Military coup attempt in Bolivia fails, president urges people to mobilize against democracy threat
Armoured vehicles rammed into the doors of Bolivia’s government palace Wednesday in what appeared to be a failed military coup attempt, as President Luis Arce said the country stood firm against attacks on democracy and urged people to mobilize.
“Here we are, firm in Casa Grande, to confront any coup attempt,” he said in a video in the palace, surrounded by cabinet ministers. “We need the Bolivian people to organize.”
The soldiers later pulled back as supporters of Arce waved Bolivian flags and cheered in a central square.
Arce swore in new military leaders amid the attempted coup. That includes the position of the general commander of the army, Juan José Zúñiga, who appeared to be leading the rebellion.
New army chief José Wilson Sánchez ordered all mobilized troops to return to their barracks. “No one wants the images we’re seeing in the streets,” he said.
‘I will not allow this insubordination’: president
Previously, Arce confronted Zúñiga in the palace hallway, as shown on video on Bolivian television: “I am your captain, and I order you to withdraw your soldiers, and I will not allow this insubordination,” Arce said.
But prior to entering the government building, Zúñiga told reporters in the square that there will be a “new cabinet of ministers.”
Members of Bolivia’s armed forces entered one of the main squares in La Paz on Wednesday, as the country’s president condemned the movements. Some in the capital held signs saying, ‘Democracy must be respected.’
“Surely things will change, but our country cannot continue like this any longer,” he told a local TV station.
Zúñiga did not explicitly say he’s leading a coup, but in the palace, with bangs echoing behind him, he said the army was trying to “restore democracy and free our political prisoners.”
“Stop destroying, stop impoverishing our country, stop humiliating our army,” he said in full uniform, flanked by soldiers, insisting the action being taken was supported by the public.
The incident was met with a wave of outrage by other regional leaders, including: the Organization of American States; Gabriel Boric, the president of neighbouring Chile; the leader of Honduras and former Bolivian leaders.
The leadership of Bolivia’s largest labour union condemned the action and declared an indefinite strike of social and labour organizations in La Paz in defence of the government.
Arce called for “democracy to be respected” in a message on his X account.
“We cannot allow, once again, coup attempts to take the lives of Bolivians,” he said from inside the palace, surrounded by government officials, in a video message sent to news outlets.
An hour later, Arce announced new heads of the army, navy and air force amid the roar of supporters. Video showed troops setting up blockades outside the government palace.
Soon after troops and armoured vehicles start pulling back from Bolivia’s presidential palace. A Reuters witness said Zúñiga was later arrested for the failed coup, after an attorney general opened an investigation against him. It’s unclear where he’s being taken.
Tensions over the economy
Bolivia, a country of 12 million people, has seen intensifying protests in recent months over the economy’s precipitous decline from one of the continent’s fastest-growing two decades ago to one of its most crisis-stricken.
Bolivia’s financial quagmire stems, at least in part, from an unprecedented rift at the highest levels of the governing party.
Arce and his one-time ally, leftist icon and former president Evo Morales, are battling for the future of Bolivia’s splintering Movement for Socialism (MAS) ahead of elections in 2025.
The political fight has paralyzed the government’s efforts to deal with the deepening economic despair, and analysts had warned that the social unrest could explode in the historically turbulent nation of 12 million people.
Cracks in the governing party opened in 2019, when Morales, then Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, ran for an unconstitutional third term. He won a contested vote plagued by allegations of fraud, setting off mass protests that caused 36 deaths and prompted Morales to resign and flee the country.
After an interim government took control in what MAS called a coup, Morales’s chosen successor, Arce, won the election on a campaign promise to restore prosperity to Bolivia, once Latin America’s mainstay source of natural gas.
Morales rallies supporters to oppose coup
Arce had been Morales’s finance minister who oversaw years of strong growth and low inflation. But assuming the presidency in 2020, he encountered a bleak economic reckoning from the coronavirus pandemic. Diminished gas production sealed the end of Bolivia’s budget-busting economic model.
Still hugely popular among Bolivia’s Indigenous communities, coca growers and union workers, Morales saw an opportunity. After returning from exile, the charismatic populist announced plans last year to run in the 2025 vote — setting himself on a collision course with Arce, who is expected to seek re-election.
Morales, to his credit, announced a national mobilization of his supporters in the wake of the apparent coup attempt.
“We will not allow the armed forces to violate democracy and intimidate people,” he said.
Published at Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:12:52 +0000
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is free. His future in publishing government secrets is unclear
Julian Assange is a hero to many and a traitor to others. Supporters of the WikiLeaks founder and publisher view him as an investigative journalist who exposed damning information governments wanted to keep hidden, while critics see him as a threat to national security. His newest title, however, is free man.
His 14-year-long legal saga to avoid extradition to the U.S., to face espionage charges over the publication of troves of classified intelligence files in 2010, has come to an end.
Assange pleaded guilty Tuesday in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, to a single felony charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defence information.
But it’s unclear if or when he’ll return to his life’s work — and whether or not WikiLeaks will once again become a clearinghouse for whistleblowers revealing state and military secrets — given the toll the ordeal has had on him.
He will always be a defender of human rights, said his wife, Stella Assange, but she told reporters Wednesday evening in the Australian capital of Canberra, that the 52-year-old needs to recuperate.
“You have to understand what he’s been through,” she said. “He needs time.”
She asked that people give them space and privacy “so that our family can be a family before he can speak again at a time of his choosing.”
The plea deal meant he was sentenced to the time he’d already served in the U.K. and was free to go.
Assange spent the past five years locked up in England’s Belmarsh high-security prison, confined to his cell for 23 hours a day, as he fought extradition to be tried on 18 charges under the U.S. Espionage Act — charges that could’ve seen him sentenced to 175 years in prison if he’d been convicted.
Before that, he spent seven years living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was granted political asylum after courts in England ruled he should be extradited to Sweden as part of a rape investigation that was eventually dropped in 2017.
Negative impact on Assange, Wikileaks
Assange’s U.S. legal adviser, Barry Pollack, says he’s not under any sort of restrictions or gag orders as part of the plea deal.
But James Turk, the director of the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University, has doubts about Assange’s future in publishing sensitive information.
“I think the process had a major negative impact on him that might make it hard for him to play much of an active role as either a journalist or a publisher in future,” he told CBC News.
Assange, who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, rose to fame in 2010 when his organization began publishing some 700,000 classified documents and diplomatic cables released by U.S. military whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Many of the documents related to the conduct of the U.S. military during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, documents revealing that the civilian death tolls in the two U.S.-led wars were much higher than were being reported and details about the detainment of U.S. prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Manning also leaked a video, which WikiLeaks titled Collateral Murder, showing U.S. troops fatally shooting a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters news agency employees, from two Apache helicopters in Baghdad in July 2007.
Manning was arrested in May 2010 and later convicted of 20 charges under the Espionage Act. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but former U.S. president Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017 in his final days in office.
In the years that followed, WikiLeaks also released leaked Democratic Party emails from National Security Agency intercepts and tens of thousands of internal emails that were hacked from Sony Pictures.
But WikiLeaks hasn’t published anything on its website since 2021 and hasn’t released any original documents since 2019.
Assange, in a 2023 interview with The Nation from inside Belmarsh prison, said the organization was unable to publish leaks due to his imprisonment, U.S. government surveillance and restrictions on the organization’s funding.
WATCH | Assange, wife reunite in Australia after 14-year legal saga ends:
U.S. gov’t remains critical of Assange
The U.S. State Department said Wednesday that Assange and the 2010 WikiLeaks releases not only harmed the ability of diplomats to build relationships abroad, but also put lives at risk.
His legal team disputed the accusation that WikiLeaks put people in peril.
“There’s no evidence of any actual harm and that’s exactly what the U.S. government acknowledged in court today in Saipan,” Jennifer Robinson, Assange’s Australian legal adviser, said in Canberra.
Brig-Gen. Robert Carr, a senior U.S. counter-intelligence official who led a review of the impact of the WikiLeaks cables and testified at Manning’s sentencing hearing in 2013, said he uncovered no examples of anyone being killed as a result of the leaks.
The people who were actually harmed in all of this, said Turk, were the two who brought secretive information to light — Assange and Manning — while those who committed potential war crimes, as revealed in the leaks, have faced no consequences.
Press freedom at risk
Press freedom advocates applauded Assange’s release, but warned that even the plea deal has repercussions for journalists and news outlets.
The very fact that he was charged under the Espionage Act — a law dating back to the First World War but that has never been used to prosecute a journalist or publisher — puts a chill on journalists working with classified documents, said Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
“I think that we’ve avoided the worst case scenario,” he said in an interview from Washington, D.C., explaining that had Assange gone to trial in the U.S., the case likely would have gone through appeals and ultimately wound up before the Supreme Court, where a legal precedent could have been set.
That, Timm said, might have allowed “overzealous prosecutors who have an axe to grind against the media” to go after organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which he noted have long histories of publishing leaks of secretive material.
Journalists covering national security and other sensitive areas of governance speak with confidential sources and encounter classified information on a daily basis for their reporting, he explained.
That’s something news organizations might think twice about moving forward, he said, if the threat of prosecution under the Espionage Act is looming over them.
WATCH | Assange travels to Saipan to enter plea in U.S. espionage case:
Published at Wed, 26 Jun 2024 23:10:13 +0000
