Coup Attempt in Bolivia

I’ve been trying to get a sense of how much of the military is actually behind this. Current reporting seems a bit confused. For example, I’ve seen multiple articles say that “2 tanks” are outside the government palace, but I’ve yet to see any photos or videos demonstrating that. All I’ve seen so far are a handful of images like in the article showing uniformed troops, and one video showing an armored vehicle ramming a building (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c288eewr1wko.amp ). Best I can tell that is a Tiger armored vehicle. I’m wondering if this is a case of reporters calling any military vehicle a “tank” or if there are actual tanks (which for Bolivia would mean the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK-105_Kürassier or possibly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EE-9_Cascavel depending on you definition of “tank”).

At some point hopefully someone with knowledge of Bolivian Army insignia will chime in and identify which units are participating in this coup.

From the article

"Bolivia is among the world’s most politically turbulent nations, having had nearly 200 coups and revolutions since it won independence from Spain two centuries ago. Morales was ousted by the army as recently as 2019 after a disputed election."

Apparently a general, Juan José Zúñiga was removed as commander of the Bolivian army yesterday, and he responded with this. Makes it a bit understandable why they would want to get rid of him.

It looks like it already failed: https://www.reddit.com/r/BalticSSRs/comments/1dpbto6/bolivia...

https://x.com/upholdreality/status/1806090907084865627

Sounds like the plotters didn't secure the TV station first.

Follow the money.

https://x.com/panoparker/status/1318157559266762752

I was in Bolivia during the event. It was not a real "coup" and it was in general a pretty uneventful military vs government dispute. Locals were a bit upset that the media did so much fuss about something that was not a big deal.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c288eewr1wko might be a better source. It's not paywalled, for one.

I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the population support the coup.

South America has a history of military dictatorship but after the pendulum swings enough to the other side people seem to lose their memory a bit.

it sounds like the kirchners' allies in bolivia are going through the kind of crisis we were headed for here in argentina before they lost power here in the election in november. not that we aren't still in a crisis, but we have two things going for us:

1. recognizing the wrongheadedness of the kirchners' policies, we elected an opposition leader who favors capitalism. unfortunately, he's a total nutbag, and his advocacy of freedom seems to be strictly limited to freedom of enterprise (not, for example, freedom of abortion, freedom to protest, or freedom to use public transit anonymously)

2. we aren't a petro-state