Latin America was famed for coups, but Bolivia shows how it has changed
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In a continent once famous for long spells of military rule, Bolivia’s latest attempted coup was mercifully brief.
General Juan José Zúñiga, head of the Andean nation’s army, stormed the presidential palace on Wednesday, proclaiming his men the saviours of the nation. The outlook for democracy appeared bleak: Bolivia has experienced scores of successful coups over the past two centuries, the ruling socialist party is bitterly divided, and the economy is sinking fast.
Yet hours later, instead of making a victorious broadcast as Generalísimo, Zúñiga was filmed on a mobile phone receiving a scolding from the democratically elected president, Luis Arce.
As the two men came face to face in the seat of power in La Paz, Arce wagged his finger and shouted at the errant general as onlookers bellowed: “You’re not alone, President!” Latin American leaders condemned the attempted coup, swiftly and unanimously. Even jailed conservative ex-president Jeanine Áñez, whom Zúñiga had sought to free, denounced it.
Shortly afterwards, Arce reasserted control, swore in new military chiefs, and Zúñiga was arrested.
Bolivia is not out of the woods. The calamitous state of the economy and faction-fighting between Arce’s supporters and fans of his charismatic but flawed predecessor Evo Morales pose serious risks.
Still, in its amateurism and brevity, the failed putsch echoed the region’s last serious attempt at an illegal power grab. On that occasion it was the hard-left president of Peru, Pedro Castillo, who went on live television in December 2022, his hands shaking. He announced he was closing congress and seizing extraordinary powers — only to flee hours later when no one supported him.
“It’s very negative that these events happen at all,” said Nicholas Watson, Latin America managing director at consultancy Teneo, of the coup attempts in Peru and Bolivia. “But they mostly fail.”
The region’s last successful military coup was in Honduras in 2009, and it gave way within months to fresh elections.
There are other encouraging examples of democratic resilience in Latin America. An attempt by supporters of hard-right former president Jair Bolsonaro to storm Brazil’s presidential palace and Congress was swiftly put down in January 2023.
Elected radical leftwing leaders took power in Colombia and Chile the previous year without hindrance. In Guatemala, an anti-corruption crusader, Bernardo Arévalo, overcame efforts by the outgoing administration to block his path to power. Popular anger at government failures during the pandemic was channelled through the ballot box rather than via revolutions.
Yet the region gets too little credit for being the most democratic in the developing world. Sergio Díaz-Granados, executive president of the regional development bank CAF, complained outsiders cling to an outdated picture of Latin America as a cauldron of political instability — one that owes more to the 1970s, when Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile (among other nations in the region) were all under military rule.
In reality “the region has shown in the last 30 or 40 years that it is able to carry out reforms and face crises democratically”, Díaz-Granados said in a speech the day before the Bolivian coup attempt.
Elsewhere in the developing world, the picture is bleaker. Africa, for example, had a wave of successful military coups in the Sahel and the Gulf remains largely under the sway of unelected autocrats.
Latin America’s problem is different. While military coups may be out of fashion, the region has a long-standing weakness for messianic but authoritarian leaders. Chosen via the ballot box, they tend to grab more power once in office and undermine institutions.
Nayib Bukele in El Salvador is the region’s best-known example, once dubbing himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and justifying his mass imprisonment of young Salvadoreans as necessary to fight crime. Some fear Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa is now treading a similar path.
“There’s a general recognition that the military has no place in today’s Latin America and coups have become an anachronism,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow at Chatham House. “But the challenges are different now. In Mexico, for example, you have creeping control of the military over parts of the economy and large segments of the state.”
Outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has handed the military control of ports, airports, customs, hotels and an airline, in addition to the national guard. Unusually in Latin America, Mexico has two cabinet positions for defence, one for the army and air force and a second for the navy. Both are normally filled by senior military officers.
Watson at Teneo said militarisation “is López Obrador’s biggest legacy and the hardest to unwind”. “There’s no need to stage anything so crude as a coup, but this is much more insidious.”
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