In Latin America, Autocrats Rise Anew
tions professor at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil. “It’s not limited to the right or left now.”
Economic troubles, in an area suffering from stagnant commodity prices, is one factor leading to incumbents trying to hold power in Latin America, said Ben Raderstorf, an analyst at the Inter- American Dialogue, a policy group based in Washington, recently.
Mr. Morales, part of a group of leftist leaders in Latin America who rose to power at a time of high commodity prices, sought to tackle a history of inequality in Bolivia. He forced foreign energy companies to share more profits with the state, investing the proceeds in education and health care.
Mr. Morales toured the country wearing traditional clothes and tout- ing his indigenous roots. He built a web of aerial cable cars in the capital, La Paz, connecting the city’s poorer periphery to places of employment. By 2012, the poverty rate had dropped by more than half from a decade before.
Top officials in La Paz argue that now is not the time to cut short a productive presidency on what they say are the mere technical grounds of term limits.
“It’s historic leadership, it doesn’t work in short cycles,” said Gabriela Montaño, the head of Bolivia’s Chamber of Deputies and a member of the president’s Movement Toward Socialism party. “There is simply no leader in Bolivia like Evo Morales.”
From her office in the Legislature, Ms. Montaño noted that nearly half of the country’s senators are women and added that her own rise to power would have been impossible under any other president. She then brought up the case of Germany, a democracy where the current chan- cellor, Angela Merkel, entered office before Mr. Morales and is now trying to form a coalition government after her fourth election.
“I think as Bolivians we have the right to re- elect people as we please,” she said.
But more recent news about Mr. Morales’s government has concerned the misuse of public funds and attacks on the news media.
“I think he is a villain,” said Gabriela de Carpio, 34, an unemployed mother in La Paz, citing the increasing frequency of corruption scandals.
The term limits that Mr. Morales wants to jettison were part of a Constitution he had promoted in 2009.
“In Bolivia the executive is now the only power and directs all others,” said Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, a former vice president, and now an opposition politician.
But even though Mr. Morales has said he will run again, that does not mean he will necessarily win in a walkover.
In judicial elections in December, a majority of Bolivians voiced their anger at the government by nullifying their ballots rather than picking from a list of judges that had been preselected by leftists.
But, as Julio Eguino, a 42-year- old psychologist, put it, “the question is, if not Evo, then who?”
While Mr. Eguino is keeping an open mind, he said he has little interest in the opposition.
He added that the changes in Bolivia begun by Mr. Morales still have a long way to go.
“It’s not a question of even five terms for Evo,” Mr. Eguino said recently at his home in the capital’s middle- class neighborhood of Calacoto. “It might be a question of a century to see the change we need.”
Contriving an undemocratic way to cling to power.