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.