survival. On Monday, a march organized by former president Evo Morales reached La Paz after traveling across the Bolivian highlands since May 12th, drawing together campesinos, indigenous groups, and workers opposed to Paz's economic policies. The march, called the March for Life to Save Bolivia, began in Caracollo, a town 188 kilometers south of the capital in Oruro department. It represents the crescendo of a crisis that has consumed Paz's young administration with stunning speed.

The immediate trigger for the current unrest traces back to concrete economic failures. When Paz took office, he inherited a country already struggling under the weight of an exhausted economic model. Two decades of leftist governance under the MAS party had maintained macroeconomic stability through gas exports and commodity booms, but that foundation had crumbled before Paz even arrived. Bolivia faced severe dollar shortages, depleted foreign reserves, fiscal deficits, unsustainable fuel subsidies, and chronic shortages of diesel and gasoline. The economy had grown dangerously dependent on state spending, gas production was falling, contraband was rising, and inflation was beginning to squeeze ordinary Bolivians' ability to afford basic goods.

Paz promised to correct these imbalances and open a new chapter. Instead, his handling of fuel prices and subsidies triggered a political catastrophe. While analysts note that many Bolivians initially accepted the price increases and partial subsidy cuts as necessary medicine, the real blow came when the government sold contaminated gasoline—what became known as "garbage gasoline." Citizens not only paid more for fuel; they watched it damage their vehicles and engines. The economic logic of austerity collapsed into a visceral sense of betrayal.

But the crisis runs deeper than fuel prices. Paz arrived at the presidency weakened from the start. He won the first round of elections with just 32 percent of the vote in a field marked by unusually high numbers of blank and null ballots. Many Bolivians who might have voted for Morales—barred from running—cast protest votes instead. Paz limped into office without a popular mandate, and he quickly squandered what support he did have. Political analysts point to a fundamental miscalculation: sectors that had voted for him expecting moderate, centrist governance watched him pivot sharply rightward, toward the business interests of eastern Bolivia and the agroindustry. The government became associated with the right and with corporate power—precisely the opposite of what voters thought they were choosing.

The rupture with social movements proved fatal. During two decades of MAS rule, a political bargain had held: social organizations guaranteed stability and the state delivered resources, influence, and access to power. Paz severed that arrangement. He cut funding and influence to unions and popular organizations, expecting them to accept austerity in silence. Instead, groups like the Peasant Federation of La Paz Túpac Katari and the Bolivian Workers Central—initially demanding attention to their specific grievances—escalated to calling for his resignation. Even his own vice president, Edman Lara, who was supposed to anchor support in rural and popular zones, was pushed out of the inner circle and has since declared himself opposed to the government.

By Monday, 25 road blockades had been established across four of Bolivia's nine departments, with 16 in La Paz alone. The government alleged that some Morales-aligned protesters had begun carrying weapons, pointing to videos of members of the Ponchos Rojos—radical Aymara campesinos from the La Paz highlands—displaying firearms and shouting about civil war. The government claims Morales is financing the unrest through narco-trafficking; Morales denies it. Presidential spokesman José Luis Gálvez expressed concern about the weaponization of the protests.

Yet political analysts consulted by the newspaper offer a more complex picture. Both Franz Flores Castro, a political scientist with a doctorate from FLACSO-Ecuador, and Marcelo Silva, a university professor and political analyst, agree that while Morales remains a relevant political actor, his actual control over the mobilizations is far less than either the government or some observers suggest. Silva argues that the government deliberately inflates Morales's influence to create a common enemy and distract from its own failures—a classic political maneuver. The real drivers of the crisis are structural: economic exhaustion, broken social compacts, and the loss of popular confidence in Paz's direction.

Neither analyst sees an immediate threat to Paz's government falling. The protests, while serious, remain concentrated in La Paz and El Alto and have not yet reached the nationwide scale of previous Bolivian crises that toppled presidents in 2003 and 2005. The government has managed to negotiate with teachers, miners, and other mobilized groups, partially defusing some pressure points. But the underlying fracture—between a president who arrived weak, made poor economic choices, abandoned his political base, and dismantled the state-social movement relationship that had sustained governance for nearly twenty years—shows no sign of healing. What began as a crisis of fuel prices has become a crisis of legitimacy.