Bolivia has just added a peculiar chapter to its long history of political turmoil, which includes everything from military coups to dark conspiracies.
The Bolivian president, Luis Arce, denounced on Wednesday “an attempted coup d’état” after a group of soldiers advanced through the center of La Paz until forcibly breaking into the Quemada Palace, the former seat of government.
The tension was resolved after Arce replaced the country’s military leadership, the mobilized soldiers returned to their barracks and their leader, General Juan José Zúñiga, was arrested.
While this was happening, voices of support for democracy emerged throughout the entire political spectrum that, by the way, contrast with the country’s past as a place conducive to government overthrows.
“Bolivia has had the most coup attempts in the world between 1950 and the present,” says Jonathan Powell, an expert on political instability at the University of Kentucky.
However, different analysts express surprise at what happened in the South American country on Wednesday.
“Adventure”
In the two centuries since it declared independence in 1825, Bolivia has had a new government on average every 26 and a half months.
A global study by Powell and Clayton Thyne, professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, indicates that from 1950 until last Tuesday the country had 23 cases of coups d’état.
That includes 11 successful hits, defined as those that allowed their drivers to control the power for at least a week, and 12 failed attempts.
The decade in which Bolivia recorded the most coups was 1970: eight completed or attempted, in some years with two cases in a row.
The Bolivian historian Manuel Contreras, member of the Bolivian Academy of History, attributes this past fundamentally to internal factors of the countryfrom the absence of a solid institutional framework to “an unprofessional Army that lends itself to this type of adventures.”
“At least in the ’70s the Army was perceived as a development entity,” Contreras tells BBC Mundo. “They thought they had a role to play in the development of the country; “That has changed.”
Among the dictators of the time was General Hugo Banzer (1971-1978), who overthrew a military man who governed de facto, harshly repressed social movements, sharply increased foreign debt and He in turn fell in a coup organized by another general.
Several military and civilian governments followed, with new episodes of violence and human rights abuses, including the assassination of socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga during the coup that placed General Luis García Meza in power in 1980.
Specialist districts highlight, however, that the series of coups d’état in Bolivia was cut off after the beginning of the constitutional government of Hernán Siles Suazo in 1982, which opened a long democratic period, although the country continued to experience internal conflicts and political crises.
One of those critical moments was in 2019, when the then socialist president Evo Morales sought to be re-elected after almost 14 years in power and denounced a coup against him, a statement that some share and others reject.
Morales announced his resignation after the military suggested he do so amid street protests and allegations of irregularities in his electoral victory by the Organization of American States (OAS).
“Amazing”
The new accusation of an attempted coup in Bolivia launched on Wednesday by President Luis Arce has caught the attention of various observers.
“This surprised me quite a bit,” says Thyne, one of the co-authors of the global study on coups d’état in the world.
“The OAS and a more general anti-coup norm have taken hold in Latin America, making any coup in the region quite shocking. Bolivia has been a democracy since 1982 and seemed to have moved past the most recent electoral turmoil of 2019-20,” the expert tells BBC Mundo.
Zúñiga, who had been dismissed as head of the Bolivian Army on Tuesday for threatening statements he made against Morales, declared during the coup that “the Armed Forces intend to restructure democracy, to make it a true democracy.”
But your movement lacked support from other military sectors And later the general himself accused President Arce of having told him to bring the armored vehicles out onto the streets to increase his popularity in the midst of the economic and political crisis that the country is going through.
Thyne calls that “one of the dumbest accusations” he’s ever heard. “There are millions of better ways to stimulate political support. “This only demonstrated the weakness of a president who already had difficulty showing strength,” he points out.
On the other hand, historian Contreras considers it possible that the government attempted a self-coup.
“This government is so weak and the situation is so delicate that anything can happen,” he maintains.
In recent months, Bolivia has had street protests and road blockades amid a dollar shortage, a drop in international reserves and growing difficulties importing fuel.
Added to this is a dispute within the ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) between Arce and Morales, who intends to return to the presidency in the 2025 elections despite the doubts that this generates from a legal point of view.
Jean Pierre Lavaud, a French sociologist who has investigated the sociopolitical processes of Bolivia, considers that in the country “the main actors of instability of the (past) era are not the same as now.”
“The big current problem,” Lavaud tells BBC Mundo, “is created by the internal struggle in the MAS.”
“We don’t know what is going to happen,” he concludes. “Bolivia is always surprising.”
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