A T 11.40PM ON October 22nd, two days after Bolivia’s presidential and congressional elections, Paul Handal met a dozen neighbours on the street in Villa Fraterna, an upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Santa Cruz, the country’s biggest city. Suspicions were mounting that the president, Evo Morales, was trying to avoid a run-off vote by fraudulent means. Opposition leaders had called a general strike to demand one. Mr Handal and his neighbours dragged trees and tyres to an intersection to build a barricade.

“We thought it would last a day or two,” says Mr Handal, who owns a motorsports consultancy. Then the tribunal declared Mr Morales the winner and more evidence of irregularities surfaced. Over the following fortnight more than 100 people signed up to man the intersection in Villa Fraterna. “This is the second time Evo robbed us of our vote,” says Mr Handal, who is at the barricade from 7am to 7pm every day. The first was when Mr Morales decided to run for a fourth term, in defiance of a referendum vote in 2016. “My vote counts,” the protesters daubed in white on the walls of a dried-out canal. In the evenings families bring tables and chairs to play cards and listen to the radio. Vendors from a nearby favela bring food carts. Catholic and evangelical groups take turns leading prayers.

Such scenes are occurring across Santa Cruz, a city of 1.5m people that is laid out like a bicycle wheel: 27 avenues project like spokes from the centre, which is encircled by anillos, or rings. Barriers made of branches, bricks, refrigerators, trash bins, scrap metal, wire and caution tape block hundreds of intersections and thousands of smaller streets. The paro cívico (civic strike) has brought normal life to a halt. Supermarkets are allowed to open until noon, but most other business has shut down. Schools are closed. Ambulances, police cars, garbage trucks and lorries delivering food are the only vehicles allowed through the barriers. The shutdown is slowing commerce in the surrounding department of Santa Cruz, which provides 70% of Bolivia’s food and 30% of its GDP .

Orders for the strike come from Luis Fernando Camacho, the head of the Comité pro Santa Cruz, a group with roots in the department’s elite that now claims to represent everyone. Dressed in a polo shirt and flanked by bodyguards twice his size, the lawyer spends his days coaxing power brokers to support the strike and his nights visiting barricades. Although the strike costs Santa Cruz $30m a day in lost output, most cruceños, including business owners, support it.

Their rebellion is the most radical response to the flawed election. Mr Morales avoided a second round by just 35,000 of the 5.9m valid votes cast after a mysterious interruption of the vote count. Comités cívicos in other departments are staging smaller strikes. Carlos Mesa, the defeated presidential candidate, at first demanded that the vote go to a second round but now backs the protesters’ call for a fresh election supervised by a new electoral tribunal.

The government is trying to head that off by backing an audit of the vote count by the Organisation of American States ( OAS ). It is “the institutional mechanism to determine whether or not there was fraud”, says Adriana Salvatierra, the president of the senate, who is from Mr Morales’s Movement to Socialism ( MAS ) and represents Santa Cruz. The government has agreed to let the election go to a second round if the auditors find fraud.

That does not satisfy the protesters. They mistrust the OAS , whose secretary-general, Luis Almagro, on a visit to Bolivia this year affirmed Mr Morales’s right to run for re-election. Positions are hardening. On November 2nd Mr Camacho, who has sought support from the armed forces, promised “radical measures” if Mr Morales did not resign within 48 hours. When the president ignored the ultimatum, Mr Camacho ordered protesters to shut government buildings and the country’s borders to trade, so that Mr Morales “doesn’t have a single peso to govern”.

The government calls the insurrection an attempted coup. Encouraged by Mr Morales, thousands of miners and coca farmers have thronged cities to defend his election victory. In Montero, 50km (30 miles) from Santa Cruz, two protesters were killed on October 30th when government supporters tried to dismantle a barricade. At least one other person died in clashes in Cochabamba on November 6th.

Mr Mesa, a former president, is not a bystander but neither is he shaping events. He is “just interested in being president”, says Mr Camacho dismissively. The candidate resists Mr Camacho’s radical demand that Mr Morales resign. “It has to be the popular vote that defines” his exit, says Gustavo Pedraza, Mr Mesa’s running-mate, who is from Santa Cruz.

The protesters’ suspicions of electoral fraud look well founded. Investigators have found unusually high numbers of invalid votes, precincts where turnout was 100% and inexplicable revisions to vote counts, usually in favour of Mr Morales. “There are too many irregularities to be human error,” says Édgar Villegas, a computer engineer at the Higher University of San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital.

This week 30 experts chosen by the OAS arrived. They will review how votes were tallied and how information was transferred from polling centres to the electoral authorities. Even if they determine that enough fraud occurred to invalidate the result, it is not clear how a second round might be held. Many Bolivians will not trust the electoral tribunal to oversee it. Several of its members have quit because of its handling of the vote. A presidential run-off would not change the makeup of congress, in which the MAS won a majority—fraudulently, the opposition claims. “We’re tied up like a pretzel,” says a foreign diplomat. “It’s going to be hard to find a constitutional solution that society will accept.”

The standoff threatens to weaken a consensus among social groups that Mr Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous-origin president, had managed to create during his 14 years in power. In Plan 3000, a working-class neighbourhood of Santa Cruz named for a project to house 3,000 people displaced by a flood in 1983, residents complain that the strike is hurting people without savings. “We’re not beggars,” says Marítimo Solares, the leader of a youth group affiliated with the MAS . “For us, democracy is not just voting, it’s being able to put food on the table for our children.” He fears the return of racial and regional antagonism.

Effigies of Mr Morales hang from stoplights above several barricades. When Mr Camacho sped past in a caravan of high-powered pickups, a few riled-up protesters yelled, “Get rid of the damn Indian!”

The Santa Cruz insurrection superficially resembles one that took place in 2008, when the largely white and mestizo elite rebelled against Mr Morales’s leftist policies and centralisation of power. He suppressed it by accusing its leaders of sedition, jailing some and forcing others into exile. Other rebellious leaders made peace with the government.

This month’s protests are more dangerous for the government. Rather than demanding autonomy, protesters are calling for a restoration of democracy, which resonates across the country, points out Mr Pedraza. In contrast to 2008, Mr Morales’s power is waning rather than waxing. “This time, he can’t just cut off the heads of leaders,” says Wilfredo Rojo, the cruceño president of the national association of exporters. “He will have to slaughter citizens.”

On November 4th hundreds of thousands of cruceños filled the city’s centre to hear Mr Camacho respond to Mr Morales’s refusal to resign. Beneath a famous statue of Jesus, he announced that he would go to La Paz with a Bible in his right hand and a resignation letter for Mr Morales to sign in his left. On his first attempt soldiers put him on a plane back home. He was due to try again as The Economist went to press. Rather than taking down their barricade in Villa Fraterna, Mr Handal and his neighbours have put up a Christmas tree.■