Although the Electoral Court has not yet issued official results, saying it has until December 31 to do so, the Equipos Mori opinion poll company, based on 80 percent of votes cast, reports that “traditional parties failed to win a single large city,” according to an Associated Press release.

These parties—the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), Movement of the National Revolution (MNR), New Republican Force (NFR), and National Democratic Action (ADN)—received a combined vote of just over 10 percent of the national vote. Prominent figures from these parties won the mayoralty in the capital, La Paz, and other major cities by abandoning their parties and forming local electoral vehicles. The MAS, on the other hand, scored victories in half of the country’s municipalities and will now control a number of medium-sized towns, gaining at least 25 percent of the vote.

These results follow a pattern of electoral successes by similar political forces elsewhere in Latin America—such as social democrats Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva in Brazil, Ricardo Lagos in Chile, and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, and Peronist Néstor Kirchner in Argentina. These politicians were voted into office after promising to improve the living standards of working people, which have been devastated by imperialist domination and the capitalist economic depression that has engulfed much of South America in the last half-decade.

Over the past decade, successive Bolivian regimes have complied with imperialist demands to accelerate “free market” reforms. They have cut social welfare programs, opened the door to greater private and foreign investment in state-owned companies, and removed price subsidies on essential goods.

Morales, as the central leader of MAS, has gained popularity by campaigning against imperialist austerity demands advanced often in the name of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and in solidarity with the governments of Cuba and Venezuela. He calls for an end to the government’s coca eradication efforts, which have driven tens of thousands of farmers deeper into poverty. He also has stated his opposition to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s operations in Bolivia, which have served as a means for deeper U.S. military intervention throughout the Andean region. MAS refused all state subsidies for the election campaign, arguing that the money should be spent on public education.

With privatization of Bolivia’s mines in 1985, mass firings forced many former miners to join indigenous Aymara and Quechua peoples in growing coca for a living. In 1995, a congress of cocaleros voted to create a political organization—Sovereignty of the Peoples. The group ran in the elections as MAS.

In the election for president in 2002, Morales received 21 percent of the popular vote against 22 percent for MNR candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was declared the president in a deal worked out by Congress. A little over a year later, massive mobilizations of workers and peasants against government plans to begin exporting natural gas to the United States forced Sánchez de Lozada to resign and flee the country. The plan was widely seen among working people as another Wall Street project to further exploit Bolivia’s natural wealth.

Bolivia is rich in minerals and other natural resources. It is a leading producer of tin and has the second-largest known reserves of natural gas in South America, after Venezuela.

Imperialist investors and domestic capitalists have profited from the plunder of the country’s resources and superexploitation of its labor. At the same time, more than 60 percent of the population gets by on less than $2 a day. About 70 percent of the population lives below the government’s officially declared poverty line. Bolivia’s workers and farmers are also being squeezed by never-ending payments on the country’s $5.3 billion foreign debt—two-thirds of the country’s gross domestic product—that transfers wealth into the coffers of banks in the imperialist centers.  
 
 
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