After two decades of MAS dominance and three years of currency freefall, Bolivians face an unfamiliar choice: two conservatives offering opposing cures. One bets on IMF shock therapy and austerity; the other on legalizing the shadows and coaxing hidden dollars home. Both promise salvation. Neither can promise it will be painless.
A Rightward Lurch Born of Exhaustion
Bolivia’s politics are shifting under the weight of scarcity. After almost 20 years of one-party rule under the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), endless fuel queues, empty shelves, and whispered black-market exchange rates have pushed voters to the brink. In the first round of August, MAS performed so poorly that it nearly lost its legal status—a stunning collapse for a party that once embodied national pride.
Now the country’s future rests between two market-friendly candidates who share an appetite for reform but disagree on the speed of its implementation. Their immediate task is brutally simple: pull dollars back into the system and import enough fuel to shorten lines. “It’s not going to be solved quickly, it’s going to take time,” said Luisa Vega, a 63-year-old teddy-bear vendor in El Alto, idling in her stall as customers vanished, in comments to the AP.
Her words capture the mood of a country running on fumes. Bolivia has spent its confidence like hard currency—carefully at first, then all at once. The state’s foreign reserves, once robust due todue to high gas prices, have nearly depleteddepleted. Inflation is at its highest level since the early 1990s. And the once-mighty MAS machine is splintering into rival factions and recriminations. What’s left is fatigue—and a longing for competence, no matter who provides it.
Currency Chaos and the Border Economy That Won’t Wait
To experience Bolivia’s crisis, head to Desaguadero, two hours from La Paz, just before dawn. There, rafts stacked with bread, cooking oil, and fuel cross the lake into Peru, where subsidized Bolivian goods fetch three times the price. The state blames smugglers for shortages. But the smugglers are symptoms, not villains, in a system where the official exchange rate has collapsed and prices change by rumor.
The black-market math is ruthless: one Peruvian sol buys nearly four bolivianos, the AP reported. For people like Ronald Vallejos, who ferries flour and sugar across the border, it’s an opportunity disguised as necessity. “Crises are opportunities,” he told the AP, admitting he hides Peruvian soles under his floorboards.
As dollars vanish, importers stall, and price controls make legal trade unprofitable. Lines form outside subsidized bakeries; rumors of oil or rice deliveries send crowds chasing across neighborhoods. “Gratuitous spending, speculation, and smuggling are worsening the situation, increasing prices by up to 300% in some cases,” warned Deputy Consumer Protection Minister Jorge Silva, who told the AP that angry vendors once chased him out of a market when he tried to check prices.
Smuggling has become the moral hazard of scarcity. When the state can’t supply, the border does. What once felt like theft now feels like a matter of survival.
Two Cures on the Right—One Bitter, One Improvised
The first candidate, Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, offers the textbook cure. A former president and Texas A&M-trained engineer who once worked for IBM, he promises to go hat in hand to the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank for billions in rescue funds. In return, he would lift price controls, slash subsidies, and court foreign capital back into hydrocarbons and lithium. “We will change all the laws. We will change Bolivia,” he vowed at his final rally, according to the AP.
To some, it’s finally adult supervision. To others, it’s déjà vu—the ghosts of 1980s austerity wearing new suits. Quiroga’s pitch to restore discipline and reopen to the U.S. and Europe sounds bold in a country that spent decades defying Washington. However, orthodoxy has its costs: Indigenous groups on the salt flats already warn that they will resist water-intensive lithium extraction, and unions smell a familiar story—sacrifice for the many, profit for the few.
His rival, Rodrigo Paz, offers something messier and more Bolivian: legalize what already exists. The centrist senator wants to formalize the informal—to pull dollars from mattresses, legalize smuggled vehicles, offer tax amnesties, and let today’s border hustlers register as cross-border traders with fixed fees. “There will be no more smuggling, everything will be legal,” he told a cheering crowd, the AP reported.
Paz’s plan is less IMF than improvisation, a kind of fiscal rummage sale: if you can’t borrow dollars from the world, find them at home. His running mate, Edman Lara, a former police captain who went viral on TikTok railing against corruption, has turned the campaign into a populist spectacle. “Everyone is against him—the media, the pollsters—that means he gets my vote,” said Salomé Ramírez, a 37-year-old commuter in La Paz, speaking to the AP.
Yet Paz’s improvisation carries its own risks. Lara’s unfiltered populism—promising universal income and massive pension hikes—has forced his partner to reassure markets that fiscal order still matters. “Paz and Lara are visiting places that other presidents haven’t,” said José Torres Gómez, a 28-year-old student in El Alto, telling the AP they are “speaking to the poorest people who need their help the most.“
Quiroga sells bitter medicine with technocratic polish. Paz sells triage with charm. One promises to reopen the economy to lenders; the other to reopen it to itself. Both gamble on time and trust they don’t yet have.
EFE/ Gabriel Márquez
The Stakes Behind the Slogans
The deeper question isn’t which man fixes the numbers—it’s who can rebuild faith. Bolivians are tired of miracles, socialist or neoliberal. MAS once promised dignity and inclusion, and for a while it delivered, riding the commodity boom to lower poverty and expand education. But as the money ran out, the system stagnated.
Now, exhaustion—not ideology—is pushing voters to the right. Quiroga’s plan risks triggering protests if austerity takes effect more quickly than the relief. Paz’s gamble risks chaos if his legalization spree floods the system with counterfeit faith in a failing currency. Either way, the next president will inherit a border economy that has learned to live without the state and a capital whose patience is measured in hours spent waiting in line.
There’s also geopolitics. Quiroga’s victory would realign Bolivia with Washington overnight, pleasing investors but reviving fears of foreign tutelage. Paz would move more slowly, hoping to plug fiscal holes internally before seeking loans abroad. Both paths converge on the same reality: Bolivia needs dollars and stability more than ideology.
“Who is going to have confidence now?” Vega asked in that chilly El Alto market, her question cutting through the political noise. It’s the question that will decide the election.
Also Read: Peru’s Generation on Edge: José Jerí’s Promise of Order Meets a Street That Won’t Be Silenced
In the end, Bolivia’s worst economic crisis in four decades has produced two roads to the right—one paved with IMF contracts, the other with legalized contraband. One demands discipline; the other, pragmatism. Both require courage. Neither offers miracles.