‘Mano Dura’ Policies Return to Bolivia

La Paz saw its security forces turn violent against massive demonstrations in June, arresting scores and wounding many more as police broke up major protests. The operation closed out a stretch of unrest that had run more than fifty days, driven by a range of grievances but centered, above all, on one demand: that President Rodrigo Paz step down. It was the most severe confrontation yet between his administration and the social movements that have driven Bolivian politics for a generation.

The blockades and marches had already begun to fade by the time Paz declared a 90-day state of exception, a move that handed the security apparatus expanded authority and formally outlawed the road blockades that had strangled the country’s economy and energy supply for over seven weeks.

Bolivia has been there before. The last time a president invoked these emergency military powers, in 2019, security forces committed massacres against protestors with no one held accountable.

Days before the violent dispersals, Paz urged ordinary citizens to physically confront the blockaders, a call that helped spark street-level clashes among far-right militants, police, and protesters. Rights monitors have since documented excessive force by officers, in some instances working in tandem with extremist groups. Paz took office promising to end Bolivia’s cyclical unrest; instead, the cycle has intensified on his watch.

Thomas Becker, a senior clinical supervisor at the University Network for Human Rights who focuses on Bolivia, told International Business Times that the current moment is eerily recognizable. He points to a surge in violence against protesters and bystanders alike; shootings, arbitrary arrests, torture carried out by police often working alongside paramilitary groups; layered on top of official rhetoric branding demonstrators as narco-terrorists, language that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other Trump administration figures have picked up and repeated. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau went further still, claiming without evidence that protesters were “organizing RIOTS and BLOCKADES with the support of organized crime and drug traffickers.”

Becker says the combination of the crackdowns plus the racialized rhetoric from Paz’s allies, mirrors the lead-up to the 2019 coup and the killings that followed under the Trump-backed right-wing interim government of Jeanine Áñez.

Violeta Tamayo saw the violence firsthand. Reporting on the June protests for the left-wing outlet La Izquierda Diario, she told International Business Times that police opened fire with tear gas at close range and without warning, aiming directly into the crowd at waist height. Tamayo was struck in the arm, likely by a tear gas canister, leaving a wound deep enough to expose bone; she underwent multiple surgeries and spent days hospitalized. She says many other injured demonstrators were arrested and charged in ways she describes as highly irregular.

Behind the crackdown sits a fast-moving remilitarization of Bolivia’s drug war, backed by Washington. The United States and Bolivia signed a $20 million agreement earlier this month to train and equip Bolivian security forces. It follows Paz’s move to restore ties with the US Drug Enforcement Administration, undoing a two-decade-old expulsion order issued by former leftist president Evo Morales.

The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) publicly framed the new funding as a break from the Morales era, declaring that his time had passed and that, with Paz now in office, “a better future for both our countries starts now.”

Officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), from State’s INL bureau, and from U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) have all made visits to Bolivia in recent months, as the two governments rebuild a security relationship that had been dormant for years. The State Department has also touted the new INL push as coinciding with a visit from an Assistant Secretary of the INL, F. Cartwright Weiland, during which the bureau announced it had returned to Bolivia “after nearly 20 years of far-left socialist government” and pledged to “work alongside Bolivian law enforcement to fight narco-terrorism.” This kind of overtly partisan – and warmaking – rhetoric has been at the center of the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America, called the Trump Corollary (spinoff of Teddy Roosevelt’s) or the Donroe Doctrine (taken from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823).

Guillame Long, the former Ecuadorian foreign minister and a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, sees the DEA’s return as a step backward. “The return of the DEA in Bolivia marks the resurrection of a security paradigm that has led to gross violations of human rights, and filled prisons and cemeteries in Bolivia and across Latin America, while leaving the international drug trade largely intact,” he told International Business Times.

Since Paz assumed office, DEA presence has grown steadily; in May, Bolivia’s top drug-enforcement official confirmed plans to open a DEA office in La Paz. The U.S. embassy’s staffing has shifted accordingly, with new arrivals like Chief of Mission Erik Martini, whose background spans counterterrorism and counternarcotics work in Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Ecuador, now shaping the embassy’s more assertive posture on drug policy. Martini’s appointment, paired with the broader wave of new personnel, signals that this is not a symbolic gesture from Washington but a staffed, resourced shift in direction.

Long argues the timing is telling: “Bolivia’s paradigm shift in its approach to fighting drug trafficking, known as the National Strategy to Fight Drug Trafficking and Reduce Excess Coca Cultivation, was in fact starting to show clear signs of success,” he says, suggesting the new U.S.-backed approach is displacing a domestic strategy that was, by his account, already working.

The official return of the DEA has already produced headline-grabbing results. In March, Bolivian authorities captured Sebastián Marset, the Uruguayan trafficker wanted across the region, in a DEA-supported operation, and extradited him to the U.S. In April, Bolivian police took part in U.S.-funded training led by Colombian instructors, trainers widely regarded as the region’s most experienced in counterinsurgency methods.

During the blockades, a bloc of ideologically aligned governments – Argentina under Javier Milei, and Chile under José Antonio Kast – sent what they called humanitarian aid to Bolivia. Lawmakers in both Bolivia and Argentina have since called for investigations into those shipments, citing conversations with the military and warning they may have contained “repressive material,” including tear gas. The accusations have not been confirmed.

The pattern has precedent. During the Cold War, Reagan administration official Elliott Abrams, who later resurfaced in the first Trump administration, pleaded guilty over his role funneling weapons to Nicaragua’s Contras under the guise of humanitarian assistance, assistance that fed directly into massacres. Former Argentine president Mauricio Macri faces similar accusations of shipping ammunition to Bolivia to help suppress the 2019 protests.

At the peak of the recent unrest, a period that left protesters dead, maimed, and detained, Pete Hegseth labeled the demonstrators “narcoterrorists” bent on “overthrowing democratically elected leaders,” collapsing a domestic political crisis into the vocabulary of the drug war.

Once a protest movement gets reclassified as a narcotrafficking or terrorist threat, the range of tools available for suppressing it widens dramatically. That playbook has already played out across the region’s more militarized governments, including Ecuador, El Salvador, and now Argentina, a troubling precedent for a country like Bolivia, which has spent decades working to leave behind the caudillos and military juntas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For Becker, the current moment recalls earlier waves of U.S. intervention in Bolivia, which criminalized coca cultivation region-wide and produced massacres and disappearances of political opponents. It was that earlier period of violence and instability that gave rise to the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) and to former President Evo Morales’s political ascent in the first place.

“They aren’t just coming for our natural resources,” Emma Bolshia Bravo, director of the Institute of Therapy and Investigation in La Paz, told International Business Times. “They are also coming to train and advise on how to carry out this domestic repression; Plan Condor never finished, it simply changed form.”

In June, the Trump administration designated Brazil’s largest criminal organizations, which operate across Bolivian territory, as narco-terrorist groups, a designation that unlocks new legal authority for U.S. operations in border regions. Sources familiar with Bolivian counter-narcotics and foreign policy, who wished to remain anonymous to protect their personal safety, say DEA activity is expected to concentrate near the Brazilian and Paraguayan borders, where most cartel activity is based.

Across Latin America, U.S. operations targeting similar groups have already killed more than 200 people, including the bombing of a dairy farm in Ecuador and a string of boat strikes on civilians in the Caribbean and Pacific.

Bolivia’s own rhetoric now tracks this broader hemispheric trend, in which protest movements, criminal networks, and political opposition all get folded into one elastic threat category. What began as a war on “narco-terrorism” is increasingly functioning as a war on democratic governance and the rule of law across the region.

That same elasticity shows up in how Bolivia is using its emergency powers. Even with the blockades that triggered the state of exception largely gone, the Paz government says it won’t lift the measure until it is “no longer needed,” an open-ended standard with no clear end date.

Becker warns that “efforts to criminalize these forms of protest are a direct assault on freedom of expression and assembly and a transparent attempt to silence Bolivia’s popular movements.”

Bolivia isn’t unique in this respect. Right-leaning leaders such as Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele have sidestepped their legislatures to prolong their own states of exception, and even left-leaning governments — Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, and Honduras’s Xiomara Castro — have bypassed democratic checks of their own.

At the same time, the political temperature between Paz and Morales keeps climbing. The two men now routinely call each other “narcos” in public, and Paz officials have spent months suggesting that Morales’s days in freedom are “numbered.” Morales, for his part, remains holed up in his bunker in the Chapare coca-growing region, guarded by hundreds of armed loyalists.

Figures within the Paz government, along with prominent voices in the conservative bastion of Santa Cruz, say they already possess enough evidence to prosecute Morales, claims that, notably, have circulated mainly among right-leaning Bolivian political figures rather than through any formal charging document. Morales, meanwhile, alleges there are signs of a parallel U.S. process forming around his own capture or extradition, fueling speculation he could meet a fate similar to Nicolás Maduro’s. Even so, Morales retains substantially deeper political support than Maduro did and would be far harder to remove without triggering serious bloodshed.

During the Cold War, Washington deployed thousands of operatives to Bolivia, effectively criminalized coca farming, and intervened directly in the killing of Che Guevara and other prominent figures. By 2026, according to the Foreign Assistance Tracker, U.S. foreign aid to Bolivia had dwindled to almost nothing, with no dedicated security assistance on the books at all. Measured against that recent baseline, the current pivot toward Washington marks a sharp reversal, one arriving at precisely the moment Bolivia’s government is moving to criminalize protest and extend emergency rule.

Long offers a bleak historical verdict: “History has already shown that a return, now under Rodrigo Paz, to a militarized approach of fighting drugs while criminalizing coca-growing communities does not defeat organized crime.”

How far this new phase of the drug war, and the parallel campaign against political dissent, will go remains an open question, as does whether Bolivia’s fragile democratic institutions can withstand the pressure. Trump’s assertive reengagement in the Western Hemisphere may prove the sharpest test yet for peace, rule of law, and democratic governance in the region since the Cold War.