STATEMENT ON THE STRUCTURAL CRISIS AND ESCALATION OF VIOLENCE IN BOLIVIA
Bolivia is experiencing a deep economic, political, and social crisis, currently reflected in the shortage of food, fuel, and imported products; the inflationary escalation; the devaluation of the Bolivian currency (boliviano); and a rise in social conflicts. This situation, rooted in the structural dependence on rentier capitalism and the crisis of the extractivist model, has worsened due to misguided government measures, such as the liberalization of meat and other food exportations.
The recent episodes of violence across the country, widespread shortages, and social confrontation are not isolated events but rather acute expressions of a structural crisis in the economic model and internal political disputes within the ruling party. The scarcity of foreign currency—with the dollar reaching 20 bolivianos on the black market (official change is 6.96)—has triggered an inflationary spiral, doubling the prices of basic products such as meat (90 Bs/kg), oil, and sugar, while the government continues to subsidize hydrocarbons, benefiting mainly the agroindustry. Natural gas exports (which accounted for 32% of fiscal revenues in 2014) dropped to 18% in 2023.
Capital flight and the lack of US currency are what primarily drove the parallel dollar to 20 Bs., generating the devaluation of our currency and causing 12% year-on-year inflation (the highest in 13 years).
The Recent Conflict
The origins of the economic crisis and the conflicts we are witnessing today date back at least eight years, when natural gas exports (which are partly one of the State's main sources of income) began to decline, gradually depleting state coffers over the years.
The Economic Crisis: The Exhaustion of the Primary-Export Model
The current shortage of dollars and inflation are due to Bolivia's historic dependence on an extractivist model that was deepened during the MAS governments. With falling international prices for hydrocarbons and minerals, the country faces severe external constraints: YPFB (the State’s petroleum company) imports 90% of diesel and 50% of gasoline but cannot meet demand due to a lack of foreign currency. This has been exacerbated by the Legislative Assembly’s failure to approve 16 international loans for a total of US$1.849 billion.
Government measures have been contradictory and misguided: while it announces price controls (never enforced), it authorizes meat and other exports, causing internal shortages and price hikes for essential goods, leaving families without meat, oil, sugar, rice and other products of daily use.
Political-Electoral Crisis
From the political-electoral perspective, the trigger of the crisis was the disqualification of presidential candidates, including former President Evo Morales.
The judicialization of politics (a result of the electoral law passed by the Evo Morales government) has brought many political parties to the brink of being banned from elections.
Despite the critical situation, current candidates and parties have not proposed programs to change the economic or political model. Instead, they recycle old liberal ideas: reducing the State capacity, taking loans, cutting subsidies and bonuses, austerity, and complete freedom for the bourgeoisie, mainly in the agroindustry sector, livestock and bankers, not to mention the absolute absence of political renewal at all levels. As an example, the three eternal candidates of the right-wing that insist on taking power over the last 30 years are currently presidential candidates: Doria Medina, Tuto Quieroga, and Manfred Reyes Villa.
No real alternative exists for workers—right-wing candidates repeat 30-year-old neoliberal recipes, while those claiming to be leftist (they actually are social democrats) have abandoned any project to transform the capitalist system, and do not have any interest on moving towards socialism-communism.
Party labels are bought and sold, clientelism is rampant, and there is no internal democracy in these parties, showing that these are business platforms for economic power groups, not coherent political parties.
This is not a coincidence, as liberal democracy does not allow true "people's government", but it is a system of class domination operating through cultural hegemony, where the ruling class (bourgeoise-oligarchy) imposes its worldview as if it was “common sense” via schools, media, and political parties (ideological apparatuses).
This happens through the co-optation of popular demands, where reformist parties (including "progressive" ones) neutralize the class struggle, channeling discontent into harmless reforms. Similarly, through the integral State, which combines coercion (repression) with consensus (elections, formal rights). In Bolivia, this is evident when the MAS party uses rhetoric defending the land and the rights of indigenous peoples to legitimize extractivist policies. In Harvey's words, bourgeois democracy is the "political marketing" of capitalist plunder.
Protests: Popular Legitimacy vs. Political Opportunism
Worker, merchant, and transporter protests over rising living costs reflect genuine social discontent, they are legitimate and express the rage of the working class and peasants. However, the absence of revolutionary leadership has allowed the sector so-called “evismo” (followers of Evo) to redirect these struggles into opportunistic slogans, such as defending Morales’s candidacy—ignoring and moving far from the urgent and legitim popular demands.
The government’s response has been the militarization of some regions and the criminalization of protests, paving the way for reactionary rhetoric calling for “order” and “iron-fist” policies, typical of authoritarian regimes.
Slogans such as "Arce... the people are hungry" and signs reading "Mourning for our economy" on closed businesses demonstrate the rift between the government and the social base it claims to represent. However, this discontent has been exploited by the "evista" sector, which, under the slogan of "enabling Evo" (to the elections) and that this is the only way to "save Bolivia," has diverted the urgent economic demands of the Bolivian people toward an electoral agenda based on the candidacy of their leader. The blockades in Cochabamba, La Paz, Santa Cruz, and other parts of the country have paralyzed the transportation of food and fuel, generating significant economic losses and shortages in cities. Although they initially enjoyed popular support, the prolongation of these measures, in addition to the escalation of violence in Llallagua, have alienated popular sectors affected by the shortages and embraced reactionary slogans.
The "Evo Myth" and Class Struggle
Media and political narratives have reduced the crisis to a personal feud between Evo Morales and Luis Arce, masking the real social dynamics. For “evism,” Morales represents popular redemption; for the government and right-wing, he is a “terrorist” that looks for the destabilization of the country. This benefits both sides: on one side, the government avoids blame for the crisis; on the other hand “evism” justifies adventurous tactics, such as blockades, menacing magistrates, or general violence menace.
In reality, the confrontation is between classes and fractions of them: industrial workers against entrepreneurs, coca farmers against police and military soldiers in Chapare, motorcycle gangs from urban centers against workers and the people in Cochabamba, ruined small producers and merchants against large importing capital. Behind all these conflicts lie the interests of the owners of the means of production (capitalists) seeking to accumulate profits, and those of the workers, middle layers of society, peasants, demanding higher wages.
The violence in Llallagua, evinces the infiltration of other types of interests. This region, as well as other ones (Chapare, Qaqachaka, Challapata) have become an enclave of illicit economies (drug trafficking, smuggling, illegal mining), a direct result of the historical abandonment of the State.
According to the 2024 Census, this area has the highest rates of extreme poverty (over 50%), forced migration, and occupational mortality (60 young miners died in 2024). Despite its mineral wealth (Amayapampa, Mallku Khota, Capasirca), the MAS governments—throughout their various administrations—have never implemented serious policies to improve the living conditions of their inhabitants, limiting themselves to the rhetoric of "nationalization" while perpetuating dependence on extractive economies, or handing over mineral wealth to "cooperative" entrepreneurs.
The media criminalization of the ayllus (traditional social structure) (Layme, Chullpa, Chayantaka, among others) hides the fact that the State, far from combating mafia networks, has allowed their consolidation. An example of this is the smuggling and drug trafficking caravans that operate with impunity in the region, often with the complicity of local and national authorities. This reality is not exclusive to Northern Potosí; it is a national phenomenon linked to informality (70% of the Bolivian economy) and the lack of productive alternatives. The stigmatization of the ayllus—when they are not "amorphous masses" but organized territories—seeks to hide the responsibility of the government and elites in deepening a model that combines legal extractivism with criminal economies.
The danger of militarization and police repression is that this spiral of violence could lead to a massacre against popular and peasant sectors, as occurred in 2019, and consolidate the path toward an authoritarian-repressive regime in the future.
The Evo strategy reproduces the error of 19th-century Blanquism, that is, believing that an organized minority (in this case, the blockaders) can, through exemplary actions, push the rest of the people into an insurrection. This voluntaristic vision ignores the fact that the masses are divided and that the urban middle layers have long shifted to the right and now support repression. The call to "overthrow Arce" has no correlation with a revolutionary program, but rather with electoral calculations.
Is there a proscription of the popular movement?
While the government and the right reduce the conflict to a "crisis over Morales' ambition," which Morales's disqualification implies, it is substantially dangerous because it implies transferring the power of popular sovereignty to the courts, judicializing politics.
As Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB) and Communist Youth (JCB), we are against criminalizing any expression of legitimate protest. Considering the profound economic crisis affecting the Bolivian people, and the government's demonstrated ineffectiveness in even alleviating this situation, we believe that a series of mobilizations have occurred, are occurring, and will continue to occur throughout the country, which should not be criminalized or indiscriminately repressed.
In this regard, and to avoid further shedding of the people's blood, we demand:
To alleviate the situation of workers and their families, we demand that the central and municipal governments implement the following measures:
We believe that to get out of this abyss we find ourselves in, measures must be implemented in the country's economic structure. No right-wing or social democratic party will do so, due to their collective economic interests. Only a party that represents the interests of the working majority of the country can carry out a task of this type, only a workers' and popular government can take the country out of the capitalist system where, as a country exporting raw materials, we are at the whim of the decisions of the large foreign monopolies that dominate the governments.
As the Communist Party and its youth, we are undertaking the task of preparing an initial document, which will be a new beginning for building the party of workers, peasants, and the Bolivian people to lead our people to a state with social justice, in which the needs and interests of the working class and popular majority prevail. This document will contain several additional proposals for emerging from this economic crisis that is so devastating to our class.
Capital flight and the lack of US currency are what primarily drove the parallel dollar to 20 Bs., generating the devaluation of our currency and causing 12% year-on-year inflation (the highest in 13 years).
The Recent Conflict
The origins of the economic crisis and the conflicts we are witnessing today date back at least eight years, when natural gas exports (which are partly one of the State's main sources of income) began to decline, gradually depleting state coffers over the years.
The Economic Crisis: The Exhaustion of the Primary-Export Model
The current shortage of dollars and inflation are due to Bolivia's historic dependence on an extractivist model that was deepened during the MAS governments. With falling international prices for hydrocarbons and minerals, the country faces severe external constraints: YPFB (the State’s petroleum company) imports 90% of diesel and 50% of gasoline but cannot meet demand due to a lack of foreign currency. This has been exacerbated by the Legislative Assembly’s failure to approve 16 international loans for a total of US$1.849 billion.
Government measures have been contradictory and misguided: while it announces price controls (never enforced), it authorizes meat and other exports, causing internal shortages and price hikes for essential goods, leaving families without meat, oil, sugar, rice and other products of daily use.
Political-Electoral Crisis
From the political-electoral perspective, the trigger of the crisis was the disqualification of presidential candidates, including former President Evo Morales.
The judicialization of politics (a result of the electoral law passed by the Evo Morales government) has brought many political parties to the brink of being banned from elections.
Despite the critical situation, current candidates and parties have not proposed programs to change the economic or political model. Instead, they recycle old liberal ideas: reducing the State capacity, taking loans, cutting subsidies and bonuses, austerity, and complete freedom for the bourgeoisie, mainly in the agroindustry sector, livestock and bankers, not to mention the absolute absence of political renewal at all levels. As an example, the three eternal candidates of the right-wing that insist on taking power over the last 30 years are currently presidential candidates: Doria Medina, Tuto Quieroga, and Manfred Reyes Villa.
No real alternative exists for workers—right-wing candidates repeat 30-year-old neoliberal recipes, while those claiming to be leftist (they actually are social democrats) have abandoned any project to transform the capitalist system, and do not have any interest on moving towards socialism-communism.
Party labels are bought and sold, clientelism is rampant, and there is no internal democracy in these parties, showing that these are business platforms for economic power groups, not coherent political parties.
This is not a coincidence, as liberal democracy does not allow true "people's government", but it is a system of class domination operating through cultural hegemony, where the ruling class (bourgeoise-oligarchy) imposes its worldview as if it was “common sense” via schools, media, and political parties (ideological apparatuses).
This happens through the co-optation of popular demands, where reformist parties (including "progressive" ones) neutralize the class struggle, channeling discontent into harmless reforms. Similarly, through the integral State, which combines coercion (repression) with consensus (elections, formal rights). In Bolivia, this is evident when the MAS party uses rhetoric defending the land and the rights of indigenous peoples to legitimize extractivist policies. In Harvey's words, bourgeois democracy is the "political marketing" of capitalist plunder.
Protests: Popular Legitimacy vs. Political Opportunism
Worker, merchant, and transporter protests over rising living costs reflect genuine social discontent, they are legitimate and express the rage of the working class and peasants. However, the absence of revolutionary leadership has allowed the sector so-called “evismo” (followers of Evo) to redirect these struggles into opportunistic slogans, such as defending Morales’s candidacy—ignoring and moving far from the urgent and legitim popular demands.
The government’s response has been the militarization of some regions and the criminalization of protests, paving the way for reactionary rhetoric calling for “order” and “iron-fist” policies, typical of authoritarian regimes.
Slogans such as "Arce... the people are hungry" and signs reading "Mourning for our economy" on closed businesses demonstrate the rift between the government and the social base it claims to represent. However, this discontent has been exploited by the "evista" sector, which, under the slogan of "enabling Evo" (to the elections) and that this is the only way to "save Bolivia," has diverted the urgent economic demands of the Bolivian people toward an electoral agenda based on the candidacy of their leader. The blockades in Cochabamba, La Paz, Santa Cruz, and other parts of the country have paralyzed the transportation of food and fuel, generating significant economic losses and shortages in cities. Although they initially enjoyed popular support, the prolongation of these measures, in addition to the escalation of violence in Llallagua, have alienated popular sectors affected by the shortages and embraced reactionary slogans.
The "Evo Myth" and Class Struggle
Media and political narratives have reduced the crisis to a personal feud between Evo Morales and Luis Arce, masking the real social dynamics. For “evism,” Morales represents popular redemption; for the government and right-wing, he is a “terrorist” that looks for the destabilization of the country. This benefits both sides: on one side, the government avoids blame for the crisis; on the other hand “evism” justifies adventurous tactics, such as blockades, menacing magistrates, or general violence menace.
In reality, the confrontation is between classes and fractions of them: industrial workers against entrepreneurs, coca farmers against police and military soldiers in Chapare, motorcycle gangs from urban centers against workers and the people in Cochabamba, ruined small producers and merchants against large importing capital. Behind all these conflicts lie the interests of the owners of the means of production (capitalists) seeking to accumulate profits, and those of the workers, middle layers of society, peasants, demanding higher wages.
The violence in Llallagua, evinces the infiltration of other types of interests. This region, as well as other ones (Chapare, Qaqachaka, Challapata) have become an enclave of illicit economies (drug trafficking, smuggling, illegal mining), a direct result of the historical abandonment of the State.
According to the 2024 Census, this area has the highest rates of extreme poverty (over 50%), forced migration, and occupational mortality (60 young miners died in 2024). Despite its mineral wealth (Amayapampa, Mallku Khota, Capasirca), the MAS governments—throughout their various administrations—have never implemented serious policies to improve the living conditions of their inhabitants, limiting themselves to the rhetoric of "nationalization" while perpetuating dependence on extractive economies, or handing over mineral wealth to "cooperative" entrepreneurs.
The media criminalization of the ayllus (traditional social structure) (Layme, Chullpa, Chayantaka, among others) hides the fact that the State, far from combating mafia networks, has allowed their consolidation. An example of this is the smuggling and drug trafficking caravans that operate with impunity in the region, often with the complicity of local and national authorities. This reality is not exclusive to Northern Potosí; it is a national phenomenon linked to informality (70% of the Bolivian economy) and the lack of productive alternatives. The stigmatization of the ayllus—when they are not "amorphous masses" but organized territories—seeks to hide the responsibility of the government and elites in deepening a model that combines legal extractivism with criminal economies.
The danger of militarization and police repression is that this spiral of violence could lead to a massacre against popular and peasant sectors, as occurred in 2019, and consolidate the path toward an authoritarian-repressive regime in the future.
The Evo strategy reproduces the error of 19th-century Blanquism, that is, believing that an organized minority (in this case, the blockaders) can, through exemplary actions, push the rest of the people into an insurrection. This voluntaristic vision ignores the fact that the masses are divided and that the urban middle layers have long shifted to the right and now support repression. The call to "overthrow Arce" has no correlation with a revolutionary program, but rather with electoral calculations.
Is there a proscription of the popular movement?
While the government and the right reduce the conflict to a "crisis over Morales' ambition," which Morales's disqualification implies, it is substantially dangerous because it implies transferring the power of popular sovereignty to the courts, judicializing politics.
As Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB) and Communist Youth (JCB), we are against criminalizing any expression of legitimate protest. Considering the profound economic crisis affecting the Bolivian people, and the government's demonstrated ineffectiveness in even alleviating this situation, we believe that a series of mobilizations have occurred, are occurring, and will continue to occur throughout the country, which should not be criminalized or indiscriminately repressed.
In this regard, and to avoid further shedding of the people's blood, we demand:
- · The end of all forms of criminalization of social protest.
- · The end of arbitrary arrests against the mobilized people.
- · The end of the militarization of any sector of the country, taking into account the disastrous history of human rights violations by the military and police forces.
To alleviate the situation of workers and their families, we demand that the central and municipal governments implement the following measures:
- · Authorities must control the unjustified price increases of basic food products, which have been speculatively increased in markets, fairs, and supermarkets throughout the country.
- · New forms of organization must be promoted for worker-popular-neighborhood control of prices and food distribution.
- · Promote fairs with state-produced products at production costs.
- · Promote neighborhood fairs where the product and consumer are available to reduce unnecessary intermediation costs.
We believe that to get out of this abyss we find ourselves in, measures must be implemented in the country's economic structure. No right-wing or social democratic party will do so, due to their collective economic interests. Only a party that represents the interests of the working majority of the country can carry out a task of this type, only a workers' and popular government can take the country out of the capitalist system where, as a country exporting raw materials, we are at the whim of the decisions of the large foreign monopolies that dominate the governments.
As the Communist Party and its youth, we are undertaking the task of preparing an initial document, which will be a new beginning for building the party of workers, peasants, and the Bolivian people to lead our people to a state with social justice, in which the needs and interests of the working class and popular majority prevail. This document will contain several additional proposals for emerging from this economic crisis that is so devastating to our class.
