Bolivian voters poised to swing right, back into the White House's favour

US embassy shut its doors after Evo Morales evicted its ambassador, but today's election could ease relations. Thomas Graham reports from La Paz

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The US embassy in Bolivia, like a fortress behind its perimeter wall, has been a silent presence for almost 20 years.

Back in 2008, the country's left-wing president, Evo Morales, accused Philip Goldberg, the US ambassador, of conspiring against his government and kicked him out of the country.

The embassy has lain near dormant ever since. But Morales is no longer in power.

His party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), has imploded. And today Bolivia is set to swing to the right as it chooses between Rodrigo Paz, a centrist senator, and Jorge Quiroga, a conservative former president, in a presidential runoff.

Both candidates have said they will rebuild the relationship with the US just as Donald Trump's administration places Latin America at the heart of its foreign policy.

"The US-Bolivia relationship has been in the deep freeze for decades," said Benjamin Gedan, a former state department official. "Both sides bear some responsibility. But the duration of the estrangement is mostly attributable to Morales."

Morales's antipathy to the US predated his time as president. As a farmer of coca - the leaves of which are chewed by tradition in the Andes, but can be processed into cocaine - Morales was targeted by forced eradication campaigns in the 1990s as part of the US-led "war on drugs".

It was in leading the resistance to these campaigns that Morales rose to prominence, first in the coca farmers' union, then in the MAS, which he led to power in 2006. Soon after, when his government was rocked by secessionist protests in the eastern lowlands, Morales perceived the hand of the US behind them.