Coup Attempt in Bolivia
bloomberg.comI’ve been trying to get a sense of how much of the military is actually behind this. Current reporting seems a bit confused. For example, I’ve seen multiple articles say that “2 tanks” are outside the government palace, but I’ve yet to see any photos or videos demonstrating that. All I’ve seen so far are a handful of images like in the article showing uniformed troops, and one video showing an armored vehicle ramming a building (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c288eewr1wko.amp ). Best I can tell that is a Tiger armored vehicle. I’m wondering if this is a case of reporters calling any military vehicle a “tank” or if there are actual tanks (which for Bolivia would mean the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK-105_Kürassier or possibly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EE-9_Cascavel depending on you definition of “tank”).
At some point hopefully someone with knowledge of Bolivian Army insignia will chime in and identify which units are participating in this coup.
Yeah, Bolivian sources also used the word "tanque" for vehicles that clearly were not tanks.
From the article
"Bolivia is among the world’s most politically turbulent nations, having had nearly 200 coups and revolutions since it won independence from Spain two centuries ago. Morales was ousted by the army as recently as 2019 after a disputed election."
And how many of them were with the support of CIA ?
Apparently a general, Juan José Zúñiga was removed as commander of the Bolivian army yesterday, and he responded with this. Makes it a bit understandable why they would want to get rid of him.
but steve gets celebrated when he did it
It looks like it already failed: https://www.reddit.com/r/BalticSSRs/comments/1dpbto6/bolivia...
Sounds like the plotters didn't secure the TV station first.
Rookie mistake.
Follow the money.
NB: the lazy pattern of linking to a brief microblog post rather than giving the payload text is one of my long-standing pet peeves. Particularly as such sites have a longstanding tendency to die (e.g., Google+, Ello, Imzy, Posterous, Blogger, ...)
And for those unable or unwilling to view The Site Formerly Known as Twitter, the payload is:
Archive link: <https://archive.is/JjyYL>Elon Musk: "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." Bolivia just stopped him from mining in their country. I'd say they dealt with it pretty well.Interested tidbit of historical information.
I was in Bolivia during the event. It was not a real "coup" and it was in general a pretty uneventful military vs government dispute. Locals were a bit upset that the media did so much fuss about something that was not a big deal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c288eewr1wko might be a better source. It's not paywalled, for one.
I find the BBC is too willing to run with anything when it comes to breaking news. Longer lead time pieces using BBC reporters with better edited content they do great on, but they have proven over and over they will relay anything when it comes to breaking news, and that they do especially poor when using freelance reporters for breaking news.
Ido Vock, who has the BBC byline, is a freelance journalist not a BBC reporter. https://muckrack.com/ido-vock
Marcelo Rochabrun from the Bloomberg piece is Bloomberg's Lima Bureau Chief. https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/AWGVgQgsdOs/marcelo-rochab...
I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the population support the coup.
South America has a history of military dictatorship but after the pendulum swings enough to the other side people seem to lose their memory a bit.
Most of them funded by the US.
Democracy doesn't work in a US-dominant world. My country is nowhere near Africa yet there have been 7 coup attemps, 4 successful, most backed by US in her 100 year history[2]. The last one didn't succeed and the US is currently protecting the leader of the attempt, refusing to give him us back.
Arab leaders are likewise domestically widely regarded as sockpuppets of the USA. On the rare occasion a democratic election happens, the president suddenly dies, gets assasinated, or a coup d'état happens and gets hanged. Off the top of my head see [2] for an example.
This is not to say democracy would work in a Russia- or China- dominant world. It seems democracy only works for the nations who can sufficiently defend against infiltration by the NSA/foreign intelligence agency of the dominant power. And I don't think that's easy, or feasible at all. You can't expect an African nation of 10M population who gained independence 2 decades ago to have the skilled people to be able to conduct this sort of intelligence operations.
And of course, the US is the peacekeeper of the world, only bringing democracy and welfare to the poor nations held back by their authoritarian leaders and backward ideologies and religions. Long live Imperium Americana!
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Egyptian_coup_d%27%C3%A9t...
For those downvoting, it's no secret and has a long history. See United States involvement in regime change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
im noticing lately that comments critical of America is routinely downvoted here. All of what you wrote holds true.
I think blaming the US every time a developing nation screws up is a little bit of a tired trope.
Not a trope when its true and factual. Hell, ex-CIA directors have even admitted it in books and TV! Most Americans don't like hearing that their government can be one of the "bad guys".
This would be true if there wasn't a huge list of coup attempts in developing countries backed by the U.S. dating back almost a hundred years up until today. It's not a conspiracy, the U.S. has engaged and continues to engage in political interventions world over when they deem it necessary.
Lately? HN is a forum derived from an American company and promoting Silicon Valley culture. Most of the points of view of everything (not only politics) are strongly skewed towards American culture and beliefs. I would find it surprising if it was different .
Roughly 10% of HN is in SFBA, 50% in US, and 30% in Europe. SFBA people are a small minority here.
There'd probably be a fairly strong seeding effect though.
And HN is anything but a random sample people from a given country; to be part of the tech scene you kinda have to take an interest in what is happening in the US and it certainly pays to be pro-SV since historically they provided a lot of well paid jobs. That'd be a huge bias in opinion.
I think it's usually a bad idea to attribute any broad sentiment to HN as a whole, but if you wanted to make the point that it's a tech industry forum and thus shares (with many counterexamples!) tech industry biases, that's a much more grounded thing to say than that it's a "Silicon Valley" site.
I will say this, though, and it's a wild guess so take it as you will: the median opinion among American tech industry workers about the government of Bolivia is: not, in any way at all, ever once thinking or caring about the government of Bolivia.
I wonder how many use VPN and/or Tor.
I would guess somewhere between 5-15%, but I would be surprised if it was over 10%.
Crazy they just green lighted the whole segment of the population who were fighting for their own destiny.Democratic governments and political parties, unions, student organizations, journalists, artists, teachers, intellectuals, opponents to the military juntas and left-wing sympathizers (including socialists, peronists, anarchists and communists)
Doesn’t look like it
The unions declared an indefinite general strike
https://x.com/redstreamnet/status/1806068831984783583
And as I write this it seems like they’re outnumbered in the plaza
I wouldn't be surprised either, seeing as Arce has gone off-script as if he's been bought and paid for. He wasn't really elected himself, he was elected as a proxy for Morales who had been overthrown and exiled by a coup. He's followed that up with a complete break with Morales.
What wouldn't surprise me even more is if this coup were staged to allow Arce the excuse to put the country into martial law before being voted out.
-----
Evo Morales’ party expels President Luis Arce and deepens political war in Bolivia
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-10-05/evo-mora...
In Bolivia, an “Intense” Battle Between Arce and Morales
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/in-bolivia-an-inte...
How exactly did Arce go off script?
Arce has not been a proxy for Morales, which is who people were actually voting for. That was the script.
A significant part, perhaps. Latin America is very polarized. But apparently not the majority. Luiz Arce got the absolute majority of votes in the last election, which was organized precisely by the group that did the last coup and was against him and his political party.
Arce is the formal head of MAS, which is Morales' party. MAS won a fair election in 2020 after the "coup" in which Jeanine Anez assumed power after Morales fled the country along with the constitutional line of succession after widespread violent protests following an unprecedented 4th term election (which in turn followed his unprecedented 3rd term election, which in turn followed his unprecedented 2nd term election --- prior to Morales, successive terms were forbidden) that was broadly and, if you care what OAS says, officially deemed fraudulent. Anez, an unapologetic right-winger appointed by standard constitutional succession rules, promised elections, delivered them, and conceded power peacefully to her MAS successor, who almost immediately had her arrested and has imprisoned her ever since.
This isn't so much my take as that of the European Parliament and Human Rights Watch.
> if you care what OAS says, officially deemed fraudulent.
I do not care. Later studies contradicted and criticized OAS conclusion. OAS was a player in the 2019 coup:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/26/bolivia-d...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3621475
> Anez, an unapologetic right-winger appointed by standard constitutional succession rules,
What rules? She was not Evo Morales successor. The correct successors were being persecuted and had access denied to the government buildings. And during Anez illegitimate government, she used violence and the police to attack protesters and to persecute the opposition [1]. They tried to postpone the election, but they had no popular support and their coup was unsustainable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senkata_and_Sacaba_massacres
> Later studies contradicted and criticized OAS conclusion.
They criticized the statistical analysis which was not actually the main evidence OAS gave. It's just what everyone focused on.
The main evidence was someone replaced the servers used to transcribe/verify tally sheets bypassing auditing and accessed the machines while they were counting and a they found changes in the minutes and the forgeries of poll officials' signatures.
Eh, there's a lot of criticism of the OAS report, and a lot of it is persuasive. It's hard to argue that Morales should have been allowed in the race in the first place, though.
Anez was another in a long line of Bolivian heads of state that terribly abused their power. If you're trying to position me to defend the right-wing elite of any country in South America, you're barking up the wrong tree. But Anez assumed the role of interim president after a constitutional crisis, promised prompt elections, and peacefully transferred power back to Morales party, which then immediately had her imprisoned.
That's a really generous reading of events. My reading was that Anez and her cohort orchestrated a successful coup, but couldn't hold power and were forced to concede and hold elections, in which the party which had been deposed in Anez's coup again won the majority vote
Again: the only reason Anez, who occupied the same spot in the Bolivian line of succession that Anthony Blinken does in ours, assumed power was that 3 of Morales supporters higher in the order than her resigned. That's an awfully elaborate coup design!
I wonder why they resigned... Just because they were being attacked, their houses burned, with family members being kidnapped, all while they were prevented from entering government buildings....
Linera left with Morales. The President of the House apparently left to Argentina. but Salvatierra didn't flee? Resigned of her own accord.
And, again: Anez called prompt elections and peacefully handed power back to MAS less than a year later. She had every opportunity to avoid that: the election took place during the start of the COVID pandemic.
Anez is not good. I don't dispute MAS appears to be the better steward of Bolivia. But Morales had plenty of time to set up a constitutional succession and build a long-term movement (note that Morales and Arce hate each other, and there are rumors that the coup has more to do with that relationship than anything else). Instead, he tried to secure an unprecedented 4th term, after his unprecedented 3rd term, after his unprecedented 2nd term. Is it any wonder that there was chaos in 2019? If Morales had just annointed a successor, MAS would have won in a walk.
> Linera left with Morales. The President of the House apparently left to Argentina. but Salvatierra didn't flee? Resigned of her own accord.
Salvatierra explicitly tells in interviews that one of the reasons for her resignation was the threat of the coup violence. That in the moment of her resignation there were already outside her house a violent mob ready to attack if she did not resign. In a context where other MAS members already had their houses attacked, their relatives kidnapped and tortured.
> And, again: Anez called prompt elections and peacefully handed power back to MAS less than a year later. She had every opportunity to avoid that: the election took place during the start of the COVID pandemic.
She tried to avoid the elections during pandemic, but was forced to retreat the proposal.And as I said, all recent soft coups in Latin America involve making elections some time later, just after ensuring that the overthrown group would not win (which failed in Bolivia because of MAS popular support).
Yes, Morales should have annointed a successor. But even his extra terms were more democratic than what the opposition did in response. And it is a little naive thinking that this would have prevented a coup or some other reaction if the parties that Morales defeated in the elections still were defeated by his successor.
What the opposition did in response was appoint, through the documented constitutional line of succession, an interim president who immediately called elections and peacefully transferred power to their opposition, which promptly imprisoned them. I understand pretty well the competing narratives about 2019, but it is very difficult for me to get past that basic fact pattern.
All recent coups in Latin America (and several coups outside) follows the exact same script: overthrown the government and say that is temporary and you will organize new elections. During this time, use propaganda, media, repression and sometimes new laws to weaken the overthrowned group so that they will lose the elections. Foreign countries that support the coup can just initially say that they are worried with the "crisis", but then will rapidly recognize the new elected government, avoiding the embarass of openly support an obvious dictatorship.
This same script is being used at least for 20 years now (I remember being used in Equador). But its last part failed in Bolivia.
That's exactly what didn't happen here!
it sounds like the kirchners' allies in bolivia are going through the kind of crisis we were headed for here in argentina before they lost power here in the election in november. not that we aren't still in a crisis, but we have two things going for us:
1. recognizing the wrongheadedness of the kirchners' policies, we elected an opposition leader who favors capitalism. unfortunately, he's a total nutbag, and his advocacy of freedom seems to be strictly limited to freedom of enterprise (not, for example, freedom of abortion, freedom to protest, or freedom to use public transit anonymously)
2. we aren't a petro-state
> we elected an opposition leader who favors capitalism. unfortunately, he's a total nutbag
many such cases!
no, nothing like this has ever happened before in recorded history. probably that's fortunate
i mean people have elected all kinds of madmen as heads of state, so that's not the unprecedented part. but i don't think any country has ever elected a minarchist as a head of state. two weeks ago he gave a speech at a cato forum here describing the state he now heads as by nature a violent and criminal organization. he may be right about that, but generally believing such things makes you unelectable
we are in uncharted waters. this is going to be exciting!
You're closer to the action than me and very probably much better informed, but the opinion I've formed from across the Southern Pacific is that Millei's 'minarchist' rhetoric is mostly theatre and that he's in fact very similar to the many leaders that have been put in place or helped into power in South America before by the (mostly external) financial interests who want to keep plundering and extracting its resources.
he gives every sign of sincerely believing it except for donating his salary (as he did when he was just a legislator)
certainly external financial interests are helping him a great deal, and there's been significant plundering historically, but it remains to be seen what happens with that. since perón, investing in non-portable assets in argentina has historically been a 'heads i win, tails you lose' deal with the government; your losses will be privatized, but your profits will be nationalized. so generally it's the argentine politicians doing the plundering, not barrick gold or the ypf investors
Peronism is weird and incomparable with other non-right wing movements. Argentina's modern history is largely defined by left-wing Peronists vs. right-wing Peronists.
Hence, you can't evaluate other countries governments based on whether they're aligned with the Kirchners or not, it says almost nothing other than they're not on the extreme right. You have to judge them on their own terms.
the policies that led to the bolivian crisis were the same policies the kirchnerists were applying in argentina; it was an ideological alliance, not one of convenience