Edgar Luis Fernández (born 11 November 1971) is a Bolivian cab driver, politician, and trade unionist who served as a party-list member of the Chamber of Deputies from Santa Cruz from 2010 to 2015.
[1][α] Although born in Totora, a rural town in the Carrasco Province of Cochabamba, he spent most of his life in the Santa Cruz Department, having moved there with his mother at the age of 1.
[5] Fernández capped off his rise through the ranks of the sector's trade unions in 2006 when he was elected president of the Plan 3,000 Urban Drivers' Bloc, representing twenty-two of the area's workers' organizations and affiliated route owners.
Throughout the early 2000s, this fact was harnessed by the nascent Movement for Socialism (MAS-IPSP) into popular support for the party, converting the district into one of its primary partisan bases in the Santa Cruz Department.
[1] The confluence of these two groups – the MAS and the drivers' unions – generated a lasting political alliance, one whose vote-getting power was first put to the test at the municipal level in 2004 and at the regional in 2005.
[9] In 2009, the country's national drivers' federation elected to lend its full support to the party, a pact that garnered the sector a quota of candidacies for its representatives in all nine departments.
[1] Unlike in previous years, Fernández exited victorious, owing to the MAS's steadily improving performance in the Santa Cruz Department, achieved through the consolidation of a multifaceted base of support composed of lower-class urbanites, western migrant settlers, and lowland indigenous peoples.