Bolivia’s ex-leader Morales reappears in stronghold after 7-week absence

The public appearance ends rumours that Morales fled the country following the abduction of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Evo Morales, Bolivia’s former long-serving socialist leader, has reappeared in his political stronghold in the country’s central Chapare region after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence.

His public appearance on Thursday in the town of Chimore ends rife speculation he had fled the country in the wake of the United States abduction of his ally, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in January.

The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of the former leader smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium to address his supporters.

Morales endorsed candidates for next month’s regional elections and pointedly accused the US under President Donald Trump of wanting “to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America”.

Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, serving from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise”.

He dismissed rumours that he would try to flee the country, pledging to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism party.

The former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on charges of human trafficking, which he has denied.

In December, a month after Paz was inaugurated, Bolivian authorities arrested former President Luis Arce as part of a corruption investigation.

The accusations centre on Arce’s time as economy minister under Morales, when authorities say he oversaw the diversion of approximately $700m from a state fund created to channel natural gas revenues into development projects for Indigenous peoples and peasant farmers.

Since taking office, Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with Washington and recent efforts to bring back the US Drug Enforcement Administration – some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the country – have also rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’s bastion of support.