Bolivian President Luis Arce tried to call the heads of the three armed forces to ask what the irregular troop movements that heralded the June 26 coup attempt meant, but none of them answered his calls. In November 2019, military commanders also stopped answering the phone to then-President Evo Morales. Shortly afterward, they appeared on television calling for his resignation, leading to his overthrow.
In five years, the Bolivian military leadership has twice rebelled against presidents of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). “The structural explanation is that the military is conservative and rejects any modification of the liberal order, especially the inclusion of indigenous people,” believes Reymi Ferreira, former Minister of Defense under Morales and university professor. “The military texts, their training, their conviction, make them see themselves as conservative agents of the existing order,” he adds.
For Ferreira, it is not strange that in these two rebellions “those who acted, Williams Kalimán, in 2019, and Juan José Zúñiga, now, were military friends of the Government; they adopted a radical rhetoric, which served them politically, but at the time of the conflict they returned to what they really thought.”
The governments of Evo Morales (2006-2019) took several measures, mostly symbolic, to change the military mentality, but their effect was ephemeral or counterproductive. In 2009, the Armed Forces adopted the wiphala, the indigenous flag, and incorporated it into their uniforms. In 2010, they changed their traditional motto of “Subordination and perseverance. Long live Bolivia!” by the Castro “Homeland or death. Overcome!”. In 2016, due to the Government’s agreements with the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA), they created an “anti-imperialist” school that all the country’s military personnel had to attend to advance to the rank of captain. Morales considered himself the “first common soldier president,” he met every Monday with the military command and raised his budget, which was 114 million dollars in 2001, to 483 million in 2018, four times more. He was the only one during the democratic period who was able to purchase significant quantities of weapons and equipment for the Armed Forces.
At the same time, he earned military rejection by sending “neoliberal” commanders to retirement and by prosecuting the leaders who in 2005 delivered to the United States 28 missiles that Bolivia had received from China. He also managed to jail the officers who led the October 2003 crackdown in El Alto, during which 67 protesters died. Arce, for her part, proceeded to arrest and prosecute a large part of the military hierarchy who had worked with her predecessor, Jeanine Añez, accused of the Sacaba and Senkata massacres, in which 31 people died. Zúñiga set the release of these soldiers and civilian politicians as the objective of his uprising.
“There is an esprit de corps in the Armed Forces, as in other corporations, religious or otherwise; the military feel that the civil power orders them to act and then prosecutes them,” explains Ferreira. “If Zúñiga spoke about it to gain support for his movement, it is because it is there, in the military sentiment,” he affirms.
The recent arrest of more than twenty soldiers accused of participating in the June 26 coup attempt, including five commanders, two force commanders and three regiment commanders, is now added to the list of political decisions that the military considers grievances. According to former Minister Ferreira, “the Arce Government is between a rock and a hard place. If he does not demand that justice apply the law, he sets a terrible precedent: the consequences of very serious acts are minimal; But if he rigorously applies the law, as he is doing, quite a few antibodies will be generated in the Armed Forces, where there are factions but also esprit de corps.” The offense is aggravated by the fact that the arrested officers are presented to the press by the Police, with whom the military has a historical rivalry, which has sometimes led to armed confrontation.
Analyst Armando Ortuño sums up the military impact of the MAS governments as follows: “The Armed Forces suffered several purges and they have resorted to commanders with increasingly less capacity and training. The Army became involved in economic activities such as controlling smuggling and gold mining in the north of the country, which gave rise to a Zúñiga who had his own intelligence group and became very powerful.” His friendly rhetoric gave him that power. This changed when he appeared on television and threatened former President Morales, who had initially been his ally, but became his adversary when he leaned towards Arce. Despite this, Arce dismissed him. Ortuño suggests that the desire not to lose the accumulated economic power could have been the motive for the uprising.
Ferreira rules out that, at this time, the Armed Forces as such intend to close the democratic cycle. Rather, the commandos take advantage of the moments of weakness of the MAS governments to try to replace them with other civil parties and obtain some political advantage. In the case of Morales, this moment was the instability caused by protests against alleged electoral fraud. In the case of Arce, the economic crisis that the country is suffering. “If the president is strong, there will be no uprising,” he emphasizes. Ferreira does not believe that what happened can be considered a “self-coup,” as most of the Bolivian opposition proposes. “Arce has not won with this. Rather, the Government’s military front has cracked, which will increase its vulnerability to the social movements and conflicts that will come,” he reasons. Nor have Zúñiga and the other generals involved won, who today face charges of terrorism and armed uprising, with the possibility of serving 20 years in prison.
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