WASHINGTON When Bolivias socialist president, Evo Morales , stepped down last week after nearly a month of sometimes violent protests over a disputed October election, it was right-wing opposition leader Luis Fernando Camacho who declared victory.

Today we won a battle, Camacho, a businessman who came seemingly out of nowhere to lead the charge against Morales, told Reuters . Only when we can be sure that democracy is solid, then will we go back home.

Bolivians and international observers have debated whether the president was the victim of a coup, as he asserts, or a popular uprising, as his opponents and even some of his former supporters claim.

But in the week since Morales fled the country he led for 14 years amid pressure from the armed forces, Camacho and a cadre of previously unknown conservative leaders have seized on popular unrest to assert control over Bolivias transitional government, providing a clear picture of what their version of solid democracy looks like.

And its not democratic at all.

It was a democratic protest with a view toward new elections, and it got seriously co-opted by an extreme right wing that didnt follow any of the rules, said Linda Farthing, a journalist and researcher who is based in Bolivia.

Camacho, a lawyer and businessman with previous ties to far-right extremist groups, was barely known across Bolivia before he emerged as a key opposition figure during this years elections, and especially after declarations of fraud during the Oct. 20 vote sparked nationwide protests. He has not taken a place in the transitional government, but he has remained a powerful figure: Camacho, a Christian, stood alongside Jeanine ez, a conservative Christian senator, on Wednesday as she declared herself Bolivias interim leader while carrying an oversized Bible into the presidential palace.

Since then, ez has promised to pacify Bolivia and put the Andean nation on the path to new elections. But she has acted as if she wants to govern, and she and her allies have wasted little time in proving that their image as restorative democrats was nothing more than a facade.