“On Oct. 20, Bolivian President Evo Morales will go to the polls in search of a fourth term. Victory would extend his time in office to almost two decades, and — depending on how the election goes — could place democracy itself at risk in the Andean country.
“Unlike with Morales’s counterparts in Latin America’s three consolidated autocracies — Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua — his past elections have been democratic and his governance style autocratic but not authoritarian. Members of Bolivia’s long-suppressed indigenous majority felt vindicated by the election of an Aymara president, and many analysts now see Morales’s 13 years in office as successful on economic merits, with consistent growth (real GDP per capita has almost doubled) alongside fairly ambitious socialist redistributive efforts…”