https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/mutiny-in-bolivia?pc=1618
Sinclair Thomson
18 July 2024Politics

During the two hundred years since it gained independence, Bolivia has experienced innumerable coups d’état. The presidential palace, flanked by the Cathedral of La Paz and the Legislative Assembly on the Plaza Murillo, has been the setting for many of these blunt bids for political power. It became known as the Palacio Quemado, or ‘Burnt Palace’, after it was set afire during a failed uprising in 1875. Yet despite this history, it came as a shock when fourteen armoured vehicles rumbled into the Plaza on 26 June and smashed open the palace’s gate. The leader of the incursion, General Juan José Zúñiga, entered the grounds accompanied by the heads of the navy and air force, and was met by President Luis Arce Catacora. Arce ordered him to withdraw his troops. Zúñiga refused. The face-off lasted several minutes before Zúñiga got back into his vehicle and retreated to the army headquarters in Miraflores.

Zúñiga later told journalists that his aim was to seize the government buildings and ‘reestablish democracy’ by military means. He denounced the Arce administration and called for the liberation of political prisoners, including the leaders of the 2019 right-wing revolt that overthrew Evo Morales. As Arce swore in new military commanders, Zúñiga was arrested and jailed. Yet by that time he had already contradicted his previous statements and declared that it was in fact the President himself who had directed him to stage the event in an attempt to prop up his faltering government.

In the wake of the stand-off, there was an outpouring of support for Arce in the largely indigenous city of El Alto and among sectors of the social movements. Yet many of the administration’s critics, on both the left and right, believed Zúñiga. Morales, who still leads the governing Movement for Socialism (MAS) party despite having been ousted from the presidency in 2019, and who is Arce’s main rival in the 2025 presidential elections, claimed that the government had orchestrated the incident to garner popular favour. The right-wing lowland opposition and urban middle classes agreed that it was all a political show.

As coup attempts go, it was certainly a strange one. There were no bullets fired, no occupations of government buildings. But if it were staged, why would Zúñiga and his accomplices have accepted the role of scapegoats? This murky episode, and the clashing responses to it, provide a window onto Bolivia’s current state of crisis. Two decades after the end of neoliberal governance, the country is experiencing a sort of structural decomposition. The economy is in steady decline, the leadership of the MAS is profoundly split, state institutions are eroding, and visions of national renewal are hard to find.

Arce served as Minister of the Economy in the Morales government for over a decade – a role in which he oversaw the greatest economic bonanza in republican history. Poverty and inequality declined, the middle class expanded, urban development accelerated and GDP grew at a healthy rate. Yet as with other Pink Tide projects, the MAS model depended on the commodities boom of the 2000s. It began to falter when prices took a downward turn in 2014, and further deteriorated when the pandemic triggered a global recession and soaring inflation in 2020. Since then, the state coffers have dried up due to decreasing fossil fuel production and exports. Bolivia collected $5.5 billion in natural gas rents and $6.6 billion in foreign sales in 2014, compared to $1.8 billion and $2.1 billion in 2023. Its mineral exports are still significant, but they bring in scant revenue because the tax structure favours cooperative mining producers. Despite the country’s hydrocarbon wealth, the government continues to import fuel for popular consumption, and it is yet to industrialize its potentially profitable lithium holdings.

Foreign exchange reserves have meanwhile fallen from $15.1 billion to $1.8 billion over the last decade. The government has borrowed to cover its losses, with foreign debt now at around 30% of GDP. It has retained many redistributive measures, including direct cash transfers to the poor and subsidized fuel prices, but this has cut further into the state budget. Partly as a result, public investment declined by half between 2016 and 2022. The currency is officially worth 6.97 Bolivianos to the dollar, but this can reach 9.20 on the black market. A scarcity of dollars and fuel has generated frustration across class lines. In late June, the government faced a strike from the heavy transport sector. These issues leant plausibility to the notion that the Plaza Murillo affair was confected as a distraction.

Bolivia’s economic crisis coincides with a political one. The gulf between President Arce and Morales, head of the MAS party, appears unbridgeable. Morales routinely attacks his former comrade, denouncing him as a traitor to the Proceso de Cambio (‘Process of Change’) who has reverted to the neoliberal status quo ante. Arce, in return, asserts that Morales’s public criticism amounts to collaboration with the right. The truth is that the two do not differ much in terms of policies or principles. Both seek to use the country’s natural resources to sustain a development model that mixes state and private enterprise, mitigates inequality through the redistribution of rents, incorporates indigenous and popular sectors politically, and preserves some autonomy from Washington. The differences between them are largely a matter of political style (Morales is combative, Arce mild-mannered) and the changed economic circumstances (initially favourable under Morales, much less so under Arce).

The main point of contention concerns who exercises greater power within the MAS. Morales’s frustration began in 2021 when the President ignored his advice to change the composition of the cabinet. The animosity has only escalated – partly on account of the caudillismo that is baked into MAS political culture. The cult of personality surrounding Morales can be traced back to his days as the leader of the coca-growers’ movement. It was inflated by MAS ideologue Alvaro García Linera, whose theory of Evismo framed Morales as an irreplaceable, once-in-a-century revolutionary hero. Since assuming office, though, Arce has developed his own personal ambitions and loyal following.

While Arce’s approval ratings have declined from around 50% to as low as 18%, Morales’s bid to replace him faces major legitimacy problems. Morales oversaw the passage of the 2009 Constitution, which allowed for only two consecutive presidential terms. Yet in 2013 the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal ruled that his first term should not count since it preceded the new constitutional framework, permitting him to stand for a third. In 2016, Morales held a plebiscite to modify the constitution to enable him to run again, but the initiative was narrowly voted down. The following year, a new ruling declared that term limits violated Morales’s human rights and allowed him to contest the 2019 elections. This knife-edge race concluded with Morales declaring victory and the opposition crying foul. Middle-class protests against ‘electoral fraud’ culminated in street violence and attacks on MAS officials. The Organization of American States, backed by the Trump White House, declared the victory illegitimate. Social movements and security forces both urged Morales to step down to prevent a wider conflict. Fearing for his life, the President fled the country, bringing an end to the longest civilian government in Bolivian history.

Military officials swore in Senator Jeanine Añez in November 2019 to head an unelected right-wing regime. Her government used heavy-handed tactics to silence its critics and carried out two massacres that left 21 protestors dead and hundreds injured. Deeply unpopular, Añez crashed to defeat in elections the following year, which Arce won with 55% of the vote. Morales then returned from exile and prepared for his next presidential campaign, on the grounds that the constitution does not rule out discontinuous terms in office. Yet his repeated attempts to cling to power and control the party apparatus have eroded his popular prestige. Arce has sought to use his institutional influence to block Morales’s return to the presidency. Morales has retaliated by expelling both Arce and Vice President David Choquehuanca from the party.

It remains unclear how this power struggle will play out. The MAS was founded in 1997 as a hybrid between a political party and a federation of social movements (its full name is Movement for Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the People). Although Morales is the leader, he does not have the power to nominate electoral candidates. They must be selected at party assemblies with the participation of the social movements, which are currently aligned with Arce’s faction. The polarization of the party renders it unable to nominate a contender. The two sides are too far apart to even engage in negotiations.

The confrontation in the Plaza Murillo bears the marks of this division. Three days earlier, Zúñiga, once a close ally of Arce, publicly denounced Morales and promised to block him from returning to office. This outburst violated a constitutional ban on military interference in political affairs and led Arce to dismiss him from his post. Soon thereafter, the general launched the mutiny. In their tête-a-tête outside the palace, Zúñiga accused Arce of betraying him. The episode could thus be seen as a spin-off from the Arce/Morales struggle, triggered by Zúñiga’s overzealous attempts to side with the former against the latter.

The acrimony between arcistas and evistas has also inflicted serious damage on both the legislature and judiciary. The 2023 judicial elections could not be held on time due to the factional deadlock in the legislative assembly. This caused the current Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal to extend its mandate, prompting the evistas – who already have reason to view the institution as biased in Arce’s favour – to denounce its rulings as illegitimate. At the same time, congressional infighting has frustrated important actions such as the approval of loans and lithium negotiations with potential foreign investors. Almost $1 billion worth of loans, earmarked for projects including infrastructure development, land titling and irrigation, have been secured by the executive but held up by the evista bloc, which insists that they should not be approved until the judicial elections have taken place.

As the MAS continues to tear itself apart, the Bolivian right is still struggling to assemble any meaningful opposition. It remains discredited after Añez’s disastrous stint in office. She and Luis Fernando Camacho, governor of the lowland department of Santa Cruz, are both serving time in prison for their roles in the overthrow of Morales. No candidate has emerged to replace them, and the conservative bloc is beset by deep divisions. Given the strength of popular opposition to neoliberalism, they cannot offer any alternative agenda to the left-nationalism of the MAS. Indeed, the right’s weakness helps to explain why personal and factional hostilities have freely proliferated within the ruling party.

The MAS has clearly lost a significant degree of control over the armed forces. Morales had quadrupled military spending in the hope of ensuring their loyalty. Unexpectedly, though, cadre at all levels turned against the President after the 2019 election and aided the right-wing power-grab. Until last month, Arce’s administration appeared to have the military in hand once again. Yet it is now apparent that the split within the MAS has destabilized the structures of command and facilitated armed intervention in the political process. Those who claim that Zúñiga’s mutiny was stage-managed neglect the extent to which the army can operate autonomously from the elected government.

Bolivia’s social movements have also regained significant autonomy from the state, and may be decisive in shaping the outcome of the ongoing political struggles. Between 2000 and 2005, they were by far the most powerful force in the country, bringing down the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, setting the agenda for economic and constitutional transformation, and elevating Morales and the MAS to high office. Yet after the right-wing opposition was defeated and the new constitution passed in 2009, political power was increasingly centralized, and the social movements came under MAS control. When the ruling party was unable to co-opt them, it resorted to strong-arm tactics to weaken the grassroots leadership and in some cases create parallel organizations.

Morales has always been able to control the syndicalist organizations of coca-growing peasants in the lowland Chapare region. But during his time in office, several other popular organizations – constituting the Pacto de Unidad coalition – were gradually brought into line, either voluntarily or under sustained pressure. When the Morales government fell, these organizations reclaimed much of their political independence. Though they never recovered the vanguard role that they had played in the early 2000s, they were effective in organizing against the Añez regime and securing the MAS’s return to power under Arce. As the antagonism within the MAS deepened, the Pacto de Unidad continued to support the Arce government, while the coca-growers stood by Morales. The social movements have increased their influence within the MAS and reasserted their capacity for large-scale mobilization. On 26 June, hundreds of people spontaneously surrounded the Plaza Murillo and confronted the troops in the street. This popular intervention was likely one of the factors that prevented an outbreak of violence and stopped the military from seizing power.

Despite the Añez interregnum, Bolivia has been one of the most resilient of the Pink Tide countries. Yet its economic and political problems are now being compounded by a challenging international conjuncture. The government must contend with the longstanding animosity of the United States as well as the reactionary turn in Europe and the stalemate in Latin America, where the left has come up against right-wing restorationist and populist projects. The stand-off in the Plaza Murillo demonstrates that the dissension within the MAS has created opportunities for reactionary forces, foreign and domestic, to wreak havoc on the country. Arce’s opponents may dismiss it as nothing more than a simulacrum of history, but it reflects a very real trend, whereby the stalling of the Proceso de Cambio has opened the door to would-be authoritarians.

There is nothing inevitable about this decomposition. What are the possible alternatives? The MAS has been gravitating towards China, the BRICs and de-dollarization to address the country’s structural economic obstacles. Lithium extraction remains the developmentalists’ dream, while environmentalists face an uphill struggle for a green transition. Popular forces are in a strong position to counter caudillismo, perhaps drawing inspiration from indigenous political cultures that favour decentralization and rotating authority. Yet these pathways are rarely the subject of open debate or contestation. On the eve of the bicentennial, it seems that the starting point for envisioning Bolivia’s renewal is recognizing the depth of its current crisis.