(17 May 2025)
RESTRICTON SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
La Paz, Bolivia – 16 May 2025
1. Demonstrators marching after breaking police line, police officers in riot gear walk alongside them
2. Various of police firing several tear gas canisters and spraying gas towards protesters
3. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Eduardo Ticona, demonstrator:
"Where have this traitor government left us? This is why we want to support Evo Morales in the ballot as our representative. He is the only one, because he is a revolutionary leader, not an imposed one."
4. Woman crying on her knees in front of police with riot shields
5. Various of demonstrators chanting (Spanish): "If we are not the people, then where are they!" "Companions what do we want?" "For Evo to come back!"
STORYLINE:
Hundreds of supporters of Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales marched toward the country’s top electoral court on Friday to push for their leader’s candidacy in presidential elections later this year.
The rally later descended into street clashes as police tried to clear out a group of demonstrators.
The confrontations come in response to a ruling by Bolivia’s Constitutional Court that blocks Morales, the nation’s first Indigenous president who governed from 2006 until his ouster in 2019, from running again in August elections.
As the march arrived in Bolivia’s capital of La Paz, protesters seeking to register Morales’ candidacy surged toward the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. Security forces barricading a road to the court held them back.
Police reported two officers, a journalist and a local merchant were injured in the clashes.
Footage showed police using tear gas to disperse the crowd and moving to detain some of the protest’s organizers.
The court’s unanimous decision Wednesday upheld an earlier ruling that bans presidents from serving more than two terms.
Morales has already served three, and, in 2019, resigned under pressure from the military and went into exile as protests erupted over his bid for an unprecedented fourth term.
Morales returned to Bolivia a year later as the 2020 elections vaulted to power his preferred candidate, President Luis Arce, from his long-dominant Movement Toward Socialism party.
Arce, who announced earlier this week that he would not seek re-election, insisted that the Constitutional Court had disqualified Morales, his mentor-turned-rival, from running in 2025.
AP Video by Carlos Guerrero
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