The 2019 Bolivian political crisis was a period of intense political upheaval and unrest in Bolivia that followed the disputed 2019 Bolivian general election, in which incumbent President Evo Morales was initially declared the winner. Morales had run for a controversial fourth term despite having recently lost a constitutional referendum to remove presidential term limits. His bid for reelection was enabled after the Supreme Court then struck down the term limits. The election and the results were heavily contested, with protests occurring across the country as the opposition and many sectors of society alleged that the vote count was manipulated to favor Morales.
Suspicions of fraud were first sparked by a sudden and unexplained 24-hour long halt in the vote count in the hours following the election. Morales then initially declared victory, but in the face of growing protests eventually proposed holding a runoff election. However, the military and the police of Bolivia, along with the Bolivian Workers' Center (COB), subsequently requested President Evo Morales to resign. He did, complaining that he was the victim of a coup. The government of Mexico offered him political asylum the following day, which he accepted. An audit of the election by the Organization of American States, requested by Morales before he fled the country, found widespread irregularities and evidence of manipulation in the voting records and recommended the election be annulled and held again. Protests continued and sometimes resulted in deaths; in several cases the security forces opened fire on protesters, most notably in the Senkata and Sacaba massacres.
Parliament voted to make opposition senator Jeanine Áñez acting president on 12 November. Although parliament did not have a quorum for the vote following a boycott by the former ruling party Movimiento al Socialismo, Bolivia's Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal endorsed Áñez's assumption of the presidency. Most of the MAS members then returned, with some assuming key positions such as Leader of the Senate. They also committed to working with the interim government towards new elections. The Bolivian Congress unanimously approved a bill on 23 November 2019 that annulled the results of the 20 October election, allowed for new elections, and prevented Evo Morales from participating in the new elections. The bill was signed into law the next day by president Áñez.
The year following the crisis saw continued political chaos and violent protests. Áñez's government began to harass Morales's supporters and charged him and some members of his party with sedition. Morales led the opposition from exile, calling for the Bolivian people to reject the new government. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Áñez repeatedly delayed holding new elections. Elections were finally held in October 2020, which were won by Luis Arce, Morales' former finance minister.
Background
2016 constitutional referendum
The Bolivian constitution allows the President and Vice President to run for re-election only once, limiting the number of terms to two. A 2016 referendum to increase the limit to three terms was rejected. However, in 2017 Bolivia's Supreme Court completely abolished term limits for all political offices, arguing that running for political office is a human right that could not be limited, even by the constitution. The court cited Bolivia's obligations to human rights as a signatory of the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights. The Organization of American States, which is responsible for enforcing the convention, protested against the Supreme Court's interpretation. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights clarified in 2019 that indefinite re-election should not be considered a human right. The Supreme Court also reversed its original 2017 ruling in 2023.
2019 general election and subsequent investigations
On 20 October 2019, the first round of voting for all government positions was held. After the polls closed, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal began to release the preliminary results of the presidential election. At 7:40 pm, when 83.8% of the votes had been counted, the tribunal stopped updating the preliminary count. It claimed this was because it was beginning to release the final official results, although it had still not done so by the next day. At the time that the preliminary count was stopped, Morales led with 45.3%, and his primary opponent, Carlos Mesa, had 38.2%. Less than a 10-point lead would have resulted in another round of runoff voting. At 9:25 pm, President Morales stated he was the likely winner, given that rural areas would guarantee his victory.
Although uncounted votes in rural areas were expected to favor Morales, one body observing the election—the Organization of American States (OAS)—stated that even if Morales did win outright, his lead beyond the 10-point threshold would be so negligible as to warrant a runoff anyway. The OAS expressed concern about a purported day-long gap in results reporting: after 24 hours, the updates resumed, but with a surge for Morales at the first update.
On 21 October, the Plurinational Electoral Organ reported a count, suggesting that with 95.3% of verified votes, Morales had too large of a margin above 10 points to overcome, avoiding a second run-off round, and so Morales would remain in power for a fourth term. Based on this result, along with claimed irregularities, the Bolivian opposition and protestors as well as some Western governments and observers called for an audit of the process and results, to which Morales agreed. The OAS audit of the election began on 31 October and was observed by Spain, Mexico, and Paraguay.
Protests
By 24 October, Morales began describing the actions taken against him as a coup. On 25 October, when the results were officially announced with Morales as the winner, various countries in Latin America, as well as the United States and European Union, called for the second round to go ahead regardless of the official results.
On 31 October, two deaths were announced by the government.
The third death during the protests occurred on 7 November when a 20-year-old student called Limbert Guzman was killed during clashes.
Events
Allegations of electoral fraud and OAS audit
On 6 November, the Bolivian opposition published a 190-page long report containing fraud accusations, including irregularities such as mistaken electoral acts additions, data swiping and electoral acts where the ruling party obtained more votes than registered voters, expecting to send it to international organizations such as the OAS and the United Nations.
Although a complete report was not yet due, mounting tension in the country prompted the OAS to release a preliminary report on 10 November claiming that they had discovered sufficient evidence of election fraud to warrant new elections. This led to a string of events that culminated in Morales being forced to resign, despite him admitting in his memoirs he took the decision of resigning on November 9, and that he originally accepted the OAS audit and called for new elections within the hour of its publication. The OAS alleged multiple irregularities, including failures in the chain of custody for ballots, alteration and forgery of electoral material, redirection of data to unauthorized servers and data manipulation. They added that it was statistically unlikely that Morales had secured the 10-percentage-point margin of victory needed to win outright, saying that election should be annulled after it had found "clear manipulations" of the voting system, and that "The manipulations to the computer systems are of such magnitude that they must be deeply investigated by the Bolivian State to get to the bottom of and assign responsibility in this serious case."
An analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) disputed the OAS's preliminary findings and criticized what it called a "politicization of the electoral observation process". The co-director of the think-tank, Mark Weisbrot, stated the OAS showed "no evidence – no statistics, numbers, or facts of any kind" to support its claim of electoral manipulation. CEPR concluded that due to Morales's voter base being in more rural regions, the results from peripheral areas received towards the end of the count were more likely to be in his favour. The New York Times noted, however, that this criticism has "not addressed the accusations of hidden data servers, forged signatures and other irregularities found by the O.A.S. observers, nor have they tried to explain the electoral council's sudden decision to stop the count". The OAS also dismissed the report as "neither honest, nor fact-based nor comprehensive".
On 5 December, the full 95-page OAS report was released along with 500 pages of corroborating details as appendices. These included that an outside user who controlled a Linux AMI appliance with "root privileges" — conferring the ability to alter results – accessed the official vote-counting server during the counting and that in a sample of 4,692 returns from polling stations around the country, 226 showed multiple signatures by the same person for different voting booths, a violation of electoral law. On those returns, 91 percent of votes went to MAS, approximately double the rate recorded elsewhere.
On 21 December, the Technical Mission of Electoral Experts sent by the European Union published a 67-page report that concluded that the election day "passed peacefully and with a high voter turnout" but "a large number of electoral records showed irregularities, which could be due to deficiencies in the training of jurors or deliberate manipulations".
On 3 January 2020, at a meeting of the Committee for Latin America of Socialist International, it was declared that they accepted the findings of the OAS and that Morales was not a victim of a coup. A document containing discussions of the Bolivian political crisis states that "After a broad mobilization of citizens in that country in protest of electoral fraud that was informed and verified by an audit conducted by the Organization of American States (OAS) of the elections that took place on 20 October, the president Evo Morales did not suffer a coup d'etat".
Independent contract researchers for CEPR, John Curiel and Jack R. Williams disputed the claims of irregularities in the late vote count that were made by OAS with a statistical analysis released on 27 February 2020. They contended that the OAS allegations about irregularities in the vote count were made on two unproven premises: "...the unofficial count accurately reflects the vote continuously measured, and that reported voter preferences do not vary by the time of day". Later, in August 2020, after Nooruddin published the dataset he used for the OAS audit to a Harvard University digital repository, CEPR released a statement suggesting that the way the data was sorted was flawed due to a coding error which would indicate that the OAS claims about the irregularities in the vote count were also flawed.
After weeks of repelling violent protests at the Casa Grande del Pueblo presidential palace, units of the Police Operations Tactical Unit (UTOP) tasked with defending Morales assembled a meeting on 8 November. UTOP officers ultimately decided at the gathering to abandon their posts and to call for the resignation of Morales. According to Reuters, UTOP turned away from Morales for multiple reasons: complaints of alleged orders to suppress opposition protestors while avoiding Morales loyalists; resentments over perceived preferential treatment given to the military; and the exhaustion of combating protestors.
On 9 November, Morales organized a meeting and ordered the military to maintain security, with officers present rejecting Morales's orders according to former general Fernando Sánchez. According to The Wall Street Journal, following this meeting, officers feared of "violent military suppression" similar to 2003 protests during the Bolivian gas conflict, which happened before Morales become president. At this time, all UTOP officers had left their positions, leaving Morales vulnerable to protesters. At a police station near the presidential palace, officers climbed onto the roofs and chanted "The Police with the People". Police nationwide refused to take action against protesters, returning to their stations, while other departments began to mutiny against the Morales government, arguing that they did not want to be an "instrument of any government". Head of the Bolivian Armed Forces, General Williams Kaliman, refused to suppress violent demonstrations, saying that the military would "never confront the people among whom we live" and that the events unfolding were "a political problem and it should be resolved within that realm".
After police left their posts at the presidential palace, Morales never returned and was forced into hiding in an improvised office protected by a small group of his guard. He ultimately held a press conference at the Bolivian Air Force's presidential hangar in El Alto International Airport later in the day, leading some to suspect that Morales had already lost control of the government. Franklin Pareja, a professor of the Higher University of San Andrés, said that because of the abandonment by police, the Morales government "lost its shield" and that "it was totally vulnerable and couldn't go on".
According to members of the Bolivian military quoted by The Wall Street Journal, authorities had opposed Morales's actions for some time. Morales had performed multiple actions that had offended officers within the armed forces, including glorifying Che Guevara after his guerrillas killed 59 Bolivian troops during their insurgency in the 1960s and forcing officers to attend the Anti-Imperialist Military Academy that was led by a convicted former rebel. General Tomás Peña y Lillo, who was chief of the Bolivian armed forces until 2010, stated that officers within the military were traditionally conservative and had refused plans proposed by Morales to be guided by Cuban military and intelligence agents, damaging Morales's hold of the military. Roberto Ponce, former chief of staff of the Bolivian military, also explained that Morales spent little on the country's armed forces as he feared that he would be overthrown, which frustrated military officers.