by Tommy Johnson
A coup attempt took place in Bolivia Wednesday night fresh on the heels of the one in 2019. Despite the fact that the ruling party is weak and rife with factional disputes, the attempted military coup failed after three hours.
This year’s coup plotter, the commander of the Armed Forces Juan José Zúñiga, is connected to the far-right coup plotters of 2019, and was jailed for embezzling large sums of money in 2013, only to be personally appointed to his position in 2022 by Bolivian president Luis Arce.
Contention between the former president Evo Morales and current president Arce have increased, leading Zúñiga to publicly threaten the arrest of Morales if he were to run against Arce in 2023. Some monopoly media speculated that it was none other than Arce who orchestrated the failed coup attempt of last week.
Whoever was behind the attempt it is clear that there was no direct intervention of US imperialism, which would have enabled the coup to be further reaching and better orchestrated if there had been. Instead it highlights vividly the crisis of bureaucratic capitalism in Latin America and the imperialist crisis more generally on a world scale.
In 2019, when Morales was “elected” president in a sham election, protests erupted and right-wing sections of the military began a coup. Morales’s fourth term would only last a few weeks, and a far-right “interim” government backed by US imperialism was instituted. The following year, Morales’s revisionist, social-democratic and corrupt party MAS (Movement for Socialism) would return to power, with Arce at its head hand-picked by Morales.
US imperialism has a direct interest in who is running Bolivia due to it having the largest quantities of lithium in the world. Lithium is particularly valuable in the inter-imperialist contradiction between the US and China and in the manufacturing of electric vehicles. Chief of the United States Southern Command General Laura J. Richardson has been the official military agent of US imperialism in Latin America focusing on the question of lithium, and framed the resource as a question of “national security over our backyard.”
In 2020, the CEO of Tesla, owner of social media platform X and US imperialist, Elon Musk, tweeted in regard to Bolivia that “we will coup whoever we want, deal with it!” A successful coup attempt would mean great satisfaction for US imperialism and specifically those among them like Musk who openly want to plunder the country and control its government. Such clear financial motivation casts suspicion on Musk’s direct involvement in the conspiracies of 2019 and 2024, which together highlight the crisis of US imperialism and its growing desperation.
