With MAS Triumphant, Is Bolivia’s Rightwing Coup Over?

FEATURING GUILLAUME LONG – Bolivia’s MAS Party is celebrating. A year after a rightwing coup that deposed the popular president Evo Morales and after two election delays, the socialist part proclaimed a huge victory for democracy after a landslide win for Presidential candidate and Morales ally, Luis Arce.

Morales had been banned by the post-coup government of Jeanine Añez from running for President or even for a Congressional seat. He remains exiled in Argentina and while there he hailed Arce’s victory as a, “great triumph of the people.”

Guillaume Long, senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is a former Ecuadorian politician and academic who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador and Human Mobility, in the government of Rafael Correa. He was previously the Minister of Culture and Heritage, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. He later became Ecuador’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, before resigning in January 2018.