LEARNING FROM THE BANALITY AND AFTERMATH OF BOLIVIA'S COUP
LEARNING FROM THE BANALITY AND AFTERMATH OF BOLIVIA’S COUP
DREW HOLLAND KINNEY FEBRUARY 26, 2020
COMMENTARY
This week’s court ruling disqualifying ousted leader Evo Morales from pursuing a Senate seat has brought last year’s events in Bolivia into sharper focus. Amidst allegations of election-rigging in a presidential contest against centrist candidate Carlos Mesa, Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales fled Sucre for Mexico in fear for his life (he now resides in Argentina) under pressure from the armed forces to leave his post.
On Nov. 12, with soldiers patrolling the streets and military jets circling the capital, Jeanine Áñez, a right-wing politician accused of racism, gripped an oversized Bible and declared herself interim president. Áñez then issued a decree that exempted “the military from criminal responsibilities related to the use of force,” while violence between protesters and the security services intensified as a coalition of right-wing politicians and business elites consolidated power. The Áñez government has since hired a consulting firm, CLS Strategies — which also helped sell the 2009 coup in Honduras — to enhance its image in the run-up to elections.
This was a typical example of a military coup d’état. Emblematic of military interventions that are preceded by protests and supported by civilian elites, Morales’s opponents and international observers immediately questioned the coup label. The former president’s critics maintain there was no coup because his election was illegitimate and the military was merely “playing peacekeeper,” even as events after his departure exhibit all the trademarks of a coup.
Whenever a country’s elites and masses support a coup, as in Bolivia, they create the impression that the military’s actions are legitimate. Indeed, civilian involvement in military interventions defies (unrealistic) expectations about what constitutes “normal” civil-military relations and sparks debates about a given event’s coup-like nature. What the various parties to this post-coup debate never point out, or perhaps fail to recognize, is their universal agreement that military involvement in disputes over who gets to rule is illegitimate — whether or not civilians invited the armed forces to do so.
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https://warontherocks.com/2020/02/learning-from-the-banality-and-aftermath-of-bolivias-coup/?singlepage=1
