Rumors of a Coup

The rumors fly across list serves, get echoed by left-leaning intellectuals abroad, and are magnified by declarations from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Then foreign reporters take notice. Yesterday a young stringer for a foreign news service called me to ask, "So, Jim, do you think there is anything to these rumors of a coup against Evo?"

Bolivia is abuzz with rumors of a possible coup. One foreign analyst who sometimes advises the Morales government even named the supposed date – tomorrow, October 11.

So, is there anything to this? Here's my guess – no. Let's look at the political terrain a moment.

Are there a lot of powerful people in Bolivia who hate Evo Morales. Yup. In Santa Cruz you can download "Kill Evo" screensavers for your cell phone. Morales, his rhetoric and what he represents (separate a lot of the time from his actually politics which are more moderate) inspire a lot of passion both for and against him. Finding where it runs hard against him is easy and it dovetails a good deal with the old Bolivian outposts of money and power.

Would the military make such a move? Militaries in Latin America traditionally take the drastic step of a coup when two conditions are present – one is a wave of instability that provides the pubic justification and the other is behind the scenes support from the US government (though not in all cases).

How unstable is Bolivia right now? Well, there is the bloody conflict last week between miners. There is a transportation strike right now in La Paz. And there is the discontent in the nation's eastern departments that produced a daylong general strike a month ago and a lot of heated rhetoric. But not even all of that together adds up to anything near the instability that each of the past four Presidents had on their hands – nationwide road blockades, strikes that went on for weeks, soldiers shooting into crowds leaving dead bodies in the dozens. If instability is a prerequisite for a coup, the current situation falls pretty short.

Would the US government support such a move? The US government certainly has a long record of winking its support to militaries to topple (or try to) leaders that the US doesn't care for. Ask Chileans who lived through that other 9/11, in 1973. US fingerprints in the much more recent attempted ouster of Chavez are also not hard to find, which helps explain why the Venezuelan president keeps acting like an early warning system.

But here as well, just from a Machiavellian point of view, I don’t see why the US government would support this, at least now. I know a number of Embassy officials who have said, off the record, that they don't expect Evo and MAS to serve a full five-year term. But there still remains a split in the Bush administration over how hostile or cooperative to be with the Morales government and the Morales government, despite some soaring rhetorical attacks on he US, has also held out enough genuine olive branches that it seems like we are a way from the US launching another experiment in "regime change". Of late those experiments haven't gone too well.

Finally, a lot of the powers that might desire a coup – be it the US government or Morales' most rabid domestic opponents – also have a stake in national stability. In Bolivia a coup would not mean stability. It would mean plunging the country into one of the bloodiest and most unstable situations on this continent since the bloodiest days of the 1970s. The genie of the poor and the marginalized tasting power is out of the bottle and tanks won't put it back in.

To me, all that says that a slow undermining of Morales' public support – through strikes, stalling the Constituent Assembly (over demands that do often have legitimacy) and other such tactics – is a much better strategy by his foreign and domestic opponents. A better one by far that guys in green uniforms trying to seize control.

But then again, as they saying goes – sometimes the paranoid are right. Let's hope not.