Bolivia restores ties with Israel, last president held over monies

Bolivia's new centre-right government restored formal diplomatic ties with Israel on 9 December after a two-year break under the country's last, leftist government. In late October 2023, with the socialist Luis Arce as president, Bolivia became one of the first Latin American states to sever ties with Israel in protest at its punitive actions in Gaza, before joining a multilateral lawsuit against Israel in 2024, the Agence France-Presse reported. The renewal of ties was signed in Washington D.C. at a meeting between Bolivia's foreign minister and the Israeli ambassador to the United States. Separately, the former president Arce was detained on 10 December for questioning in relation with the suspected embezzlement of public funds during his presidency or previously, when he was finance minister. Arce has in the past denied involvement in any acts of corruption and exercised his right to be silent, though he remained in police custody after his interrogation, the website Infobae reported.

Bolivia elects a "moderate" president

The self-styled centrist Rodrigo Paz Pereira, a senator and former mayor of Tarija in southern Bolivia, won the country's second round of presidential elections on 19 October and will be sworn in on 8 November, thus ending two decades of socialist rule. The outgoing president, Luis Arce, was one of several regional leaders to congratulate him without delay. In the first round of voting in August, Paz's Christian Democratic party garnered 49 of the lower legislature's 130 seats and 13 of the Senate's 36 seats, which would give him a measure of legislative clout. Paz declared on 23 October that a renewal of ties with the United States after a 17-year break would help tackle the country's economic problems, and observers were expecting Bolivia to move away from its allies of recent years - namely Russia, China, Islamic Iran and socialist Venezuela. He clarified a day before that the rulers of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela would not be invited to his swearing-in, as they were "not democratic." Bolivia, he stressed, is a "democratic country. While there are diplomatic relations, to be respected (due to) previous conditions, our condition for relations is based on democracy." The BBC summarized in a report on 20 October the president-elect's reform and liberalization plans.