The short-lived coup attempt in Bolivia this Wednesday exposes the height of lThe tensions that split that country in the middle. But, at the same time, the speed with which it was neutralized stands out in this episode with rancid aromas of a past of incessant institutional crises and militarism.
It is a piece of maturity that even brought together President Luis Arce and his poisoned internal enemy, Evo Morales, in the same sentence. And even, from prison, he added the repudiation of former governor Fernando Camacho and former president Jeanine Añez, whom the leader of the mutiny, General Juan José Zúñiga, intended to free with his crazy carapintada-style rebellion.
The outcome is good news for a region that still has serious fragility. It is enough to note that in Brazil prominent Bolsonaro supporters celebrated the coup attempt, not its result.
Arce now has an opportunity to consolidate itself due to the strong support it received when facing the attempt. But it is not clear how he will escape the social and economic crisis that corners his government and feeds Evo with his rivalryZúñiga, who was removed from the leadership of the Army hours before his failed mutiny for announcing that he would arrest the former president, is a chaotic result of that anarchy that Evo Morales has sought to deepen in order to pave the way at any cost to the Palacio Quemado.
In the hours that the insurrection occurred, new road closures and more protests by truck drivers due to the lack of fuel and foreign currency were scheduled. All amid widespread government disarray which even announced the arrival of fuel supplies from its Russian ally, news denied by the state oil company itself, YPFB.
The total battle between Arce and Evo ended with the division of the ruling MAS party, created by these two men when they were allies. This conflict has two roots. One of them is the irresponsible appetite for returning to power the former president, who constitutionally does not have that right, as noted by the Supreme Court that disqualified him because he had already been in office three times.
But Evo does not usually respect those limits and launched into dynamite the institutional and legislative support of Arce to create a crisis that would undermine the government and make its return to power essential. That game with fire has had this very serious consequence.
A central chapter of the political soap opera is the stoppage of its economy. In the early 2000s, Bolivia was growing robustly thanks to natural gas exports. Morales, elected in 2005, was lucky because fluid prices doubled to reach record levels. The country was a success, individual income increased, infrastructure was improved, unemployment fell. Arce was the Minister of Economy.
Miracle began losing muscle towards the end of the second decade of the century and never recovered. That is why there was resistance among the MAS’ own bases to Evo seeking a fourth consecutive term in the October 2019 elections. Thus, when manipulated the election result To avoid a ballot that was impossible to win, the conditions were in place for a popular outbreak that ended up tearing his government to pieces.
Evo fell but not from a blow as he claimed. On the contrary, he resigned from the presidency in November of that year in compliance a request signed by Juan Carlos Huarachi, leader of the legendary Central Obrera Boliviana (COB).
The former president went to Mexico and there created the narrative of the coup, which an addicted justice took it as true and produced a series of processes and ordered, among others, the arrests of Añez, the interim president that Congress appointed to fill the power vacuum left by Evo’s departure, and Camacho, governor of Santa Cruz, two of his internal enemies.
Evo returned to Bolivia with the aura of someone who achieves freedom from his tyrants and began to seek the path to the presidency again, denying the right of justice to prevent that advance. Zúñiga’s ephemeral mutiny should be a warningnot because of what the military can do, but because of the passionate suicide of its political class.
