Bolivia: Can we close the gap?

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 26/10/2025

Guest columnist.
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When Pope Benedict XVI resigned from the papacy in February 2013, Facebook, the social networking site of the time, was flooded with photos of the resigning Pope wearing a Nazi uniform. The intention was obvious: to portray the conservative Benedict XVI as a fascist and Nazi who hated minorities, given that he had previously published his brilliant book, *The Dictatorship of Relativism*, in which he denounced, criticized, and questioned many of the ideological fads and fetishes that are still prevalent today, such as LGBT activism and anti-birth control.

Honestly, I'm a fairly casual Catholic, but I'm also someone who has a lot of affection for the institution. So I spent several months explaining that, during the Nazi regime, Joseph Alois Ratzinger, the secular name of Benedict XVI, was a child. People had a hard time understanding that he was a young man surrounded by a totalitarian and oppressive system, circumstances that nullify any freedom of expression or protest. In other words, Joseph didn't wear the swastika by choice, but because it was imposed by the state and the powers that be. In fact, one of the characteristics of totalitarianism is the nullification of the individual, his faith, his affections, and his decisions.

Years later, I came across the book: Bolivia: An Asymmetric Threat to the Americas, written by my great friend Grover Colque Lucana. Research shows that many of these practices were copied by the Movement Toward Socialism in Bolivia. But there's one that caught my attention: forcing young people to wear MAS symbols at all times. Basically, it's a way to erase their identity, their culture, and their individual autonomy, allowing them to live, eat, and breathe the party. Look at the contradiction in terms: the MAS claims to defend Indigenous people, but, in reality, it enslaves them. One of the book's final conclusions is: we all need to free ourselves from MASism, but especially those who are forced to be militants.

On the other hand, several political strategists, and many sensible people, claim that anyone who wants to succeed in politics in Bolivia needs to reach out to these sectors, even if they don't like it. However, the response of the older politicians, who are thankfully retiring, is always: we're not going to waste our time with those people. It seems that arrogance is the rule of the feudal lords of national politics.

However, every rule always has an exception, as in the last election, which had a second round for the first time in the nation's history, Rodrigo Paz fostered this rapprochement with these sectors. While it's entirely possible that the international left has its own dark agenda, the truth is that Paz did something no one had dared to do: steal votes from the MAS.

At the end of the first round of elections in August, I wrote an article titled "Andean-Caribbean Leopardism," in which I expressed my concern about a possible agreement between the dictatorial system and Paz's PDC. It's noble to acknowledge that more than an agreement, what we're dealing with is a strategy to conquer the electoral market. It's true that Rodrigo's offers are, in many cases, far-fetched and unrealizable, but we must learn the lesson: you can't do politics without the grassroots.

The PDC's victory in the second round, rather than being seen as a lesson learned, brought out many of the frustrations of Jorge Tuto Quiroga's voters, as posts such as "I'm going to feed animals instead of helping these indigenous people" and "the country is screwed because of the cardboard-colored people" were seen.

I fully agree with the freedom to discriminate; in fact, we do so when choosing a partner or friends. But freedom is one thing; reproducing the racial struggle that 21st-century socialism established in Bolivia three decades ago is another. For example, many of those who today furiously protest the bonds offered by the PDC forget a significant detail: it was the Tuto Quiroga government, 2001–2002, that introduced indigenism. Specifically, the subjective variable "original nation" appeared in that year's census. NGOs used this data to demand a constituent assembly and public policies with an ethnic focus, with which Quiroga strongly agreed.

Nelson Medina, a monk of the Dominican Order, often says that one of the reasons the left hates Christianity is that Koinonia—that of viewing the other as a complement and a brother—collides head-on with the dialectic of oppressor/oppressed. And one of the reasons for the constant conflicts in our region, in general, and our country, in particular, is that we allow this vision of permanent war to replace the gospel's message of harmony.

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, Nobel Prize winners in economics in 2025, demonstrated that the societies that have prospered the most are precisely those that have managed to resolve and heal their conflicts. The accumulation of capital, which is the sum of financial funds, human talent, and business know-how, occurs in countries that have replaced the conflict society with a collaborative society.

In closing, a question is in order: Bolivia, in the name of progress and the future of our children, can we close the gap we've been dragging on for decades?

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