With the slogan ‘no to the eradication of coca, yes to the nationalization of hydrocarbons and the institution of a Constitutional Assembly, in February 2003 the MAS and other labor and social organizations formed a united front against the ‘impuestazo’,  a progressive and non-deductible tax of up to 12.5%, that the government hoped would cut the fiscal deficit. On the 12th and 13th of February 2003, La Paz and its suburbs actually turned into battle grounds which brought face to face thousands of demonstrators, striking police officers and soldiers instructed to keep order.

Evo en 2002

The skirmishes, unbelievably violent, left 33 dead and two hundred wounded.

In the beginning of October, because of a government decision to have the gas from Tarija exploited by an international consortium, new demonstartions, civic strikes and road blocks started to bring La Paz to a standstill, while in El Alto, 14 kms from the city centre, violent confrontations between protesters and police and military forces left a trail of the dead. The government talked about a ‘coup d’etat’, but didn’t dare to declare a state of siege, while the Catholic Church and various NGO’s denounced ‘a real massacre’. The 13th of October, Sanchez de Lozada declared the plans for the gas exploitation suspended and called for a national dialogue. Morales and other protest leaders rejected the dialogue: the only avenue left open to the president was to abandon power. The dramatic events of October 13th left 28 dead, almost all of them from El Alto, which brought to 63 the number of casualties in the country for that month.

On October 17th, after sending a letter of resignation to Congress, Sánchez de Lozada managed to pass through the ring of Morales’ followers that had surrounded the Quemado Palace. That same evening, the now ex-head of state boarded a plane in Santa Cruz de la Sierra that took him to Miami, the first stop of his exile in the United States.

In La Paz, at the same time, the National Congress confirmed vice-president Carlos Diego Mesa Gisbert as the new president. He was acceptable to the opposition because four days earlier he had decided to withdraw his support for the president “because the chain of uninterrupted events accompanied by a high cost in human lives is intolerable to my conscience as a human being and vice-president and a man committed to ethics”.

Mesa, who wanted to ‘finish the confrontational scenes’ that had brought chaos to the country, proposed holding a referendum on the gas question, the modification of the Hydrocarbons Law to augment revenues for the state, and the institution of a Constitutional Assembly.
Morales and the other opposition leaders decided to give the new president a 90 day truce. But Mesa’s fate was sealed. Between a congress hesitant to approve the reforms proposed by the president and the radical masses in the streets, Evo Morales, in order not to be outflanked by the unions, the neighborhood councils and other social and workers organizations who demanded the nationalization of the gas and oil reserves without any considerations for the companies that held contracts to these resources, was destined to play a determining role, in the way he had done in the fall of Sánchez de Lozada.

On December 5th, 2004, in a climate heated by street mobilizations, the explosion of bombs with a clear terrorist character, and the accusation by Morales that the Armed Forces and the American Embassy were planning a coup d’etat, municipal elections were held. The MAS, for the first time, was the most voted party in the country, with 18.4%of the votes. Although it had lost 2 points in relation to the presidential election of 2002, it was the only political force that had grown with respect to the municipal elections of 1999: all the other important parties, from the left, the centre and the right, had plummetted.

In May 2005, when the House of Representatives refused to include a 50% royalty provision in the new Hydrocarbons Law, a royalty which by now had become an unalterable demand of the MAS, Morales harangued yet another series of antigovernment protests, in which tens of thousands of indigenous people, farmers and miners participated in marches, strikes and road blockades.

Faced with the impossibility to control the pandemonium that had taken control of the country, Mesa resigned irrevocably on the 7th of June.
On the evening of the 9th of June, in a settlement reclaimed by the MAS and its allies, and backed for the sake of social peace by the Catholic Church, the Armed Forces and even Mesa, the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, a judge who’s apoliticism would clearly help to facilitate the distension which the country urgently needed, was designated as the new president of the country.