Democracy and Bolivian Sovereignty in the Morales Era

In late 2019, Evo Morales was forced out of office as the President of Bolivia and charged with sedition and terrorism. Morales had spent more than two decades as an indigenous and cocalero activist, then served as President for nearly fourteen years. During this time, he and the Bolivian Movement Toward Socialism party, the MAS, oversaw a new constitution with the goals of supporting Bolivian sovereignty and democratic ideals. Morales’s version of democracy,though, is intertwined with sovereignty, and centered on increasing the rights of the indigenous peoples who brought him to notoriety. This paper seeks to determine the extent to which Morales succeeded based on a sampling of policies put into place during his tenure. These evaluations will demonstrate that while Bolivian systems have moved toward democracy and national sovereignty under Morales, his own actions undermined that progress. Morales’s commitment to his indigenous identity and vision of himself as an indigenous leader caused him to work against his own stated aims of democracy and sovereignty