EL ALTO, Bolivia (AP) — Barred from appearing on Sunday’s ballot, former leftist president Evo Morales has launched a scrappy campaign for a presidential contender with no name, no face and no formal platform.
The contender’s known as “Nulo” — Spanish for the null-and-void vote.
Nulo has a reliable base in Bolivia, where voting is compulsory. For many years, voters disillusioned with Morales’ increasingly high-handed attempts to prolong his presidency over three consecutive terms defaced their ballots or left them blank.
Supporters of Morales to declare their votes null
But with the coca-farming union leader disqualified from the race and seeking to distance himself from the unpopular President Luis Arce and other leftists associated with Bolivia’s worst economic crisis in four decades, Morales has emerged as Nulo’s greatest champion.
“Brothers, we are on the right track. Absenteeism, blank ballots, undecided voters, all of it,” Morales told Radio Kawsachun Coca, his media outlet in the Bolivian jungle of Chapare, where he has been holed up for months among fiercely loyal coca-growing labor unions.
If Morales leaves his tropical stronghold, he risks arrest on charges related to statutory rape. He denies the allegations.
“Nulo is where we belong,” he said, urging voters to scratch, scribble and sketch on their ballots. “We’ve already won here.”
But under Bolivian law, Nulo cannot win the elections— nor trigger a redo. Because authorities must remove spoiled and blank ballots from the final count, a surge by Nulo would give all the candidates a boost without affecting the distribution of votes.
Morales bets on ‘Nulo’ to stay in the game
Morales is betting that an unusually high proportion of votes for Nulo would embarrass the right-wing front-runners, former President Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga and businessman Samuel Doria Medina, undermine the credibility of the consequential election and extend his own political relevance.
“Evo wants to be in the election and say, ‘This is my vote … I’m the winner without even having participated,'” said political analyst Carlos Saavedra.
Morales’ bid for Nulo comes after the iconic leftist leader, like other Latin American populists of his generation, exhausted a range of tactics to stay in power.
To run for a third term in 2014, Morales changed the Constitution’s two-consecutive-term limit and stacked the top courts with his supporters.
To run for a fourth term in 2019, he found a way around a referendum blocking his bid. That last attempt six years ago led to Morales resigning under pressure from the military and fleeing into exile as violent protests erupted over his disputed reelection.
From ruling bloc to running alone
This time, with his ally-turned-rival Arce in power, Morales had all the cards — rather, courts — stacked against him.
The ex-president’s power struggle with Arce splintered his once-dominant Movement Toward Socialism.
Although running with a different faction, Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez represents the MAS party’s best hope.
But support for Rodríguez, a coca-farming union activist like Morales, has declined in recent weeks as an accelerating currency crisis stokes outrage at the long-dominant MAS party.
Morales’ followers can appear even more disgusted with the left than with the right-wing establishment that their leader built his career opposing.
“Evo Morales taught Andrónico everything he knows, and Andrónico stabbed him in the back. How can we trust a candidate like that?” asked Wendy Chipana, a 28-year-old volunteer at a Nulo campaign office in El Alto, the sprawling city of rural migrants overlooking Bolivia’s capital of La Paz.
“We only have one candidate, Evo Morales. That’s why we’re deciding not to cast a single valid vote.”
As anger flared in June over Morales’ disqualification, his supporters blocked highways and clashed with police in unrest that left eight dead. Morales warned that the country would “convulse” should Sunday’s election proceed.
Yet in recent weeks he has changed his tune, urging his followers to register their frustration through the ballot box.
For ‘Nulo’ voters, the ballot becomes a canvas
Nulo campaigners are asking voters to get creative.
Chipana distributes decals of Morales’ face that voters can stick on their ballots.
Retired professor Martha Cruz, 67, says she’ll mark hers with a large X. Diego Aragon, 32, a coca farmer in Chapare, plans to paste a coca leaf on his paper in a nod to Morales’ legalization of the medicinal plant, maligned during the U.S.-backed war on drugs as the base product in cocaine.
Clothing vendor Daniela Cusi, 44, wants to take her time in the voting booth.
“I’m going to bring paint and draw his pretty little face all over,” she said.
Voter cynicism intensifies
With just days to go before the election, Nulo is drawing even some of Morales’ detractors who prefer to vote for nothing than back any of the uncharismatic candidates.
“I’m done with Evo, but I have no information about these other candidates,” said Diana Mamani, 30, selling shivering lambs at a market in the far reaches of El Alto. “The right-wing spends all this money on propaganda but they haven’t bothered to come out here.”
The two right-wing candidates, Quiroga and Doria Medina, have run for president and lost three times before.
Despite disenchantment over his autocratic tendencies, sexual abuse cases and profligate state spending, Morales, as Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, retains a level of fervent support that no other candidate can claim.
“I look in the mirror and realize I am just like him,” said Cristina Sonco, 43, a worker at the scenic cable car linking La Paz to El Alto, one of the many infrastructure projects Morales built as president. Like Morales, Sonco is an Aymara, the Indigenous group forming the majority of Bolivia’s population.
Recalling how his presidency reduced inequality and increased her rights in a country historically dominated by a white and mestizo, or mixed-race, elite, she started to weep.
“He’s like a father to me,” she said. “Not like these other candidates.”
The light-skinned, Western-educated Quiroga and Doria Medina represent the same ruling class that Morales swept aside when he first rode to power in 2005, vowing to bury 20 years of pro-Washington, free-market policies that failed to lift Bolivians out of poverty.
Bolivia’s crisis summons ghosts of the past
Twenty years later, Bolivia finds itself at the end of another historic cycle. Prices are rising and fuel is scarce. Families can no longer access their dollar savings.
In some ways, analysts say, Sunday’s elections could leave Morales right back where he started.
“I think that’s why Morales is pushing for Nulo, not a left-wing vote,” said Aymara author Quya Reyna. “It would suit him for the right-wing to come to power.”
After all, Morales’ past five years spent bickering with his former protégé wasn’t a great look for the maverick leader, Reyna said, adding:
“He’s much more comfortable confronting neoliberal administrations. That would lend him social legitimacy, even if he’s not in the government or Congress.”
