NSTworld Bolivia's Morales resigns after losing backing of security forces
“I resign my post as president,” the leftist Morales said in a televised address, capping a day of fast-moving events in which many ministers and senior officials quit as support for Latin America’s longest-serving president crumbled.
Morales – a former coca farmer and Bolivia’s first indigenous president – was declared the winner of the October 20 presidential election a narrow margin, giving him a controversial fourth term, having first taken power in 2006. As chanting Bolivians kept up demonstrations in the street, the 60-year-old Morales called new elections, but this was not enough to calm the uproar. The commanders of the armed forces and the police joined the calls for the president’s resignation.
Under the constitution, power then passes to the president of the Senate and the speaker of the lower house of Congress in that order. But both of them have resigned, too. To make the announcement that he was stepping down, Morales traveled by plane to the coca-growing Chimore region of central Bolivia, the cradle of his career in politics.
Morales insisted his government was leaving behind “many social triumphs.” The World Bank has credited his government for a decrease in the poverty rate from 45 percent of the population in 2010 to 35 percent in 2018.
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