Bolivia’s scandal about sex, politics and China

(Photo: Juan Karita – AP)

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, who took office 10 years ago and is convening a constitutional referendum Sunday to allow him to run for re-election in 2019, is often described in world media as a benign autocrat. Despite his fiery anti-capitalist rhetoric, he is carrying out responsible economic policies, we have read many times.

In reality, Morales is destroying his country. In recent days, a political-sexual scandal involving a young woman who had a child with Morales and has since become a top executive of a Chinese company that is a major government contractor has exposed much of what is wrong with Morales’ authoritarian government.

The scandal came to light Feb. 3, when tv journalist Carlos Valverde revealed that Morales had fathered a child with a young woman named Gabriela Zapata in 2007, when she was between seventeen and nineteen years old, and that Zapata has since become a top executive of a major Chinese corporation that has received more than $500 million in government contracts.

Showing an eight-page newspaper advertorial of China’s CAMC Engineering firm in a local newspaper that presented Zapata as one of the company’s top executives in Bolivia, the journalist reported that CAMC has become one of the largest government contractors. And a sizable part of the government contracts with CAMC to build roads, railroads and other public works were signed after Zapata joined the company in 2013.

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