Tactics of Political Violence in the 2019 Bolivian Crisis

Return of the Catastrophic Stalemate?

Abstract

During Bolivia’s 2019 political crisis, reactivated modes of political violence occurred within and alongside familiar forms of mass mobilization. In Bolivia’s recent history, this period is most comparable to the 2006–2009 partisan conflict over constitutional reform and departmental autonomy known by the Gramscian term empate catastrófico, or catastrophic stalemate. Although there are many similarities between the two periods, both social movement and institutional norms limiting violence were weakened between the two, resulting in more rapid deployment of destructive tactics and deadlier violence by security forces. As Gramsci’s model argues, greater deployment of force was no guarantee of political success in either crisis. This article examines three extraordinary and destructive tactics: partisan street clashes, sometimes involving firearms; arson attacks on electoral authorities, party offices, politicians’ homes, and police stations; and mass shootings of demonstrators. I describe these three tactics as part of Bolivia’s repertoire     of contention—that is,  as  routinized forms of political action with commonly understood meanings—and compare their use in both the 2006–2009 stalemate and the 2019 crisis. Quantitatively, I analyze the deadly violence in 2019 by drawing on Ultimate Consequences, a comprehensive database of nearly six hundred deaths in Bolivian political conflict since 1982. In the final weeks of Morales’s presidency, violence between opposed civilian groups accounted for all four deaths, whereas several incidents of partisan street clashes involved potentially lethal force. Following Morales’s ouster, however, the security forces became the central violent actor, perpetrating at least twenty-nine of the thirty-four violent deaths.