Evo Morales
Evo Morales was president of Bolivia from 2006 to 2019, nearly fourteen years, the longest in the country's history, the Aymara llama-herder's son and coca growers' union leader who was the first indigenous president of a country whose majority is indigenous, elected in December 2005 with fifty-four per cent, the first absolute majority since the return of democracy, and re-elected with sixty-four in 2009 and sixty-one in 2014. The presidency was the nationalisation of the gas fields on May Day 2006, with the army at the wells and the contracts rewritten so that the state took eighty per cent. With the commodity boom that paid for the cash transfers to schoolchildren, the old and mothers, the growth of five per cent a year, the halving of extreme poverty, the cable-car system over La Paz. There was the constitution of 2009 that made Bolivia a plurinational state with thirty-six official languages and a whipala on the flagpole beside the tricolour. He was born in Isallavi in Oruro in 1959, herded llamas, played the trumpet in a band, did his military service. He moved with his family to the Chapare in the tropics in 1980 to grow coca, whose growers' federation he led from 1988 against the American-financed eradication. That made him a congressman in 1997, expelled from congress in 2002, and second in the election that year. The opposition of the eastern lowland departments, which have the gas, tried autonomy in 2008 and was beaten in a recall referendum. The indigenous marchers of the TIPNIS in 2011, against a road through their reserve, were the first to break with him. The referendum of February 2016 on letting him run a fourth time said no by two points. The constitutional court said in 2017 that term limits violated his human rights. The election of October 2019, in which the count paused and resumed with him just past the margin, brought three weeks of protest, an OAS audit that found irregularities, the police's mutiny and the army commander's suggestion that he resign, which he did on 10 November and called a coup, flying to Mexico and then Argentina. His party won the election of 2020 under Luis Arce and he came home. The two men have since split the movement. Barred from running in 2025 and under an arrest warrant on a charge of statutory rape, he has kept to the Chapare with his growers around him.
- Lived: 1959 CE – ?
- Nationality: Bolivian
- Roles: president, trade unionist, politician
