Some see the youth soccer tournament as the former president’s newest to remain in the race for the 2025 election.
Politics and football have long been combined in South America, but not so much. On Sunday, the Evo Cup, a soccer tournament for young foreigners organized through former Bolivian President Evo Morales, named after former Bolivian President Evo Morales, began in the country’s coca tropics.
The preparation has been dictated through political fragments, and the opposition wonders about the participation of the national football federation in a tournament named after Morales.
Morales said the goal of the tournament is football as a form of integration. Six groups from Bolivia and six others from all over the Americas participated.
Morales is passionate about football. While he was president, at the age of fifty, he laughed playing professionally in the Bolivian top league. He promoted the game through the inauguration of new synthetic fields throughout the country.
But with the Evo Cup, some of its parts conflict that Morales’ motivation is more than love for the game.
On the political stage, Morales is a vital but reduced figure. Although he is the leader of the ruling Movement to Socialism (MAS), he no longer has a direct stake in the government. And while it maintains the unwavering of some sectors of society, adding the coca growers of the chapare, it is no longer as popular as it once was.
His monopolization of force during his nearly 14 years as president and his result of a referendum on whether he can exceed term limits and run again in 2019, have made him a divisive figure, even within the MAS.
Morales won the 2019 election, contested through the opposition, which alleged fraud. The country took advantage of the protests before the military advised Morales to resign. He did and then fled the country. After a year of political instability, the MAS, under the leadership of former Finance Minister Luis Arce, was re-elected with a landslide victory, and Morales has since returned from exile in Argentina.
He is just one of many MAS candidates proposed in the 2025 elections, and some see the tour’s call as the newest to keep their call.
Members of the opposition have threatened to file a complaint with FIFA if the national football federation does not disassociate itself from a tournament that they politically. FIFA, to which the Bolivian National Football Federation is affiliated, has a policy of neutrality. The national football federation said it only provided assistance for refereeing and equipment, and did not organize or promote the event.
Opponents also sourced investment for the tournament and the resolution to hold it in Chapare, a coca-producing region they described as a “red zone” for drug trafficking.
In a letter sent to all the groups involved, opposition lawmakers warned them about the damage to their reputation and Morales warned Pablo Escobar, whom they said “used to gather groups to play in the garden of his house. “
Organizers retaliated, refusing to replace the tour call and pointing out that it was funded through sponsors and the Six Federations of the Tropics, the umbrella union of coca growers. Héctor Arce, a MAS representative, accused the opposition of “stigmatizing an entire region. “of drug trafficking. “
El Chapare, where Morales lives and where his help is strongest, is one of the two main coca-producing regions in Bolivia and is described as a state within a state, where the first authority is the coca growers’ unions.
It was there that Morales gained political notoriety as a union leader, at a time when the Bolivian government was still following the U. S. -led “war on drugs,” with a forced eradication of coca that has turned violent.
After the MAS came to power, it expelled the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The U. S. and legalized a certain amount of coca cultivation. Violence has plummeted and progress has reached marginalized places in the past. But doubts hang over the exact fate of the Coca del Chapare.
In recent months, drug trafficking has rarely been far from the news, with a number of high-level corruption cases, murders and drug seizures, some not far from where the Evo Cup will take place.
In the face of criticism, several withdrew from the tournament, but organizers brought replacements.
For his part, Morales thanked the opposition for all the loose publicity. “Unintentionally,” he said, “the Evo Cup has arrived at Fifa. “