On Sunday, the head of Bolivia’s military called on Evo Morales to resign from the presidency. Minutes later, Morales was on a plane to Cochabamba where he did just that. These facts leave little doubt that what happened in Bolivia this weekend was a military coup, the first such event in Latin America since the 2009 military coup against the Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. (The 2012 and 2016 impeachments of Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff are widely viewed as “parliamentary coups”.)
The mainstream press has bent over backwards, and tied itself in more than a few tangled knots, to avoid drawing this conclusion. The Wall Street Journal celebrates Morales’s ouster as “a democratic breakout”. The New York Times is characteristically more circumspect, hemming and hawing about how “the forced ouster of an elected leader is by definition a setback for democracy” but might also “help Bolivia restore its wounded democracy”. This head-spinning rhetoric does not prevent the New York Times from swiftly dismissing left-of-center politicians’ “predictable” claims that what happened was a coup.
The Trump administration has unsurprisingly welcomed Morales’s fall. The White House says “Morales’s departure preserves democracy,” and argues: “These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail.” The foreign minister of Brazil’s far-right government has similarly declared: “There is no coup in Bolivia.”
It is hardly surprising that conservative governments and powerful media outlets applaud Morales’s forcing out and dismiss the claim it constitutes a coup. More surprising is that leftist commentators, including Raquel Gutiérrez and Raúl Zibechi, have taken a similar stance. Zibechi attributes Morales’s fall to a “popular uprising”. This claim cannot be lightly dismissed. It points to the massive popular demonstrations that confronted Morales in the weeks after the 20 October election. Protesters rallied around two main claims.
The first is that Morales should not have been on the ballot at all in 2019 because he lost a February 2016 referendum on indefinite presidential re-election, which a slight majority of voters rejected. Morales overcame this hurdle when Bolivia’s electoral court declared in 2017 that not allowing Morales to run for indefinite re-election violated his “human rights”. Many Bolivians disagreed with this controversial decision, including some who previously supported Morales.
The second is that the 20 October election was fraudulent. Suspicion centered in particular around a 24-hour suspension of the live transmission of “rapid-count” results of the election. At the time of the suspension, on election night, the count showed Morales leading by less than 10% over his nearest rival, Carlos Mesa. This would have triggered a December runoff election, but when the transmission of the vote count resumed a day later, Morales had the requisite 10% lead needed to avoid a runoff. Suspicion that this change was due to fraud led to large and growing protests in the week after the vote, with Morales eventually agreeing to a binding audit of the vote by the Organization of American States. Mesa also initially agreed to the OAS audit, but withdrew his agreement under pressure from far-right leaders, who rejected the elections entirely, and began to call for Morales’s resignation.
On Sunday, the OAS delivered the results of its audit, which found irregularities in the vote process extensive enough that the OAS said it could not certify the vote as accurate. As promised, Morales accepted this finding, and immediately called for new elections. This is what protesters had initially demanded. But in the weeks after 20 October, the principal demand changed from a new election to Morales’s resignation.
This demand was initially voiced by Bolivia’s far right, centered in the lowland department of Santa Cruz. Yet, in the days before Morales’s fall, the demand for his resignation was also voiced by popular movements, including the miners’ union and the Bolivian Workers’ Central, which on 10 November somewhat tentatively called on Morales to “reflect on resigning if doing so would be for the good of the country”.
For Zibechi, Gutiérrez, and other leftists, popular movements’ calls for Morales to resign prove his fall was not a coup. This view, however, ignores the critical timeline by which Morales resigned only after he was pressured to do so by the military. Unlike all other actors in Bolivia, when the military “suggested” Morales leave office he had no choice but to say yes, or risk tremendous violence. Unfortunately, events of the last several days suggest that the coup will not end the violence and chaos gripping Bolivia.
Since Morales resigned, many elected officials of his Mas party have also resigned their posts, claiming that they are doing so for fear of their own and their families’ safety. Video shows Morales’s house being ransacked on Sunday and chilling instances of police abuse of power in the last several days. On Tuesday night, the far-right vice-president of Bolivia’s senate swore herself in as president, to a nearly empty legislative chamber. Mas senators boycotted the proceedings, with at least some saying they did so for fear of their safety.
Whatever the broad array of forces that contributed to Morales’s downfall, the fact that the military pushed him out has emboldened the worst elements of Bolivian society. It may also embolden popular movements to strike back, as has occurred so often in Bolivia’s history. Indeed, predominantly indigenous protesters in El Alto, La Paz and elsewhere are in the streets denouncing the burning of the indigenous wiphala flag and growing military repression of the populace. Some protesters are now calling for civil war.
The debate over whether or not Morales’s ouster constitutes a coup is revealing. Those who deny that there has been a coup – Trump, Bolsonaro and mainstream press – express the predictable and longstanding animosity of the powerful towards leftist governments that challenge the status quo and offer the powerless hope for an alternative. For those in this camp, Morales’s fall is fully (or largely) legitimate and something to be welcomed as the return of democracy, regardless of how it occurred. The denunciation of Morales’s ouster as a coup – the position of leading leftist figures in Latin America, the US and UK – reveals an equally longstanding, and, yes, predictable concern with military intervention in the political process, particularly when this is hitched to the type of oligarchic rightwing revanchist racism now on display in Bolivia.
But the Bolivian conflict is not black and white. What we need at this moment is not a simplistic condemnation or uncritical defense of Morales and the Mas. We need to recognize the multiplicity of forces, including popular movements, which challenged Morales in recent weeks (and often for much longer).
We also need to recognize that, right now, it is not popular movements that have taken charge in Bolivia, but a Bible-thumping racist right that has burned the wiphala, promised that “Pachamama will never return to the [presidential] palace” and chillingly called on the military and police to “pacify” Bolivia’s streets. The sad result of this is chaos and violence by state security forces and at least some Mas supporters. At the end of the day the most important question may not be whether or not this was a coup, but what comes next? The picture so far is decidedly grim.
Gabriel Hetland is an assistant professor of Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies and Sociology at University at Albany, SUNY
