What Do Lula’s Release and Morales’s Ouster Signal for Latin America?

It’s been an extraordinary few days in Latin America. On Friday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s charismatic former President, was released from prison after serving a year and a half of a twelve-year sentence. Two days later, Evo Morales, the embattled President of Bolivia, was forced to resign, at the suggestion of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and amid increasingly violent protests over the disputed results of his recent reëlection.

The Latin American chessboard became especially kinetic, as an American military man might say, in the past four weeks. A convulsive series of events began in mid-October, with unexpected angry protests in normally stable Chile. The protests, triggered by a hike in metro fares, spread widely, rocking the government of the conservative billionaire Sebastián Piñera and setting off a sort of existential crisis, across the social spectrum, over issues of inequality and inclusion. Chile’s eruption was followed, a week later, by Bolivia’s Presidential elections, in which the leftist Morales, controversially running for a fourth term, was declared the winner.

In 2016, during his third term in office, Morales held a referendum on whether he should be allowed to stand for an unconstitutional additional term. (As it was, he had finagled his third term with the argument that the country’s new 2009 constitution, which he had promoted and allowed for two terms only, provided him with a new beginning, despite his having entered office in 2006.) He narrowly lost the referendum but appealed to the constitutional court, a pliant body, which ruled in his favor, on the grounds that to deny him the right to run would be an infringement of his human rights. The decision enraged the opposition, but Morales, who retained significant support, especially among poor and indigenous Bolivians, ran again. On Election Day, he took a slight lead in the closely watched electronic vote tallies, but it appeared that his margin would not be large enough to avoid a second round. At that point, the tallying was halted for twenty-four hours, and, when it resumed, without explanation from the electoral tribunal, the trend lines had changed, giving Morales a margin sufficient to claim victory in the first round. Even before that, though, his opponent had complained of irregularities, and, when Morales was declared the winner, the protests began. His departure, after nearly fourteen years in power, brings to an abrupt end to one of the longest Presidencies of the diminished group of leftist leaders once branded as the Pink Tide.

Ironically, Morales’s election came just a week before elections in neighboring Argentina saw the victory of a left-of-center Peronist candidate, Alberto Fernández, over the unpopular conservative incumbent, Mauricio Macri. Fernández’s running mate was the flamboyantly controversial former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. C.F.K., as she is often referred to, has been embroiled in a series of corruption scandals, but, as a senator, a post to which she was elected in 2017, two years after her Presidential term ended, she enjoys immunity from prosecution. Fernández will not take office until December, but the promise of a friendly government in Argentina has already galvanized the left across Latin America, with celebratory greetings extended from the socialist governments of Cuba and Venezuela, and from Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-of-center President of Mexico.

Meanwhile, Lula’s release from prison, even though he still faces criminal charges in a series of corruption cases, will inevitably alter the political equation in Brazil, by offering a counterbalance to the far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro. On Sunday, Lula tweeted a statement in solidarity with Morales, with whom he has been friendly for years: “I just heard that there was a coup in Bolivia and that comrade @evoespueblo was forced to resign. It is unfortunate that Latin America has an economic élite that does not know how to live with democracy and the social inclusion of the poorest of the poor.” There is a strong sense, among both Lula’s supporters at home and his observers abroad, that he was railroaded by political opponents, led by the crusading judge Sérgio Moro, in order to prevent him from running in the 2018 elections, which the polls suggested he would have won by a wide margin. Moro brought charges of corruption and money-laundering against Lula, though many deemed the evidence as less than convincing, and sentenced him. After Bolsonaro was elected, Moro accepted his offer to be the justice minister. Last week, Brazil’s Supreme Court freed Lula, along with thousands of other prisoners who are appealing their convictions.

Lula’s release also allows him to retake his role at the forefront of the leftist leaders of the region and may help launch a leftist resurgence at a time of deepening political polarization across Latin America. But, for now, with Donald Trump in office in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and right-of-center governments in Colombia, Ecuador, and various Central American nations allied to both of them, a Pink Tide 2.0 seems less likely than an increasingly Cold War-like atmosphere in a region that is already sharply divided over how to handle the crisis in Venezuela and the consequences of its colossal economic meltdown. Heads of governments on the right welcomed Morales’s resignation and called for a prompt democratic transition in Bolivia. The leaders on the left, including Lula, Argentina’s Fernández, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, and Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, all denounced Bolivia’s military “coup.”

In the hours after the resignation of Morales, an ethnic Aymara who was the first member of an indigenous community to become the President of Latin America’s only indigenous-majority country, sectarian violence broke out across the country. The Vice-President, the Senate leader, and the leader of the chamber of deputies resigned along with Morales, and power seemed to fall to Jeanine Áñez Chávez, a vice-president of the Senate. On Monday, Áñez made an emotional televised address, in which she appealed to the commander-in-chief to put troops on the streets to assist the police. On Tuesday, as unrest continued and in spite of the lack of a quorum because of the nonappearance of Morales’s loyalists in the legislative assembly, Áñez declared herself the “interim President” of Bolivia, with the goal of “pacifying the country.”

Morales first went to ground in the rural region of Chapare, which he had made his base, with a handful of aides, and denounced plans by the police to arrest him. His home in the city of Cochabamba was vandalized and looted, while a house belonging to one of his sisters was burned down. Luís Fernando (El Macho) Camacho, a conservative Christian who is the increasingly prominent self-styled leader of the opposition, and whom some call the Bolivian Bolsonaro, entered the Presidential palace with some followers and then emerged to declare that “the Bible has reëntered the palace.” Outside the palace, one of his loyalists, a Christian pastor, was reported to have triumphantly declared that “the Pachamama”—a deity regarded as the Earth Mother by indigenous peoples of the Andes, including the Aymara—“will never return.” Late in the day on Monday, Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, announced that Morales and twenty of his cabinet ministers and legislative allies, many of whom had already taken refuge in the Mexican Ambassador’s residence in La Paz, had accepted his government’s offer of asylum. On Tuesday morning, after hours of secret discussions to guarantee his safety, Morales arrived in Mexico City aboard a small Mexican air-force jet that had been sent to retrieve him.

While the consequences of neither Lula’s release nor Morales’s ouster can yet be fully understood, it’s clear that, while the far right appears to be gaining strength again in Latin America, as it is in Europe, the left can’t be completely discounted. And neither can the military, which largely retreated to the barracks a generation ago, in the post-Cold War restoration of democracy across the continent, but in some countries has lately begun, if not to seize power outright, then to assume the role of institutional arbiter. In Guatemala and Honduras, for instance, the military has never relinquished its influence over civilian politics, while in Brazil, where a third of Bolsonaro’s cabinet members are former military men, it has become much more explicit. The military role has also expanded in Mexico (where the armed forces are prominent in the failing war on the drug cartels), and, to varying degrees in Cuba and Venezuela, military officers either share power with civilians or are making it clear that they regard themselves as an integral part of the national destiny. They have now done so in Bolivia, too.

This trend, along with the deepening sense of an ideological fault line, is being aided and abetted by the Trump Administration, which has relied on threats and carrot-and-stick policies to impose its will on the region, applying escalating sanctions against regimes that it doesn’t like—such as those in Cuba and Venezuela—and strong-arm tactics to get its way with Mexico and the states of Central America on questions of immigration. By repeatedly sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and by periodically threatening armed action or support for military coups against Venezuela’s government, Trump is undermining the efforts made by recent Administrations, notably Barack Obama’s, to effect a more respectful rapport with the governments of the hemisphere.

Yet signs of a new levelheadness, or perhaps of fairness, are beginning to emerge. Lula’s release demonstrated a refreshing independence on the part of the Brazilian Supreme Court and seemed to offer a belated counter to the politically and ethically tarnished judiciary that had convicted him. In Chile, an effort is building to amend the constitution, which was rewritten during the dictatorship of the late general Augusto Pinochet, and has been little modified since then. And the Organization of American States, or O.A.S., a multilateral body long repudiated by the left as an overly U.S.-influenced institution, may have resurrected its viability as a more balanced regional player, after Morales agreed to settle his disputed reëlection by authorizing it to carry out an independent investigation. On Sunday morning, the O.A.S. released the findings of that investigation in a report that found a number of serious irregularities, including evidence of fraud in Morales’s favor, and concluded, “The audit team cannot verify the results of the present election, and thus recommends a new vote.”