Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales has claimed he is the victim of a “brutal judicial war” orchestrated by the current president, Luis Arce, after prosecutors issued an arrest warrant over his alleged relationship with a minor.
On Monday, public prosecutor Sandra Gutiérrez revealed that a warrant for Morales’s arrest has been active since October. He is accused of “human trafficking” involving a 15-year-old girl with whom he allegedly fathered a child in 2016.
Gutiérrez said the warrant has yet to be executed because of a “risk to the lives of police officers” attempting to enforce it since Morales has been under the protection of coca growers in the rural region of Cochabamba, where he lives.
In a post on the social media platform X, Morales, 65, who governed from 2006 to 2019, accused Arce – a former ally turned bitter rival – of engaging in “lawfare” against him in order to hand him over to the United States as a “trophy of war”.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, has denied the allegations, calling them a strategy by Arce to block him from running in the 2025 presidential elections.
Both politicians belong to the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas), and Arce, 61, once served as Morales’s finance minister. But the two have been at odds and are now competing for the party’s presidential nomination.
Morales is aligned with rural coca growers, while Arce’s support mainly comes from the urban middle and working classes.
“There is a deep political and economic crisis in Bolivia at the moment,” said Angus McNelly, a lecturer in international development at King’s College London and the author of a recent book on Bolivian politics.
During Morales’s presidency, Bolivia experienced a period of economic progress and poverty reduction, largely thanks to a gas commodities boom. In 2019, he successfully ran for an unconstitutional third consecutive term, prompting widespread protests.
Under pressure from the military, Morales resigned and fled the country. In what many consider a coup, the senator Jeanine Áñez declared herself interim president, standing down in 2020 when fresh elections were called.
Morales handpicked Arce as his successor, and with Mas’s victory, the former leader returned home.
But with a sharp decline in its natural gas reserves, the country has experienced steep economic deterioration, marked by a shortage of US dollars and a sharp drop in imports such as fuel and food.
“Economic crises usually lead to massive political fractures,” said McNelly. “What’s strange in Bolivia’s case is that all this political polarisation is happening within the same party.”
McNelly said one reason for this is the weakness of Bolivia’s opposition, which remains incapable of mounting a serious challenge to Mas.
In June, following a failed military uprising by a disgruntled general, Morales accused Arce of staging a fake coup to bolster his popularity.
In September, Morales led a march of thousands of supporters to the capital, La Paz, to protest against the government, sparking violent clashes that left scores injured.
The current warrant issued against Morales is valid for six months. Prosecutors claim that the alleged victim’s parents, seeking to “climb the political ladder”, sent the 15-year-old girl to Morales’s youth brigade in 2015. A year later, she gave birth to a baby of whom Morales is alleged to be the father.
Although Bolivia’s supreme court has ruled that Morales cannot run in August’s elections, he insists he will contest the presidency.
“Sadly, the political crisis isn’t going to be resolved any time soon in Bolivia,” said McNelly. “I’m really worried about what will happen in the 2025 elections. I think there is potential for more violence, more uncertainty – and I don’t believe the elections offer a clear pathway out of this crisis.”
