From jungle hideout, Evo Morales ponders his next move

In a small village deep within the Bolivian jungle, hundreds of people brandished wooden spears and improvised shields.

- Tiago Rogero and Tom Silverstone

Behind them a wooden fort - with an observation post where a man held a bow and arrow - blocked the path leading to a radio station, where Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales, 65, has been entrenched for seven months, seeking to avoid arrest.

Reaching the building is impossible - even, apparently, for the police - without the authorisation of the hundreds of coca farmers who guard every access route in Lauca Ñ, a tiny village in the coca-producing Chapare region.

Morales faces an arrest warrant, accused of fathering a child with a 15-year-old girl during his presidency in 2016. Bolivia’s first Indigenous president and the country’s longest-serving leader denies having committed any crime. He claims the case is part of a plan by the current government to destroy him politically - and even to have him killed.

More than 550km away in La Paz, the man Morales accuses of masterminding the supposed plot denied any such plan. “He’s been talking this nonsense since the early years of our government,” said Bolivia’s president, Luis Arce, 61, who was Morales’s finance minister during his nearly 14 years in power.