Who are Rodrigo Paz and Tuto Quiroga, the aspirants for president of Bolivia?

Bolivia decided to change course; now it's time to define its direction.

After the defeat of the left in the first round on August 17, Bolivians will go to the polls this Sunday to elect their next president.

The centrist Rodrigo Paz and the conservative Jorge Tuto Quiroga will compete for the next five years of government in Bolivia in the first runoff election in the country's history.

The winner will lead the first center-right government elected at the polls after two decades of dominance by the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), the party that governed almost uninterruptedly since 2006 under the leadership of Evo Morales.

In the midst of one of the harshest economic crises the country has experienced, with year-on-year inflation of more than 23%, a shortage of international reserves, and a loss of value of its currency, a large majority opted for opposition candidates.

On the one hand, Rodrigo Paz, of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), presents himself as a moderate reformer who seeks “capitalism for all.” Among the pillars of his proposal is a fiscal adjustment plan with which he will seek to advance a cut in public spending.

A congressman, mayor and current senator for Tarija, Paz is the son of former president Jaime Paz Zamora (1989-1993), who was one of the main leaders of the historic Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR).

On the other side, Jorge Tuto Quiroga, of the Liberty and Democracy (Libre) alliance, seeks to return to government 23 years after having served as president, from 2001 to 2002, following the resignation due to illness of former president Hugo Banzer Suarez.

Quiroga seeks to present himself as a man with technical and political experience capable of resolving the difficult challenges posed by the country's economy. To achieve this, he advocates a harsh austerity plan and “shock therapy.”

These are the two candidates who will fight for the presidency of Bolivia this Sunday, October 19.

Senator Rodrigo Paz

Rodrigo Paz, 58,He heads into Sunday's runoff election with a pragmatic approach and a promise to restore Bolivia's fiscal stability without abandoning the popular sectors that drive the economy.

"We are not going to harm health, education, security, or social benefits," Paz promises, delivering a moderate, ideologically-oriented speech.

Born in Galicia in 1967 during the exile of his father, former President Jaime Paz Zamora (1989-1993), Paz lived in ten countries before arriving in Bolivia at the age of 15.

Jaime Paz Zamora, 86, was one of the main leaders of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a left-wing party that became center-right, where Rodrigo Paz himself began his political career.

The Christian Democratic Party candidate studied International Relations and has a master's degree in Public Management from the American University of Washington. DC.

It wasn't until he was 32 that Paz decided he would dedicate himself to politics and ran for deputy for Tarija.

Since then, Paz has been a deputy, mayor of Tarija, and currently, a senator for that department.

Trained in his father's MIR (Mexican Revolutionary Party), Paz has changed acronyms, from Carlos Mesa's Citizen Community to the PDC, which now has him as its presidential candidate.

"The PDC was a dead acronym that has been revived to give former MAS voters who were upset with the party a chance to maintain some political identity," says Bolivian journalist Fernando Molina, author of "Las 4 crises: Historia economica contemporanea de Bolivia" (The 4 crises: Contemporary economic history of Bolivia).

In the first round, Paz failed to win in Tarija, his political stronghold for more than two decades. On the contrary, he ended up relegated to third place with only 19%; and in the capital, where he served as mayor, he barely reached 15%.

Paz was charged with alleged corruption in public works during his tenure as mayor of Tarija, including overpricing and irregular contracts.

During his campaign, he promised to lower taxes, provide access to credit, and eliminate import restrictions. He will also reduce fuel subsidies and seek to decentralize the budget.

"What matters to me is that people eat and can work, that the State doesn't screw up your life," Paz told the local press about what he often describes as a "lockdown State."

Paz has managed to present himself as an outsider, even though he isn't one.

The inclusion of Edman Lara, a police officer known among the popular sectors for denouncing corruption on TikTok, as his running mate helped him in a campaign that demanded new faces, but could complicate things for him in the runoff, according to analysts.

“Lara was crucial in the first round, but she could have become a pain in the ass. Many voters are scared of Lara,” says Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian professor at Florida International University.

While Lara is bringing Paz closer to MAS voters, that is what could alienate him from other sectors that want nothing to do with Evo Morales.

Former President Tuto Quiroga

Jorge Tuto Quiroga, 65, seeks to present himself as a man with technical and political experience who can move the economy forward and definitively bury the years of socialism in Bolivia.

Born in Cochabamba, the Libre alliance candidate earned the nickname of his father, Jorge Tuto Quiroga Luizaga.

It was in the United States where he took his first steps in the private sector as a systems engineer at International Business Machines (IBM) until he returned to Bolivia in 1988.

During the administration of Rodrigo Paz's father, Jaime Paz Zamora, Quiroga took his first steps in the public sphere as part of the new liberal elites trained abroad.

Tuto held a technical position in Paz Zamora's foreign ministry, and was undersecretary of the Ministry of Planning and Minister of Finance.

However, he did not get to that position because of his affinity with the former leader of the MIR, but rather because of agreements with the Nationalist Democratic Action (ADN).

Tuto was a member of the ADN, a political space founded by Hugo Banzer Suarez, former military dictator (1971-1978) and later democratically elected president of Bolivia in 1997.

The alliance with the former dictator was sealed with Tuto's candidacy to be Banzer's vice president. At 37, he became the youngest vice president in Bolivian history.

In 2001, Banzer resigned due to health problems, and Quiroga became president of Bolivia by constitutional succession, a position he held until August of the following year.

Although Tuto came to represent the renewal faction within ADN, he is burdened with a history that does not allow him to present himself as the expression of something new in a moment that demands different faces.

In that sense, Tuto's campaign strategists understood that confrontation was not the best resource for this election.

"Instead of seeking the position of the candidate with popular charisma, Tuto proposed a campaign as the good guy, the family man, the loving one, instead of assuming a more confrontational position," says Molina.

To refresh his image, he opted for a 38-year-old tech entrepreneur from Santa Cruz as his vice-presidential candidate: Juan Pablo Velasco.

In the 2005 elections, he ran for the presidency of Bolivia but lost to Morales, the first electoral victory that allowed the MAS to come to power.

After that defeat, Quiroga remained out of politics until December 2019.

That year, interim President Jeanine Anez appointed him presidential delegate to speak to the international community, a position he held for only a few weeks.

In that context, Evo Morales called him an “expert defender of dictatorships.”

In December 2024, Quiroga launched his fourth bid for the presidency of Bolivia, after a failed attempt at unity.

Among the measures he proposes to confront the economic crisis are the elimination of taxes on foreign investment, the opening unrestricted fuel imports and the request for a loan from the IMF.

The Left Vote

The first round not only confirmed the decline of the left, but also demonstrated that the departments where the MAS won in the 2020 elections were now in the hands of Rodrigo Paz.

The results in La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosi, and Chuquisaca showed that those districts decided to replace the blue of the MAS with the green of the PDC.

In the department of La Paz, the second district in electoral weight in the country, the PDC candidate came in first place with 47% of the votes, while in 2020 the MAS had obtained 68%.

“Paz captures the vote, both rural and urban, that the MAS has lost,” says Gamarra.

In El Alto, which is the second most populated city in Bolivia and by population In the urban indigenous sector, Paz came in first place with 59% of the vote. While in 2020 the Movement Towards Socialism had won with 76%.

“This sector does not see Rodrigo as a social democrat or as a son of his father, but rather they see his discourse as more favorable to their interests, even though he is not a leftist,” he adds.

For his part, Morales, who called for the vote to be annulled in the first round, has now shown signs of recognition for Lara.

“Evo is betting that Paz will win and that it will be, therefore, a weaker, more dispersed, less aggressive government, that they will not persecute him and that he will fall as soon as possible,” Molina points out.

Despite Paz's high starting point, analysts assure that - according to the private polls to which they have access - it may not be enough to beat Quiroga, who decided to move towards the center in the second stage of the campaign.

“Tuto is going to keep the votes from Santa Cruz and Pando, the question is whether that will be enough. Santa Cruz is the largest electoral market, but he needs to add more votes, possibly those of Samuel Doria Medina,” explains Gamarra.

Although candidate Doria Medina, who came in third in the first round with 20% of the vote, supported Rodrigo Paz on election night, analysts agree that a large portion of those votes could go to Quiroga.

“I said that if we didn't win, I was going to support whoever came in first, if it wasn't the MAS. That candidate is Rodrigo Paz, and I keep my word,” Doria Medina said that night.

There is no doubt that the first round marked a turning point in Bolivia's recent history, after almost 20 years of MAS governments.

Now it remains to be seen what proposal will fill that blank page, and whether it will be the most conservative option. or a more moderate alternative.

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