Bolivia's Paz Government Faces Mounting Pressure as Protests and Resignation Calls Escalate

Six months into his presidency, Rodrigo Paz is running out of room to move. Protests have spread across Bolivia's key cities—La Paz, Oruro, Cochabamba—and the demands have hardened from negotiation to resignation. Unions, farmers, teachers, and transport workers are blocking roads, striking in public offices, and openly calling for the president to step down. The economic crisis he inherited from two decades of leftist rule has not improved. Instead, his attempts to fix it have fractured his political base entirely.

Paz took office in November 2025promising to solve Bolivia's acute problems: a shortage of dollars, fuel shortages, and inflation that had crippled the economy under Evo Morales and Luis Arce. His prescription was direct and painful. He eliminated fuel subsidies that had been in place for more than twenty years. He cut public spending. He sought external financing to restore liquidity. These were the moves a technocrat makes when the cupboard is bare. They were also the moves that would turn nearly everyone against him.

The Central Bolivian Workers Union, the COB, rejected the closures of money-losing state enterprises, framing them as hidden privatization. Teachers in Santa Cruz chained themselves to government offices demanding salary increases and a voice in new education policy. Coca farmers from the Cochabamba region, historically aligned with Morales, threatened to join the blockades. The COB and allied sectors demanded a twenty percent wage increase. Paz refused, citing fiscal impact. The gap between what people needed and what the government could afford had become unbridgeable.

Then came the fuel crisis, which exposed something worse than economic mismanagement: possible corruption and sabotage within the state oil company YPFB. In February, the government admitted it had distributed gasoline of poor quality. The official explanation blamed contaminated residue in storage tanks inherited from previous administrations. But by April, when the hydrocarbon minister Mauricio Medinaceli resigned, the narrative had shifted. The government alleged deliberate adulteration of fuel, mixing with water and oil, and what it called sabotage designed to destabilize the new administration. No definitive investigation concluded who was responsible. What was clear was the damage: more than ten thousand vehicles suffered engine failure, injector deterioration, fuel pump problems. Transport workers lost their livelihoods. The National Chamber of Industries calculated that protests and blockades were costing the economy fifty to sixty million dollars per day.

Political analyst Rafael Archondo saw a president trapped in the center, rejected by both left and right. The government had tried to contain the unrest and failed. Paz had chosen to govern without building a solid parliamentary majority, despite opportunities for coalition-building. This forced him to rule by decree, without sufficient political backing for serious reform. The economic crisis inherited from the MAS governments had not ended. The fuel subsidy removal was practically the only major measure taken. Meanwhile, conservatives thought the reforms too timid, too much continuity with the old model. The left rejected the austerity entirely. Archondo described a country split into two types of opposition: a radicalized version in the highlands and western regions, where blockades concentrated, and a more moderate eastern opposition demanding deeper economic change and clearer direction.

Another analyst, Ricardo Calla Ortega, offered a more complex picture. The protests were not simply Morales orchestrating a comeback. Morales retained mobilization capacity among rural unions and coca farmers in Cochabamba, La Paz, and Oruro, where he still held influence through rural union networks. But behind the visible protests operated other interests: drug trafficking organizations, illegal mining operations, smuggling networks. These sectors felt threatened by Paz's actions against criminal networks and drug cartels. They were financing blockades and mobilizations in the Chapare region, northern La Paz, and areas near El Alto. Calla cautioned against overstating Morales's role. The former president was one actor among many, part of a wider landscape of crossed interests seeking to destabilize the government. For now, the conflict remained geographically limited, not yet strong enough to trigger a larger political crisis or immediately threaten Paz's hold on power. But the pressure was mounting, and the president had few allies left.