What Happened in Bolivia Was Definitely a Coup

The Hangout Discuss
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I’m not sure if you have been keeping up to date with what’s been happening in Bolivia, but basically:

There was an election and a left-wing president won. However, there are some suspicious events surrounding this election. The counting went down randomly at some point and then when they continued counting, he had won by a big enough margin to win outright (in Bolivia, if you win by less than 10% of the vote, there is a second round. It was 9% before the counting stopped and then it was suddenly 10% when it started up again). So there are some super shady details surrounding the election.

So what did the military do? They stormed in and “asked” the president to step down. He did in order to prevent violence. Now there’s a right-wing government instead.

This is a coup. Let me explain why.

  1. There was going to be another election – an American pressure group claimed that the details of the election were fishy (which they were) and demanded another election. The president said yes immediately and 2 hours later, the military “asked” him to step down. Clearly, they didn’t want the election to happen again. Why? If the people didn’t want the president to win again, they wouldn’t let it happen.

  2. Getting the military to do your dirty work for you to get a popular leader out of office is a coup – it doesn’t matter if they “politely asked” or “demanded”. Getting the military to do it has the undertones of “or else”. If it wasn’t a coup, the government could have demanded the president step down themselves. They needed the threat of the military to make sure it happened. COUP.

  3. No matter the outcome of the election, the president was still technically the president until next year. Forcing him out of office early is a coup. He won the last election fair and square even if you disagree with the circumstances of this election. So forcing him out before his term is over? COUP.

  4. There was a democratic option on the table! And they chose not to take it. Now they have a government which hasn’t got the majority vote. COUP.

  5. There is currently an online campaign of random throwaway accounts saying “dear friend. This is not a coup” copy-pasted. This is clearly damage control from the government.

This is disgusting. I don’t agree with the circumstances of the election and that’s why there should have been another election. This is just authoritarian and anti-democratic. COUP.

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lol, the people saying the military ‘politely asked him to step down’ are delusional idiots with soup for brains.

When does a military ever politely ask for something. It’s a MILITARY. They DEMAND, they don’t ask :joy:

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Why did the military ask him to step down? That’s not the actions of a government just kindly asking a man to step out of office. The military means force. If you don’t want to imply force or have a silent “or else” on the end of the “polite request”, don’t have the literal forces requesting anything

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“Politely asked him to step down”.

You don’t politely ask someone to step down from a high position.

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And not with the literal army :joy:

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The army?

Yeah. They command/demand you to do so.

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I don’t blame the military - they were just following orders if you ask me

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It’s not about blaming the military. It’s about the fact that using the military is clearly a threat of violence. You don’t send the military in to do your dirty work if you just want to make daisy chains!

But also, they should answer to the president, not a right wing fringe group!

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One of the things making me doubt the legitimacy of Morales right now is the fact that in 2016 there was a referendum that wasrejected (by a very narrow margin, but still 51% of the vote said NO), to get rid of term limits set in the 2009 constitution (so that Morales could run for a fourth term this year). Under the constitution, the term limit was set at two terms of five years each. Morales (if he hadn’t been forced to flee), would be completing his third term, since he went ahead and already passed the two term limit since the first one “didn’t count” since it was before the 2009 constitution.

That whole ignore a referendum and get judges to overturn the law your didn’t like instead, Marks it so I wouldn’t necessarily say that he was elected “fair and square” last election because he was already surpassing term limits in the previous election.

So how was he even running for a fourth term when the Constitution of 2009 prohibited it and the people rejected a referendum to let him run yet again? In 2017, the Bolivian courts struck down the part of the constitution that imposes term limits and passed a law that allowed Morales to run for a fourth term.

Sure, he may have stepped down peacefully and said he agreed to another fairer election, but I personally wouldn’t trust someone who had already manipulated term limit laws (after accepting his defeat initially).

I’d also like to point out that it’s not like an opponent from the election that has stepped into interim control, but the next person (that didn’t resign), who constitutionally should take power in a power vacuum such as this. She’s also saying she will hold elections as soon as possible, which I really Hope is true.

I’m genuinely trying to research more and figure out what is happening because I know the media I consume (primarily in English) can be biased, but I tend to trust Reuter’s and BBC.

I think it’s awful that people are being killed in the pro-Morales protests (BBC), so that definitely does point to a coup since military/police force is being used against citizens, but I can’t really get over Morales’s sketchy behavior enough to sympathize with him as a person/leader. I also legitimately hate being on the side of Trump, so it’s taking a lot to not just join in on the left’s denouncement of this as an unjust coup (because, I could concede that it’s a coup, I just don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing yet). This article was interesting to me as well in the debate.

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Personally, I don’t consider term limits to be democratic in themselves. If a country wants someone to continue ruling, then they should be allowed that option without some arbitrary rule stopping them.

However, I can admit that it should be down to the country. The Supreme Court in Bolivia did rule that there had been international tampering in the referendum and that the vote would have ruled in favour of abolishing the term limit otherwise. And if that wasn’t the case, another vote gave the people against Morales ruling for another term the chance to express that. Where were all of the people who were against that in the first place? They were enfranchised, so either they changed their mind, they didn’t vote or more people came out of the woodworks to show their support of Morales. Either way, it is a very democratic way of settling a shady referendum.

And the pressure group that ruled the issues with the original election were going to be the ones to oversee a re-election. So the USA had the opportunity to oversee a re-election and see if the results were really in the favour of Morales. This time, it would have been out of Morales’s hands – a guy who technically should still be president, as his term isn’t over yet.

Yes, there’s a lot of shady stuff going on in terms of Morales and I don’t deny that. However, the response was 1000x worse

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Morales took an hour to decide to have a re-election (without the army pressuring him) when it was originally ruled to be an issue. However, the army then got involved 2 hours after he announced that he would be happy with a re-election, which does a great deal to show that they didn’t want a re-election to happen!

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But following whose orders exactly is the interesting question to me. Because, some of the article I’ve read make it out to be that they are listening to the will of the people who wanted Morales out. Which sounds great in theory, but I am having a hard time believing, tbh. But I am also having a hard time believing the opposition…

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Have you seen the protests to put Morales back in? It’s ridiculous how many of the “people” want him to rule still.

He was also technically the president until next year regardless of the outcome of the election, which means that what happened was entirely illegal! They claim to be protecting democracy, but their defence is “he didn’t win a referendum which was ruled to be tampered with” when they actually just broke the law and took control of the government!

Not to mention the fact that the woman who declared herself president when Morales stepped down didn’t get the majority vote. This is entirely authoritarian and it’s really worrying to me

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Yes, I have seen the protests and it’s terrible that they are being met with violence from the new leadership!

I just can’t find a single source that calls into question the referendum of 2016. After the Supreme Court passed the law, there were also protests against this, which I am finding a lot of info on. I don’t know if it’s the bias of the American/UK media or what, but I’d love to see this confirmed.

Eh, I disagree. I think absolute power corrupts absolutely and no matter the leader, they are changed by their time in office and often not for the better. I think there are too many “home field” advantages that an incumbent has at their disposal to trust that there will always be fair elections.

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I’ll find info on the referendum part!

I feel like this infantilises the electorate, personally. As long as the elections are completely democratic and fair, if the people felt like their leader had become corrupt, then they will vote him out in the next election. If they don’t, it’s not up to us as outsiders or some law that doesn’t take into account nuance to decide whether the leader should be forced not to run again. That’s undemocratic to me!

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And yes, I believe he should have had a re-election. However, I think it’s important for it to be a re-election and not just forcing him out of power (prematurely, no less). It’s not up to a fringe group of people to decide what’s best for the country, even if they think the people are misled. That’s really paternalistic, to me. In fact, I think term limits, in general, are paternalistic. As if the people don’t know that being in power for long enough could corrupt an official. It seems ridiculous to me

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I don’t mean that the people won’t vote him/her (the corrupt leader) out because they’re dumb, I just think voter suppression is a real problem that takes many forms and it is easier for the incumbent to make these things happen. We have a ton that goes on in the US (even besides the electoral college system) that has caused me to lose faith in my own democracy. Between gerrymandering, discriminatory ID laws, supervisors of elections running for the office of the election they are supervising (check out the last Georgia governor election), confusing ballots, and many other issues I’ve seen, I think that term limits are one way to try to keep politicians honest. We don’t have them in the US senate and that’s one reason that I think that whole thing has gone to sh*t.

So that last sentence “as long as the election is completely democratic and fair” is a long shot in a lot of cases!

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I wanna say I was wrong about the corruption in the referendum. I’m mixing it up with the election! He definitely should have honoured the referendum and it was stupid not to. However, it’s still illegal to force him to step down before that!

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I didn’t even know about these coups until last night :no_mouth:

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Interestingly, Morales’s supporters were much less likely to vote than the opposition! His support mainly comes from the indigenous people, many of whom don’t actually speak Spanish, so would have been discouraged from voting due to the language barrier. I think there’s a lot going on in Bolivia that is substantially worse than anything abolishment of a term limit could do. In fact, I think countries in general should be focussing more on voter suppression in all of its forms than an arbitrary time limit on leaders – a time limit that is different in every country because we still haven’t decided what that supposed “sweet spot” is to stop corruption/voter suppression from happening

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