On the afternoon of June 26, 2024, General Juan José Zúñiga entered Plaza Murillo in La Paz and declared that there was going to be a change of government in Bolivia. The soldier gave a brief speech surrounded by soldiers in balaclavas: “For many years an elite has taken charge of the country, destroying the homeland. “We are going to restructure democracy.” Minutes later, a tank knocked down the door of the Government Palace where President Luis Arce was.
The attempted coup in Bolivia was defused in a matter of hours, but the images revived the ghosts of the military regimes that dominated Latin America during the 20th century. Between 1945 and 2000, there were 109 coups in the region, according to figures from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois.
The wave of democratization of the 21st century reduced these events. However, over the past five years, the region has shown signs of increasing instability: in 2019, Evo Morales resigned from Bolivia’s presidency under pressure from mass protests and the armed forces. A few months later, Nayib Bukele stormed the Salvadoran Parliament with the army to force the approval of his reforms. The Peruvian president Pedro Castillo tried to carry out a self-coup to stop his dismissal in 2022. And in Brazil, thousands of Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed Congress after his defeat in the elections in what the police are investigating as an attempted coup d’état.
In total, since 2019 there has been one successful coup d’état, six failed attempts and two conspiracies that were discovered in time. In contrast, in the previous five years there were only two incidents, according to the Cline Center.
A deterioration of democracies
The application of the concept of coup d’état to these events is strongly debated. Marcela Ríos, director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), considers that coup attempts are not necessarily growing, but that there is a notable deterioration in democracies.
“The trend shows that, if at the beginning of the 21st century there was only one dictatorship, today we observe that four countries are clearly not democratic and with serious situations against human rights: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Furthermore, the situation in El Salvador deteriorates daily, with a president re-elected despite being expressly prohibited in the Constitution, and with the extension of a state of exception that violates rights and has 2% of the population in jail,” explains Ríos.
The latest International IDEA report warns that in the last five years the region has experienced more democratic contraction than expansion. In fact, the pollster Latinobarómetro found that support for democracy fell from 63% in 2010 to 48% in 2023.
Twenty presidents accused or convicted
The reasons for Latin Americans’ discontent with democracy are multiple. Recently, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) warned that the region could be suffering a new “lost decade” in economic matters, with expected growth of just 0.8% annually.
“The flame of the meager economic results is citizen discontent with the governments in power. In addition, we have the recent crisis of insecurity and expansion of organized crime, which is no longer a phenomenon of some countries or areas, but rather has the entire region in fear,” says Ríos.
Francisco Eguiguren, head of the Law department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and former Minister of Justice, adds that discontent with corruption is a breeding ground for authoritarianism. “The neoliberal scheme in many of our countries, for example, Peru, generated privatizations. For some governments that was a business,” he says.
Twenty Latin American presidents have been accused or convicted of corruption so far this century. The situation in Peru is especially discouraging: all living former presidents have been imprisoned, convicted or persecuted by justice, according to the report Latinobarómetro 2023.
“The perpetuation of these dynamics over time can end in democratic ruptures through various means. One of them: the self-coups —as in Peru with Castillo and before with Fujimori—; or in more traditional coups d’état like the one in Honduras in 2009,” adds Ríos.
From the military coup to the soft coup
The image of General Zúñiga trying to take power by force is already rare in Latin America. Professor Diana Higuita, author of ‘End of the coup d’état? From the palace revolution to the constitutional assault’explains that there is less and less acceptance of violent access to power.
“What has been happening is that political intrigues are resolved with other modalities” such as impeachment (impeachment) or legal wars. “We are not yet in a rise of dictatorships. What we see is a deterioration in the quality of democracy due to the crisis of representation and polarization,” he adds.
An example of this type of “soft blows” occurred during the election of Bernardo Arévalo as president of Guatemala in 2023. The attorney general of the Central American country, Consuelo Porras, who was on the list of “corrupt and undemocratic actors” of the State Government United, tried to invalidate the results of the elections. The European Parliament condemned the action as an attempted coup d’état.
“The parliamentary coup d’état or the soft coup has the paradox that the constitutional order is not formally broken. The problem is if you are using institutions as an instrument and distorting their purposes,” explains Eguiguren. Military coups may not be increasing, but there are many risk factors for democratic stability. Disenchantment, adds Eguiguren, can be dangerous.
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