South America | Bolivia is in a permanent crisis

Protest against high diesel prices: Farmers block a road in the town of Cuatro Canadas in Santa Cruz department on September 2, 2026. Photo: AFP/Rodrigo Urzagasti A few days before the end of the state of emergency in Bolivia, the government announced on Sunday that it would submit a decree to parliament to extend it for another 90 days. In June, right-wing President Rodrigo Paz declared a state of emergency for 90 days by decree, and Parliament confirmed it a day later with a two-thirds majority. The South American country remains rocked by economic crisis, protests and scandals. Because of ongoing shortages and an increase in the price of diesel, transport associations and farmers are blocking country roads again, and supporters of former President Evo Morales are calling for new protests. At the same time, a serious political scandal is putting the government in need of an explanation: Paz's close advisor, the Argentine political strategist Fernando Cerimedo, was arrested on charges of attempted femicide.

Cerimedo was arrested on August 18 at Santa Cruz airport. He is believed to have ordered an assassination attempt on his pregnant ex-partner, the lawyer Nadia Beller, who survived three shots outside a hotel in the same city. Cerimedo wanted to silence her, Beller accused him from the hospital bed, because she had evidence of corrupt dealings by the Paz government and the presidential family. The public prosecutor's office is now also investigating the Argentine for illegal enrichment and money laundering. Particularly explosive: A photo shows Cerimedo in March at a top-level meeting between Paz and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio - it refutes Paz's initial claim that the Argentine never held an official role for Bolivia's government.

The case is more than a criminal case: It shows how deeply intertwined the Paz government is with the international right and shadowy actors, while at the same time criminalizing social movements at home. Cerimedo is considered one of the most influential minds behind digital disinformation campaigns of the new Latin American right: He worked for Javier Milei in Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and most recently Nasry Asfura in Honduras.

The scandal hits a government that has barely recovered from the previous crisis. From the beginning of May to the end of June, farmers, indigenous people and trade unions paralyzed large parts of the country with road blockades for 53 days, surrounded the government headquarters in La Paz and demanded the resignation of President Paz. According to the Bolivian ombudsman Defensoría del Pueblo, 22 people died as a result of the blockades, more than 580 were arrested, and the economic damage is estimated at at least two billion US dollars.

The protests were triggered by a new land law, which meant that the property of small farmers was no longer legally confiscatable and against which indigenous people and farmers from the lowlands had already protested in April. The government withdrew the law, but protests spread. Teachers and transport workers had previously demonstrated over high inflation and massive fuel shortages against Paz, who had filled his cabinet with ultra-right-wing forces, broken election promises and repealed petrol subsidies while favoring banks, agribusiness and mining.

The Paz government ended the blockades in June with the help of a double strategy: on the one hand, it concluded agreements with individual protest sectors in order to divide the movement and, on June 20, it also ordered a state of emergency with military deployment to clear the streets. Union leaders and Morales were prosecuted and criminalized. The government benefited from a split in the movement itself: While the leadership of the trade union umbrella organization COB negotiated with the government, grassroots organizations criticized the agreement as a betrayal - for them, the real fighting power lay in the direct, self-organized blocking of the paths. At the same time, however, the protesters were unable to mobilize large population groups in the cities - probably because they themselves were suffering from food and medicine shortages caused by the blockades.

Paz emerged from the crisis badly damaged - after ten months in office, he has hardly any political support left. The break with Vice President Edmand Lara began the day after the inauguration in November 2025, when Lara felt excluded from cabinet meetings - Lara later called the president a "dictator, tyrant and liar" and voted against the state of emergency, while Paz, in turn, recently accused his deputy of having a "dangerous dictatorial profile." Recently, the president's Christian Democratic party PDC broke up into three factions; Alliance partners withdrew.

To solve the crisis, Rodrigo Paz is relying on a $1.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund and is trying to make a pact with the right-wing parties in parliament to change the constitution, expand regional autonomy and restructure the justice system. In return for the loan, the IMF obliges Bolivia to undertake neoliberal reforms: fuel subsidies will be abolished and mining and hydrocarbons will be opened up to private, transnational capital. Again, it is the same sectors - capital, raw materials, agribusiness - that are expected to benefit from the crisis, while subsidies for the majority are no longer available. The fundamental aim of the constitutional reform is to dismantle Bolivia's economic and state model shaped by the Movement to Socialism (MAS). Paz and his government are in a political dilemma. If the state of emergency is extended by the parliamentary majority, the planned constitutional changes are excluded for constitutional reasons, which makes the economic reforms demanded by the IMF more difficult. However, if the government allows the state of emergency to expire, it will lose its strongest repressive tool against the mass protests by trade unions and social movements announced for October. Any decision threatens to further exacerbate the country's political and economic instability.

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