Lucero is 28 years old and since she was 20 she has spent most of the day sitting behind a small corn stand in Plaza Murillo, the seat of the Bolivian government in La Paz. On Wednesday, around three in the afternoon, she saw how armoured vehicles of the Army entered at full speed through one of the side streets. She did not 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 throw tear gas. Lucero took her baby in her arms and fled to 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 gate of the Palacio Quemado. “I was very scared, the soldiers shouted that we had to leave, but we never understood what was happening,” she says. On Thursday, the gate bears the scars of the attack, guarded by 17 police officers. Unless one is informed, these twisted pieces of metal are the only evidence that there has been an attempted coup 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, he was already agitating the idea that everything had been a setup by Arce to gain internal popularity and external support. Evo Morales, Arce’s political father and today in a hopeless confrontation with the president in the fight for control of the MAS, also joined the idea of the self-coup. The Government then accused Morales of being a coup plotter. Political scientist Susana Bejarano has an alternative view. “The riot 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 that he did. This management problem better explains what has happened. The attempted coup d’état 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 in decline since May, when it went from 34% to 28% in just one month, according to a survey by the consulting firm Diagnosis. 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 has taken hold that everything will be worse next year. Social humor is not the best for a president who in a year will go for his re-election. In that shadowy scenario the dispute between Arce and Morales is played out. “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 markets and shops and packed gas stations. Fearful that a worsening political crisis would later lead to shortages, they waited in line for up to four hours to fill up their gas tanks or buy food. You can’t blame them. With 39 coups since 1946, both successful and unsuccessful, they have plenty of experience in testing democracy. The reflex is translated into high social mobilization in the face of any threat. On Thursday, going down from the city of El Alto, where the airport is, to the city of La Paz took two hours, more than four times the usual time. Social organizations, strong in this working-class and peasant municipality of more than a million people, had decided to block the main road in support of Arce. There were also social movements gathered in Plaza Murillo, although perhaps not as many as the president had hoped.
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 sky-high and the economy was booming. It won’t be easy, explains Diego Ayo, a 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 canons 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 have had in history. When he makes his statements against Morales in front of the press, emboldened and disregarding the Constitution, he launches into the most vulgar outrage. Arce simply loses control of the clumsiness of a military man,” he says.
This is the only way to explain why Lucero, the corn vendor in Plaza Murillo, believed on Wednesday that the violent incursion of the armored cars was part of a military spectacle. That is how unexpected and implausible the failed coup d’état in Bolivia was.
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