Bolivia’s ex-leader Evo Morales reappears after months-long unexplained absence | Bolivia
Bolivia’s long-serving former socialist leader Evo Morales reappeared in his political stronghold in the tropics on Thursday after an unexplained absence of almost seven weeks, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and silencing rumors that he had fled the country after capturing Nicolás Maduro, the former president of U.S. ally Venezuela.
The weeks-long ordeal over Morales’ fate has shown how little the Andean nation knows about what is happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human-trafficking charges, and how vulnerable U.S. president Donald Trump is to fears of potential future overseas escapes.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, broadcast footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived by tractor to a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, who served from 2006 until his alarming 2019 impeachment and subsequent self-exile, revealed he contracted chikungunya, an incurable mosquito-borne disease that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “surprised me.”
“Be careful of chikungunya, it’s a serious condition,” said Morales, 66, who looked much thinner than in previous appearances.
He rejected rumors, fueled by local politicians and social media, that he would try to flee the country and vowed to stay in Bolivia despite threats of arrest from conservative president Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism party.
“Some media said ‘Evo will go, Evo will run away.’ I said clearly: I will not go. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s latest efforts to revive diplomatic ties with the United States and bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration nearly 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran have shaken the coca-growing region that has served as a bastion of support for Morales.
On Thursday, Paz confirmed he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit that will bring together politically aligned Latin American leaders at a time when the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert U.S. dominance in the region.
Before announcing the candidates he will support in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a long speech that recalled his frequent criticisms of US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s attempt to revive the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate all left-wing parties in Latin America.”
