It Could Happen Here - Bolivia: The World's Worst Coup

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Mia and James discuss the economic crisis and splits in the MAS and Bolivia's social movements that led to the worst coup attempt in modern history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was,

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Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jamee Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is droning under the oppression of whoever keeps changing the stupid zoom

interface it's different every time it always gets worse it never gets better please stop we're trads for zoom zoom layout just get it get it one time put the recording thing on the stupid

panel on the bottom and then never change it it simply never gets better yeah this is Mia who's extremely annoyed at Zoom with me is James yep also extremely annoyed at Zoom hi just in solidarity with Mia fuck him yeah and also also extremely annoyed right now

is the man stages the world's worst coup asked to report to prison i don't think we can call it the world's worst coup mia that's a bold claim you're forgetting silver corp no so okay here's the thing about silver corp right the guys who defeated silver corp had guns yeah but silver corp didn't they had bb guns yeah but here's the thing right they they those guys again those guys did not have real guns defeated by guys with guns these guys had guns they had a lot of guns they were defeated by people with flags yeah yeah and a guy standing in a doorway being like no you can't come in go home report directly to jail i i you know so we we are i i i genuinely believe this is the worst

coup i've ever seen in my entire life and you know we we lived in the venezuela one i i i distinctly remember stepping out of a post office and checking my phone and getting 18 messages from my friends that said do you do you what do you know about the coup in Turkey? That was a terrible coup. That was it. They could have just saved us all this trouble if shot air to one down from a jet fighter, but they didn't. You know, there's been plenty of bad ones.

There was that coup recently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a fiasco. Hilariously, this coup in Bolivia we're covering today happened exactly one year and three days after the March of the Wagner Corps. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that one. What a...

Wow. Yeah. Everyone's trying it, guys. If you believe you can achieve, give it a go. Do a coup if you want to. Why not? Donald Trump, he tried one.

Didn't work very well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we really... Also, I mean, we can't forget January 9th. Even the... Well, I don't... Because January 6th was already farce,

but, like, we forgot the farcest farce version of it in Brazil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No one was even there. Yeah, yeah, the old building coup. Yeah, lots of very stupid coups. But this is probably the worst one um and so we're going to be explaining sort of what happened but the thing about this coup is that in order to understand what's happening with this coup we have to get through i think a part of bolivian

history that has not been really well understood or talked about on the left, which is effectively what happened in Bolivia after the coup in 2019. I think people sort of know that there was a coup and that it got overturned.

But, comma, that was sort of the point at which the sort of Anglo-media and the sort of press that hits the left here kind of just took off. So you have your sort of 2019 coup. The place where sort of everything getting lost kind of starts is that so there's this coup. The left sort of response to the coup is not very strong because the sort of social movements have been hollowed out by the sort of incorporation into the Bolivian state, so they

sort of just don't have the juice to really kind of, you know, roll this coup back. This is the 2019 coup, not the 2024 coup. Yeah, you know, the thing about the 2019 coup

that makes it very different from this one is that that one was, you know, there was a broad base of support for this, right, in this sort of, like, far right out of Santa Cruz and also out of sort of, like, more moderate center-right factions. So, you know, there are sort of large street movements in favor of this. This is not true of the most recent one. Yeah, absolutely not.

Yeah, but, you know, by 2020, as 2020 is sort of progressing, A, Anya's coup government is a fiasco. Their management of COVID is just terrible. Enormous numbers of deaths. I mean, actually, I mean, not by American standards, I guess, but, you know, really, really mismanagedaged i mean my i have friends there who are talking about how if you're going to the hospital and you needed to use like a piece of medical equipment you had to buy the medical equipment or a part to fix a machine and show up to the hospital with the part because they

couldn't order it yeah i've uh yeah i've seen that in a few places in the world. It's never a good time. Yeah, it's not good. It was a real shit show. And by sort of, I think about September, early September of 2020, the left has sort of gotten its shit together. And there are this massive set of roadblocks.

Bolivian social politics tends to sort of be about roadblocks because you know country a lot of mountains a lot of roads you can very easily block off and then prevent anything from you know for example entering a city yep good idea so they're they're able to just basically shut down the bolivian economy the government is once again on the verge of collapse and once again and we'll get to the sort of first time this happened but uh even morales once again sort of pulls the supporters off of the barricade so he can go win an election rather than you know attempt to just bring down the sort of coup government so you know that eventually happens the government is forced to hold elections because you know

they've they've lost control of the country and the mas takes you know wins this election by overwhelming margins the mas is even morales's party it's the sort of like party of the bolivian left but yeah the guy who comes to the power is lewis or say he's an interesting figure because he is kind of we're going to get more into sort of what the MAS is in a bit but he is from a kind of right wing of the party that's not talked about very much yeah he is a you know he's not a guy who comes

from the social movements in the way that sort of Morales did like he was even Morales was a guy from the president of the Cocoa Growers Union Arce is a banker he's an economist and a banker he comes out of the Cocoa Growers Union. Arce is a banker. He's an economist and a banker. He comes out of the Central Bank of Bolivia.

And he had been kind of the guy running Bolivian economic policy, but he is from the developmentalist wing of the party, which means he is effectively from the wing of the party that are the kind of like centered left capitalists that the social movements

kind of allied themselves to under more allies in order to do this sort of national economic development policy so these are a lot of these are a lot of mining sector guys um these are a very specific sort of cadre of of these like central bank guys you know and i and i think this is the part the the thing about the MAS that's kind of relevant here is that it usually also has a base support among people you wouldn't expect. I mean, there's a lot of small business owners

who support them because the MAS really did, for most of the time they've been in power, preside over sort of astonishing economic growth. They sort of did this by marrying these social movements to this kind of national bourgeoisie developmentalist faction. Yeah. And the other thing that the MAS sort of does in the period between when they come back to power in late 2020, 2021, and now is they actually go after the people who did the coup, right? Onyes, who was the previous president, is just in prison for helping you do the coup um the the other big person who's been arrested is luis fernando camacho who is a man who in in 100

complete seriousness calls himself macho camacho so that's that's a good sign yeah that that's indication of who this guy is which is he is a really fanatical Christian nationalist. He's playing a very similar role to – actually, I think even in a lot of ways, he's played a more radical role to what Bolsonaro played in Brazil, where Camacho in Bolivia is this kind of – he's the guy who's rallied both evangelicalism and Catholicism, kind of he's the guy who's rallied both sort of evangelicalism and Catholicism although it's rallied both of them into this sort of

virulent and specifically in Bolivia anti-indigenous sort of political force the 2019 coup is seen in very very explicitly is seen in religious terms both talk about how like the

word of God is back in the capital and the wheel but like all of this sort of indigenous various indigenous stuff is just never going to come back so cabacho gets arrested in 2022 for you know doing this coup and this sets off so he by the way like is the governor of the state of santa cruz and this sets off a bunch of like a right-wing general strike a bunch of riots like hundreds of people are injured in street fighting between his sort of fanatics and everyone else in the country um it does an enormous amount of economic damage they it sets off sort of roadblocks um the government i mean camacho i think also is still

in prison but it kind of you know the government's kind of forced to make concessions to these people so you know the the whole the whole sort of our say government is kind of on shaky footing from the beginning and all of this is before the bolivian economy really hits the shit but before before we get to the Bolivian economy, do you know what else hits the shit? Oh. Is it the meal kit preparation delivery service that we are not allowed to mention

for legal reasons? Yes, it is. Yes. Yeah. You'll be pooping your brains out. Don't do it. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, Don't do it. Better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden.

We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise.

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We are back. So let's talk about the other thing that's been happening in Bolivia. Well, okay, I say other thing. One of the four other things that's been happening in Bolivia. And that is the real sort of collapse of the bolivian economy so the bolivian economy the bolivia has been kind of different from the rest of the sort of kind of left-wing pink tide governments that were elected in the in the sort of 2000s era sort of anti-globalization politics

um most of those countries economies imploded a long time ago like venezuela is sort of obviously the most famous case but all of these economies fell apart because these were all economies based on the commodity boom we've talked about this in some of our brazil episodes but the the very short version is that a lot of a lot produce primary commodities, like your copper, your natural gas, things like stuff, all got massive price spikes in the early 2000s because the Chinese economy had integrated into the rest of the world economy fully by joining the World Trade Organization. industrialization boom in china and you know the chinese the the the the levels of sort of demand that this induces is unbelievable because chinese economic growth in that period is unreal and it's it's economic growth that is unreal in a country with a billion people in it so this produced a kind of shock of demand for all of these sort of mineral resources that was not entirely unprecedented but enormously large and also allowed all of these sort of mineral resources that was not entirely unprecedented but enormously large and also

allowed all of these sort of social democratic economies to you know kind of paper over the inherent contradictions of their base being both capitalist and also a bunch of like unions by they're just sort of being enough state revenue from all of these exports to just kind of buy everyone off, paper everything over. Yeah, the clientelism. Yeah, yeah. And that stops working when the economy goes under. But Bolivia's economy does a lot better than the rest of the economies in the region. There are a lot of reasons for this.

Part of it is that, you know, Arce, who is running the economy of Bolivia in the sort of the period, like post-2008 period, when everyone else's economies are collapsing, he is genuinely doing some pretty interesting macroeconomic stuff. Also, the other thing that's going on is that Bolivia main export – and people – okay, so people in the US tend to think of Bolivia as a country that produces lithium. That's not true. That might be true maybe 30 years in the future. That will be to think of Bolivia as a country that produces lithium. That's not true. That might be true maybe 30 years in the future. That will be Bolivia's primary export. But Bolivia's primary export for the last two decades has been natural gas.

And natural gas prices didn't quite do the same thing that oil prices did that imploded the Venezuelan economy. And so through economic management and these sort of political alliances and you know the high price in natural gas the bolivian economy had sort of been fine unfortunately what's happening right now is that bolivia is running out of natural gas and because

it's running out of natural gas and also because their economy is an export-based economy based on natural gas not so good not not such good vibes yeah it's very bad the entire economy is falling apart because you know and this is this is a very very classic kind of economic crisis you know the economic crises are having is i'm not seeing it described as a balance of payments crisis but that's what it is which is that the bolivian economy works on buying things with american dollars so you know like a lot of the businesses in the country involve are sort of import businesses right you know i mean i know people who run businesses like this uh in bolivia where you know you're importing uh shoes or like motors yeah stuff like that and you buy them with american

dollars and you sell them in bolivia but the thing is this requires a constant supply of american dollars to go buy good manufactured goods from other places because bolivia's manufacturing economy is effectively a joke and this is something that was true of all of these economies i mean bolivia never they kind of tried to industrialize in the 70s but they never got as far along with it as a country like brazil or a country like venezuela did in the 70s and the other thing about these all these sort of pink tie governments is they all took power in economies that have been completely de-industrialized by neoliberalism right we talked about this with brazil brazil went from a country that was a kind of like effectively a first not quite a first maybe a second tier a large a powerful second tier industrial power to a country whose economy is

almost entirely based on sort of primary commodity production and farming bullshit so they've they've moved down they've moved down the value chain they're manufacturing less stuff they're producing shit that's on the bottom they're getting less value from value-added bullshit moving up the chain and this is this is also the problem with the bolivian economy and because the natural gas is is drying up they don't have enough dollars coming into the economy for people to use to buy things. And the Bolivian currency is also pegged to the dollar, right? So there's supposed to be an official exchange rate at which X amount of money is worth X amount of dollars. are sort of running around in the streets trying to find people who will exchange their currency for dollars. This is

a classic sort of balance of payments. Well, I guess it's kind of a balance of payments. But they're having a giant dollar shortage. This is really, really messing up. I mean, not just the economy, but the entire political system is really kind of coming apart under this.

Now, okay, I talked about things kind of coming apart. There is another thing that is coming apart in Bolivia, which is the MAS is shattering. Yes. It's shattering. It's splintering in two. So what is the MAS? So the MAS is this part. Oh, okay okay so it has a slightly weirder history which is that so the mas was a completely random actually kind of kind of right-wing political

party but importantly it had electoral status so it was it's a party that was taken over by the social movements at the end of the sort of stuff stuff we're going to get to in order to be able to run candidates for office. But this means that because, again, because it was literally an existing legal registered party that was taken over from the outside and because of how it emerged, it's always been seen as sort of a movement party, right? It's supposed to be like the assembly of Bolivia's sort of left-wing social movements. And these left-wing social movements are the movements that, emerge isn't quite the right word, but they're the movements that solidified and began to sort of exert their power from 2000 to 2006

in this enormous sequence of social uprising against sort of Bolivian neoliberalism. The most famous of these are the water and gas wars, which are these fights against water privatization and the sort of gas line. And this alliance of peasant unions, sort of the traditional sort of urban, urban sort of proletariat, like traditional sort of like urban left,

these, these new street movements, coca growers, unions, miners, unions, and a whole array of indigenous groups that we frankly do not have time to get into here because the politics there are

extremely the philosophy is extremely complicated i don't know if i've talked about this on this show before but one of the i mean we're talking about like feel like they have like philosophical constructs that i don't understand it's this philosophical construct that's like a dialectic, but there's three parts of it and they don't, it doesn't resolve. They just all kind of grind in tension with each other. Right. So like,

okay, we're not really going to get into that. It's outside the scope of the show. If you're more interested in this, read rhythms of the patch of Cootie or get a doctorate, I guess. Yeah. Return to grad school your options

are limited but you know there's this coalition of all of these kinds of unions um these rural unions urban unions um urban street movements rural street movements gather together gather their strength set up a million roadblocks and just smash the neoliberal right. They are, Bolivia's right is basically completely destroyed. From the period of 2006 until 2019, that was the first time they ever took power. They did it in a coup and they held power for about one year before they were kicked out of power again. So they basically completely reshaped all of politics in Bolivia. The second round of roadblocks very nearly destroyed the Bolivian state until, as I sort of alluded to earlier,

Eva Morales pulled his supporters off the barricade in order to get an election in 2006. And this is the election the MAS won. And to understand the kind of seismic change of this right the mas is the first party in the history of bolivia to win a majority of the seats in the parliament by itself first party ever it completely destroyed the existing sort of political system and again this this this was supposed to be a sort of a sort of new kind of party right uh the theory of the mas is it's the organization of the social movements uh former vice president and sometimes marxist garcia lenera described it as quote there's a dialectical relationship between the social movements and the party now this is a lie or more precisely

if this is a dialectic it is not a hegelianian or Marxist dialectic where the sublation of two parts creates a concrete totality or a whole that is neither of the things that are supposed to be for it. This is a Maoist dialectic where two sides face off with each other and one of them hits the other side of the head with a hammer until it dies.

It's just a conflict. It's just... There are two people and they both want to control the thing. Yeah, they're fighting each other. It's a fight. That's what ends up happening, right? So the social movements and the indigenous movements in particular

have been fracturing for a decade. You know, there are a whole series of large fights, even in sort of like the early 2010s, over sort of the MAS doing these infrastructure things that everyone else in the country was like why are you building a road through indigenous land there's these huge fights many such cases yeah so you know the the and this this is the kind of hollowing out and the kind of conflict that had led to the social movements being completely unable to overturn the coup in 2019 and it taking them until the end of 2020 to really pull their shit

together and you know overturn the coup and uh you know what else overturns coups that's a that's a hefty promise is it arming the working class me it is arming the working class we are we are sponsored by Arm the Entire Working Class. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like,

how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15%

and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake

gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the one with the green guy on it. We're back. So, okay, so now we get to the present split in the social movements. What has happened now is that, you know, Arce and, and Eva Morales had always kind of gotten along usually. But once, you know, Arce took power, he, instead of, he didn't want to sort of just be a proxy for Eva Morales. want to sort of just be a proxy for even morales he had his own sort of actually like not great agenda either a sort of more technocratic agenda although you know you have to sort of ask evil like you're the one who brought these people into the party like i don't know what you were expecting um yeah you brought these people in that they weren't going to govern as governed as a sort

of center-left technocratic capitalist government you know you could have seen this coming but they they have been increasingly fighting and the two the two sides are now implacably hostile they are saying evil fucking hate each other and this this divide has split every single social movement in bolivia from the landless workers movement to the cocoa growers to the indigenous federations to the fucking urban trade unions to the miners unions every one of these organizations either has officially split into two factions that's one's an evil faction and one's in our safe faction or they are in the middle of the fight where you know they're they're both sides are still fighting for control over yeah over you know their union federation and this is not a clean left right split which is this is actually i mean that was kind of what i was expecting

ish when this fight started that i was sort of expecting that this was going to end up as a fight between sort of you know the left the social movements and the sort of center right base but that's not really what happens it is kind of a left right split but you know it's also a split over the person of evo himself and because it's partially a split over Evo himself, there's a lot of more left-wing groups that are kind of backing Arce because they don't want even more allies to come back into power and

re-solidify his control over all of these social movements, and they're angry at him for a whole series of attempts to co-opt their movements. It's also a split about how autonomous a social movement should movements. It's also, you know, it's also a split about sort of how autonomous a social movement should be. It should be able to be from government policy.

It's, you know, it's kind of external to this, but one of the other things that's going on is that Evo has been really unpopular with a lot of feminist groups in Bolivia for a very long time for a lot of reasons, including, I mean, you know, one of the big ones is Bolivia's horrific femicide crisis, which the MAS has been in power for almost 20 years

and has done jack shit to actually deal with, right? So there are all of these sort of fractures breaking out. Partially also, it's a war for control of the MAS between the coca growers' unions and the miners' unions.

So this is a shit show. It is a complete fiasco. And then, you know, the thing that makes it more of a fiasco is, you know, we talked about this sort of with, we did an episode about kind of what's been happening with the sort of pink tide governments a while back. And, you know, one of the things we talked about in that episode was Ecuador, whereador has this left-wing base that should win every single election until the end of time and they don't because they're constantly fighting each other and this is effectively the beginning of hopefully it doesn't turn into that but i mean the mas if it is if it is even sort of united is an unprecedented bolivian political juggernaut it should win every election like i mean not till the end of time. They probably should only

win, I don't know. They have kind of demographic issues right now, but they should still be winning effectively every election, and they're not. And the reason that they're not is because of this shit. Or the reason they might not is because of all of these splits. And these are very

this isn't a these are very, very serious political splits. I mean, one of the miners workers meetings very famously, the two sides broke into fist fights. I think 140 people were injured. So, you know, this is, these are very serious fights. There's also a whole disaster right now over who actually is the candidate of the MAS, fights there's also a whole disaster right now over who actually is the candidate of the mas because evo held this congress of the mas it was his supporters that arce was not at and they said that because he didn't because i say he didn't show up he was kicked out of the party classic so there's this whole thing so he's technically been expelled but like the courts got the

electoral courts are now involved because the electoral courts have to decide what, like, you know, they have to figure out what, what candidate their party's running. So it's this, it's, it's a complete catastrophe.

And in the midst of this complete catastrophe, there is the worst coup of the 21st century. So let's get into finally this coup so this coup is run by a guy named juan jose zuniga is the he's the commander of the bolivian army he is handpicked by arce to run the army to be the guy who yes he's the ox a dude yeah and this is you know this this this has sort of shades of the fact that pinochet was sort of elevated by Allende and the Social Democrats. It reminds me of Franco as well, getting promoted above his peers. Yeah, those were tragedy, this is farce.

So what happens is that on Tuesday of last week, Zuniga goes on TV and says, I am going to... Evo Morales cannot be allowed to take power again. I will stop him from taking power. And Arce is like, dude, what the fuck? And just immediately fires him. Because, you know, you can't do that?

Yeah, like almost every country with a codified constitution has prohibitions on its military intervening and its politics right like yeah the basics of democracy bolivia has had a series of military governments and military coups across the sort of 20th century um including the god the fucking cocaine coup uh that i've talked about at length in our world of the communist league episodes that ends with like klaus barbie fucking running around right so i mean you know like this is a country that has had military coups quite literally staffed by actual nazis right yeah so you know this is this is a place that take that takes the threat of a military coup very very seriously um there hasn't been one

blessedly in a long time but there's a lot of people who are fucking alive for the last one and you know and so this this is you know people are extremely unhappy even people who i think in theory would be okay with you know the government being dep unhappy. Even people who I think in theory would be okay with, you know, the government being deposed, like absolutely under no circumstances want the fucking military running the country because again, everyone fucking remembers how bad that shit was. But what appears to have happened is that

Zuniga realizes that, so he's just been fired, right? Which means that he has a very short time window in which he could try to pull some shit which means that whatever whatever he may have been planning i don't know what his actual plans were he may have been actually planning a coup he may not have been until here and which is to be like well i guess we have to do it now if he was planning he wasn't planning very well yeah yeah what results from this for this very i i think results on this very short timetable is

is the worst coup i've ever seen so what appears to have happened is that on wednesday he gathers the troops that he's able to gather which is not that i mean we're talking like a hundred guys maybe yeah it was not a you know they had they had a decent number of armored vehicles but it was not like a lot of troops no it does not appear that he even had the support of a lot of troops right like yeah a lot of the rbcs who have kind of been sitting there going what the fuck is going on but it was you know i mean i was watching the videos who were like the live streams from journalists on the ground of these troops and they're just they're just worth that many of them no they really weren't like it was uh the whole thing was just really fucking shocking like like

shockingly bad they didn't even surround the building they just went up to one door yeah so so what happens is they they use an armored vehicle to ram the door of the presidential palace and they try to take control of it but the thing is right um our say is it in the presidential palace he and his cabinet are in the next building over so they've taken the wrong building um first off so these are going great and and again this this is not a sort of you know this is not a coup that follows a standard coup repertoire of i seize the president sees the radio station sees, seize the trains, right? And have control over the military barracks, which is your basic five-step plan to how to do a coup.

We'll be doing that episode soon, by the way. Yeah, yeah. Given today's Supreme Court, we're in the clear now. Yeah, we're in the clear. The five-step plan to do a coup. So they don't even see it as part one. So they're kind of

just kind of milling around uh uh the front of the presidential palace and trying to get into the next building where the president actually is um it's also the demands are also very weird um zuniga claims that he's not overthrowing the government he claims that he's still loyal to our say but he's going to form a new cabinet okay useful yeah that's how you normally do that yeah so he's like yelling about the economic crisis says he's going to quote restore democracy and quote release political prisoners which i kind of get okay so. So the political prisoners thing, I think is about the people who've been arrested for doing a 2019 coup. I have no idea what the store restored democracy means.

I don't know if he had any idea what he meant by restored democracy. Something was happening. But the thing is, the other thing about this coup is that it has no backing at all. I mean, it doesn't even have backing the army, but it has no, it doesn't even have backing among the right,

both macho Camacho and Janine on yet on. Yes. You had people who did like the last one both condemned the coup so people she is trying to break out of prison condemned the coup right this is going nowhere worst coup i've ever seen so meanwhile our say it is cabinet are in the next building over appointing a new commander of the army so that the new commander of the army can go outside and order the troops to go back to their barracks. Outstanding. This is kind of what's happening.

But also, meanwhile, outside, so that these troops have taken over the square in front of the presidential palace. And they have sort of successfully managed to take over the square with a bunch of sort of military police and riot gear but there's a sort of crowd who's come to yell at the army right and it's just very weird spectacle because it's there's all these soldiers who all have long guns right being protected by a light of cops with riot shields yeah yeah like so weird if you open up on the crowd like you don't have enough numbers to not get stones every every single one of you is going to be individually executed like so they're all by people who don't have guns and and that's the thing that that that you know and when i say executed i mean like

they're gonna get executed by the government that that's assuming they live long enough and are not just beaten to death by the crowd, which is also a real possibility. But, you know, so this crowd is sort of approaching the line of riot police are getting tear gassed a bit. But this is, and I kind of emphasize this enough, this is not a kind of normal, like highly organized Bolivian mass protest where, you know, all of the unions call a general strike

in the middle of this. But again, this whole thing lasts maybe two and a half hours. So there's not time to do the actual kind of sort of roadblocks and stuff like that. There's not time to actually do the organization that you would need to do to overturn this coup. This coup falls apart so fast that people don't have time to make protest signs.

All they have are flags. They do not have time to write signs out. That is something. They don't have time to come up with chants. I was watching, the funniest part about this whole thing, so I was watching a live stream of the protesters, and the protesters had gotten this kind of, I guess you'd call it sort of a metal gate, I guess.

It was this big sort of, it almost looked like, you know how you get those white shelves that have metal bars and it was kind of like that, but cross-hatched. It was pretty big. It was bigger than a person. And three people are carrying it in front of them, going to the police line, presumably to use it as a battering ram. But the troops run away so fast that these guys couldn't get their gate up to the police line fast enough to use it.

That's how you know it's going well it was staggering it was amazing so you know the entire coup calls apart zuniga gets arrested on live tv he's like giving a press conference and they just like arrest him amazing but at the end of this as it's falling apart the one genuinely masterful stroke that zuniga pulls in this entire i mean it missed a just a cavalcade of failure the one actual genius line that he does as as he's sort of being arrested he says it's in prison too uh he claims that he's been ordered by our say to do this in order to bolster say's poll numbers, which are dog shit. It's fake news.

Yeah. Yeah. Now okay, this whole scheme begs the question. What was our say supposed to get out of this? Sorry, not our say. What is what is he get out of it? Right? Because he's going to prison. It's like, why would he do it if it was just under orders from the president?

Because yeah, this is a lose-lose for him so none of it makes any sense but comma this is immediately picked up by morelli supporters who fucking hate rsa and they all immediately begin sort of repeating this and now this has become sort of the official line i mean even morales has been on tv on social media just saying yeah this was this was a fake coup this was a coup that are say did against himself to help his poll numbers and this is you know this is a this has turned into a real thing and there's a lot of people who are sort of like i don't know it the whole crew was really weird, right? And there's a lot of people who believe this because they're, you know, I mean, either because they want to believe it or because, you know, I mean, it does look weird or because they're fucking just hate our say from the beginning, right? This is all, you know, as funny as it sort of is, this has had a sort of catastrophic effect on sort of just regular Bolivian people because

people are fucking terrified. You know, they're terrified that this is the beginning of the army coming back into politics. They're terrified that someone else is going to do a coup. I mean, even Morales has been saying for a very long time, actually both of them have been trading accusations that the other one is going to do

a coup against them. Yeah, they've been banging the coup drum for a little while yeah everyone everyone has sort of been claiming that there's going to be queues happening and all of this is creating this sort of cauldron of things that are extremely bad for the bolivian left um the the economic boom that wielded the coalition together is over um it's not clear anyone can bring it back because again this is a this is a natural gas based thing right yeah and the other problem that they have is you know the problem that all social democracies have which is that they've created a middle class base of small business owners and people with middle class salaries and professional jobs

and we talked about this in the brazilian context and this is something that garcia has talked about too which is that well he doesn't say it in these words because he's a coward and a capitalist, but social democracy produces its own gravediggers by creating a middle class that despises them and then eventually destroys everything the social democrats fought to create. And that – it is very possible that what we are in right now is the opening stages of this entire political project coming apart. Yeah. And I fucking hope it doesn't, and I hope that, you know, but again, like, the only actual way to resolve the inherent sort of political and social contradictions of attempting to have a sort of left-wing socialist political base and a capitalist government is to eliminate the capitalist state yeah so either either you do that or you get another one of these shitty fucking cues yeah you're just constantly vulnerable to this shit right like at any point yeah yeah you're creating the conditions which you know and i mean and we've we've we've already seen the coup that's capable of knocking them out of power right it's the coup

that actually has sort of a mass like a mass backing from the right. And this was not that coup. This was, this was, this was the comedian's coup. This was the Joker coup. This was the, this was the worst coup, worst coup anyone's ever seen. Yeah. But, you know, the next one, the next one might not be.

Yes. And that's quite serious. Yeah. So until then, hopefully, hopefully we don't reach serious yeah so until then hopefully we don't reach there but until then this has been NakedAffin here yeah you too can overturn a coup by

yelling not even particularly menacing at a bunch of troops yeah practice practice at home in case you ever need to do it it could happen here as a production at home in case you ever need to do it. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.

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