The "Turkey Model" against coups in Bolivia

Last Wednesday, while everyone in Turkey was glued to the screen for the Turkey-Czechia match at the European Championship, an intriguing piece of coup news appeared in the tickers at the bottom of the screen. Amid the excitement of the match, it was of course not a story that would draw much attention at first. It is one of the usual things in Latin American countries, places where a change of government through ordinary elections is perceived as an exception.

However, the connections that soon made people pay attention to the coup news began gradually to fade from memory. Shortly after 7 October, Bolivia was one of the countries that took the clearest stand against Israel. As early as November it had announced that it was suspending diplomatic relations with the occupying Israel, which is committing genocide against Gaza.

Moreover, only 20 days earlier President Luis Arce had paid a visit to Moscow, where he had put the option of joining the BRICS countries on the table with Putin. In the same meeting, an important lithium sales agreement had also been signed with Russia.

These three matters could undoubtedly have been the most important motives for the usual suspects behind the coup in Bolivia. We do not know how meaningful it would be to ask which of these three reasons was the more decisive. But what makes the coup in Bolivia more remarkable from Turkey's point of view than all three of these reasons is that the President called on the people to resist the coup and to repel it, and that the people answered this call, so that the coup was doomed to failure within a short time.

Undoubtedly, this constitutes an interesting example showing that the model of resistance to coups, which was first put forward in Turkey on 15 July, can be applied elsewhere too. In the past in Turkey as well, for an elected government to be toppled by a coup, however much popular support it had, it was enough for the military to issue a memorandum. Those in power, if they had hats, took their hats, and if not, their parties, and left. This was no different elsewhere. The military was always right, because it had the weapons and was protecting the country. The duty of protecting the country also conferred the status of owning the country.

It was the civilian administration in Turkey that, for the first time on the occasion of the 27 April e-memorandum, reminded everyone that the military's duty of protection was given by the people and exclusively for that purpose, and that it did not include any authority to govern. Thus, by strongly emphasizing that in a democratic system the military is subordinate to the government and that the reverse is never true, a military coup attempt was stopped before it had even stirred. On 15 July, in a coup that had already begun and been attempted, President Erdoğan's call on the people to resist soldiers who had left their barracks also opened a brand-new era in the history of coups.

In Bolivia too, the military coup attempt launched under the command of General Jose Zuniga was brought under control within a short time, after President Luis Arce called on the people to protest and announced that he had dismissed the coup-plotting generals and appointed new commanders in their place. After the newly appointed Army Commander Jose Wilson Sanchez ordered "all soldiers and personnel in the streets and squares to return to their units,"

the coup attempt, now utterly leaderless and groundless, came to an end.

Thus we are faced with an example in which we can comfortably say that the solidarity of state and nation against the 15 July coup attempt, whose 8th anniversary we will mark in 15 days, has turned into a model. Given its stance against Israel, its request to join the BRICS bloc, and the world's richest lithium reserves that it possesses, thinking that Bolivia would be a coup target for the US is by no means considered conspiracy-mongering. That the general who attempted the coup is himself one of the country's own sons does not eliminate the possibility of a plot. Coups are in any case carried out by people recruited from within that country; the alternative is occupation, and in fact all such coups are covert occupation attempts.

Is what really motivates the forces behind the coup plotters the Bolivian President's support for Gaza or his stance against Israel, or is it the imperialists' access to lithium resources? We can think about this question together with the question of whether the motivation behind the US's unfathomable support for Israel, at the price of setting all the peoples of the Middle East against it and making so many enemies, is a religiously driven Zionist-sharia-ist motivation or the motivation of possessing the oil and other resources in the region. Here, the Zionist sharia-ism that plunges the world into corruption probably constitutes the ideological motivation of colonial ambitions, and the real aim is to bring oil and

other material resources under control.

Viewed from one angle, one can also see a complete disproportion between the resources mobilized for Zionism, the enmities incurred, and the material gains obtained: the scene may also prompt one to ask whether it is worth this much for Zionist desires. At some stage, ideological-religious motivations and economic-exploitative motivations become so intertwined that it is impossible to keep a net account of this business. Sociological analysis is needed precisely here.

There are two more noteworthy points in the coup attempt in Bolivia.

One is the clear and resolute stance that former President Evo Morales, who is also the rival of the current president, displayed against the coup. Morales not only openly condemned the coup attempt but also issued a call for National Mobilization to defend democracy against the coup, declared an indefinite general strike and road blockades, and announced that they would not allow the armed forces to violate democracy and intimidate the people, thus taking a stance in common with the government against coups.

The second was that General Zuniga, whose coup ended in failure, put the responsibility for the coup he himself had carried out on the President he was trying to overthrow. In other words, a "scripted coup" scenario was thus repeated as the inevitable scene of a failed coup attempt. Some media outlets also tried to explain a coup that was repelled so easily by saying that it could only have been "planned by itself against itself."

Just like the defense arguments that the failed plotters resorted to after the 15 July coup attempt, once they had got over the initial shock: it was seen once again that those who fall into a trap of their own making turning around and asking "who set this trap for us?" is one of the routines of failed coups.