Bolivia's New Emergency Law: Paz Likely to Pursue Negotiation Over Military Intervention

Bolivia's Congress spent fifteen hours debating and then approved a law on Sunday that gives President Rodrigo Paz the legal authority to deploy the military to clear roads seized by protesters. The measure emerged after more than a month of blockades that have strangled the country's supply lines and killed ten people—seven from lack of access to medical care, three in protest-related violence. Yet analysts close to the situation believe Paz will not rush to invoke this new power. Instead, they expect him to pursue a slower strategy: negotiate with protest leaders in each region while letting the blockades exhaust themselves.

The law itself is designed to protect the state's hand. It establishes a framework for declaring states of exception and coordinating police and military action during grave crises, ostensibly to guarantee humanitarian corridors and the flow of food, fuel, and medicine. One clause grants soldiers a presumption of legality during such operations and requires the government to assume their legal defense—a provision meant to ease military fears of prosecution for using force. The blockades now stretch across eight of Bolivia's nine departments and affect at least eighty separate points on the road network.

The protests began with demands for wage increases and social benefits, but have been captured by groups loyal to former president Evo Morales, who have made Paz's resignation their central demand. The Túpac Katari peasant federation and the Bolivian workers' central organization have led the action. The most recent violence erupted Saturday in San Julián, in Santa Cruz department, where a clearance operation involving tear gas left sixteen civilians and nineteen police officers wounded. The operation briefly opened the road, but protesters regrouped and reinforced their positions, leading to clashes that lasted more than four hours.

Franz Flores Castro, a Bolivian political analyst, sees the crisis at an inflection point. Days before the San Julián clash, there had been a partial opening of routes that allowed food shipments to reach La Paz and El Alto, the cities hit hardest by the blockades. That suggested an implicit understanding might be forming. Then the violence in Santa Cruz shattered that fragile momentum. Flores noted that some reports indicate protesters may have used firearms during the clash, though he cautioned against accepting claims circulating on social media without verification, given the intense information war playing out alongside the physical one.

The San Julián operation itself may have deepened resistance. The Movimiento Juvenil Cruceñista, a regional youth group, participated in the clearance effort alongside police. Their presence inflamed tensions rooted in Bolivia's long history of conflict between regional elites in Santa Cruz and indigenous and peasant organizations from the western highlands. Protesters saw the participation of this group—which has historically used harsh language toward indigenous Bolivians—as a provocation. Some said they could accept police clearing the roads but not those who had called them savages and worse. That dynamic helps explain why the operation generated more resistance than authorities may have anticipated.

Flores believes the new law does not signal that Paz intends to declare a state of exception immediately. Rather, the government sent the legislation to Congress to buy time while betting on the gradual weakening of the protest movement. The executive is attempting to combine sector-by-sector negotiations with a strategy of political and logistical attrition, avoiding for now decisions that might escalate the conflict. Ministers are traveling to departments across the country to address local and regional demands. Some of those efforts had begun producing results before the recent violence.

The government understands the risks of invoking emergency powers, Flores argued. Bolivia faces a crisis of state capacity—it is a weak state unable to impose order across its territory. A state of exception would force the government to attempt exactly that, which is nearly impossible. The deeper fear is that large-scale military intervention could trigger a spiral of violence that ends up strengthening the very movements it aims to suppress. History in Bolivia suggests the opposite of what authorities hope: more deaths lead to more violence, and mobilized sectors emerge stronger. The new law leaves the door open for military deployment if negotiations fail and blockades persist, but Paz appears to view that option as a last resort, one he will pursue only if economic pressure and exhaustion do not break the protests first.