THE stand-off between Bolivia’s president Luis “Lucho” Arce and the former president Evo Morales doubtless undermines the Latin American left, yet its real contours are not widely reported.

Some facts on the coup at the end of June, alongside attempts by the executive to bar Morales from the 2025 presidential race, reveal a common theme: the need felt by 20th-century elites and many non-indigenous individuals to destroy Morales politically.
 
On July 10 around midday, grassroots movement leaders from across Bolivia were attacked in Plaza Abaroa in La Paz by persons who looked like paramilitaries in a tightly organised block, armed with small explosive devices called “petardos” that are meant to be fired toward the sky.

They fired them directly at the campesino farmers from the countryside and the urban poor who had arrived to support Morales at a meeting of the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE).

The TSE proposed eliminating primaries. Such a move is opposed by the organised bases in the Movement toward Socialism (MAS), Morales’s party. MAS has over a million militants, more than all the other parties combined. It re-elected Morales as its president last October.
 
The court is situated on the plaza. Police separated the campesinos from civil servants who were mobilised by President Arce on the far side of the park. After the meeting ended in dissonance, some 600 civil servants (from the ministries of defence and the interior, said youth leader Aquilardo Caricari who arrived from the Cocalero region) streamed over to the other side of the plaza and attacked Morales’s supporters.

The police did not intervene until they were ordered to fire tear gas at the campesinos. Several people were injured, and a progressive journalist was chased out of the plaza.
 
The mainstream press described this as a confrontation between equally aggressive parties. The geopolitical stakes are high. Debra Hevia, US Chief of Staff in Bolivia, allegedly said in a recording leaked to the press that both Arce and Morales must be removed from the scene for Bolivia to return to “democracy” as the US State Department understands it.  

Soldiers ram through the palace door

One week earlier, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) stated that a coup attempt was crushed on June 26 in Bolivia, but its causes remain latent. IACHR, an independent arm of the Organisation of American States, documented the many deaths and systematic torture of the right-wing coup regime that seized power in 2019.

One year later, Bolivia’s indigenous masses voted out the usurpers. Last week, IACHR argued that the continuing lack of respect for democratic institutions and the failure to uphold the constitution underlies the army’s treason of June 26.

Disregard for the constitution has brought the legislature to near paralysis. The executive rules through the high courts, which have overstayed their constitutional term limits since the beginning of 2024 in defiance of popular mobilisations of tens of thousands of people.
 
June 26 fell on a Wednesday, and in the afternoon sunlight with reporters filming, an armoured car rammed into the doors of the old palace that faces Plaza Murillo in the city of La Paz. The nation’s President, Vice President and several ministers were standing directly inside the door when the chief of the army, Juan Jose Zuniga, jumped out.

After a brief exchange, he returned to his barracks at 5.30pm. Arce had replaced the high command. Before that day, Arce and Zuniga played basketball practically every Sunday. The President had ignored military guidelines for advancement (Zuniga ranked very low in his cohort), and warnings from social movement leaders against the promotion of Zuniga.
 
This supposed coup attempt strikes many as strange. For one, when General Zuniga was arrested that evening around 7pm, he insisted the President had ordered him to stage the coup to boost the executive’s dismal popularity.

He had gone on television a few days prior and given interviews threatening to detain Morales to prevent him from running for president. The constitution prohibits the armed forces from engaging in politics, but no immediate reprimand followed from the national government.
 
Ordinary Bolivians watched the news and found it very strange that General Zuniga failed to secure the parliament, a block away from the palace and a bastion of campesino strength. They wondered why Arce’s cabinet ministers were walking amidst tanks and mutinous soldiers during the few hours of the coup attempt, without security or bullet-proof vests.
 
“I have no idea what kind of coup this might be,” Morales said two days later. “It started with cabinet ministers wandering around Plaza Murillo [among the coup forces, then one of them] striking a tank [with his hand]. It was a coup where the wounded suffered pellet shots [balines]. What kind of coup uses pellet shots?”
 
Campesinos dislike Minister of the Interior Eduardo del Castillo, a young presidential hopeful, because he accuses their leaders of drug trafficking, which they say is slanderous.

They call him a variety of denigrating names, including “Rambo.” He was the one who struck a tank, demanding to know who was in charge. Many Bolivians following the news decided at that point they were witnessing a sham.
 
President Arce tries to remove Morales as MAS president

Three days later, Arce dropped a new bombshell during an interview with the Spanish news agency EFE. Arce, using powers which do not belong to him,  declared his rival Morales disqualified from the leadership of MAS.
 
Morales’s opponents insist he cannot run for president. Leading constitutional experts and international statesmen say the 2023 decision by a constitutional court made no substantive ruling on that question — rather, it offered a tangential and hence non-binding opinion in a decision regarding a distinct matter (the legal term is obiter dictum).
 
The pace of “anti-Morales” assaults is relentless. His participation was banned at TSE’s meeting of political parties set for July 10. Millions of Morales supporters understand this as an attack on campesino participation in national politics.

They possess the constitutional right to elect their own leaders, but the Arce administration has refused to recognise them, and instead created parallel movements.

Grassroots outrage forced the electoral court to backtrack. Morales attended the meeting but he was, in his own words,  “cornered” by the other political parties, and he departed. The other parties then signed an agreement they described as “unanimous.”
 
Since October of last year, two MAS congresses with thousands of delegates have been held to fulfil the requirements of electoral laws, while most of the other parties have not met, or have met by Zoom.

The mainstream press treats Arce’s parallel movements as legitimate. Their leaders include a supposed president of MAS named Grover Garcia who was put forth in early May. At least for the moment, not even the TSE has recognised Garcia as president of MAS.
 
When Morales left the meeting, before the paramilitaries attacked outside, he demanded as the condition of signing TSE’s accord that the MAS congress of last October be approved. It was in fact approved for a spell, until the high courts received pressure from Arce and back-pedalled.
 
The line in the sand concerns whether Arce’s social leaders are legitimate. The middle classes belong to a different universe. They view Morales’s supporters as “badly behaved” to quote Arce’s Minister of the Presidency, Maria Nela Prado, a mestiza (person of mixed race) who seems not to care she is employing the old racist tropes. Ranged against Arce’s supporters are millions of campesinos and indigenous.
 
Cindy Forster is a member of the Los Angeles Chiapas Support Committee.