In the aftermath of the June 26 coup attempt in Bolivia, led by a reduced number of Army and Navy officers and rank and file, there has been an impressive outpouring of support for President Luis Arce and Bolivia’s democratic institutions. Messages of solidarity have come in from heads of state and government, foreign ministries, and political institutions from across Ibero-America and the Caribbean, as well as from several European heads of state, and Russia. Honduran President Xiomara Castro, President Pro Tem of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), yesterday posted an appeal on X to the Presidents of all member states to “condemn the fascism that today threatens Bolivia’s democracy and fully respect the civilian power and the Constitution.” Bolivia’s Foreign Ministry has compiled a complete list of international messages.
In Asunción, Paraguay, today, the membership of the Organization of American States (OAS), meeting at their 54th General Assembly, voted by acclamation to approve a resolution condemning the coup—although it never mentioned the word “coup”—instead stating, as reported by Argentina’s daily Infobae its “energetic” condemnation of “the illegal deployment of Bolivian Army units in the city of La Paz, constituting a threat to the constitutional regime and flagrant insubordination to the orders publicly expressed by the constitutional President Luis Arce.”
Although the State Department in Washington couldn’t bring itself to do more than call for “calm and restraint” in Bolivia, in Asuncion the U.S. was one of the sponsors of the OAS resolution, and Rich Verma, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State for Management, who is at the OAS meeting, condemned Gen. Juan José Zúñiga, who staged the coup attempt, saying that “democracy remains fragile in our hemisphere,” Associated Press reported him saying.
