Thomas Field is the author of From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era. He is coeditor of Latin America and the Global Cold War, due out in early 2020.
Nine months after the right-wing coup that ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales, elections still have not been held and popular discontent with the coup regime is boiling over. Democracy must be restored, no matter what the golpistas and their allies in Washington want.
Bolivia is currently ruled by an unelected president, Jeanine Áñez, whose government is now responsible for nearly two dozen deaths and hundreds of injuries after Evo Morales’s overthrow. The situation is dire — but this is far from the first time the country has seen a coup in defense of Bolivia’s elites.