Bolivian President Luis Arce was expelled this Thursday from the ruling Movement for Socialism (MAS) party, which brought him to power in the 2020 elections, just 48 hours before he was due to leave office and hand over power to the elected president, Rodrigo Paz Pereira. The head of MAS, Grover García, told reporters that the party leadership accused him of leading the country into an economic crisis and of committing alleged acts of corruption. "Today we issued a resolution in which it is clearly stated that Mr. Luis Arce Catacora is expelled from being a militant of the political instrument MAS-IPSP," he stated. The decision comes after MAS's worst electoral performance, in which it managed only 3.17% of the vote in the first round and only two deputies, in elections where the ruling party arrived divided and without the presence of indigenous leader Evo Morales, who had never before lost a national election. García justified the internal sanction by stating that the still-ignored president repeated proposals to mitigate the economic crisis and that at various levels there was "total harm" to the population, which he said was also reflected in the "poor" vote that MAS obtained. He also mentioned an alleged diversion of party resources that had not been regularized. Without naming names, the leadership attributed some of the responsibility to ministers in Arce's government, accusing them of failing to stabilize the economy or basic prices. MAS announced that it will request the Public Ministry to initiate investigations into all of these complaints.
