SÃO PAULO, Brazil – As Bolivia prepares for the upcoming August elections and relevant politicians confirm their will to run for president, the nation’s episcopate unprecedentedly decided to take an ostensible stance against the left-wing party that has been ruling for almost 20 years.

On May 6, the Bishops’ Conference, which gathered during the first week of the month for its annual assembly, released a public letter to the Bolivian people in which it harshly criticized Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, or Movement towards Socialism), the party that ruled the South American country with Evo Morales (between 2005-2019) and with current President Luis Arce (since 2020).

Arce said Tuesday he would withdraw from the race. It is unclear who will replace him as his party’s candidate.

Without mentioning its name, the bishops referred to MAS in a segment of the document dedicated to the “signals of death” that are part of Bolivian reality, opening it by affirming that Bolivia’s cultural and social identities have been destroyed.

“The promises of economic reactivation, reform of the judiciary and promotion of national reconciliation have been void,” the letter read, adding that “falsehood” and “deceit” have prevailed as part of a “demagogy” that kills “democracy, the rule of law, and legal safety.”

“The state monopolistic economic model systematically destroys the economy and private property; as a result, democracy’s foundations have been rotten and the country has been impoverished and in debt,” it went on.

In the document, the bishops said the availability of hydrocarbons is over and the exports have been blocked, while Bolivia becomes an exporter of manpower.

“The exercise of political and economic power must not be incentivized to the detriment of the weakest in society. In consequence, we have a paralyzed and internationally disqualified State,” the letter read.

In the following segment, titled Signals of life, the bishops call for the construction of a “pact of unity” that may transform Bolivia into “a viable nation, setting aside personal and sectoral interests,” in a clear reference to the coca producers who have historically supported Evo Morales.

“The upcoming presidential elections are an opportunity to rebuild the country and open new horizons. Vote is personal, secret, and free, so we must practice our right with responsibility and courage, repudiating anti-democratic pressures,” the message said.

According to Italian-born Bishop Eugenio Coter of the Diocese of Pando, the “government must carry out indispensable reforms to make Bolivia sustainable, otherwise the poor will continue to pay the price for it.”

“But the MAS doesn’t have lucidity, capacity nor will to promote such reforms,” he told Crux.

In Coter’s opinion, mistaken government policies, like the one that subsidized gas in Bolivia for years and greatly impacted the country’s financial reserves, must be completely changed now.

“In our message, we affirm that demagogy has been prevailing over democracy. Economic promises have blocked the private economy and created a corrupt State-based economy,” he told Crux.

Coter, who is one of the coordinators of the commission that is working on the establishment of an Amazonian Rite, affirmed that especially in the countryside the government mobilizes employees to accompany citizens in the voting areas.

“They even take pictures of the people’s votes. If a person doesn’t vote for the government, he or she can suffer retaliation,” he said.

Coter said that the government prohibits the exports of products, weakening the economy more and more.

“Poverty attains almost 48 percent of the people,” he added.

In his opinion, the opposition will not manage to unify and appoint one strong candidate, while MAS will probably nominate Andrónico Rodríguez, a 36-year-old senator who was a pupil of Evo Morales – but ended up breaking up with him and announcing last week that he will be a presidential candidate.

Evo Morales is impeded by law to run again, given that he already had three tenures as the president and the constitution determines a maximum of two tenures. He’s also facing legal charges for allegedly abusing a minor.

Arce, the incumbent, will probably avoid running for reelection due to his large unpopularity, after an administration that was considered an economic fiasco.

“So, the solution will come from the streets, with popular protests,” Coter added.

Over the past couple of decades, the Bolivian episcopate has been mostly moderate in political terms and avoided getting into political controversies, so that statement marked an important inflection, affirmed religion sociologist Julio Cordova.

“I was truly surprised when I first read that letter,” he told Crux.

Of course, many bishops tend to be critical of MAS due to a number of run-ins during Morales’s tenure. A moment of special tension was the constitutional reform of 2009, when the Bolivian State was declared secular, without any official religion. Catholics were used to teaching religion in schools, both in private and in public ones, and that was over after the reform.

“But in those years the episcopate was mostly controlled by the bishops of the highlands [the Andean, western part of the country], who always resorted to the Church’s Social Doctrine in order to indirectly criticize the government,” Cordova explained.

After 2015, the bishops of lower lands, in the Eastern part of Bolivia, became more influential. The area is economically and socially dominated by the city of Santa Cruz, a major Bolivian agribusiness hub.

“Since then, the episcopate’s statements ceased to be ideologically neutral and in favor of the poor. It emerged a direct condemnation of the State-controlled economic model promoted by the MAS,” he compared.

But nothing like the May 6 letter, Cordova said. In his opinion, the bishops assumed for the first time the political views of Santa Cruz’s agribusiness, which is also influential among the urban middle classes.

“Such social segments are fiercely anti-Morales and anti-MAS. Bishops in general come from the middle classes and live among them, so there’s a confluence of ideas,” Cordova said.

Despite numerous elements that can be criticized in the Bolivian government, it’s not a communist regime that expropriates private property – not even strong land reform programs are being promoted.

“In 2014, predicting the end of the gas reserves, Morales decided to extend the agriculture frontier [over uncultivated land] by 300 percent, and thus loosened environment protection laws,” Cordova said.

The measure resulted in a boom of soy and beef exports to China that greatly benefited the agribusiness.

But there’s a governmental restriction over exports of basic goods if the local markets are not adequately provided first. Given that the MAS administrations historically kept the Bolivian currency on a low level in comparison with US dollars, many farmers prefer to export instead of selling their products in the domestic market.

“It became common that many farmers illegally sell beef to neighboring countries, which then export it to major international markets. So, some basics are rare in the internal market and their prices went up,” Cordova explained.

The government is surely to blame in that scenario, but there are other problems that the bishops have been ignoring, he said.

In Cordova’s opinion, there’s no way to predict the outcome of the elections. He thinks, however, that it’s probable that a right-wing candidate will manage to consolidate a significant constituency and compete with Andrónico Rodríguez.

“In the case of a dispute between two major candidates, one representing the MAS’s segment and the other representing the right-wing, we don’t know what will happen,” Cordova said.

“But we do know that the Bishops’ Conference chose its side, which is to defeat the MAS.”

The Holy See and Bolivia are about to sign a new concordat. The open criticism of the government seems to be a shot in its own foot by the episcopate, Cordova said.

“It seems diplomatically wrong and it can risk the signature of the concordat. If Arce’s administration prefers to leave it to the next president to sign, and if the next president is Rodríguez, the concordat may be in danger,” he said.