How a populist president helped Bolivia's poor – but built himself a palace
The whirr of a helicopter setting off from Evo Morales’ new 29-storey presidential palace sends the pigeons in a nearby square scattering. To critics of Bolivia’s longest-serving leader, the glass-fronted building adorned by a helipad is an alarming sign of the president’s increasing vanity.
Inocencio Carvajal Lopez, however, remains unfazed. For this 62-year-old indigenous leader, the sight of the bright red helicopter is, like the palace itself, a sign that Bolivia is at last on the up.
“This country has achieved tremendous progress with our brother Evo in charge,” Lopez says, describing Bolivia’s first ever indigenous president as “one of us”.
“The palace, the helicopters, the planes – thanks to these, the outside world can now see that our government is delivering development.”
Lopez, whose broad-brimmed hat carries the emblem of the ruling Movement for Socialism party, is not free of political bias. Yet the hard numbers bear him out. The percentage of people living in poverty in this landlocked South American state fell from 59.9% in 2006, when Morales first came to power, to 34.6% in 2017, with extreme poverty more than halving (from 38.28% to
