Next: No. 189?

Another soldier in power

The streets of La Paz were littered with the bodies of slain protesters, and the new regime was holed up in the presidential palace behind a wall of tanks. Shops and banks were shuttered by a general strike, and a former head of state was demanding an uprising in support of the ousted government. But by Bolivian standards, last week's chaos was all too routine. In a country that has had 188 coups in the past 154 years (and once had three heads of state in a single 24-hour period), the most notable thing about the overthrow of President Walter Guevara Arze by Colonel Alberto Natusch Busch was its timing. It came just days after U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had urged Bolivia's leading politicians to support the country's first civilian government after a decade of military rule.

Guevara, a political moderate who once served as Bolivia's Ambassador to the United Nations, seemed doomed from the moment he was sworn in three months ago. Various plotters began planning at least three separate coups after Bolivia's Congress chose Guevara to serve as interim President until an election next May. Natusch, 46, the commander of the military training school, struck first. Backed by junior officers, he dispatched a force to surround the palace, dissolved Congress and declared himself President.

During the next five days, at least 100 protesters died as the new strongman used armor and fighter planes to crush a general strike called by the million-member Bolivian Central Labor Federation (COB). The death toll might have been higher had Natusch not stationed troops at the mines outside the capital to prevent militant workers from following their usual practice of heading for La Paz with satchels of dynamite whenever a coup takes place.

The previous military President, General David Padilla, who stepped down in August, vainly appealed to soldiers to stage a countercoup that would return the presidency to Guevara, but by week's end active resistance to the new regime halted.

Natusch, whose uncle, German Busch Becerra, headed a military regime 40 years ago, lifted martial law and press censorship, then went on TV to pledge a vaguely defined "revolutionary" government of "national leftism." He also agreed to a plan under which he would become the dominant member of a ruling triumvirate that would also include representatives of Congress and the COB.

Though Natusch promised to let the May election take place, the COB rejected the plan, leaving the composition of a new regime unsettled.

Washington had hoped that under Guevara, Bolivia would join with its fellow Andean Group members (Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador) to form a pro-democracy bloc in Latin America.

Seeking to keep that notion alive, the Foreign Ministers of the other Andean countries issued a statement expressing their "confidence" that Bolivia would soon return to "democratic and harmonious national comity." The only way to achieve that may be Coup No. 189

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