Why Latin America is on edge

It’s not every day you see a sitting president and cabinet cut their own salaries by half.

The last such headline we saw was back in 2012, when France’s Hollande kept his pledge to slash pay by 30%, though he then quietly spent a cool $10k per month on his barber. Don’t judge — you think looking that good comes cheap?!

But we raise Hollande’s sick fade because Bolivia’s newish president, Rodrigo Paz, just cut cabinet salaries by 50% in hopes it’d appease the mass protests paralysing La Paz.

The weeks of roadblocks have now triggered medicine, fuel, and food shortages that are so bad, the Red Cross is running humanitarian corridors, and neighbours are sending aid!

So… what — and we cannot stress this enough — is going on?

You could start this story on almost any date in history, but let’s pick 19 October 2025.

That’s when the business-friendly Paz — son of a former president — won the presidency and ended two decades of leftist rule under Evo Morales and his party.

Paz ran on reforms to salvage Bolivia’s battered economy, but last month’s new land reforms (making it easier to sell or mortgage small plots) triggered angry protests:

• He sold it as giving small farmers better access to credit and investment, but

• Critics feared a wave of forced sales, debt traps, and latifundios (tycoon estates).

By the time Paz shelved the idea, it was too late — rural grievances had already snowballed into mass unrest over ‘gasolina basura’ (crappy fuel), austerity, and beyond.

And that’s when a judge thought, Hmmmm you know what? This raging fire really needs more gasoline, so he re-issued an arrest warrant for ex-leader Evo Morales over shock allegations he impregnated a minor while running a human trafficking ring in office!

Many in the streets saw that as a political attack on Evo, their first indigenous president. So that’s when this really all morphed into a full-blown defend-Evo / bring-down-Paz movement.

And while Evo now hides in his remote stronghold, there are now signs the government is wobbling: the veep claims he and President Paz haven’t spoken since January!

So what to do?

Right now, Paz is hoping a mix of carrots and sticks might help stabilise the situation: carrots in the form of that 50% pay-cut he just swallowed above. But sticks in the form of Tuesday’s new law authorising him to deploy troops to the streets.