Was Evo Morales overthrown in a coup, or did Bolivians rise up to defend their vote? That question split the hemisphere after Morales resigned in November 2019, and it still does. In this interview, Bolivian activist Jhanisse Vaca-Daza gives her answer from inside the protests. A young organizer who helped lead the demonstrations against Morales, she explains what she saw on the streets and why she rejects the idea that a foreign plot or a military takeover removed him from power. Her account is one side of a contested story, and it is most useful when it is weighed against the other side, not taken in place of it.
Vaca-Daza’s argument, in short, is that the crisis was made by Bolivians, in Bolivia. She describes a broad popular movement that grew out of the disputed October 2019 election, and she insists that it was street pressure, not a coup, that made Morales’s position untenable. Whether a reader accepts that conclusion, her testimony helps explain why so many Bolivians who took to the streets did not see themselves as participants in a coup at all. They saw themselves as citizens defending an election.
The Election That Started It
The crisis began with the vote of October 20, 2019. Morales, seeking a fourth term after the courts had set aside term limits that voters had declined to lift in a 2016 referendum, was declared the first-round winner after an unofficial quick count paused for almost a day and then resumed showing him past the margin needed to avoid a runoff. For the opposition, the pause was decisive evidence of fraud. The Organization of American States, invited to audit the vote, reported serious irregularities and recommended a fresh election. Other researchers later disputed parts of that analysis, and the statistical argument has never been fully settled. But on the streets, the perception of fraud was already enough.
Vaca-Daza, like many young protesters, frames the disputed count as the trigger rather than the whole cause. In her telling, resentment had been building for years over Morales’s attempt to remain in power, his government’s treatment of critics, and a sense that the rules were being rewritten for one man. The election was the moment when that resentment found a single, concrete grievance. People did not need a statistical audit to believe they had been cheated, because the stop in the count looked, to them, like the cheat itself.
The Uprising in the Streets
Protests spread from city to city, and Vaca-Daza describes a movement that cut across the usual divisions. Students, workers, Indigenous communities, and middle-class families took part, along with civic committees that had long organized outside the party system. Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s largest city and the economic center of the eastern lowlands, became a focal point, with its civic committee and its leader, Luis Fernando Camacho, helping to organize strikes and marches. The movement was chaotic and leaderless in the way that large protests often are, but its demands converged on a single point: Morales should not take office on the strength of the disputed result.
As the protests continued, the government’s grip weakened. Police units in several cities joined the demonstrators, and clashes left people dead and injured on both sides. The armed forces did not stage a classic military takeover, seizing power for themselves, but their commander publicly suggested that Morales resign to restore peace. Morales resigned within hours and left for Mexico. Vaca-Daza argues that the military merely refused to fire on crowds and recognized a political reality that the streets had already created. Others read the same events differently, and see in the commander’s public statement the decisive military pressure that makes the word coup appropriate.
The Interim Government
Morales was succeeded by Jeanine Áñez, a senator from the opposition who became interim president under the line of succession. Her government annulled the 2019 election and promised a fresh vote, but it also took a hard line against Morales’s supporters, and the months that followed saw violence, including deadly incidents in which security forces were implicated. For Morales’s supporters, the interim government’s conduct confirmed that a coup had taken place and that its opponents were being persecuted. For Vaca-Daza and others on the opposition side, the interim government’s failures were a separate problem, and did not retroactively turn a popular uprising into a coup.
The Return of the MAS
The crisis ended, in electoral terms, in October 2020, when the Movement Toward Socialism won a clear first-round victory under Luis Arce, Morales’s former economy minister, and Morales returned to Bolivia. The result complicated every simple version of the story. It showed that the MAS retained deep support, especially in rural and Indigenous Bolivia, and that the party had not been rejected by voters as a whole. Morales’s supporters read the result as a vindication, proof that the people had not turned against his movement. His critics read it as proof only that the party remained popular, not that the 2019 election had been clean.
Why the Label Matters
Vaca-Daza’s interview matters because it reminds viewers that the word coup is not only a description but a political claim. To call 2019 a coup is to say that a legitimate president was removed by force, and that what followed was illegitimate. To call it a popular uprising is to say that a president who tried to hold power improperly was forced out by citizens defending their vote. Both labels carry moral and political weight, and both are used by governments and movements across Latin America to legitimize their own actions and delegitimize their opponents.
The honest conclusion is that the events of 2019 contain elements of both stories. There was a disputed election, a genuine mass movement, an irregular count, a military statement that hastened a resignation, and an interim government that behaved in ways its critics could fairly condemn. Vaca-Daza’s account is valuable precisely because it comes from inside that movement, and because it challenges the assumption that everyone who opposed Morales was an agent of a plot. It does not settle the question of whether Bolivia suffered a coup. No single interview can. But it makes clear why so many Bolivians who were there continue to resist the label, and why the argument over what to call November 2019 is likely to continue for years.