Álvaro Marcelo García Linera, is a Bolivian politician, who served as Vice President of Bolivia from 2006 until his removal in 2019. In the early 1990s, García Linera was the leader of the Túpac Katari Guerrilla Army. In 1992, he was accused of armed uprising and arrested along with several other insurgents. He was released in 1997. García was elected vice president as the running partner to Evo Morales in the 2005 presidential elections. He is an advocate of nationalization of Bolivia's hydrocarbon industry. In 2005 interview, he said that hydrocarbons "would be the second unifying factor of this society in October, 2003" and that "the debates over hydrocarbons are playing with the destiny of Bolivia." García wrote a monograph about the different political and social organizations that were a part of the political rise of the MAS and other indigenous factions, Sociología de los Movimientos Sociales en Bolivia , which was published in 2005. In December 2010, Linera posted the cables mentioning Bolivia from the website WikiLeaks, which leaks information from classified sources and whistleblowers, on his official page. Linera said linking this negative information was intended to allow people to see “barbarities and insults” in Washington and to expose their "interventionist infiltration." García Linera has defended the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, saying that it is not intended as a means to hamper industrial development or mineral extraction. Private miners have disagreed with this stance, suggesting that the law allows the government to expropriate their operations without providing compensation and that is signals Bolivia is hostile to foreign investment. García Linera had indicated his intention of leaving politics for teaching and writing in 2014, at the end of his term. He did not comment on his re-election the same year to the present day. On November 10, 2019 he resigned with President Evo Morales following the 2019 Bolivian protests. He left Bolivia and travelled to Mexico together with Morales. On March 8, 2012, García Linera publicly confirmed his engagement to Claudia Fernández Valdivia, a news anchor with Bolivian television station Red Uno. They were married in September 2012, holding an indigenous ceremony on Saturday the 8th and a Catholic one on Sunday the 9th.
