On Monday, the oral trial began in Bolivia against former socialist president and indigenous leader Evo Morales Ayma, on charges of aggravated human trafficking.

A court in the town of Tarija is prosecuting the former head of state for an alleged relationship maintained in 2016 with a minor — a relationship he reportedly pursued while still serving in office.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office has gathered more than 170 pieces of evidence and maintains that the young woman’s mother willingly consented to the relationship in exchange for “employment benefits” for herself.

For his part, Morales’s lawyer, Nelson Cox, stated quite matter-of-factly that the case was nothing more than a false accusation manufactured for media consumption and that — because he deemed it best — his client would not attend the hearing.

Morales is currently taking refuge in a rural, predominantly indigenous area — a region dotted with farms where coca leaf (the raw material for producing cocaine) is cultivated — known as the Trópico de Cochabamba. He has been holed up there since October 2024 to avoid arrest.

But how does Morales spend his days in this place? Well, like a rock star.

A diligent audiovisual production team documents, edits, and uploads footage of the smiling former president to social media. They film him planting cassava and rice, working out in his private gym, and receiving visits from political allies. From this location, he exerts his influence via Radio Kawsachun Coca, a station whose signal reaches across the coca-growing valleys.

He has transformed this site into an alternative Palacio Quemado (the seat of the Bolivian government). And although it lies within national territory, authorities from La Paz are unable to enter the premises. Surrounded by his followers, Morales has effectively turned the area into a country within a country.

The former president knows full well how to mobilize the indigenous masses to exert pressure on the Bolivian state. When he ran for the presidency in 2005, he used them to cast votes in his favor; when, in 2019, he fled the country following electoral fraud, he used them to blockade La Paz — even if it meant cutting off the supply of oxygen to the capital.

Now, he uses them to flout the law and station themselves at checkpoints surrounding his home in the Cochabamba Tropics.

In 2024, the international press was greeted by the sight of indigenous men wielding sharpened wooden spears, handheld radios, and shields fashioned from sheet metal salvaged from storage tanks. This was Morales’s praetorian guard, stationed at what they dubbed “Headquarters” and the “People’s General Staff.”

Let us set aside, for a moment, the challenge this poses — in an almost secessionist vein — to Bolivian democracy. Instead, let us focus on this: Morales’s soldiers were guarding a fugitive from justice — a man who refused to heed court summonses while facing accusations of orchestrating the 2019 electoral fraud and engaging in a scandalous relationship with a minor.

The ring of guards encircling Morales also exposes the moral rot within his most militant inner circle of supporters. None of them appear to be troubled by the grave accusations leveled against the former coca-growers’ leader.

The newspaper El Mundo reported that Bolivian police officers were acutely aware that they were “risking their lives: four of their colleagues had already lost their lives to sniper fire during the road blockades orchestrated by the former president’s followers.”

“We know they are heavily armed,” stated Roberto Ríos — then Minister of Government — in 2025, “and they are prepared to lay down their lives. They serve as a human shield.”

Morales clung to power for nearly 14 years through the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) — cultivating close ties with the regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. For a long time, he was the darling of the woke Left — which saw in him not only the proletarian background revered by Marxist revolutionaries but also an Indigenous man who spoke a broken Spanish, as his first language was an “indigenous” one.

The Latin American Post reported that the powerful coca growers’ unions Morales led before entering national politics — known as the Six Federations — were responsible for safeguarding his political stronghold.

His office, the website recounted, looked more like a shrine. “A soccer trophy on one shelf; a life-size portrait of Morales greeting Chávez and Castro on another,” it described. “The world may have left the Latin American Left of the 2000s behind. Morales’s inner circle has not.”

Amidst strict union control, he moves between the “People’s General Staff” and the San Francisco union headquarters — at the entrance of which stands a statue, depicted by a local media outlet as being “in the finest Mussolinian, fascistoid style.”

The potential disappointment — if indeed there is any — among the Western Left is understandable. Their socialist, indigenous, and proletarian candidate did not turn out to be the political Messiah who would embody all the goodness and purity that “colonialism” and the white man had supposedly denied him.

Their poster child was nothing more than a criminal who further poisoned the minds of ordinary Bolivians. And today, by every legal standard, he is a fugitive from justice in the very republic he swore to serve with loyalty.