That said, what's happening with interim president Anez is horrific, and she should be prosecuted as a murderer.

Even amid all this progress, early warning signs indicated trouble on the political front. Bolivia’s social and economic successes did not translate into strengthened democratic institutions. From early in his tenure, Morales showed autocratic tendencies that over time led to abuses of power. The MASmanipulated the courts to rule in its favorby appointing loyalists, intimidated political opponents, and betrayed a lack of respect for institutional checks and balances. The trend intensified after 2009, when the party won an absolute majority in both houses of parliament, allowing it to consolidate its power.

Morales’s personalistic and authoritarian proclivities gradually insulated the MAS from the base of organizers and social movements that had propelled the party to power and had, at times, served as a partial check on presidential authority. The more centralized the party became, the less likely new leaders were to emerge and carry the mantle forward. In 2014, the MAS declared Morales to be “indispensable” and announced that it would not groom a new party leader. Rather, Morales would serve, seemingly, in perpetuity: in 2016, the government held a referendum to remove presidential term limits. The referendum failed, leading Morales to complain that he had a “human right” to run for office indefinitely. The country’s highest court, dominated by Morales’s allies, supported his reasoning in a controversial ruling the following year. In essence, Morales had succumbed to what might be termed the “autocratic temptation”—the illusion that he not only spoke and acted on behalf of the entire people but could do so forever. The result was a leadership untethered from any mechanisms of accountability and insulated from feedback that could provide a counterweight to its power.

The referendum debacle severely undermined Morales’s democratic legitimacy, sharply polarized Bolivian politics, and revitalized a conservative opposition that for years had been too fractious to pose a serious electoral threat. Strong opposition movements emerged in some former bastions of support, such as Potosí, and some formerly staunch MAS allies, including the country’s biggest trade union confederation and smaller indigenous groups, even switched to the opposition. The episode also revitalized opposition to Morales among economic elites in the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s economic powerhouse, which helps explain the MAS’s electoral underperformance in that crucial region in the October 20 election. The city has since become a crucial base of support for the right-wing interim government.