Coups ain’t wot they used to be …

Bolivia’s President Luis Arce with General Juan Jose Zúñiga on the Day of the Army, December 2022.

ON TUESDAY Bolivia’s President Luis Arce fired General Zúñiga for threatening to detain former President Evo Morales should he seek another term in the 2025 elections.

ON WEDNESDAY Zúñiga led hundreds of heavily armed soldiers, faces covered, to surround the former government palace where he declared, “there will be a new cabinet of ministers … our State cannot continue like this. We want to recover our homeland.”  An armored vehicle was slammed into the gates of the Palacio Quemado, and the soldiers invaded it.

ON THURSDAY Zúñiga and Vice Adm. Juan Arnez Salvador, former head of the Navy, were charged with  terrorism and armed uprising.

WSWS, June 27 2024 – Short-lived military coup fails against Arce in Bolivia

There was a time, and not so long ago, when the inner circle of a comprador ruling class in Latin America – alarmed at the leftism of an elected government and, if not having Uncle Sam onside as accessory before  the fact, confident of his blessing after – could make a few calls to usher in one of those military coups the continent once excelled at, with all the usual trimmings of death squad and disappearance, grim repression and rule of law replaced by rule of fear.

The Bolivian government of Luis Arce should have been a case in point. It was and (since a coup of four hours, from kick-off to ringleader in handcuffs, may have passed you by) still is intent on joining BRICS. It has severed ties with Israel, ¹ part nationalised oil and other resources, and for good measure saw its president seated by Vladimir Putin’s side at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum a fortnight ago. ² What could be more infuriating to any self respecting shadowy junta; what more calculated to see it flick switches and pull levers to work that old familiar magic by which such a government is notified by tanks on the palace lawn that its services are no longer required?

All the more so when high inflation grips the country (as it does most others) and a rift between Sr. Arce and Evo Morales – another parliamentary socialist who knows a thing or two about far right coups – weakens the governing party. Said rift being more personal than political, and on the face of it given the lie by Arce’s firing of would-be king-maker, Juan Jose Zúñiga, for issuing threats to Morales. ³

In the late 20th century this would have been a walk in the park. But then, US backed coups – be they in Latin America or Belarus, Kazakhstan or Syria – ain’t wot they used to be. In fact the only ones that seem to work these days are those that eschew US backing in favour of that of The People. Witness those which ejected France from, and weakened the USA within, the West African Sahel. Most recently in Niger.

If you’re still reading, that’s likely because it’s been clear to you – perhaps for longer than it has to me – that our systemically power-serving media will be of meagre value in helping us make sense of what happened in Bolivia on Wednesday, June 26. Might I therefore suggest this, from the Socialist Equality Party hosts of World Socialist Website. I’m not an SEP member and it’s off the scale unlikely I’ll ever become one. I do share a great deal of their analysis of what ails the world but, as I put it three years ago:

I reject revolution as envisaged by Marx and modified by Lenin because, in the West at least, that ship has sailed. Seizing state power is not going to happen for two reasons. One, the industrial conditions so ably depicted by Marx and Engels no longer hold. With manufacturing exported to the global south, the proletariat has lost both its muscle and the conditions whereby its exploitation was experienced en masse.

Two, the British and all other Western ‘democracies’ are armed to the teeth, versed in the black arts of counterinsurgency … and equipped with tools of surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of the twentieth century totalitarianisms.

Nevertheless, this WSWS piece on the coup and its context supplies more detail – and richer by far analysis – than you’re likely to find in Guardian or Economist.

Short-lived military coup fails against Arce in Bolivia

Andrea Lobo,27 June 2024

Bolivian President Luis Arce named a new military high command on Wednesday in the wake of an abortive military coup launched by the former commander of the Army, Gen. Juan José Zúñiga.

In one of the most short-lived attempts in Bolivia’s long history of coups, just over four hours passed between Zúñiga’s declaration of his bid to overthrow the government and his arrest at 7 p.m. (local time). 

On Tuesday, Arce deposed General Zúñiga from his post for threatening to detain former President Evo Morales if the latter seeks another term in the August 2025 elections.

A day later, Zúñiga led hundreds of heavily armed soldiers with faces covered to surround the former government palace, Palacio Quemado, which is adjacent to the new building in the capital, La Paz. 

At the Plaza Murillo in front of the palace, Zúñiga declared, “There will be a new cabinet of ministers, surely there will be changes, but our State cannot continue like this. We want to recover our homeland.”

An armored vehicle was then slammed into the gates of the Palacio Quemado, and the soldiers invaded it with rifles and shields.

Inside the building, Arce unsuccessfully ordered Zúñiga to remove the troops.

Protests and a general strike had been called by Arce, his ministers, Evo Morales and the main union body, the Bolivian Workers Central (COB). Hundreds of demonstrators began gathering around the Plaza Murillo to tell the heavily armed soldiers to “Get out!” 

Morales cited reports that snipers had been placed around Plaza Murillo as proof that the coup had been prepared beforehand …

Read the full piece at WSWS …

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1. Severing ties with Israel may be of little direct concern to Bolivia’s elite but, insofar as it must irk Washington, is of no small indirect concern. As a comprador class, that elite operates on US sufferance.
2. I dare say the ‘shadowy junta’ can live with those seating arrangements at St Peterburg. Less so with what they symbolise; viz, deals with Russian and Chinese companies in the critical arenas of lithium and other mineral extraction in Washington’s back yard.
3. Whatever the nature of the Arce-Morales spat, for Arce to allow a top general to get so far above his station as to threaten Morales with jail time for the crime of running for re-election would have sent the clearest possible signal that his administration had lost the will to live.