Evo Morales’s closest political adviser has admitted that the Bolivian leader’s failure to groom a successor contributed to the political crisis engulfing the South American nation but slammed the “racist backlash” he blamed for the toppling of its first indigenous president.
In an interview with the Guardian, former vice-president, Álvaro García Linera, branded Morales’s forced exit an anti-indigenous, rightwing “coup” but conceded it had been aided by mistakes the pair made during their nearly 14 years in government.
“A revolution is like a cup, it has to be unbreakable when stones are thrown,” García Linera said, tapping his cappuccino during a wide-ranging interview in Mexico City where both men have been granted political asylum.
“Our cup wasn’t made of glass, but it wasn’t made of steel either. It was made of something in between – and it had cracks.”
García Linera, a white urban intellectual, fled Bolivia with Morales on 11 November on a Mexican air force jet, a day after they resigned following three weeks of protests sparked by an election shrouded in allegations of fraud. The final straw was a police mutiny and the head of army calling on Morales to go.
Since then, unrest has continued to rock the country after a rightwing senator called Jeanine Áñez declared herself interim president. At least 23 people have died, many at the hands of soldiers cracking down on pro-Morales protests.
“I am concerned that the situation in Bolivia could spin out of control,” the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, warned on Saturday.
García Linera said he and Morales had not anticipated being driven from power but did identify “weaknesses” in their ability to continue advancing Morales’s project, praised by many for slashing poverty, and creating a new indigenous middle class.
Above all, he highlighted the failure to prepare a political heir for the former coca growers’ union leader, known universally as Evo, who spent a decade building the radical support base that swept him to power in 2005.
Related: Evo Morales: indigenous leader who changed Bolivia but stayed too long
“There are new leaders who are more intelligent than us. There are leaders who are more tactically able than us. But they lack those deeps roots in the social movements,” García Linera said. “We didn’t do enough to bring up a new generation.”
García Linera said a 2016 referendum to allow Evo to seek another term reflected his irreplaceability, rather than any personal obsession with power.
He said this was also the reason why – despite losing the vote – a way was still found to include his name on this year’s presidential ballot.
“Everybody thought that without Evo, the whole thing would fall apart,” he said.
García Linera said other mistakes included recruiting prominent intellectuals to positions in government – removing their voices from the wider public debate.
This, he argued, made it easier for a far-right opposition against Morales to hide its true nature, by attracting private university students who gave an air of democratic activism, although they were actually representing the interests of the traditional pale-skinned middle class that has seen its privileges slip away.
But the self-criticism only went so far, and García Linera attacked critics on the left as “Starbucks feminists and folkloric environmentalists”.
“Their attitude in the face of what has been happening has been shameful,” he said. “They have not understood that the traditional middle class has gone fascist. They have not understood the class element or the racist element.”
As he spoke, García Linera seemed every ounce the university professor, who won fame in Bolivia for reframing Marxist analysis for a majority indigenous context.
But he has never been a traditional academic: although he studied for a maths degree in Mexico in the 1980s, he never actually graduated, and when he returned to Bolivia he joined a guerrilla group, before being arrested and spending several years in jail.
As vice-president he insisted that he would never run for president because he is not indigenous, but he has often appeared to enjoy the limelight, whether giving lengthy interviews about class consciousness or commenting on his 2012 wedding to a TV presenter which was broadcast live.
Even in exile – and wearing, he said, the same trousers in which he arrived – the 57-year-old looked remarkably well-groomed as he pondered Bolivia’s possible futures.
“If the dictatorship represses harder it could force the resistance to step down,” he said. “It could also trigger the opposite reaction.”
Related: Bolivia crisis: how did we get here and what happens next?
He highlighted the protests of the indigenous poor in the city of El Alto, which are already causing shortages of fuel and other basic goods in La Paz, though he insisted Morales was not fanning the flames.
“These people have no leaders beyond their barrios. They don’t respond to phone calls, still less to tweets,” he claimed.
Even so, such protests strengthen Morales’s efforts to secure a place in any talks that might come out of the efforts of the United Nations envoy Jean Arnault, who arrived in Bolivia at the weekend. Some believe they could even help him secure a place as a candidate in the fresh election – and a return to Bolivia.
For the moment, however, García Linera was unwilling to make predictions.
“Everything is still moving,” he said. “The correlation of forces is still not defined.”