Do we like them?

Do we like Luis Arce?

Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up, but the record is thin on people issues, the economy soured badly, and the corruption case is unresolved.

Luis Arce is a career economist. He built his career at Bolivia's central bank, then became economy minister under Evo Morales, the long-time leader of the left-wing Movement for Socialism. He was Morales's number-cruncher through the commodity boom years, and that record carried him to the presidency in 2020.

The wheels came off in his own term. Dollars ran short, fuel got scarce and inflation climbed to multi-year highs, and Arce blamed the shortages on Morales's earlier handling of the economy. He and Morales had also fallen out, and by his farewell message in November 2025 Arce was publicly blaming his old boss for the divisions in their party.

In June 2024 an army general led a failed uprising in La Paz. The general claimed, with no evidence, that Arce had ordered it to boost his own popularity. Arce rejected that as lies, and many Bolivians came out in support of him. It was a moment when he looked like a defender of democracy, though opponents kept the self-coup claim alive.

The big stoush is the Indigenous Fund case. Prosecutors allege that when he was economy minister, he approved payments from a fund meant for Indigenous and peasant communities for projects that were never finished or never built. Officials estimate losses in the tens of millions of dollars, with some reports citing far higher. He was arrested in December 2025 and invoked his right to remain silent. He and his allies call it political persecution, and the government denies that. No court has convicted him.

On the harm test, we found nothing from Arce that targets LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or other groups. The environment is the weak spot: opposition voices and advocates called his 2024 response to the Amazon fires and his announced environmental pause too little, and we did not find a clear record from his government on trans rights either way. That is a gap in what we could find, not a clean bill of health.

As for where it stands now, a judge extended his pretrial detention in June 2026 and again in late September. Prosecutors argue the case belongs in the ordinary courts because the alleged conduct was as a minister, not as president. His defence has said it will appeal, and we found no trial date or verdict.