TARQUI, Ecuador — Though its candidate is not on the ballot, one big winner in Sunday’s presidential runoff in Ecuador was clear before the first vote was cast: the nation’s long-marginalized Indigenous movement.
The Indigenous party and its allies jolted the nation in the first round of voting in February, winning half of all states, becoming the second-largest presence in Congress and transforming the agenda of the finalists in Sunday’s presidential race, the leftist Andrés Arauz and the conservative Guillermo Lasso.
“The politics of Ecuador will never be the same,” said Farith Simon, an Ecuadorean law professor and columnist. “There’s still racism, but there’s also a re-vindication of the value of Indigenous culture, of pride in their national role.”
Eager to court Indigenous voters and mindful of the need to work with the newly powerful Indigenous bloc in Congress, Mr. Arauz and Mr. Lasso have revamped their messages and shifted the contest from the polarizing socialist-versus-conservative ground that has defined national politics for years. Debates are emerging instead on Ecuador’s deep-seated inequality and on an economic model reliant on the export of oil and metals extracted from Indigenous lands.
Both candidates have promised to enact greater environmental safeguards and to grant Indigenous communities more say over the extraction of resources. Mr. Lasso, 66, a banker, has vowed to improve economic opportunities for Indigenous people, who, despite decades of progress, lag far behind national averages in access to education, health care and jobs.
Mr. Arauz, 36, an economist who led in the first round of voting, has promised to lead Ecuador as a true “plurinational” country in recognition of its 15 Indigenous nations. Though largely symbolic, the designation had been sought for decades by the country’s Indigenous party, Pachakutik, as a powerful acknowledgment of its people’s central place in Ecuador.
The rise of Pachakutik on the national stage has not only brought attention to the country’s Indigenous minority, it has posed deeper questions of identity for the entire electorate. Though just 8 percent of Ecuadoreans identified themselves as Indigenous in the last census, much of the population is ethnically mixed.
“This is a difficult conversation for us as a nation, but there’s no turning back,” Mr. Simon said.
The man most responsible for the political sea change has been the environmental activist Yaku Pérez, the Pachakutik presidential candidate in February’s first round of voting.
Mr. Pérez, 52, narrowly missed the runoff, but he greatly broadened Pachakutik’s historic single-digit appeal with his support for women’s rights, equality for L.G.B.T.Q. people and efforts to fight climate change. Mr. Pérez also backed abortion rights and same-sex marriage, creating tensions inside his socially conservative Indigenous constituency.
“Pérez had an enormous capacity to open his horizons, his discourse, to incorporate themes that weren’t there” in Ecuadorean politics, said Alberto Acosta, a former Pachakutik presidential candidate.
Mr. Pérez’s rise is part of a larger generational shift in Latin America’s leftist movements. Partly driven by social media and political protests in the United States, where most Latin American nations have large diasporas, younger left-leaning politicians are prioritizing environment, gender and minority issues over the Marxist doctrine of their mentors.
In neighboring Peru, Verónika Mendoza, 40, is among the top contenders in Sunday’s presidential election, promising to grant land titles to Indigenous communities and protect the environment. In Bolivia, the 34-year-old Indigenous leader Eva Copa recently won a mayor’s race in El Alto, a melting-pot city considered a bellwether.
This new generation of leaders is going beyond the traditional left-right divide, challenging their countries’ historic reliance on large mining, oil and agribusiness projects for economic growth, said Carwil Bjork-James, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
“These are big continental questions that the Indigenous movements have been asking for a long time,” Mr. Bjork-James said. “To see these questions being asked politically is a new level.”
Such a framework is shortsighted, their rivals say. South American nations have no alternative but to rely on revenue from raw materials to recover from the pandemic. And only through economic development, they say, can inequalities be fully addressed.
In Ecuador, Mr. Pérez managed to win nearly 20 percent of February’s vote, but his party and its allies soared from nine to 43 congressional seats in the election, becoming kingmakers in the country’s fractured 137-seat legislature.
The campaign had initially focused on the legacy of Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s longest-serving democratic president. He had lifted millions from poverty during a commodities boom in the 2000s, but his authoritarian style and the corruption allegations that trailed him had left the nation bitterly divided.
Mr. Correa, who left office in 2017, picked Mr. Arauz to represent his leftist movement this year, catapulting the 36-year-old to the top of the polls despite his limited experience and national recognition. Mr. Lasso centered his early campaign message on fears that Mr. Correa would continue to exert influence.
But the first-round results “showed that a great part of the population doesn’t want to be boxed into this conflict between Correa’s supporters and opponents, which reduces Ecuadoreans’ problems to a binary vision,” said Mr. Acosta, the former candidate.
Pachakutik’s electoral success this year traces to a wave of national protests in October 2019, when the Indigenous movement marched on the capital, Quito, to demand the repeal of a deeply unpopular cut in gasoline subsidies. The protests turned violent, claiming at least eight lives, but the government withdrew the subsidy cut after 12 days of unrest.
“We showed the country that the Indigenous people are looking for a transformation of this dominant system that only serves the most affluent,” said Diocelinda Iza, a leader of the Kichwa nation in the central province of Cotopaxi.
The life of Mr. Pérez, the presidential candidate, embodies the travails of the Indigenous movement. He was born in a high Andean valley in southern Ecuador to a family of impoverished farmers. His father was Kichwa, his mother Kañari.
His parents worked on the estate of a local landowner without pay in return for living on his property, a rural arrangement that has changed little since colonial times.
From his childhood, Mr. Pérez said he remembers the seemingly endless toil in the fields, the pangs of hunger, and the humiliation he felt at school when his mother came to parent meetings dressed in traditional skirts.
“I felt a lot of shame to be Indigenous, to come from the field, to be a farmer, to have a sharecropper father,” Mr. Pérez said in an interview in March. To succeed at school, he said, “I ended up whitening myself, colonizing myself, rejecting our identity.”
Mr. Pérez ended up studying at a local university, practicing law and becoming involved in politics through local associations defending communal water rights. He rose to become the governor of Ecuador’s Azuay region, the country’s fifth-most populous, before quitting to run for president.
His story has resonated with other Indigenous people, many of whom see the political efforts of today in the context of the five centuries since Ecuador’s colonial conquest.
“We’re not campaigning for a person,” said one Indigenous leader, Luz Namicela Contento, “but for a political project.”
Jose María León Cabrera reported from Tarqui, Ecuador, and Anatoly Kurmanaev from Moscow. Mitra Taj contributed reporting from Lima, Peru.
Tropical forests around the world were destroyed at an increasing rate in 2020 compared with the year before, despite the global economic downturn caused by the pandemic, which reduced demand for some commodities that have spurred deforestation in the past.
Worldwide, loss of primary old-growth tropical forest, which plays a critical role in keeping carbon out of the atmosphere and in maintaining biodiversity, increased by 12 percent in 2020 from 2019, according to the World Resources Institute, a research group based in Washington that reports annually on the subject.
Overall, more than 10 million acres of primary tropical forest was lost in 2020, an area roughly the size of Switzerland. The institute’s analysis said loss of that much forest added more than two and a half billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, or about twice as much as is spewed into the air by cars in the United States every year.
pro-development policies of the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, led to continued widespread clear-cutting. Surging forest losses were also reported in Cameroon in West Africa. And in Colombia, losses soared again last year after a promising drop in 2019.
a severe fire season, with 16 times more forest loss in 2020 than the year before.
anecdotal reports from Brazil and other countries suggested that deforestation was rising because of the pandemic, as the health crisis hampered governments’ efforts to enforce bans on clear-cutting, and as workers who lost their jobs because of the downturn migrated out of cities to rural areas to farm. But Mr. Taylor said the analysis showed “no obvious systemic shift” in forest loss as a result of the pandemic.
If anything, the crisis and the resulting global economic downturn should have led to less overall forest loss, as demand, and prices, for palm oil and other commodities fell. While falling demand may have helped improve the situation in Indonesia and a few other countries, Ms. Seymour said that globally it was “astonishing that in a year that the global economy contracted somewhere between 3 and 4 percent, primary forest loss increased by 12 percent.”
Global Land Analysis and Discovery laboratory at the University of Maryland, who have devised methods for analyzing satellite imagery to determine forest cover. The World Resources Institute refers to their findings as “forest cover loss” rather than “deforestation” because the analysis includes trees lost from plantations and does not distinguish between trees lost to human activities and those lost to natural causes.
MOSCOW — Russia has lauded with much fanfare the arrival of its homegrown vaccine, Sputnik V, in Latin America and Africa, and even in some countries in Europe, calling it a solution to shortages around the world.
It has been less vocal, though, about one country that is also importing the vaccine: Russia.
The Russian government has contracted out the manufacture of Sputnik V to a South Korean company that has already sent the vaccine to Russia, and plans to do the same with a company from India.
While the scale of the imports are impossible to gauge because of nondisclosure agreements, they undermine some of the narrative Russia has proudly presented about its role in the pandemic as an exporter of vaccines to needy countries.
The imports, which are expected to ramp up in coming weeks and months, could help Russia overcome a dismally slow vaccination rollout at home. They also illustrate that even countries whose scientists designed successful shots rely on cross border trade for vaccine supplies.
said last fall that overseas manufacturing could partly meet demand at home, but have since gone quiet about importing a product that has been held up as a triumph of the country’s scientists. Manufacturing the vaccine in Russia, however, has been a different story.
Russia received two cargo planes loaded with Sputnik V from the South Korean manufacturer, GL Rapha, in December and the company expects to send another shipment in coming days. Indian vaccine makers are also expected to export the Russian-designed vaccine to Russia, according to Indian diplomats.
“We face the prospect of increasing this cooperation in the field of vaccines,” India’s ambassador to Russia, Shri Varma, said at a news conference in January. “We envisage a major rolling out of Sputnik vaccine in India, using the Indian production capacities for India, for Russia and for the entire world.”
Russia has four production deals in India. One Indian company, Virchow Biotech in Hyderabad, India, last week signed a manufacturing deal with Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, to make 200 million doses a year of Sputnik V.
struggled for months last fall to obtain biotechnology equipment that is made in China, and was in short supply.
said that enough Sputnik V to fully inoculate 8.9 million people had been distributed in Russia since regulators approved the drug last August. Russia’s minister of industry said Monday he expected a quick ramp-up by April to twice that amount every month.
Russia’s vaccination campaign has fallen far behind that of most European nations and the United States. Russia has vaccinated 4.4 percent of its population, compared to 10 percent in the European Union and 26 percent in the United States.
The Kremlin this past week for the first time acknowledged that scarcity of the vaccine played a role in Mr. Putin’s decision to delay his own inoculation to avoid stimulating demand for shots before they became widely available outside the capital.
In January, when Mr. Putin became eligible for a shot under Russian rules based on his age, “production was not yet sufficient to fully meet demand in the regions,” said his spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov.
It’s not clear how large a role the imports will play in alleviating scarcity, accelerating vaccinations and saving lives in Russia. But it positions Russia lower in the pecking order of vaccine geopolitics, as an importer rather than just an exporter.
Russian officials have chosen to highlight exports, however. “A vaccine for all humankind,” the Sputnik V website declares. State media has lavished attention on even relatively small shipments of tens or hundreds of thousands of doses to foreign countries.
held back from export nearly all of the 2.4 million doses manufactured by a private company, the Serum Institute of India, as the number of infections from the coronavirus shot up across the country. The European Union also moved on emergency legislation to curb vaccine exports, a change that could limit British imports of the AstraZeneca vaccine designed at Oxford University from producers in the bloc.
President Emmanuel Macron of France said it was the “the end of naïveté” for the European Union, which has significant production capacity but had been exporting doses despite rapidly rising cases within the bloc.
The United States and Britain have both imported domestically designed vaccines made in foreign countries. The United States has done so while prohibiting some exports of U.S.-made doses abroad.
Russia imported the South Korean-produced Sputnik V in December as it expanded the categories of people eligible for vaccination. The doses arrived in two Asiana Airlines cargo planes, according to an announcement by the airline, which was touting its cold shipment service.
In written answers to questions, GL Rapha, the Korean manufacturer, said it could not discuss shipments because of the nondisclosure agreement.
The company said it expects to produce 150 million doses of Sputnik V this year. The Russian Direct Investment Fund did not respond to questions about imports to Russia.
MOSCOW — Russia has lauded with much fanfare the arrival of its homegrown vaccine, Sputnik V, in Latin America and Africa, and even in some countries in Europe, calling it a solution to shortages around the world.
It has been less vocal, though, about one country that is also importing the vaccine: Russia.
The Russian government has contracted out the manufacture of Sputnik V from a South Korean company that has already sent the vaccine to Russia, and plans to do the same with a company from India.
While the scale of the imports are impossible to gauge because of nondisclosure agreements, they undermine some of the narrative Russia has proudly presented about its role in the pandemic as an exporter of vaccines to needy countries.
The imports, which are expected to ramp up in coming weeks and months, could help Russia overcome a dismally slow vaccination rollout at home. They also illustrate that even countries whose scientists designed successful shots rely on cross border trade for vaccine supplies.
said last fall that overseas manufacturing could partly meet demand at home, but have since gone quiet about importing a product that has been held up as a triumph of the country’s scientists. Manufacturing the vaccine in Russia, however, has been a different story.
Russia received two cargo planes loaded with Sputnik V from the South Korean manufacturer, GL Rapha, in December and the company expects to send another shipment in coming days. Indian vaccine makers are also expected to export the Russian-designed vaccine to Russia, according to Indian diplomats.
“We face the prospect of increasing this cooperation in the field of vaccines,” India’s ambassador to Russia, Shri Varma, said at a news conference in January. “We envisage a major rolling out of Sputnik vaccine in India, using the Indian production capacities for India, for Russia and for the entire world.”
Russia has four production deals in India. One Indian company, Virchow Biotech in Hyderabad, India, last week signed a manufacturing deal with Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, to make 200 million doses a year of Sputnik V.
struggled for months last fall to obtain biotechnology equipment that is made in China, and was in short supply.
said that enough Sputnik V to fully inoculate 8.9 million people had been distributed in Russia since regulators approved the drug last August. Russia’s minister of industry said Monday he expected a quick ramp-up by April to twice that amount every month.
Russia’s vaccination campaign has fallen far behind that of most European nations and the United States. Russia has vaccinated 4.4 percent of its population, compared to 10 percent in the European Union and 26 percent in the United States.
The Kremlin this past week for the first time acknowledged that scarcity of the vaccine played a role in Mr. Putin’s decision to delay his own inoculation to avoid stimulating demand for shots before they became widely available outside the capital.
In January, when Mr. Putin became eligible for a shot under Russian rules based on his age, “production was not yet sufficient to fully meet demand in the regions,” said his spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov.
It’s not clear how large a role the imports will play in alleviating scarcity, accelerating vaccinations and saving lives in Russia. But it positions Russia lower in the pecking order of vaccine geopolitics, as an importer rather than just an exporter.
Russian officials have chosen to highlight exports, however. “A vaccine for all humankind,” the Sputnik V website declares. State media has lavished attention on even relatively small shipments of tens or hundreds of thousands of doses to foreign countries.
held back from export nearly all of the 2.4 million doses manufactured by a private company, the Serum Institute of India, as the number of infections from the coronavirus shot up across the country. The European Union also moved on emergency legislation to curb vaccine exports, a change that could limit British imports of the AstraZeneca vaccine designed at Oxford University from producers in the bloc.
President Emmanuel Macron of France said it was the “the end of naïveté” for the European Union, which has significant production capacity but had been exporting doses despite rapidly rising cases within the bloc.
The United States and Britain have both imported domestically designed vaccines made in foreign countries. The United States has done so while prohibiting some exports of U.S.-made doses abroad.
Russia imported the South Korean-produced Sputnik V in December as it expanded the categories of people eligible for vaccination. The doses arrived in two Asiana Airlines cargo planes, according to an announcement by the airline, which was touting its cold shipment service.
In written answers to questions, GL Rapha, the Korean manufacturer, said it could not discuss shipments because of the nondisclosure agreement.
The company said it expects to produce 150 million doses of Sputnik V this year. The Russian Direct Investment Fund did not respond to questions about imports to Russia.
RIO DE JANEIRO — China was on the defensive in Brazil.
The Trump administration had been warning allies across the globe to shun Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, denouncing the company as a dangerous extension of China’s surveillance system.
Brazil, ready to build an ambitious 5G wireless network worth billions of dollars, openly took President Trump’s side, with the Brazilian president’s son — an influential member of Congress, himself — vowing in November to create a secure system “without Chinese espionage.”
Then pandemic politics upended everything.
With Covid-19 deaths rising to their highest levels yet, and a dangerous new virus variant stalking Brazil, the nation’s communications minister went to Beijing in February, met with Huawei executives at their headquarters and made a very unusual request of a telecommunication company.
“I took advantage of the trip to ask for vaccines, which is what everyone is clamoring for,” said the minister, Fábio Faria, recounting his meeting with Huawei.
hoarding many millions of doses for themselves — has offered a diplomatic and public relations opening that China has readily seized.
closely aligned with Mr. Trump, disparaged the Chinese vaccine while it was undergoing clinical trials in Brazil, and shut down an effort by the health ministry to order 45 million doses.
“The Brazilian people WON’T BE ANYONE’S GUINEA PIG,” he wrote on Twitter.
But with Mr. Trump gone and Brazilian hospitals overwhelmed by a surge of infections, Mr. Bolsonaro’s government scrambled to mend fences with the Chinese and asked them to expedite tens of millions of vaccine shipments, as well as the ingredients to mass-produce the shots in Brazil.
The precise impact of the vaccine request to Huawei and its inclusion in the 5G auction is unclear, but the timing is striking, part of a stark change in Brazil’s stance toward China. The president, his son and the foreign minister abruptly stopped criticizing China, while cabinet officials with inroads to the Chinese, like Mr. Faria, worked furiously to get new vaccine shipments approved. Millions of doses have arrived in recent weeks.
“With the desperation in Latin America for vaccines, this creates a perfect position for the Chinese,” said Evan Ellis, a professor of Latin American studies at the United States Army War College, who specializes on the region’s relationship with China.
Britain and Germany — Huawei has mounted a well-timed charm offensive in Brazil.
said in a message on Twitter announcing the gift.
Before the first vaccines rolled off assembly lines, Huawei seemed to be losing the 5G contest in Brazil, knocked to the sidelines by the Trump administration’s campaign against it. Latin America’s largest nation was only months away from holding an auction to create its 5G network, a sweeping upgrade that will make wireless connections faster and more accessible.
Huawei, along with two European competitors, Nokia and Ericsson, aspired to play a leading role in partnering with local telecommunications companies to build the infrastructure. But the Chinese company needed the green light from Brazilian regulators to take part.
The Trump administration moved aggressively to thwart it. During a visit to Brazil last November, Keith Krach, then the State Department’s top official for economic policy, called Huawei an industry pariah that needed to be locked out of 5G networks.
“The Chinese Communist Party cannot be trusted with our most sensitive data and intellectual property,” he said in a Nov. 11 speech in Brazil, during which he referred to Huawei as “the backbone of the CCP surveillance state.”
Brazil’s foreign ministry said Brazil “supports the principles contained in the Clean Network proposal made by the United States.”
Eduardo Bolsonaro, a son of the president, who headed the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Congress, said in a tweet that Brazil would back Washington’s push.
China had already faced scorn in some corners of Latin America early in the pandemic, as concerns that it had been careless in allowing the virus to slip beyond its borders took root. Beijing’s reputation took an additional hit in Peru, after exporting cheap, unreliable Covid tests that became an early misstep in the country’s efforts to rein in contagion.
But China found an opportunity to shift the narrative early this year, as its CoronaVac became the cheapest and most accessible inoculation for countries in the developing world.
With the pandemic under control in China, Sinovac, the maker of CoronaVac, began shipping millions of doses abroad, offering free samples to 53 countries and exporting it to 22 nations that placed orders.
What You Need to Know About the Vaccine Rollout
As the first doses of CoronaVac were administered in Latin America, China took a swipe at wealthy nations that were doing little to guarantee prompt access to vaccines in poorer countries.
said in a speech late last month. “We hope that all countries that have the capability will join hands and make due contributions.”
In late February, as the first doses of China’s vaccines were being administered in Brazil, the country’s telecom regulatory agency announced rules for the 5G auction, which is scheduled to take place in July, that do not exclude Huawei.
The change in Brazil reflects how the campaign against Huawei driven by Mr. Trump has lost momentum since his defeat in the November election. Britain said it would not ban equipment made by Huawei from its new high-speed 5G wireless network. Germany has signaled a similar approach to Britain’s.
Thiago de Aragão, a Brasília-based political risk consultant who focuses on China’s relationships in Latin America, said two factors saved Huawei from a humiliating defeat in Brazil. The election of President Biden, who has harshly criticized Brazil’s environmental record, made the Brazilian government unenthusiastic about being in lock step with Washington, he said, and China’s ability to make or break the early phase of Brazil’s vaccination effort made the prospect of angering the Chinese by banning Huawei untenable.
“They were facing certain death by October and November and now they’re back in the game,” Mr. de Aragão said of Huawei.
The request for vaccines by the Brazilian communications minister, Mr. Faria, occurred as it became clear Beijing held the keys to accelerate or throttle the vaccination campaign in Brazil, where more than 270,000 people have died of Covid-19.
Feb. 11, Mr. Faria posted a letter from China’s ambassador to Brazil in which the ambassador noted the request and wrote that “I give this matter great importance.”
In a statement, Huawei did not say it would provide vaccines directly but said the company could help with “communication in an open and transparent manner in a topic involving the two governments.”
China is also the dominant supplier of vaccines in Chile, which has mounted the most aggressive inoculation campaign in Latin America, and it is shipping millions of doses to Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia.
In a sign of China’s growing leverage, Paraguay, where Covid-19 cases are surging, has struggled to gain access to Chinese vaccines because it is among the few countries in the world that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory.
In an interview, Paraguay’s foreign minister, Euclides Acevedo, said his country is seeking to negotiate access to CoronaVac through intermediary countries. Then he made an extraordinary overture to China, which has spent years trying to get the last few countries that recognize Taiwan to switch their alliances.
“We would hope the relationship does not end at vaccines, but takes on another dimension in the economic and cultural spheres,” he said. “We must be open to every nation as we seek cooperation and to do so we must have a pragmatic vision.”
Bolivia’s former interim president, Jeanine Añez, said Friday that she and several allies face arrest following the issuance of a warrant accusing her of terrorism and sedition in connection with the 2019 ouster of her predecessor, former president Evo Morales.
“The political persecution has begun,” wrote Ms. Añez on Twitter, alongside an image of the warrant. Bolivia’s attorney general declined to confirm the authenticity of the document.
Bolivia has been mired in political turmoil since late 2019, when Mr. Morales, a divisive and transformative socialist leader who was the country’s first Indigenous president, sought a fourth term in office.
The presidential campaign ended in a contested vote count, deadly protests and calls by the military for Mr. Morales to leave. He fled the country, and many called it a coup. Others accused his government of trying to rig the vote, to show him winning by a wide enough margin to avoid a runoff.
exposed deep rifts between the country’s Indigenous and European-descendant populations.
When Mr. Morales left, his vice president and the top Senate leaders stepped down as well, leaving Ms. Añez, a senator from a small, conservative party and political foe of Mr. Morales, to take over as interim leader. Then, in late 2020, a new election was called and won decisively by Luis Arce, an ally of Mr. Morales.
Both Mr. Morales and Ms. Añez used the judiciary to go after their critics. Mr. Arce, during his campaign, had promised to turn a new page in Bolivian politics.
“I have no interest in power,” Mr. Arce said in an interview shortly before his election. He promised to stay in office just five years —a contrast to Mr. Morales, who served for almost 14 years and fought to stay longer — and concentrate on fixing the economy.
By Friday afternoon, two of the 10 individuals listed on the warrant had been apprehended by authorities: former energy minister Rodrigo Guzmán and former justice minister Álvaro Coimbra, according to Gina Hurtado, an aide to Mr. Guzmán.
Roger Cortéz, a professor emeritus of political science at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia’s political capital, said that he saw the arrests as an attempt by Mr. Arce’s government to present a show of force at a time when it faces multiple political threats.
Ms. Añez, who has largely disappeared from the political map, does not necessarily present a danger to Mr. Arce. In local elections held earlier this month, she finished in third place in a race for governor of the department of Beni.
But in that same election, Mr. Arce’s party, Movement Toward Socialism, lost big in a critical mayoral race in a former stronghold called El Alto. The winner of that seat, Eva Copa, was once a leading member of the Movement Toward Socialism, but has since broken away from the party.
Her ability to win without party backing was a major blow to the Movement Toward Socialism. She earned more than 60 percent of the vote.
At the same time, Mr. Arce’s government is under increasing scrutiny for its handling of the economy and the coronavirus.
Mr. Cortéz said that the order for Ms. Añez’s arrest was an attempt to distract from the government’s “technical, ethical and practical incapacity to confront serious problems.”
