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A photograph of President Rodrigo Paz shaking hands with the executive secretary of the country’s principal trade union federation, the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB) at the Casa Grande del Pueblo in La Paz circulated widely across the internet. It signaled an end to 50 days of nationwide protests and roadblocks demanding the president’s resignation just six months after he took office. It was June 19, in the late afternoon, and early the next morning, the president declared a 90-day state of emergency.
Armed forces were deployed to road blockades around the country. Here in Cochabamba, the city with the second-highest number of blockades, the military secured bridges and main access routes into the city and conducted patrols to prevent more roadblocks, drawing both approval and condemnation from a divided population.
In the wake of the protests and ensuing repression, social movements have realigned, while the new right-leaning government faces a crisis of support — leaving the political landscape uncertain. Compounding this, Bolivia is facing its worst economic downturn in 40 years. On June 29, the government unpegged the U.S. dollar after 15 years of a fixed exchange rate, in an attempt to attract foreign currency and ease the financial crisis.
The new Paz government’s policies and the 28-day march
Paz, described by international outlets such as the BBC and Reuters as a “moderate conservative,” won Bolivia’s election in October 2025 with 54% of the vote in a runoff against Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, a neoliberal, far-right former president of the country from 2001 to 2002.
Paz won the presidency at a time when right-leaning governments were being elected across Latin America, and when Bolivia’s left was facing internal divisions following almost two decades of a Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government. He campaigned with the slogan “capitalism for all” and promised to lift Bolivia out of an economic crisis marked by 20.4% inflation and fuel and currency shortages.
His running mate, former police officer Edman Lara, who had gained national visibility in previous years by denouncing law enforcement corruption, may have played a role in his victory. Working-class voters also likely struggled to support a candidate who had played a role in Bolivia’s neoliberal policies of the 2000s.
“Paz brought different types of promises: that he would provide solutions for every social sector, that he would govern for all sectors, that he would not forget the most impoverished sector, that he would provide all these state projects to small farmers,” Esther Chura, a leader of the Unified Syndical Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB), told Truthdig.
“So (in the runoff) he was the only option, because the small farmers couldn’t vote for the other (coalition of) parties, which always sides with big business.”
However, the measures that Paz and his cabinet began to implement from November increasingly diverged from working-class constituents’ expectations. One of the first things he did was eliminate fuel subsidies through Supreme Decree 5503, accompanied by an increase in the minimum wage. As gasoline prices quickly almost doubled, Paz repealed four key taxes — including a tax on high-net-worth individuals — triggering the first wave of criticism from working-class sectors, who accused him of favoring the traditional business elite.
Early this year, the COB, together with allied organizations and unions of miners, teachers and small farmers, held their first protests against Paz’s policies and specifically against Supreme Decree 5503. While the decree was repealed on Jan. 13, the move did not quell public unrest.
As further protests unfolded, the Plurinational Legislative Assembly debated Bill 157, later known as Law 1720, to authorize the voluntary conversion of small agricultural holdings to medium or commercial-size farms. The bill was introduced by Sen. Branko Marinkovic, the top senator for Quiroga’s coalition and a well-known landowner.
Ten agricultural nongovernmental organizations and movements condemned the lack of constitutionality of Law 1720 in a statement, “By allowing private landowners to reclassify and define the status of agricultural land according to their own interests, the state is abdicating its role … of enforcing the economic and social function of land, understood as its sustainable use.”
Shortly after Law 1720 was enacted April 8, small-farmer organizations spoke out against it, arguing they had not been consulted during the drafting and legislative process and denouncing the advance of agribusiness. That day, comunarios— active participants in rural or Indigenous communities who take part in community democracy, a system of political participation officially recognized in the country — and Indigenous groups from the departments of Pando and Beni began a march to the capital, La Paz, called For Life, to Save Bolivia.
In addition to demanding the repeal of Law 1720, the marchers demanded respect for Indigenous peoples, the passing of a pro-forest law, land titles for their community lands, suspension and dismissal of the Anti-Blockade Bill, and a resolution to the fuel shortage that the elimination of subsidies had not yet resolved among other requests. The Anti-Blockade Bill, presented in December, criminalized road blockades with possible 10 to 20 years prison sentences.
On April 14, 34 Indigenous and small-farmer organizations at the National Meeting for Land and Territory in Santa Cruz demanded the repeal of Law 1720 and announced they would join the march.
A shift in the organizational structures of the movements
For 28 days, marchers carrying both the national tricolor flag and the historic Wiphala — a flag representing Indigenous peoples and small farmers — trekked over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) across the north of the country to eventually arrive in La Paz.
Social media feeds were flooded with minute-by-minute updates of the journey. In municipalities such as Patacamaya, in La Paz, comunariosformed human chains to receive the march with applause, whistles and cheers. What began as a march from the Amazon ultimately drew together workers and farmers and evolved into nationwide roadblocks that paralyzed the country for 50 days, cutting off food, fuel, and medicine supplies — and rattling the Paz government.
The march was a convergence point for social organizations and their different demands. While lowland movements prioritized the defense of their territories to guarantee their sociocultural and economic survival, union organizations such as the COB focused their demands on economic, wage and production reforms, as well as the separate demands of the mining sector. La Paz-based groups — the Tupac Katari Federation of Small-Farmer Workers and the Bartolina Sisa Federation of Women — called for the reactivation of stalled public works, a 50% reduction in public officials’ salaries and the removal of various government ministers, while other sectors limited their requests to specific trade grievances.
For Aymara political analyst Quya Reyna, the differing goals prevented the mobilized groups from consolidating a strategic coalition. Common ground was largely limited to the demand to overturn Law 1720 — the core battle the movements won, as it was repealed May 14.
“Our priority was demanding the annulment of this law because, as Indigenous people, our territory is our life […] it is our heritage and what we are going to leave to our children,” Vivian Palomera told Truthdig. As the executive director of the Vaca Díez Regional Federation of Farm Workers, she said that for small farmers, demanding the resignation of the president wasn’t a top priority like it was for other groups, but instead they were focused on stopping the conversion, or essentially privatization, of the land.
There are currently two distinct and co-existing movement structures in Bolivia with their own decision-making mechanisms, anthropologist Pedro Pachaguaya says. There are those with an Indigenous character, whose demands relate to their territorial contexts, and those of a working-class, productive nature. Within the latter, the productive side brings together traditional unionism, such as mining cooperatives or the COB; while the working–class side organizes independent workers, trade guilds and informal urban sectors. Historically, small-farmer organizations — whose largest representative is the CSUTCB — and labor organizations such as the COB have worked together and coordinated common struggles.
During the recent protests however, the demands from the different sides reflected their own interests. And as the days passed, the demands became increasingly divergent and the union organizations began to take on a more dominant role. The National Federation of Mining Cooperatives (Fencomin), which represented the mining sector during the protests, demanded that miners be supplied with enough explosives and fuel to be able to continue working, and that more land be opened up to mining exploration. The national government yielded to these demands in an attempt to reduce the impact of the protests.
The government prioritized negotiating with union and productive organizations, which generated tensions within the movements. On May 6, leaders and local representatives of farmer and Indigenous organizations publicly disavowed Victor Hugo Roca, the national head of the CSUTCB, alleging that he had negotiated with the government without consulting the rank and file. Later, the Tupac Katari Federation rejected the pacification agreement between the COB and the government that aimed to end the conflict.
Such fragmentation represents a historic rupture, Pachaguaya concludes: “What is happening in Bolivia in 2026 is something different … It is not the classic left that is mobilizing. There is no political party convening the protests, no charismatic leader at the helm, no unifying ideology. What exists are Indigenous, farmer, and worker structures that activate their own system of governance, in their own manners of communicating, with their own ways of making decisions.”
Prior to this, the rise of the MAS, with Indigenous leader Evo Morales elected president in 2005, had marked a turning point in Bolivia’s social movements. Poverty was slashed, and Indigenous rights and Bolivian sovereignty were prioritized. But with time, a crisis of representation developed that affected both Indigenous farmer communities and their ties with labor unions.
More and more, leaders were “people who did not belong,” Chura says, arguing that dynamic then worsened under Luis Arce Catacora, the MAS leader who succeeded Morales in 2020. There was a power struggle between the two leaders, and they withdrew their mutual public support. That rift, compounded by a burgeoning economic crisis, left the ruling party split into two irreconcilable factions: the “evista” wing and the “arcista” wing.
This fragmentation is now replicated regionally and within various social organizations. It can be seen in the Regional United Federation of Campesino Workers of the Southern Altiplano (FRUTCAS), for example, a well-known union organization in southwestern Potosi, which other unions are affiliated with.
“Under the Arce government, the big problem is that the unions have split,” Leonel Mamani Mendoza, a farmer in the community of Coroma in southwestern Potosi, told Truthdig. “For example, there was the arcista FRUTCAS, the evista FRUTCAS and the opposition FRUTCAS, seeing the entire union organization system fragmented.”
Under the new government, “the organization is trying to recover that representation and legitimacy that they once had, but it is a challenge,” he said.
Increased tensions, divisions, and loss
The recent protests both reflected that fragmentation and deepened it. Those supporting Morales, Arce, or other options, had different demands. As the roadblocks were strengthened and consolidated, communities became divided in their support or rejection of them, and that divide was also seen within the unions and farmer movements.
By the end of May there were 89 roadblocks across the country. La Paz faced severe shortages: food items such as beef, chicken, eggs and dairy were hard to obtain, prices rose exponentially and residents had to wait in long lines to access the few products that did arrive in the city. A 30-egg carton, for example, whose normal price hovered around 35 bolivianos (US$3 to US$4), cost more than 70 bolivianos (US$7). More than 1,100 food-service businesses closed nationwide.
Here in Cochabamba, farmers and producers of items such as milk, flowers and eggs went to the main square to sell their products so as not to waste them. They couldn’t transport their goods to other cities, and there was a shortage of fruit and vegetables because of roadblocks in the tropical regions of the country. In the streets, there was an atmosphere of worry, discontent and frustration.
Mamani said divisions in the movements increased because many communities and individuals didn’t see sustaining roadblocks as feasible, given their impact on supplies for those communities.
“Here in Coroma, (when the blockades began) the highest local authorities had instructed people to join indefinite blockades to demand the president’s resignation, right? And then others — fellow community members — said, ‘But when did you consult the communities?’ So there was a division. And this blockade period coincided with the quinoa harvest,” he said.
While mobilized farmer and union organizations remained firm in their demand for Paz’s resignation, several representatives of the productive sector declared a state of emergency over mounting economic losses, unable to transport their goods or receive suppliers. The National Chamber of Industries estimated daily losses at US$60 million and a 2.6% hit to gross domestic product. Added to that was the outcry from informal-sector merchants across the country, who said their economic hardships were worsening.
Human rights violations
As for the state’s role, according to the Ombudsman’s Office, about seven police and military operations were carried out in May and June 2026 to dismantle blockade points. In those operations, 583 people were taken into custody, of whom 324 have been released and 255 formally charged as of June 15.
The Ombudsman’s Office, along with several media outlets, denounced police for using excessive force against civilians and journalists during the clearing of roadblocks. Police officers shot Violeta Tamayo, a journalist and correspondent for La Izquierda Diario in the arm while she was covering the June 10 march of the Tupac Katari Federation and the COB.
The Ombudsman’s Office also identified 15 issues affecting the rights of third parties. Among them were food shortages for vulnerable populations, lack of access to medication, difficulty transporting seriously ill patients and truck drivers being stranded on highways, “trapped amid the conflicts, with no access to water or food.”
More than a dozen deaths occurred during the blockades, though they have not yet been formally investigated. According to the Ombudsman’s Office, they included “the deaths of people presumably affected by the road blockades who arrived too late at a specialized medical center, could not be transported (died en route) or gave up on being transported because of the blockades.”
The government also caused divisions
After the COB and the government signed their agreement, the Tupac Katari farmers withdrew from the process, called an emergency assembly that never happened, and then began reorganizing their membership. Among their conditions for dialogue with the government was an end to political, judicial and economic persecution of leaders who had been detained, taken into custody or subjected to pretrial restrictions during the protests.
The scale of criminalization of protesters became evident on June 12, after 42 days of mobilization. David Mamani, then a leader of the Tupac Katari Federation, denounced the fact that more than 40 leaders from his organization had been detained, and many brutally beaten, “to silence and weaken” the movement, bringing the total number of detainees to about 400. Mamani recently allegedly fled the country.
Days after the state of emergency declaration, various sectors warned that the national government was using its new extraordinary powers to intensify persecution of union, farmer and grassroots representatives who had taken part in protests and blockades in different regions of the country, violently arresting them without warrants or identification.
This state response also deepened divisions in the movements. Small farmer leader Aquilardo Caricari told El País in mid June that movement members were rejecting the dialogues with the government. He alleged that some union leaders were negotiating “their own freedom and an end to the criminalization at the expense of protesters.”
Political analysts, for their part, said the Paz government employed a strategy of attrition toward the protests, by combining arrests, legal proceedings and police interventions as the public increasingly rejected the farmer and Indigenous leaders.
Days after the agreement with the COB and the declaration of a state of emergency, the president urged that those responsible for the blockades be investigated and sanctioned, while vowing to work to “strengthen the presence of the state across all territory.”
Along the same lines, the government filed complaints at the end of June against former president Evo Morales, COB executive secretary Mario Argollo and Tupac Katari executive Vicente Salazar, identifying them as the main instigators of the pressure tactics.
Today, people remain on edge here. The country is reckoning with obvious internal tension within its grassroots movements and the arrest of several of their leaders. At the same time, the legitimacy of the Paz government has been seriously weakened in the past seven months, as the stance of the grassroots has shifted from initial support to demands for his resignation.
“People no longer want dialogue,” Chura said. “I think people are determined to see Paz leave. With all that has happened, how could we keep supporting the government?”
