What's going on with Evo Morales in Bolivia? When is a coup not a coup? What's the CIA got to do with everything? China????
So here's Max Fisher on whether Bolivia is seeing a "coup" or a "popular uprising":
Transitions like Bolivia’s tend to be fluid and unpredictable. The perception of legitimacy, or a lack thereof, can be decisive. But today’s world rarely fits the black-and-white narratives that emerged from the Cold War and that still shape expectations that coups and revolts are morality tales with clear heroes and villains.[...]
Coups often come after mass uprisings calling for change, with generals describing their interventions as temporary measures to restore democracy. And few, if any, popular uprisings succeed without military support, if only in the form of generals refusing to come to the government’s aid.
The political scientist Jay Ulfelder has referred to that as a “Schrödinger’s coup,” after the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, writing that such cases “exist in a perpetual state of ambiguity, simultaneously coup and not-coup” with no hope of forcing the events into a “single, clear” category.
Michael Parlberg on whether some covert CIA role is at play:
Let’s not mince words. It’s a coup. When an elected president is forced to resign by the head of the armed forces, after weeks of escalating street violence and a police mutiny, the word “coup” fits. [...]
The United States welcomed Morales’s ouster, and the U.S. presence in Bolivia, particularly in drug policy, has long been unhelpful. But “The CIA is behind everything bad in Latin America” is a lazy analysis by those who don’t care to understand the internal dynamics of other countries. It’s also one which inflates the omnipotence — and interest — of the U.S. while denying the agency of domestic actors. (The United States has not had an ambassador in Bolivia for more than 10 years, and both the DEA and USAID were kicked out of the country by Morales years ago. Far from its Cold War reputation as an all-powerful puppet master, the U.S. now treats Latin America with indifference and neglect. Today, the foreign power that matters in the region is China.)
Keith Johnson on the role of natural resources in the situation ("is lithium the new oil?"):
The notion that Evo Morales was an obstacle to the exploitation of Bolivia’s lithium potential, and that his ouster in some way is meant to open the door for multinationals to tap Bolivia’s mineral wealth, is upside down. For more than a decade, Morales talked of turning Bolivia into a lithium powerhouse and made the full-scale development of the country’s mineral resources a staple of his economic vision. While Morales spoke of using these resources to benefit all Bolivians, deals that would bring the benefits he claimed never really materialized. [...]
[Globally] China dominates the production of lithium-ion batteries, for the same reason it rules so many other areas of manufacturing: moderately cheap, well-educated labor mixed with extensive infrastructure, combined with major government investment in electric vehicles. That’s an issue U.S. strategists have raised in the last few years, but the problem isn’t a lack of supply of lithium itself; China sources most of its lithium from Australia and Chile, rather than domestic mining.
Chile and Argentina have far higher-quality reserves of lithium and more favorable climatic conditions for the type of lithium mining carried out in South America. That means they are much, much more appealing as a source of lithium than Bolivia is, at least with current technology. They are also both allies of the United States, as is Australia, the other major lithium producer. In other words, there’s no need for Washington to resort to shady means to ensure a questionable source for something it already has a plentiful supply of.
