There are moments in a country’s history, especially in authoritarian countries, when institutions feel like scenery: visible, formal, but hollow. It is hard to trust them, and it’s even harder to think that they will uphold their duties, that they will do what they ought to do.
Bolivia’s 2025 presidential election was one of those moments.
By the time my country reached 2025, the crises we were facing were layered on top of one another. Inflation hovered around 23 percent. Meat and basic foods became scarce. Fuel shortages were so severe that many of us walked or biked to work. But the crisis was not only economic; it was institutional and democratic. For more than twenty years, the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party had been dominant. By 2025, state institutions had been eroded and politicized, and then further weakened by internal fractures within the ruling party itself. Volatility could be felt everywhere, and holding elections in such a moment didn’t only seem difficult, it felt dangerous.
In the lead up to the vote, the country’s polarization deepened, but what was more alarming was that several authorities aligned with MAS, including former president Evo Morales, openly threatened unrest to halt the elections. This is why more than two-hundred civil society organizations united to create Cuidemos el Voto (Let’s Protect the Vote), an independent, youth-led electoral-mobilization effort that aimed to hold a parallel vote count after recruiting more than sixty-thousand volunteers across the country. Our goal in holding a parallel vote count was to have an independent tally conducted by civil society that would allow results to be verified in real time against official numbers. But, as expected, the ruling party accused monitoring initiatives like ours, that were simply seeking transparency, of plotting fraud. One of our allied monitoring rooms in La Paz, where we received and processed voting-center results, was targeted by leaders of the ruling party the night before the election. These party leaders seized the building, entered the rooms where our teams were working, and demanded the arrest of those involved with our project. The risk that the election might be disrupted, or even suspended, was real.
And yet, the elections were held. The results were independently verified. And Bolivia did not descend into chaos.
What made the difference was not institutional strength. It was organized, nonviolent action.
