A miner, pick in one hand, rifle in the other, adorns many main squares of Bolivia’s highland mining communities, symbolizing the country’s tradition of radical social movements. Although the size of the mining unions is today much reduced, the miners’ legacy lives on in strong social movements in both the rural and urban spheres. It was these that galvanized support for the presidential candidacy of Evo Morales in 2005, and again in 2009. Morales had previously been a leader of the coca farmers who, influenced by the miners’ radicalism, had been a key element of the resistance to neoliberal reforms in the 1990s.
Eight years on from his original election, and with every chance of winning the forthcoming 2014 presidential contest, Morales has brought big changes to this, one of Latin America’s poorest and most unequal countries. In 2006, he reasserted state control over Bolivia’s natural-gas industry, its main source of export and tax revenues, increasing the amount of tax paid by foreign companies. The same year, he initiated the rewriting of the constitution with a view to extending the political and social rights of its majority indigenous population, long marginalized by mestizo élites. The new constitution came into force in 2009.
