Lucero is 28 years old and since she was 20 she has spent most of the day sitting behind a small stall selling corn in Plaza Murillo, headquarters of the Bolivian Government in La Paz. On Wednesday, around three in the afternoon, she saw how armored Army cars entered at full speed through one of the side streets. She didn’t give much importance to the matter because she thought it was “a military exhibition or something like that.” Things changed when the soldiers began to fire tear gas. Lucero took her baby in her arms and fled towards a corner. “Everyone was running, because the gas was already very strong,” she says. Dolores, 20, also sells corn. She resisted the gas for a few minutes and was able to see how the tank driven by General Juan José Zúñiga, dismissed 24 hours earlier as head of the Army by the president, Luis Arce, ran over the small green grilled door of the Quemado Palace. “I was very scared, the soldiers were shouting that we had to leave, but we never understood what was happening,” she says. On Thursday, the door bears the scars of the attack, guarded by 17 police officers. If one is not informed, those twisted irons are the only evidence that there has been an attempted coup d’état in Bolivia.
General Zúñiga is imprisoned in La Paz along with a dozen soldiers who joined Wednesday’s riot. It is possible that he will spend up to 30 years in prison, a sentence that will be added to the dismissal he suffered for threatening former President Evo Morales on television. The soldier said that he was willing to arrest Morales if he insisted on being a candidate in the 2025 general elections. Arce had no choice but to fire him, a decision that surely was not easy for him: both are very close friends and every Sunday they play together basketball. The rebellion ended as quickly as it had begun. The president appointed a new head of the Army, arrested Zúñiga and celebrated in Murillo Square with his followers that the house was in order. But the chronicle hides that the swell is rough in Bolivia.
The opposition to the government of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) initially repudiated Zúñiga’s rebellion, but the truce lasted only a few hours. On Wednesday night, the idea was already being raised that everything had been a setup by Arce to gain internal popularity and external support. Evo Morales, Arce’s political father and now in a hopeless fight with the president for control of the MAS, also joined in on the idea of a self-coup. The government then accused Morales of being a coup-monger. Political scientist Susana Bejarano has an alternative view. “The coup shows the weakness of the Arce government,” she says, “it is accused of not being able to make quick decisions. The waiting time between the dismissal and the appointment of the new head of the Army gives Zúñiga room to plan the madness he did. This management problem better explains what has happened. The attempted coup may give legitimacy to Arce, but in two days this will be over and Bolivia’s problems will still be there.”
Arce’s positive image has been plummeting since May, when it went from 34% to 28% in just one month, according to a survey by the Diagnosis consultancy. The causes must be sought in the economic crisis: in Bolivia there is a lack of fuel due to the shortage of dollars to import, inflation is growing and the idea that everything will be worse next year has taken hold. The social mood is not the best for a president who will be seeking re-election in a year. The dispute between Arce and Morales is being played out in this dark scenario. “Arce sees a threat in Morales in the sense that both are candidates in the 2025 elections,” says Raúl Peñaranda, analyst and director of the news portal Digital compass“The president is weak, he doesn’t make decisions, the economy is bad. In three years of government, the president has given only six press conferences. And Evo is the opposite, he is a steamroller, although he doesn’t have much support among the electorate either,” he adds.
When Zúñiga attacked the Palacio Quemado on Wednesday, Bolivians rushed to the markets and stores and packed the gas stations. Fearful that a worsening political crisis would later turn into shortages, they stood in line for up to four hours to fill up their gas tank or buy food. You can’t blame them. With 39 coups d’état since 1946, both successful and unsuccessful, they have a lot of experience in testing democracy. The reflection translates into high social mobilization in the face of any threat. On Thursday, getting down from the city of El Alto, where the airport is located, to the city of La Paz took two hours, more than four times the usual time. The social organizations, strong in that worker and peasant municipality of more than a million people, had decided to cut the main highway in support of Arce. There were also social movements gathered in Plaza Murillo, although perhaps not as many as the president would have expected.
Arce’s challenge is to recover the mystique of the best times of the MAS, when the price of gas, Bolivia’s main export product, was through the roof and the economy was humming. It won’t be easy for him, explains Diego Ayo, doctor in Political Science. “In 2006, with Morales, an ascending phase began that is now in decline both politically and economically. When the problem is in both factors at the same time, normal norms are broken and anything can happen,” says Ayo. Zúñiga’s uprising has to do with this path towards the implausible. “Zúñiga believes that he is still in 1981 and that he must be the assistant of Luis García Meza, the worst dictator we had in history. When he makes his statements against Morales in front of the press, emboldened and flouting the Constitution, he launches into the most vulgar outrage. “Arce simply gets the clumsiness of a military man out of his hands,” he says.
This is the only way to explain why Lucero, the corn seller in Plaza Murillo, believed on Wednesday that the violent irruption of the armored cars was part of a military spectacle. This is how unexpected and implausible the failed coup d’état in Bolivia was.
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