The former Presidential Palace of Bolivia, which a group of rebel soldiers led by the recently dismissed Army Chief Juan José Zúñiga violently entered using a tank on Wednesday, is called the Burnt Palace. It is a nickname that it owes to an assault it suffered in 1875 when a mob threw lit torches from the nearby cathedral and caused a fire that disabled the seat of Government. The building, in Plaza Murillo in La Paz, was rebuilt; But since then it has witnessed dozens of violent mobilizations, uprisings and coups d’état that have marked its history.
The last of these episodes occurred this Wednesday. In the Casa Grande del Pueblo, the modern skyscraper built during the Government of Evo Morales next to the Palacio Quemado to house the executive power, President Luis Arce has called on the Bolivian people to mobilize to “confront any coup attempt” surrounded by his Cabinet . He then renewed the military leadership and the rebel military retreated on a day that will go down in the long list of chapters of instability in the Andean-Amazonian country.
According to a data analysis by American academics Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, Bolivia is the country that has suffered the most coups in the world since 1950: 23 in total, although 12 of them failed. “Depending on how it is counted, there are an extraordinary number of coups d’état,” acknowledges Bolivian historian and journalist Robert Brockmann. “If it is by number of presidents, you can’t really take them all into account because some lasted half an hour,” he says ironically.
If we take the period of military dictatorships between 1964 and 1982, where presidents of all political persuasions were forcibly overthrown, Brockmann highlights the coming to power of Hugo Banzer Suárez, who governed Bolivia for the first time between 1971 and 1978. “It was a hard right-wing coup with a lot of repression, but at the same time it brought, just like [Augusto] Pinochet, a period of great economic stability.” But while the Chilean dictator overthrew a democratically elected government, the Bolivian ruled among military dictatorships.
“He is a soldier who hit another soldier, who hit another soldier, who hit another soldier,” he lists, before citing the next stage of Bolivian history, between 1978 and 1982, a “horrible period of 10 governments, between civil, military and frustrated elections”, which gave way to another dictatorship, that of the military man Luis García Meza who governed Bolivia de facto between 1980 and 1981 after perpetrating a coup d’état with the advice of the Argentine military dictatorship and for which he murdered the charismatic socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz.
For Brockmann, it was a “disastrous period with massacres, persecutions, states of siege and drug trafficking” that greatly discredited the right and during which Bolivian society learned its lesson and fully embraced democracy in 1982 in elections won by a left-wing coalition. And although the government of Hernán Siles Suazo had to face the acute economic crisis that caused a stratospheric hyperinflation of 23,000% in 1985, this marked the end of coups d’état.
A weak army and a strong society
After the end of the period of military dictatorships, Bolivia experienced a stage of agreed democracy, in which those who came to power had to build alliances. In those years, there were crises and revolts such as the so-called water and gas wars, in which Bolivians rose up in defense of their resources. The last one caused the overthrow of former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who fled to the United States, and promoted the rise of Evo Morales to power with majority support of the population.
That allowed Bolivia’s first indigenous president to govern for more than a decade without the need for alliances. But it also led him to cling to power and change the laws to extend his mandate until the political crisis of 2019 broke out. Then, the population took to the streets en masse after elections in which Morales sought to be re-elected for the fourth consecutive time, which It took the Armed Forces out of the barracks and caused the resignation and flight of Evo Morales to Mexico, in an episode that the former president defined as a “coup d’état,” although that qualification has been the subject of dispute.
For the journalist and doctor in social research with specialization in Political Science Rafael Archondo, since democracy was reestablished in 1982, it cannot be said that it has been interrupted. “There have been 42 years of democratic life, of successive elected constitutional governments of various parties, where all the forces, even those who at some point took up arms, became elected authorities, and the presence of the military in national life has been completely insignificant,” he says. “We have not even had levels of military participation like what exists in Mexico where the military builds an airport or takes care of certain facilities.”
Archondo defends that neither in 2019 nor this Wednesday has there been a coup d’état, since general order was maintained and the military has not governed “not even a single minute.” And both he and Brockmann interpret the insurrection led by Zúñiga in Plaza Murillo as part of an internal confrontation in the ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), divided between former president Morales and his successor, Luis Arce, who is suffering the attacks of a strong economic crisis deepened by the lack of hydrocarbons and dollars.
“Today was a joke,” says Archondo. “That had no trace of a coup d’état. The coups d’état are carried out at dawn and their imperative order is to arrest the president, arrest the ministers, and close Congress. None of that happened today. It started at 4 in the afternoon and surprised everyone having a coffee and produced only one negative result, which was the breaking of the metal door of the old Government Palace.”
But beyond the real motives and intentions of what happened this Wednesday, the analyst highlights that all the crises experienced so far this century in Bolivia—from the fall of Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 to that of Evo Morales in 2019— have been resolved through institutional channels. “I believe that the fundamental reason for this entire process is that you have a very active, very politicized and very awake society and a very weak State, which has indeed been strengthened in this century, but which has never managed to gain a foothold against the wishes of society,” he defends. “There has not been, fortunately, a way to build a repressive, authoritarian or vertical State.”
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