The coup that wasn’t. The last Bolivian state crisis and the limits of the concept of Coup d’État

Abstract

In the light of the events in Bolivia referring to the ousting of President Morales towards the end of 2019, a huge international polemic emerged as to whether the accurate description of these events was a coup d’État. This article concludes that, independently of personal inclinations, to opt for the coup d’État variant is misleading. The analytical problems faced with the Bolivian case seem to stem not only from the hasty way in which scholars dealt with the facts behind the events, but also from the fact that the very coup concept may have reached its own cognitive limits. In order to overcome these limits the article expands the conventional threefold scheme (target/perpetrators/tactic) for defining a coup by adding the variable of the partial legal order concerning the political regime of the country. Given that definitionally the concept of a coup d’État implies the breaking of this order, it is argued to use the concept of restauration of the state instead of coup, if the anormal disruption of a president’s period coincides with the fact that the mentioned order was already broken.