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Bolivian soldiers stormed the capital’s central plaza and attacked the presidential palace on Wednesday in an apparent attempted military coup in the South American nation.
Footage broadcast on Bolivian media showed an army vehicle ramming into the entrance of the presidential palace followed by soldiers. Outside the place, heavily-armed soldiers and armoured vehicles gathered in the historic Plaza Murillo.
“Bolivia is facing a coup attempt,” Bolivian President Luis Arce, a onetime protégé of the country’s former leftist leader Evo Morales, said in a brief televised statement on Wednesday from an unknown location. “We need the Bolivian people to organise and mobilise against the coup-plotters.”
General Juan José Zúñiga has been accused by politicians of leading a putsch. An hour earlier, Arce denounced the “irregular mobilisation” of army units in La Paz.
Zúñiga, dressed in military fatigues, told a local television crew outside the palace that “the three chiefs of the armed forces have come to express our dismay. There will be a new cabinet of ministers, surely things will change, but our country cannot continue like this any longer.”
Foreign minister Celinda Sosa Lunda claimed in a video statement that some army units had launched an attack on “democracy, peace and national security” and called on the international community and the Bolivian public to back Arce’s leftwing administration.
Morales, who has been publicly feuding with Arce and still wields significant influence even after resigning as president in 2019, called on his supporters to mobilise in support of democracy. “We will not allow the armed forces to violate democracy and intimidate people,” Morales posted on X.
Bolivia, a landlocked country of 12mn people in the high Andes, has experienced numerous coups since gaining independence in 1825.
The military action drew swift condemnation from across the globe.
“The European Union condemns any attempt to break constitutional order in Bolivia and overthrow democratically elected governments,” said Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat.
Luis Almagro, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States, called on the army to submit itself to the “legitimately elected civil power” in Bolivia.
Mexico’s president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum offered unconditional support for Arce in a post on X. “The uprising of some units of the armed forces of Bolivia is an attack on democracy. We strongly condemn these acts,” she wrote. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, said he wanted “democracy to prevail in Latin America; coups never work out”.