Where’s Evo? Missing Morales mystery as Bolivia’s ex-president goes to ground
NEWS | 07 February 2026
For more than a year, he stayed hidden in plain sight: despite an arrest warrant for human trafficking charges, former president Evo Morales moved freely in at least one region of Bolivia, attended rallies, received foreign journalists and went to the polls to cast his vote in the 2025 presidential election. But shortly after the United States attack onVenezuela – and the detention of Nicolás Maduro – Morales disappeared from view; a month later his whereabouts remain a mystery. Bolivia’s first Indigenous president immediately criticised the attack on Caracas as “brutal imperial aggression”, both on social media and, the day after the strike, on his Sunday radio programme broadcast from the heart of the Chapare, a coca-producing region in central Bolivia. Since then, however, the man who was once one of the most recognisable faces in Latin America has not been seen either on his programme – missing four editions – or at the public events he used to attend. His disappearance has fuelled a flurry of theories, including claims by a conservative MP that he has fled the country. The disappearance comes as the centre-right president, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, tightens ties with the US in search of support for the battered economy and an acute dollar shortage. One of Paz Pereira’s main aims is to bring back the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which, after violent incursions in Chapare that led to clashes and dozens of coca growers’ deaths, was expelled by Morales in 2008. Although the coca leaf has widespread legal and cultural uses in Bolivia as a stimulant, digestive aid or treatment for altitude sickness, it is known that part of the crop grown in Chapare is diverted for cocaine production. The official version – put forward by political allies and the coca growers’ unions – is that Morales has not fled but is instead ill. View image in fullscreen President Evo Morales, here attending a rally in Entre Rios, Cochabamba, on 14 August 2025, is said by supporters to have contracted dengue. Photograph: Agustín Marcarian/Reuters On the first edition of his radio show without Morales, the presenter said the former president had “caught dengue”, a mosquito-borne viral illness common in Latin America. The following Sunday, the former evista senator Leonardo Loza fuelled the rumours already gaining traction and declined to disclose his whereabouts, saying only that he was “in some little corner of our Patria Grande”, a term used by some to refer to Hispanic America. His supporters made fun of the mystery, wearing masks of his face and even producing a song, Where Is Evo?, which lists his achievements as Bolivia’s longest-serving president and concludes that he is “with the people. The swirl of theories intensified in late January, when the conservative MP Edgar Zegarra Bernal said the former president was in Mexico – something that would not be unprecedented: after Morales was accused of rigging elections in 2019, he fled to Mexico before later moving on to Argentina. But Bernal gave no details or evidence and instead demanded that the government prove otherwise. “Why has the arrest warrant against Evo Morales not been enforced so far?” he said. Since October 2024, Morales had been entrenched in a small village deep within the Bolivian jungle, where hundreds of coca farmers prevented police from executing an arrest warrant against him over allegations that he fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl during his presidency in 2016. Morales has always denied the accusations, saying they amount to political persecution orchestrated by the then president, his former protege Luis Arce, with whom he broke after returning to Bolivia in 2020. Deeply unpopular amid Bolivia’s worst economic crisis in four decades, Arce did not seek re-election. Paz Pereira won but did not move against Morales. Instead, he had Arce arrested on accusations that he had “enabled illicit enrichment” while serving as Morales’s finance minister. Paz Pereira has not commented on Morales’s whereabouts, but his government minister, Marco Antonio Oviedo, said that “the information available” suggested Morales remained in the Chapare. A coca growers’ leader who requested anonymity told the Guardian that “Comrade Evo is already in full recovery and will soon resume his public agenda,” without offering a timeline or location, adding only: “There will be a surprise soon; he has already overcome dengue.” The former president has also resumed posting on social media, criticising Paz Pereira’s government. “But that is no guarantee that he is here or elsewhere, because it’s well known that he does not usually write his own tweets,” said the political analyst José Orlando Peralta. As dengue symptoms, at least in milder cases, do not usually last more than a week, Peralta believes that “either Morales has fled or he is more seriously ill – it is not typical of him to disappear from the media agenda for this long”. Given the relationship Paz Pereira has sought to establish with the White House – this week, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, praised the US “friend Bolivia” – and the emphasis Trump has placed on a so-called “war on drugs”, Peralta believes that “it’s surely only a matter of time before the DEA returns to Bolivia, and that will obviously complicate Evo Morales’s political and private life.” Additional reporting by Thomas Graham in Mexico City
Author: Tiago Rogero.
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