The Bolivian President Tried to Buy My Vote with Food

A whirring helicopter cut through the mountains and dropped from the sky, a rare enough sight in the quiet mining village of Quime, nestled in a tranquil forested region of the Bolivian Andes. Out from the copter and onto the hilly terrain stepped Bolivian President Evo Morales, shaking hands and mingling freely with the people with very little in the way of security.

Ostensibly, the president was in town to celebrate the inauguration of a new indoor market, to give the vendors a dedicated space to hawk their vegetables, potatoes, coca leaves, and other goods, bringing them in from the town's narrow, twisting streets. In reality, however, Morales never even made it to the market, limiting himself to a quick speech on the parade grounds before taking off again in the helicopter for his next destination.

The real reason the president decided to visit this tiny town, it turns out, was to build up support for an upcoming referendum to determine if he would be allowed to run for a fourth term in office in 2020. To help sway any undecided voters, the government provided a feast for the entire community.

Morales first spoke to the gathered crowds about "the power of the village to advance the future of Bolivia," and dove into what sounded like a generic campaign speech about the investments the government was making in health, education, potable water, and hydroelectric energy. He barely mentioned the market at all, except for a vague, tangential promise about Bolivia becoming a world leader in eradicating malnutrition.

The villagers—who, like the president, were members of the indigenous Aymara ethnicity—ate up the speech with gusto. Next, they ate lunch.

On the hill behind the festivities, some of the townspeople were busy preparing the feast. The main attraction was a meal called huatia, which is a mix of potatoes, sweet potatoes, chicken, and plantains, baked underground using piping-hot rocks. First, the cooks heated the rocks up in a fire for about an hour. Then, they buried them along with the food, covering the pots with cardboard and tarps to keep them from getting excessively soiled by the dirt. Although the method is usually considered a traditional Bolivian meal, the cooks insisted that the preparation actually originated with Spanish invaders, many centuries in the past.

Another hour later, enough time for some other dignitaries to get through their own obligatory speeches, the meal was ready, with ample food for everyone to stuff themselves. "You can really taste the earth on these," one young man said as he munched on a potato.

While the villagers feasted, men walked around passing out coktéls, a potent drink made with singani, a grape brandy produced locally in the Andes. The liquor was mixed with tumbo juice, derived from a cylindrical green fruit filled with orange pulp, also known as banana passionfruit. The juice was sweet enough to mask the alcohol, but after hours of drinking small shots out of plastic cups the population appeared plenty tipsy.

After everyone ate their fill and as the liquor had a chance to sink in, the dancing started. Drum and flute bands blasted competitive traditional tunes from only a few meters apart, while Aymara men and women dressed in colorful costumes bobbed and spun their way through Bolivian folk dances. Opportunistic dogs canvassed the field, looking for discarded scraps of potato or chicken bone. Long after the president was just a hazy memory, the music and dancing continued deep into the night.

Food has historically been an important factor, if not the most important, when the population of a country elects or otherwise forces a regime change. Queen Marie Antoinette of revolutionary France is famously (if apocryphally) credited with suggesting that the people eat cake when they complained that the price of bread was too high. Denied a vote at the ballot box, the offended masses took matters into their own hands and lopped off her head.

Closer to home, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz as well as former candidate Chris Christie both made opposition to healthy school lunches part of their campaigns, suggesting that French fries are preferable options to fruits and vegetables. In South America, Evo Morales himself once advised Hugo Chavez, the deceased leader of the Venezuelan socialist movement, that "to maintain the ideology, you have to guarantee [that people have] food."

He took his own advice to heart. Morales, a former coca farmer, swept into power in 2006 with a promise to bring political representation to the Bolivia's mostly marginalized indigenous populations. He burnished his populist credentials by nationalizing the nation's energy sector and spending the profits on social programs. He easily won reelection twice, but is blocked by the country's constitution from running for a fourth time in 2020—hence the referendum.

The yes or no question was a political hot button in the months leading up to the ballot. All over Bolivia, from dense urban areas to bucolic countrysides, walls and buildings were decorated with "Evo No" or "Evo Si" graffiti.

As it turned out, even feasting his constituency wasn't enough to quell doubts about corruption in Morales' party and the prospect of keeping the same president for up to 20 years, and the "nos" carried the election this week with a reported 51.3 percent tally. The political and economic future of the country is an open question, which could lead toward prosperity or back to poverty—but for the day, at least, the people of Quime ate their fill.