Researchers enter row over legitimacy of ex-Bolivian president, who quit after violent protests

A row over the legitimacy of Bolivia’s longest-serving leader, Evo Morales, has been reignited after researchers in the US questioned allegations that fraud was used to help the country’s leader of 14 years win the last election.

Writing in the Washington Post, the researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data and science lab have entered what has become a fraught debate about Morales’s legacy and whether he was forced to step down due to an attempt to manipulate the vote or, rather, pushed out as part of a military coup.

Rightwing government claims former president is guilty of terrorism and sedition

The interior minister of Bolivia’s rightwing interim government has vowed to jail the former president Evo Morales for the rest of his life, accusing the exiled leftist of inciting anti-government protests that he claimed amounted to terrorism.

In an interview with the Guardian, Arturo Murillo claimed that Morales had been orchestrating efforts to “strangle” Bolivian cities by ordering followers to erect roadblocks that would starve its residents of fuel and food.

The barricades blocking the road to Alto Lipari are fashioned from every conceivable object: telegraph poles and tree trunks, wheelie bins and wooden crates, a bed frame and even a shipping container daubed with insults aimed at Bolivia’s “sell-out” police. Their message is unambiguous. “Evo de nuevo” reads a demand written on to the ground at the blockaded entrance to this rural farming community an hour’s drive south of La Paz. “Bring Evo back.”

A 20-minute hike further on, a group of Evo Morales loyalists, armed with sticks of dynamite used to deter unwanted visitors, keep watch from a mountainside observation point.

Álvaro García Linera concedes mistakes pair made but branded the toppling of Morales as an anti-indigenous, rightwing ‘coup’

Evo Morales’s closest political adviser has admitted that the Bolivian leader’s failure to groom a successor contributed to the political crisis engulfing the South American nation but slammed the “racist backlash” he blamed for the toppling of its first indigenous president.