Former President Tries to Turn the Tables on Powerful Bolivian Leader

John Otis. Wall Street Journal. October 28, 2019

LA PAZ, Bolivia—The politician leading the opposition against Bolivian President Evo Morales is well-schooled in the power of protest.

Carlos Mesa himself was forced to resign as president in the face of protests in 2005. That time, the one leading the marchers in the streets was Mr. Morales, who was elected in a landslide six months later.

“It was a very educational experience,” Mr. Mesa said.

Now he is attempting to use similar street tactics and international pressure to force Mr. Morales, one of the longest serving leaders in Latin America and a fierce critic of U.S. policy, to face him in a December runoff. The incumbent is claiming he won a fourth term in the first round of voting on Oct. 20, though electoral monitors say the process was shot through with irregularities.

Mr. Mesa has a steep hill to climb. The ruling party, Movement Toward Socialism, controls all branches of government, including the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which counted the votes.

Pressure from Washington, Europe and the Organization of American States has made little difference in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Honduras where presidents have clung to power through fraud-marred balloting, said Eduardo Gamarra, an expert on Latin American elections at Florida International University.

“Where there has been fraud, the outcomes are always basically frozen,” he said.

Tall and bespectacled, Mr. Mesa, a 66-year-old historian who has written books on everything from Bolivian cinema to soccer, seems more at ease behind a desk than on a stage whipping up crowds.

“He’s more a man of letters than a politician,” Gonzalo Mendieta, a lawyer and newspaper columnist in La Paz, said of Mr. Mesa.

Mr. Morales, by contrast, grew up herding llamas in the Andes mountains. He was an outspoken union leader before jumping into politics. An Aymara Indian in a nation with a huge indigenous population, Mr. Morales says that white, upper-class politicians like Mr. Mesa have misruled Bolivia for centuries.

Mr. Mesa was elected vice president in 2002 but broke with then-President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada after he ordered a deadly crackdown on protests led, in part, by Mr. Morales. When the president resigned in October 2003, Mr. Mesa was sworn in as head of state.

Mr. Morales continued to organize strikes to demand the nationalization of Bolivia’s natural-gas industry. Unwilling to use force to break them up and with the country paralyzed, Mr. Mesa announced after just 18 months in office that he, too, was stepping down.

“This is as far as I can go,” he said in his resignation speech.

Ironically, it was Mr. Morales who resuscitated Mr. Mesa’s political career.

In 2015 he asked Mr. Mesa to represent Bolivia in a case before the International Court of Justice. In a dispute dating back to the 19th century, landlocked Bolivia wanted neighboring Chile to grant it access to the Pacific Ocean. Bolivia lost the case, but Mr. Mesa’s arguments were seen as passionate and patriotic.

That caught the attention of Bolivia’s opposition, which had lost at least three straight elections to Mr. Morales. Mr. Mesa was recruited to run against him.

At first “he didn’t want to be a candidate and would wake up at night sweating” over the decision, said Diego Ayo, who briefly served as Mr. Mesa’s spokesman.

Once he launched his campaign, Mr. Mesa faced new challenges. The Morales government, which controls many TV and radio stations, saturated the airwaves with campaign ads and vastly outspent Mr. Mesa’s bootstrap operation, according to Mr. Ayo.

The opposition failed to unite behind Mr. Mesa, with the most radical sectors chastising him for assisting the Morales government in the case against Chile. As a result, Mr. Mesa was just one among eight opposition candidates on the ballot. Some who voted for him did so with little enthusiasm.

“It was more about stopping Morales,” said Iván Arias, a community organizer in La Paz, who cast his ballot for Mr. Mesa.

Still, early returns as well as an independent quick count indicated he would receive enough votes to force a runoff against Mr. Morales. That is when the Supreme Electoral Tribunal suddenly stopped publishing results for nearly 24 hours.

When the vote-counting resumed, the president’s lead gradually increased to 10 percentage points, the amount needed for outright victory. OAS observers questioned this sudden shift in the voting trend and recommended that the winner be decided in a runoff.

Since then, Mr. Mesa has grown more impassioned—and indignant. Flanked by more than a dozen opposition figures in front of a large Bolivian flag, a frowning Mr. Mesa on Thursday declared: “The ruling party has carried out massive electoral fraud. But we will not allow them to mock the will of the people.”

For his part, the president claimed a clean victory and accused Mr. Mesa of trying to steal it.

“We all knew he was a coward, but now it turns out that he’s also a delinquent,” Mr. Morales told reporters.

On Friday, for the fifth-straight day, thousands of Bolivians heeded Mr. Mesa’s call to take over the streets of La Paz and other cities. One of the protesters, political consultant Krupskaya Oña, said Mr. Mesa has finally risen to the challenge of leading the movement.

“He used to be bookish and timid,” she said. “But now he’s icon of democracy because he’s the only one left who can challenge Evo Morales. ”