Nicole Fabricant says Bolivia's new president Luis Arce faces a neo-fascistic right while negotiating a new relationship with the country's social movements that fragmented under his mentor, Evo Morales. Fabricant is a Bolivia researcher and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland Towson.

Greg Wilpert

Welcome to theAnalysis, I'm Greg Wilpert. It's been a little over 100 days now since the new president of Bolivia, Luis Arce, has assumed office. As he took over following a harrowing year during which the far-right president, Jeanine Anez years had managed to oust longtime leftist President Evo Morales from office. In November 2019 with the help of Bolivia's military, its police, and the Organization of American States. Luis Arce, who was finance minister under Evo Morales, managed to win last October's presidential election with 55 percent of the vote.

Since then, he has had to deal with a complicated situation, fending off Bolivia's far-right, as well as coping with the Covid pandemic and a severe economic crisis. Just how well has Arce managed to do this and what has brought Bolivia to where it is now? Joining me to discuss these issues is Nicole Fabricant. Nicole is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland in Towson and a frequent contributor on Bolivia to NACLA, Jacobin, and other publications.

Also, she's the author of the book Mobilizing Bolivia's Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land. Thanks for being here today. Nicole.

Nicole Fabricant

Thanks, Gregory. It's great to be in conversation with you.

Greg Wilpert

So let's start with what's perhaps the more urgent concern in Bolivia at the moment – the pandemic. Bolivia was hit very hard, just as most of Latin America. Give us a brief idea as to what Arce has had to deal with when he took office and what he's done since then in regard to managing the pandemic.

Nicole Fabricant

Sure. So the pandemic, as you said, had hit Bolivia pretty hard in the months of March, April, May, June, straight through the summer, and Jeanine Anez's  government really in so many ways failed to deal with this public health crisis, but also the twinning economic crisis. So we had these interlocking crises mounting at the same time. So Arce came in with and really his election, an incredible landslide was a real shock to a lot of us from the global north, expecting that it would be a much closer, given the polarization of the country, outcome.

So I think there was a lot of just shock and excitement and celebration that there was this new iteration of MAS, and he came in right away trying to figure out what the best solutions to the Covid-19 crisis would be, while at the same time not locking down economic means of everyday production and life because that had come to a stall during the crisis. So right away, they were solidifying the first major Covid-19 vaccine deal.

I think 20 percent of the population was the goal initially for Arce, and so there were a lot of these first Sputnik-V doses that arrived in late January. We're still seeing spikes, though, all over Santa Cruz right now, which is the agro-industrial capital in the region, where I've worked pretty closely. So that seems to be the hotbed and the epicenter right now of the Covid-19 crisis.

Greg Wilpert

And recently health care workers actually started a ...