A Tale of Two Coups
Biden and Trump Both Aided Military Takeovers
On November 10th 2019, the Organization of American States declared that irregularities in the Bolivian presidential election had made it impossible to verify the results. The presumptive winner, Evo Morales, agreed to call a new election, but in the midst of violent protests and a police revolt, the military forced him to resign. Morales fled the country and the next three leading members of his party resigned in turn, leaving Second Vice President of the Senate Jeanine Áñez in charge of the country. The next day, President Donald Trump celebrated it as a victory for democracy.
The houses of critics and friends of Morales alike were burned to the ground. In response to increasing civil unrest, Áñez gave out a decree exempting the military from any responsibility for killing protestors. Inevitably there were massacres, primarily targeted at indigenous supporters of Morales. For many it was a return to the old days of white supremacy, and for a year the people of Bolivia suffered under systematic torture and summary executions.
This election was contentious. Evo Morales was running for a 4th term under blatantly unconstitutional pretenses. Although he had provided stable economic growth and improved social programs for Bolivia with opportunities for indigenous people to join the middle class while cutting extreme poverty by more than half, many feared he was establishing an autocratic cult of personality around himself. The allegations of election fraud are incredibly controversial to this day, with many framing it as a blatant tactic by a USA-backed organization to depose a socialist president. Independent analyses by organizations like MIT and the Center for Economic Policy Research declared there was no evidence of election tampering.
Regardless of whether Evo Morales should even have been running for president in the first place, what happened afterwords was a blatant military coup and purge supported by the Organization of American States. This coup was celebrated by a President of the United States, who tried and failed to pull off his own coup a year later.
After more than half a year of delays, new presidential elections were finally held. Jeanine Áñez placed a distant fourth, and Morales’ protege Luis Arce won with 55% of the vote. Yet, according to The Intercept, an attempted coup was already in the works, being planned by the Minister of Defense Luis Fernando López. While members of the conspiracy like Interior Minister Arturo Murillo alleged support from Trump’s cabinet and the CIA, their plan to deploy hundreds of mercenaries in Bolivia never materialized due to a lack of apparent support from the United States. Arce was sworn in around the same time as the US presidential election was called for Joe Biden.
We don’t want our lithium to be in the Southern Command’s crosshairs, nor do we want it to be a reason for destabilizing democratically elected governments or foreign harassment — Luis Arce, referring to the United States Department of Defense Southern Command
Donald Trump generally took an overt approach to discouraging left-wing governments in Latin America, from reversing Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba and designating it as a state sponsor of terrorism, to supporting corrupt right-wing leaders like Jimmy Morales and Juan Orlando Hernández, to warning Argentina’s Alberto Fernández against supporting left-wing leaders. Ex-Green Beret Jordan Goudreau even alleged that Donald Trump supported his failed coup in Venezuela, nicknamed Operation Gideon, hosting meetings to plan the operation in Trump Hotel and Trump Doral. Beyond this, he set the tone for Latin American leaders to emulate his style of leadership, most recently with Javier Milei’s overt attempts to align himself with the MAGA movement.
Jair Bolsonaro was often called the Trump of the Tropics during his reign as President of Brazil. Bolsonaro is a blatant admirer of the 1964 military dictatorship, which was formed by a coup d’etat supported by the United States. He was propelled into the national spotlight during the 2016 impeachment of Brazil’s first female president Dilma Rousseff. He called convicted torturer Colonel Ustra a “national hero” and “the dread of Dilma Rousseff”, in reference to her torture at the age of 22 under the military regime.
During his 2018 presidential campaign he assumed Trump’s persona as he spouted out homophobic, misogynistic, and other inflammatory rhetoric. He courted comparisons to his American counterpart, aligning himself personally and politically with Trump and his family. When it came to the 2022 reelection, he even aped Trump’s electoral fraud narrative, setting the stage for a repeat of America’s January 6th attack on the Capitol. The ties between Trump and Bolsonaro, their political movements, and their advisors run deep.
Days after Trump’s attempted self-coup on January 6th, Brazilian professor David Nemer predicted in an interview that the same thing would happen in Brazil. Two years later, it did. On January 8th 2023, tens of thousands of Brazilians stormed the capitol, breaking windows and trashing precious works of art. The newly elected leftist president Lula da Silva took control of capitol security and managed to put down the insurrection. Without support from the military, it fizzled out, and Bolsonaro is currently facing charges for his role in the failed coup.
The difference between a failed coup and one that succeeds generally comes down to support from the military. Bolsonaro was popular with his military, but ultimately they did not come through for him. Protestors set up encampments outside barracks and demanded they intervene on behalf of Bolsonaro, but they did not. Why not?
Much of it has to do with the fact that Joe Biden was president and not Donald Trump, and that Biden was very interested in disrupting the precedent that threatened his own electoral victory. Months prior to the insurrection, Biden and his top diplomats made it clear that the United States would not accept a coup in Brazil. Biden’s team relayed the message over and over that the results of the election were to be respected. Court documents reveal that Brazil was on the brink of a successful coup, but sustained pressure from the Biden administration helped nip it in the bud.
This is not to say that the Biden administration is an unambiguous paragon of defending democracy worldwide. Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan was a major irritant for the Biden administration who frankly had a much better relationship with Donald Trump. According to allegations from Khan and a secret cable published by the Intercept, the Biden administration was offended by Khan’s overtures towards Putin and pushed for the military to oust him, saying that “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington”.
The no-confidence vote did succeed, and Khan was imprisoned on charges of corruption among other allegations. Ultimately this had much more to do with internal struggles within the military than anything else: Khan himself is an authoritarian whose party was originally backed by the military.
This does not excuse the crackdown, however. Khan’s party was banned from running during the last election and candidates were forced to run on independent tickets. In a country where only around 60% of adults are literate, removing the PTI’s cricket bat logo from the ballot meant that many voters struggled to identify their preferred party.
Although Khan’s Party won the plurality of seats, the military’s chosen opposition parties managed to form a coalition government amid blatant electoral fraud. One victorious candidate even relinquished his seat as he himself alleged that the vote had been rigged in his favor. This has led to a crisis in confidence in the military, and Twitter has been blocked in the country since February 17th. What happens next is an open question.
Just about every presidential administration since World War 2 has been involved in some sort of violent regime change. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the worst in recent history was President Obama’s intervention in Libya, where the destruction of Gaddafi’s regime enabled the expansion of radical Islamic terror deep into Africa. Contrary to popular belief, American policy makers are not masters of the universe, and US-backed coups often result in mass death and policy failure.
As the examples in this article demonstrate, US-backed regime change is generally much more subtle than one might expect. “Supplying just the right bit of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time” is generally much more effective than super secret squirrel assassination attempts or funding militant groups, although that can work too. The coups in Bolivia and Pakistan had everything they needed to succeed without support from the United States, and the failed coup in Brazil may have been set for success without interference from the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Operation Gideon was an abject failure that probably would have failed no matter how much support it got from the Trump administration. The United States has been trying to overthrow the Castro administration in Cuba for over half a century and has not succeeded.
This distinction is important to keep in mind when it comes to issues like the United State’s role in Gaza. It is understandable to be frustrated with the Biden administration on this issue, but I have seen absolutely insane claims on Twitter that the current invasion would have already ended under Donald Trump. The man has a settlement in the occupied Golan Heights named after him. He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and encouraged Jimmy Morales to do the same for Guatemala. His buddy Bolsonaro and his supporters were waving Israeli flags at his last rally in repudiation of Lula condemning the Israeli offensive as a “genocide”.
Meanwhile, Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken reestablished the traditional US policy of calling West Bank settlements “inconsistent with international law”. Biden managed to convince Netanyahu to halt an invasion into Lebanon and attempted to use good will from his Pro-Israel stance to delay the ground invasion in Gaza while establishing humanitarian corridors. When pressuring Biden to do more for the people of Gaza, it is important to keep expectations tempered with the understanding that US influence is limited. Understand as well that a Trump administration would have encouraged Netanyahu to crush Gaza and may have allowed the conflict to expand into Lebanon.
There is a leadership vacuum in the United States right now, and it’s a good time to pressure our political parties into putting forward candidates willing to pursue an ethical foreign policy. We don’t have to tolerate our leaders interfering with democratically elected governments, nor should we. As frustrating as the present is, we have an obligation to fight for a better future.
