’Socialism Defeated’: Bolivia Boots Its Ruling Leftists After 20 Years In Power

Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.com,

Was there ever a sweeter headline than this, coming from the Washington Post of all places?

Socialism is defeated as Bolivia heads to presidential election runoff

It must have been so painful for them to write it.

According to the Post:

LA PAZ, Bolivia — Bolivia’s socialist movement has been defeated for the first time in two decades, according to preliminary election results, as voters chose a centrist senator and a right-wing former president to go head-to-head in a presidential runoff that could bring dramatic change for this South American nation.

Centrist senator Rodrigo Paz and former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga won the most votes Sunday in a crowded race for president in this country of 12 million people, according to unofficial results from an early count that shows the two far out in front in a trend analysts say is irreversible.

Their victories mark the end of a socialist era for Bolivia, where the leftist movement of former president Evo Morales has dominated politics since his historic 2005 election as the country’s first Indigenous president. As the country faces its worst economic crisis in 40 years, voters here demanded a change.

Hell has frozen over in Bolivia — which is often a bellwether for the direction of South America’s politics.

The report notes that several conservative candidates didn’t make the final cut for the runoff, Quiroga has been around for a long time, and Paz is a moderate. But something like this represents progress, given the long grip socialism has had on the battered Andean country, which is known for its valuable natural resources. And to read the article, Paz doesn’t sound like a moderate — he sounds pretty conservative, seeking to let markets determine prices.

Meanwhile, the performance of the socialists in office over 20 long years was execrable, and the Post gave an accurate-sounding rundown:

[Socialist Evo] Morales’s so-called “economic miracle” was once hailed as a socialist success story during his three terms as president. His government was credited with lifting millions out of poverty and into the middle class. He funneled billions of dollars into public works projects that transformed society, including aerial cable cars that float over the Andes here in the high-altitude administrative capital. Morales’s continued popularity, after three terms and a controversial attempt at a fourth, helped propel the 2020 election of Arce, his former economy minister and chosen successor.

But much like his leftist Latin American contemporaries at the start of this century, Morales’s government spending depended on an influx of cash from the global commodities boom. Everything changed after the plummet in prices of natural gas, Bolivia’s main export. Gas exports declined, imports rose and the central bank began running out of dollars. Bolivia, which once supplied half of its own diesel fuel, produced only 12 percent by 2023.

In recent months, Bolivians have been forced to sleep in their cars to wait to fill their tanks amid widespread fuel shortages. Inflation, which until 2023 was controlled at 2 percent, was more than 16 percent in July. Those who depend on government-subsidized food products have had to form long lines to buy bread.

“We’re bankrupt, there are no jobs here, everything is more expensive and the money is never enough,” said Julia Ayala Casa, as she voted for Paz in southern La Paz in a traditional pollera skirt worn by Indigenous Aymara and Quechua women here. “We have to get in line just to buy oil. There’s a line for everything.”

(Hey, New York City! This, too will be yours if you are foolish enough to elect Zohran Mamdani.)

In short, the country went down the same way Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela went down, a big influx of natural resources cash, an even bigger round of government spending, and all of a sudden, the ruling clowns ran out of other people’s money. Happens every time.

Left unsaid in the Post report was the example of next-door Argentina, which decisively rejected socialism after a long period of misrule, embraced libertarianism and is now seeing economic growth it’s never seen before, growth the so-called experts were 'surprised’ to see happen. That cannot be lost on millions of Bolivian locals, many of whom have worked in Argentina as illegal aliens. Instead of continuing to flee socialism, they took their country back.

I’m just surprised the ruling socialists didn’t rig the election enough to keep themselves in power. The article describes how Morales and other leftists have sought to spoil their ballots ahead of the coming runoff, but that’s a rearguard action that won’t work.

The victory must have been too big to cheat. They didn’t, so there must be something good still there to work with. Bolivia may, this time, save itself.