Bolivia in the bullseye

The three alleged leaders of the attempted coup against Bolivian president Luis Arce on June 26th have been sentenced to six months of preventive detention.
Former Army chief Juan José Zúñiga, former head of Navy Juan Arnez, and Alejandro Irahola, former head of the Army's Mechanized Division, are being held in a maximum security prison near La Paz, according to the nation's attorney general, César Siles, who told the press that they are accused of participating in an armed rebellion and terrorism, which could carry a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.  
During that fateful day that put Bolivians at risk, 21 active, retired and civilian military personnel were arrested, among them the one who drove the tank that broke into the Executive branch headquarters in the city of La Paz, according to the EFE news agency.
This is not the first time that Bolivia has added a chapter to the history of coups in Latin America. In fact, some analysts say that since its independence in 1825, 11 coups and 12 failed attempts have taken place in its territory, making it one of the most affected by this political instability.
OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA
"Historical memory is an essential tool to fight against the repetition of the past and to build a more just and democratic future", wrote the Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano about the complexities that Latin America would go through, a region that historically has been plagued by intense political situations that seek to halt the path of the left wing.
In his opinion, this reinforces the assertion that "when a country advances towards social justice, processes that are always latent are accelerated", which explains why, among the thirty or so coups, most of them (if not all) have been carried out against leftist governments or with social defense projections.
The term coup d'état describes the overthrow of de facto governments, associated with a specific type of authoritarianism, almost always using the infrastructure of a war situation, which implies the mobilization of sophisticated resources for the effective conquest of institutions organized exclusively by civilian power, as detailed in the article Estado, golpes de estado y militarización en América Latina: una reflexión histórico política (State, coups d'état and militar’s dictatorship in Latin America: a historical political reflection), by Felipe Victoriano Serrano, research professor of Communication Sciences at the Autonomous University of Mexico.
"Symbolic, because these institutions not only represented the most important points of the political field, but also a series of highly hierarchical codes were applied to them, aimed at flooding the public sphere with a principle of exceptionality", he explains.
The same publication points out that the coups that took place in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s inaugurated a new era, from which an international military integration strategy called Operation Condor was implemented, with the aim of eradicating from the region not only the political and cultural field of the left wing, but also the bearers of indigenous cultures.
"For the first time in political history, a global extermination machine was set in motion, whose main characteristic was the supranational coordination, the effort of political and police integration to make the body of the Latin American left wing “disappear”, the researcher argues.
In the 21st century, however, the tactics used to overthrow progressive governments in the region are many. The international right wing is secretly trying to destroy presidents with media campaigns based on false ideas that incite social discontent and political delegitimization.
These destabilizing actions, known as soft coups, revolve around three factors: mobilized populations, violent local oligarchies submissive to Washington, and the limits of what the United States is willing to tolerate in each country, as the journalist and information director of the Mexican magazine Contralínea, Zósimo Camacho, explains in his article América Latina en golpe de Estado permanente (Latin America: in a permanent state of coup).
He also clarifies that this type of process is not reduced to a dispute between governments and the right-wing opposition, but that the confrontation also takes place within the governments themselves, since a large part of its members maintain ties with the elites.
These coups are set in motion when projects that move away from U.S. hegemony begin to succeed.
A clear example is what happened in Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Honduras, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Panama and Bolivia, where the peculiarities of the coups were the economic, political, diplomatic and media pressures. The worst thing is to know that this war, more silent and effective, is still going on.