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Outside a sports stadium in Cochabamba, Bolivia, three men stood on a plinth, tearing down a statue of Evo Morales, who until a few weeks before had been the country’s President. One man diligently whacked away with a sledgehammer, while another shoved at the statue’s head—crowned, like the man it portrays, with a mushroom-shaped mullet that is distinctive among world leaders. Finally, the statue came loose, and with a contemptuous heave the men threw it to the ground. The sports minister of the new government, who had helped with the demolition, told reporters afterward that stadiums shouldn’t be named for delinquents.

Morales had fled Bolivia in November, after he was accused of trying to steal an election, and the country’s military chief publicly suggested that he resign. Since then, Bolivia had been fiercely, sometimes violently divided. Many people spoke of a coup, but there was enduring disagreement over whether it had been perpetrated by Morales or by his opponents. Whoever was to blame, his departure brought an abrupt end to one of Latin America’s most remarkable Presidencies. The son of impoverished llama herders, Morales was an ethnic Aymara, the first indigenous President in a majority-indigenous country. Although he left school before college and speaks in rough, heavily accented Spanish, he managed to hold power for almost fourteen years. He was a protégé of Fidel Castro, and perhaps the last surviving exponent of the Pink Tide—the leftist leaders who dominated Latin America’s politics for more than a decade. During his time in office, he transformed Bolivia, reducing poverty by almost half and tripling the G.D.P.

Evo, as everyone calls him, is a sturdy, youthful-looking man of sixty, who prides himself on outlasting opponents in soccer matches in Bolivia’s Andean high altitudes. (During one game, in 2010, he was captured on video deliberately kneeing a distracted opponent in the groin.) As recently as last year, he claimed to stay fit by doing more than a thousand sit-ups a day. In the Presidency, he was tireless, beginning his workday at 4:45 A.M. and continuing late into the evening. A charismatic populist, he could also be arrogant and divisive, given to crass and at times eccentric proclamations. On one occasion, he suggested that eating genetically modified chicken made people gay. On another, he had the Congress building equipped with a “Clock of the South,” with hands that spun to the left, to symbolize Bolivia’s efforts to “decolonize” itself. A longtime leader of the coca growers’ union, Morales used his office to expound the medicinal properties of the plant; behind the Presidential desk, he hung a portrait of Che Guevara, made out of coca leaves.

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After Morales’s contested election, several of his highest-ranking officials resigned along with him, including the three people after him in the line of Presidential succession. The office was claimed by a member of the conservative opposition: Jeanine Áñez, a fifty-two-year-old former television presenter, who was then serving in the largely ceremonial post of second vice-president of the Senate. Within two days, Áñez had been endorsed by the military and proclaimed herself President, donning the sash of office as generals looked on approvingly. She alienated the indigenous population just as quickly, leading a scrum of followers to the Presidential palace, where she raised an outsized Bible and declared that she was “returning the Bible to the palace.” Áñez, a light-skinned blond woman, made things worse by naming an all-white cabinet. Following an outcry, she added an indigenous minister, but by then Morales’s loyalists had branded her “la mujer teñida” (“the dyed woman”) or, simply, “the whore.”

In office, Áñez signed a decree prohibiting “personality cults” in Bolivia’s institutions, and made it clear that she intended to purge Morales’s legacy and his presence from public life. A Presidential employee told me that Áñez had toured Morales’s former offices, accompanied by a man dressed in native robes and another carrying a Bible. While she prayed before portraits of Bolivia’s national heroes, the robed man blew a horn, as if to chase off evil spirits. The employee told me that when Áñez encountered the coca-leaf portrait of Che she grew visibly upset and ordered it removed.

Áñez and her allies argued that Morales had turned the country into a socialist autocracy, and that only by removing him could it heal. Morales, from exile in Mexico, insisted that he had created modern Bolivia—that the nation effectively didn’t exist without him. When I spoke to him this winter, in one of a series of conversations, Morales described Bolivia’s tradition of political instability. In a hundred and ninety-five years as an independent republic, it has seen no fewer than a hundred and ninety revolutions and coups; Morales’s ouster was arguably the latest one. “They said my government was authoritarian because I was President for a long time,” he told me. “They called me ‘Dictator Evo Morales,’ but now the Bolivian people can see what it’s like to live in a dictatorship, what it is to live with a coup d’état.” Morales argued that he should be allowed to come back and finish his term. Failing that, he assured me, his bloc—the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS—would resume control of Bolivia one way or another. “I will return, and we will be millions,” he said. He was paraphrasing the last words of one of his heroes, the eighteenth-century anti-colonial rebel Túpac Katari, just before he was pulled to pieces by four Spanish horses.

One afternoon, as I waited outside the Presidential palace to meet Áñez, a young man walked up and ostentatiously spat on the ground next to me. He seemed, perhaps understandably, to have mistaken me for an American official, there to assist the new regime.

Morales likes to say that he did not just lead Bolivia—he “refounded” it. Photograph by Moises Saman / Magnum for The New Yorker Jeanine Áñez, the interim President, says that she brought “liberation.” Photograph by Moises Saman / Magnum for The New Yorker

It was early December, three weeks after the collapse of Morales’s government, and Bolivia remained polarized. In the wealthier neighborhoods of La Paz, the graffiti called Morales an assassin, a dictator, a narco; in the poorer, more indigenous districts, slogans proclaimed “Evo Sí” and “Áñez Fascista.” Two blocks from the palace was a spray-painted message, “Alert: They are killing us,” which could have come from either camp.

The Palacio Quemado, or Burnt Palace, as it is known, earned its name in 1875, when an angry mob torched it in an attempted coup. Its replacement, a pink-and-white neocolonial structure, has survived intact, but in 1946 the reformist President Gualberto Villarroel was murdered there in another mob attack, his body hurled from a balcony and then hanged from a street lamp in the plaza below. The street lamp still stands, flanked by a plaque commemorating Villarroel’s death. The plaza, a quiet place with shade trees and balloon venders, is named for Pedro Domingo Murillo, a Creole patriot who sparked Bolivia’s war of independence against Spain, in 1809. Soon afterward, he was captured by royalist troops and hanged.

As if to repudiate this ugly history, Morales built a skyscraper, called the Great House of the People, to serve as a headquarters for his “democratic and cultural revolution.” A gleaming rectangle of glass and steel, the Great House rises twenty-nine stories above the old palace, and contains the Presidential offices and living quarters, along with several government ministries. Morales’s political opponents criticized the construction, which cost some thirty-four million dollars, as an extravagant vanity project. After he fled, the new communications minister led a press tour of his chambers, which she derided as “worthy of an Arab sheikh.” News photographs showed a spacious but rather sterile bedroom and a marble-lined bathroom with a Jacuzzi—a nice place, but not much more luxurious than a Sheraton Four Points.