Bolivia’s legislature has passed a law allowing the use of troops against protesters, a development that has drawn comparatively little international attention despite its significance for democratic governance in Latin America. The legislation authorises the deployment of military forces in domestic policing contexts — a crossing of the civilian-military threshold that, in Latin American history, has rarely ended well for democratic institutions. The move comes amid ongoing political turbulence in Bolivia following the political aftermath of former President Evo Morales’ failed attempts to return to power and the fractured state of the leftist MAS movement that dominated Bolivian politics for two decades.
The received wisdom
The progressive international response to such legislation typically runs along two tracks. One group — largely the Latin American left and its international sympathisers — tends to contextualise it within what they frame as elite resistance to indigenous and popular movements: the military is historically an instrument of right-wing reaction in Latin America, and any expansion of its domestic role is ipso facto suspicious. The other, more liberal-institutionalist group expresses concern about human rights and rule of law but is careful to avoid what might look like American interventionism in Latin American affairs — particularly given the history of US support for military coups in the region.
Both responses contain elements of truth. Latin American militaries do have a deeply problematic historical relationship with democracy. And American commentary on Latin American democratic backsliding does frequently carry the whiff of selective outrage — concern about left-wing authoritarianism that is not matched by equivalent concern about right-wing authoritarianism. These are real objections that a serious analysis must acknowledge.
A different read
But the more important question is what this legislation tells us about the trajectory of Bolivian democracy as an institution, regardless of the political valence of the government passing it. The short answer is: nothing reassuring.
Bolivia has experienced a decade of incremental institutional erosion that has crossed political lines. The crisis began with Morales’ attempt to extend his presidency beyond constitutional limits — a move that led to the disputed 2019 election and the subsequent political violence. The interim government of Jeanine Áñez, which came to power after Morales fled, pursued its opponents with similar ruthlessness. The pattern is one that political scientists call “democratic backsliding by incumbents” — each government normalising a slightly wider set of tools against its opponents, such that the next government inherits both the tools and the precedent.
The use of military forces for domestic order is precisely the kind of incremental normalisation that should alarm anyone who cares about long-term democratic stability. In comparative perspective, countries that have allowed the military-civilian threshold to erode — Venezuela being the most extreme example, but also Ecuador, Nicaragua, and now potentially Bolivia — tend to find that the instrument, once deployed, is difficult to put back. The military develops institutional interests in maintaining domestic relevance; executives develop political interests in maintaining access to enforcement capacity beyond the reach of civilian police accountability frameworks.
There is also a disturbing global trend here. Across Latin America, in El Salvador, in Ecuador under Noboa’s state of emergency, and now in Bolivia, democratic governments are discovering that their electorates will, in periods of insecurity and institutional failure, tolerate significant expansions of state coercive power in exchange for a promise of order. The appeal of what political scientists call “authoritarian legalism” — maintaining the forms of law while gutting its constraints on executive power — is not confined to any ideological tradition. Populists of both the left and right have proven equally capable of embracing it when it is electorally convenient.
The right-of-centre case here is not that the Bolivian government is uniquely malign, but rather that the rule of law and civilian supremacy over the military are not naturally occurring or self-sustaining conditions — they require active institutional maintenance, judicial independence, legislative oversight, and a political culture that treats constitutional norms as genuinely binding. Bolivia’s institutions have been weakened by years of political conflict that treated constitutional limits as obstacles rather than foundations. This law is both a symptom and a cause of that deterioration.
What is conspicuously absent from most coverage of this law is any serious engagement with what protesters are protesting about, and whether the Bolivian state has legitimate policy tools — policing reform, economic development, political dialogue — for addressing those underlying conflicts without reaching for military force. The deployment of troops is typically a sign that those alternative tools have either failed or not been attempted. Either conclusion is damning.
What to watch
- How the Bolivian constitutional court responds, if it does: judicial independence is the first institution typically subordinated in these processes, and its response (or silence) will be diagnostic
- Whether the Organization of American States or any regional body formally criticises the legislation — regional democratic governance bodies have a mixed record, but their silence is itself informative
- Whether the law is actually deployed in response to specific protests, and if so, how the military responds — the difference between formal authority and operational practice matters enormously
- The broader regional picture: Peru’s own political turbulence and instability in Mogadishu suggest that the post-COVID political instability cycle has not finished running its course globally
— J