Bolivia's 2021 protests echo 2019 coup patterns, raising fresh instability concerns

In the streets of Potosí, protesters beat a government supporter to death. The civic committees mobilized with their familiar rage. The government, facing relentless pressure, repealed the law that had sparked the unrest in the first place. To anyone watching Bolivia closely, the script felt familiar—uncomfortably so. These November 2021 protests against President Luis Arce were playing out scenes that had preceded the coup of 2019, raising a question that few wanted to ask aloud: Was Bolivia sliding toward another rupture?

The parallels are difficult to ignore. Two years ago, Evo Morales's government collapsed with striking speed. His supporters were hunted and beaten while the military and police looked on with indifference or worse. Luis Fernando Camacho, a right-wing leader from Santa Cruz, walked into the presidential palace without resistance. The mayor Patricia Arce was lynched in public while police stood aside. The armed forces backed the self-proclaimed interim president Jeanine Añez and allowed massacres to unfold in the neighborhoods of Sacaba and Senkata. When Morales's party, the Movement Toward Socialism, returned to power through elections in 2020, it seemed the cycle might break. Instead, the underlying tensions never dissolved.

Today, Camacho remains defiant. When summoned by prosecutors in October to answer for his role in the coup, he refused to cooperate. Instead, he invoked the memory of 2019 directly, speaking of a flame that had never gone out, comparing the current protests to that earlier moment of rupture. The radical opposition has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Prison time for Jeanine Añez, electoral defeat in 2020—neither has changed their essential goal: removing the indigenous president from power. If terror serves that purpose, they will deploy it.

The Arce government, meanwhile, finds itself in a precarious position. The Movement Toward Socialism won elections but does not command the state. The immediate trigger for the protests was a law called the National Strategy Against Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing. It was technical, bureaucratic, and unpopular. Under street pressure, Arce repealed it. The ease with which he capitulated revealed something troubling: an executive lacking the strength to hold ground, constantly second-guessing its own armed forces. The honeymoon that had followed the coup's reversal evaporated.

The military and police remain the wildcard. After 2020, the government prosecuted several high-ranking officers for their roles in 2019: the then-commander of the armed forces William Kaliman, air force general Jorge Gonzalo Terceros, navy admiral Gonzalo Jarjuri, and others. Yet doubt persists about where these institutions truly stand. The anti-indigenous ideology and right-wing racism that animated the 2019 coup may have taken root in the officer corps. When Arce felt compelled to publicly demand that police stop the violent mobilizations, and then removed five regional police commanders, the message was clear: he did not trust the forces meant to defend his government.

The government's own rhetoric has become a liability. Vice President David Choquehuanca warned during the protests that there were limits to patience, invoking the anger of the Inca. It echoed an earlier threat from Evo's minister Juan Ramón Quintana, who had predicted Bolivia would become a new Vietnam if the coup succeeded. Both warnings fell flat. The mobilizations were not paralyzed; they intensified. The inca's wrath proved powerless against organized opposition. The threat of vietnamization changed nothing. What these failed rhetorical gestures revealed was a government that lacked the institutional machinery to back up its words.

Bolivia's conflict appears set to persist for years. No actor possesses the force to decisively defeat the others. The calm that follows each round of protests is illusory. The underlying fractures—ethnic, social, economic—remain unhealed. The question is not whether new crises will emerge, but when, and whether the institutions meant to manage them will hold. For now, the patterns of 2019 are repeating themselves in 2021, and no one can say with certainty where they lead.